Monday, October 19, 2009

GREEN MANHATTAN: EVERYWHERE SHOULD BE MORE LIKE NEW YORK


As we've discussed in class, there's a long tradition of ascribing moral and ethical values to environments: natural, wild, and rural spaces are inherently "good," built/urban spaces are inherently "bad," and so on. There's also a common misconception that cities are primary contributors to the destruction of the environment. This misconception probably stems in part from the ways in which cities are morally scripted as "unnatural" (thus, "bad"). As David Owen notes in the following essay, "Most Americans, including most environmentalists, tend to view cities the way Thomas Jefferson did, as 'pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.'" This sort of moral scripting of the urban environment reminds me of the comments by televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were God's punishment of the "immoral" city of New York. Once again, you have the city as a space that has somehow fallen away from natural/supernatural order.

Here's David Owen's essay, which appeared in The New Yorker on 18 October 2004:

My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn’t have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.

The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.

“Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously an environmental disaster—except that it isn’t,” John Holtzclaw, a transportation consultant for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “If New Yorkers lived at the typical American sprawl density of three households per residential acre, they would require many times as much land. They’d be driving cars, and they’d have huge lawns and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and then they’d be overwatering their lawns, so that runoff would go into streams.” The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy-efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for the rest of America to sprawl into.

My wife and I had our first child in 1984. We had both grown up in suburbs, and we decided that we didn’t want to raise our tiny daughter in a huge city. Shortly after she learned to walk, we moved to a small town in northwestern Connecticut, about ninety miles north of midtown Manhattan. Our house, which was built in the late seventeen-hundreds, is across a dirt road from a nature preserve and is shaded by tall white-pine trees. After big rains, we can hear a swollen creek rushing by at the bottom of the hill. Deer, wild turkeys, and the occasional black bear feed themselves in our yard. From the end of our driveway, I can walk several miles through woods to an abandoned nineteenth-century railway tunnel, while crossing only one paved road.

Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consumption of electricity went from roughly four thousand kilowatt-hours a year, toward the end of our time in New York, to almost thirty thousand kilowatt-hours in 2003—and our house doesn’t even have central air-conditioning. We bought a car shortly before we moved, and another one soon after we arrived, and a third one ten years later. (If you live in the country and don’t have a second car, you can’t retrieve your first car from the mechanic after it’s been repaired; the third car was the product of a mild midlife crisis, but soon evolved into a necessity.) My wife and I both work at home, but we manage to drive thirty thousand miles a year between us, mostly doing ordinary errands. Nearly everything we do away from our house requires a car trip. Renting a movie and later returning it, for example, consumes almost two gallons of gasoline, since the nearest Blockbuster is ten miles away and each transaction involves two round trips. When we lived in New York, heat escaping from our apartment helped to heat the apartment above ours; nowadays, many of the Btus produced by our brand-new, extremely efficient oil-burning furnace leak through our two-hundred-year-old roof and into the dazzling star-filled winter sky above.

When most Americans think about environmentalism, they picture wild, unspoiled landscapes—the earth before it was transmogrified by human habitation. New York City is one of the most thoroughly altered landscapes imaginable, an almost wholly artificial environment, in which the terrain’s primeval contours have long since been obliterated and most of the parts that resemble nature (the trees on side streets, the rocks in Central Park) are essentially decorations. Ecology-minded discussions of New York City often have a hopeless tone, and focus on ways in which the city might be made to seem somewhat less oppressively man-made: by increasing the area devoted to parks and greenery, by incorporating vegetation into buildings themselves, by reducing traffic congestion, by easing the intensity of development, by creating open space around structures. But most such changes would actually undermine the city’s extraordinary energy efficiency, which arises from the characteristics that make it surreally synthetic.

Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we think of them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more solid waste than most other American regions of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of deepening green.

If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or by household, however, the color scheme would be reversed. My little town has about four thousand residents, spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles, and there are many places within our town limits from which no sign of settlement is visible in any direction. But if you moved eight million people like us, along with our dwellings and possessions and current rates of energy use, into a space the size of New York City, our profligacy would be impossible to miss, because you’d have to stack our houses and cars and garages and lawn tractors and swimming pools and septic tanks higher than skyscrapers. (Conversely, if you made all eight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they would require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey.) Spreading people out increases the damage they do to the environment, while making the problems harder to see and to address.

