Illusions

I apologise for not having written for a few days; I haven't had the chance to sit down and write. But I have a few minutes now, and many thoughts running through my head.

I spent the past few days in Manhattan; I arrived at the Port Authority last Thursday, and exited the bus to see the following...

Okay, I'll admit it. Manhattan is fun. There's a lot to do, and a lot to experience and explore. But from the exuberance and ostentation you are surrounded by in New York City, it is easy to forget that the rest of the world doesn't look like this. When you're caught up flashy lights, night clubs, and exotic foods, you wouldn't be able to tell that the world's forests are being demolished, that the climate is changing, that entire villages in Alaska are being moved as we speak because of land loss due to ice melting, that there will be a displacement and migration of hundreds of millions of people within the next few decades. Why wouldn't we be able to tell? We wouldn't be able to tell because the oldest parts of our brains are fixated on the near and short, spatially and temporally. And while we do know now the extent of the damage we've done, and the extent of the damage we should expect, and that our actions and the consequent reactions are what are responsible for this damage, we are not willing to accept this.

Why pick on New York City? Apart from the fact that it is where I was last, New York City represents the very foundation of the behaviour that has led to extreme ecological degradation. While to some New York City represents progress and prosperity, to others it represents greed for money and power, it represents domination of people and of the skies, and it represents a lack of concern for those who have been left behind because of this economy. Yet the image that it has created for itself is immense and immovable in our minds and culture - industrial, "free-market" capitalism will solve all ills (let's just give it a few more years...and a few more...and a few more...), banking and finance and insurance cannot be tinkered with, no matter how morally depraved they may be. But then what are we going to do about sea-level rise and coastal flooding? Are we just going to hope that we build massive barriers to keep the water out of Lower Manhattan (pages 108 and 109 in this Obama Administration report)? Will we continue to think that we need to dominate nature to live in it?

And so going to a one-acre rooftop farm called Brooklyn Grange (although it is in Queens) run by Ben Flanner and others, does give me hope.

It represents a step in a direction, a direction away from here. It represents a gathering of people not to talk about profit, but about community; it represents life, and not the destruction of it, it represents nourishment, and not continued extraction.

New York City is a home to the sort of economic mindset that makes us think of continued "free-market solutions" to climate change or to poverty (again, different manifestations of the same problems). What we've been trained to think is that climate and the environment must conform to the rules of free-market economics, that it is this economy first, then the environment, that this economy is more important than environment. Yet an economy is founded only within the context of an environment, be it local, be it regional, and be it in our minds. What we cannot mess with is our environment. What we must mess with, then, is the economy, this destructive and degrading economy. While carbon taxes or cap-and-trade represent a step, they are not the step. Let's have no illusions about this.

The environmental impact of cities

In preparing for the course I will be teaching with a few other graduate students next semester, I have been reading a lot about the changing landscapes of urban areas. Some urban areas have declined (but are now being reborn) significantly, such as areas in the US Midwest (Detroit, Cleveland, Youngstown, Buffalo), some have been well bounded from the outset (Portland), and others (New York) have continued to grow in population. By 2050, half of the world's population will reside in urban areas. There is a line of thinking, from an environmental standpoint, that concentrating residents in urban environments allows for a more efficient use of resources - energy, water and electricity can all be used more efficiently.

This is a continuation of a previous post on cities - I started thinking about cities again because I am visiting my sister in New York City; she lives in Manhattan and is a fashion designer. In an article in the New Yorker from 2006, David Owen explains why everywhere should be more like New York. Manhattan is a place where you can have multi-million square foot buildings, with tens of thousands of people working in them, with per capita use of energy being much lower than in more decentralised and sprawled urban environments. Mass transit can be used to move scores of people with the same reasoning. What is interesting, however, is the emphasis in the article on energy. (In fact, many people narrowly think that the bulk of the environmental problem today is about energy.) What is not talked much about, which Bettencourt and West from the Santa Fe Institute point out, which is evident when you visit most any urban environment in the US, is the confluence of money and ideas from elsewhere. Ideas can include culture, food, drink, art and music. When you combine multicultural resources with people who have the ability to consume those resources, you have added a whole new layer to the environmental impacts of cities. This struck me when I went inside Eataly, a 50,000 square foot complex that cooks and sells everything Italian. 

I am not going to lie - I eat Italian food, and I love food from all over the world. But it is important to recognise the environmental costs of doing so. (Sam has, and she has gone local. Since I have been buying unpackaged foods, I have also been eating almost exclusively locally-grown foods.) Cities have now become dependent on other cities to provide resources for consumption, and therefore the impacts of the city are no longer contained to the region that the city exists in. This is a key feature of globalisation. Cities now have huge ecological footprints. A study by Folke et al. shows that large cities in the Baltic region of Northern Europe require inputs from land areas between 500-1100 times the land areas of the cities themselves. How do we reconcile growing and rejuvenating urban environments with diversity and environmental impact?