Of course, living in densely populated urban centers has many drawbacks. Even wealthy New Yorkers live in spaces that would seem cramped to Americans living almost anywhere else. A well-to-do friend of mine who grew up in a town house in Greenwich Village thought of his upbringing as privileged until, in prep school, he visited a classmate from the suburbs and was staggered by the house, the lawn, the cars, and the swimming pool, and thought, with despair, You mean I could live like this? Manhattan is loud and dirty, and the subway is depressing, and the fumes from the cars and cabs and buses can make people sick. Presumably for environmental reasons, New York City has one of the highest childhood-asthma rates in the country, with an especially alarming concentration in East Harlem.

Nevertheless, barring an almost inconceivable reduction in the earth’s population, dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible remedies for some of the world’s most discouraging environmental ills. To borrow a term from the jargon of computer systems, dense cities are scalable, while sprawling suburbs are not. The environmental challenge we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s non-renewable resources, is not how to make our teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The true challenge is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan. This notion has yet to be widely embraced, partly because it is counterintuitive, and partly because most Americans, including most environmentalists, tend to view cities the way Thomas Jefferson did, as “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.” New York is the place that’s fun to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. What could it possibly teach anyone about being green?

New York’s example, admittedly, is difficult for others to imitate, because the city’s remarkable population density is the result not of conscientious planning but of a succession of serendipitous historical accidents. The most important of those accidents was geographic: New York arose on a smallish island rather than on the mainland edge of a river or a bay, and the surrounding water served as a physical constraint to outward expansion. Manhattan is like a typical seaport turned inside out—a city with a harbor around it, rather than a harbor with a city along its edge. Insularity gave Manhattan more shoreline per square mile than other ports, a major advantage in the days when one of the world’s main commercial activities was moving cargoes between ships. It also drove early development inward and upward.

A second lucky accident was that Manhattan’s street plan was created by merchants who were more interested in economic efficiency than in boulevards, parks, or empty spaces between buildings. The resulting crush of architecture is actually humanizing, because it brings the city’s commercial, cultural, and other offerings closer together, thereby increasing their accessibility—a point made forty-three years ago by the brilliantly iconoclastic urban thinker Jane Jacobs, in her landmark book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”

A third accident was the fact that by the early nineteen-hundreds most of Manhattan’s lines had been filled in to the point where not even Robert Moses could easily redraw them to accommodate the great destroyer of American urban life, the automobile. Henry Ford thought of cars as tools for liberating humanity from the wretchedness of cities, which he viewed with as much distaste as Jefferson did. In 1932, John Nolen, a prominent Harvard-educated urban planner and landscape architect, said, “The future city will be spread out, it will be regional, it will be the natural product of the automobile, the good road, electricity, the telephone, and the radio, combined with the growing desire to live a more natural, biological life under pleasanter and more natural conditions.” This is the idea behind suburbs, and it’s still seductive. But it’s also a prescription for sprawl and expressways and tremendous waste.

New York City’s obvious urban antithesis, in terms of density and automobile use, is metropolitan Los Angeles, whose metastatic outward growth has been virtually unimpeded by the lay of the land, whose early settlers came to the area partly out of a desire to create space between themselves and others, and whose main development began late enough to be shaped by the needs of cars. But a more telling counterexample is Washington, D.C., whose basic layout was conceived at roughly the same time as Manhattan’s, around the turn of the nineteenth century. The District of Columbia’s original plan was created by an eccentric French-born engineer and architect named Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, who befriended General Washington during the Revolutionary War and asked to be allowed to design the capital. Many of modern Washington’s most striking features are his: the broad, radial avenues; the hublike traffic circles; the sweeping public lawns and ceremonial spaces.

Washington is commonly viewed as the most intelligently beautiful—the most European—of large American cities. Ecologically, though, it’s a mess. L’Enfant’s expansive avenues were easily adapted to automobiles, and the low, widely separated buildings (whose height is limited by law) stretched the distance between destinations. There are many pleasant places in Washington to go for a walk, but the city is difficult to get around on foot: the wide avenues are hard to cross, the traffic circles are like obstacle courses, and the grandiloquent empty spaces thwart pedestrians, by acting as what Jane Jacobs calls “border vacuums.” (One of Jacobs’s many arresting observations is that parks and other open spaces can reduce urban vitality, by creating dead ends that prevent people from moving freely between neighborhoods and by decreasing activity along their edges.) Many parts of Washington, furthermore, are relentlessly homogeneous. There are plenty of dignified public buildings on Constitution Avenue, for example, but good luck finding a dry cleaner, a Chinese restaurant, or a grocery store. The city’s horizontal, airy design has also pushed development into the surrounding countryside. The fastest-growing county in the United States is Loudoun County, Virginia, at the rapidly receding western edge of the Washington metropolitan area.

The Sierra Club, an environmental organization that advocates the preservation of wilderness and wildlife, has a national campaign called Challenge to Sprawl. The aim of the program is to arrest the mindless conversion of undeveloped countryside into subdivisions, strip malls, and S.U.V.-clogged expressways. The Sierra Club’s Web site features a slide-show-like demonstration that illustrates how various sprawling suburban intersections could be transformed into far more appealing and energy-efficient developments by implementing a few modifications, among them widening the sidewalks and narrowing the streets, mixing residential and commercial uses, moving buildings closer together and closer to the edges of sidewalks (to make them more accessible to pedestrians and to increase local density), and adding public transportation—all fundamental elements of the widely touted anti-sprawl strategy known as Smart Growth. In a recent telephone conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved in Challenge to Sprawl, I said that the organization’s anti-sprawl suggestions and the modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant features with Manhattan—whose most salient characteristics include wide sidewalks, narrow streets, mixed uses, densely packed buildings, and an extensive network of subways and buses. The representative hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he would prefer that the program not be described in such terms, since emulating New York City would not be considered an appealing goal by most of the people whom the Sierra Club is trying to persuade.

An obvious way to reduce consumption of fossil fuels is to shift more people out of cars and into public transit. In many parts of the country, though, public transit has been stagnant or in decline for years. New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Department of Transportation account for nearly a third of all the transit passenger miles travelled in the United States and for nearly four times as many passenger miles as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority combined.

New York City looks so little like other parts of America that urban planners and environmentalists tend to treat it as an exception rather than an example, and to act as though Manhattan occupied an idiosyncratic universe of its own. But the underlying principles apply everywhere. “The basic point,” Jeffrey Zupan, an economist with the Regional Planning Association, told me, “is that you need density to support public transit. In all cities, not just in New York, once you get above a certain density two things happen. First, you get less travel by mechanical means, which is another way of saying you get more people walking or biking; and, second, you get a decrease in the trips by auto and an increase in the trips by transit. That threshold tends to be around seven dwellings per acre. Once you cross that line, a bus company can put buses out there, because they know they’re going to have enough passengers to support a reasonable frequency of service.”

Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the United States and one of the fastest-growing among the top ten, yet its public transit system accounts for just one per cent of the passenger miles that New York City’s does. The reason is that Phoenix’s burgeoning population has spread so far across the desert—greater Phoenix, whose population is a little more than twice that of Manhattan, covers more than two hundred times as much land—that no transit system could conceivably serve it. And no amount of browbeating, public-service advertising, or federal spending can change that.

Cities, states, and the federal government often negate their own efforts to nurture public transit by simultaneously spending huge sums to make it easier for people to get around in cars. When a city’s automobile traffic becomes congested, the standard response has long been to provide additional capacity by building new roads or widening existing ones. This approach eventually makes the original problem worse, by generating what transportation planners call “induced traffic”: every mile of new highway lures passengers from public transit and other more efficient modes of travel, and makes it possible for residential and commercial development to spread even farther from urban centers. And adding public transit in the hope of reducing automobile congestion is as self-defeating as building new highways, because unclogging roads, if successful, just makes driving seem more attractive, and the roads fill up again. A better strategy would be to eliminate existing traffic lanes and parking spaces gradually, thereby forcing more drivers to use less environmentally damaging alternatives—in effect, “induced transit.” One reason New Yorkers are the most dedicated transit users in America is that congestion on the city’s streets makes driving extraordinarily disagreeable. The average speed of crosstown traffic in Manhattan is little more than that of a brisk walker, and in midtown at certain times of the day the cars on the side streets move so slowly that they appear almost to be parked. Congestion like that urges drivers into the subways, and it makes life easier for pedestrians and bicycle riders by slowing cars to a point where they constitute less of a physical threat.

Even in New York City, the relationship between traffic and transit is not well understood. A number of the city’s most popular recent transportation-related projects and policy decisions may in the long run make the city a worse place to live in by luring passengers back into their cars and away from public transportation: the rebuilding and widening of the West Side Highway, the implementation of EZ-Pass on the city’s toll bridges, the decision not to impose tolls on the East River bridges, and the current renovation of the F.D.R. Drive (along with the federally funded hundred-and-thirty-nine-million-dollar Outboard Detour Roadway, which is intended to prevent users of the F.D.R. from being inconvenienced while the work is under way).

Public transit itself can be bad for the environment if it facilitates rather than discourages sprawl. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is considering extensions to some of the most distant branches of its system, and those extensions, if built, will allow people to live even farther from the city’s center, creating new, non-dense suburbs where all other travel will be by automobile, much of it to malls and schools and gas stations that will be built to accommodate them. Transit is best for the environment when it helps to concentrate people in dense urban cores. Building the proposed Second Avenue subway line would be environmentally sound, because it would increase New Yorkers’ ability to live without cars; building a bullet train between Penn Station and the Catskills (for example) would not be sound, because it would enable the vast, fuel-squandering apparatus of suburbia to establish itself in a region that couldn’t support it otherwise.

On the afternoon of August 14, 2003, I was working in my office, on the third floor of my house, when the lights blinked, my window air conditioner sputtered, and my computer’s backup battery kicked in briefly. This was the beginning of the great blackout of 2003, which halted electric service in parts of eight Northeastern and Midwestern states and in southeastern Canada. The immediate cause was eventually traced to Ohio, but public attention often focused on New York City, which had the largest concentration of affected power customers. Richard B. Miller, who resigned as the senior energy adviser for the city of New York six weeks before the blackout, reportedly over deep disagreements with the city’s energy policy, told me, “When I was with the city, I attended a conference on global warming where somebody said, ‘We really need to raise energy and electricity prices in New York City, so that people will consume less.’ And my response at that conference was ‘You know, if you’re talking about raising energy prices in New York City only, then you’re talking about something that’s really bad for the environment. If you make energy prices so expensive in the city that a business relocates from Manhattan to New Jersey, what you’re really talking about, in the simplest terms, is a business that’s moving from a subway stop to a parking lot. And which of those do you think is worse for the environment?’ ”

People who live in cities use only about half as much electricity as people who don’t, and people who live in New York City generally use less than the urban average. A truly enlightened energy policy would reward city dwellers and encourage others to follow their good example. Yet New York City residents pay more per kilowatt-hour than almost any other American electricity customers; taxes and other government charges, most of which are not enumerated on electricity bills, can constitute close to twenty per cent of the cost of power for residential and commercial users in New York. Richard Miller, after leaving his job with New York City, went to work as a lawyer in Consolidated Edison’s regulatory affairs department, spurred by his thinking about the environment. He believes that state and local officials have historically taken unfair advantage of the fact that there is no political cost to attacking a big utility. Con Ed pays more than six hundred million dollars a year in property taxes, making it by far the city’s largest property-tax payer, and those charges inflate electric bills. Meanwhile, the cost of driving is kept artificially low. (Fifth Avenue and the West Side Highway don’t pay property taxes, for example.) “In addition,” Miller said, “the burden of improving the city’s air has fallen far more heavily on power plants, which contribute only a small percentage of New York City’s air pollution, than it has on cars—even though motor vehicles are a much bigger source.”

Last year, the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C., held a show called “Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century.” A book of the same name was published in conjunction with the show, and on the book’s dust jacket was a photograph of 4 Times Square, also known as the Condé Nast Building, a forty-eight-story glass-and-steel tower between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets, a few blocks west of Grand Central Terminal. (The New Yorker’s offices occupy two floors in the building.) When 4 Times Square was built, in 1999, it was considered a major breakthrough in urban development. As Daniel Kaplan, a principal of Fox & Fowle Architects, the firm that designed it, wrote in an article in Environmental Design & Construction in 1997, “When thinking of green architecture, one usually associates smaller scale,” and he cited as an example the headquarters of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit environmental research and consulting firm based in Snowmass, Colorado. The R.M.I. building is a four-thousand-square-foot, super insulated, passive-solar structure with curving sixteen-inch-thick walls, set into a hillside about fifteen miles north of Aspen. It was erected in the early eighties and serves partly as a showcase for green construction technology. (It is also the home of Amory Lovins, who is R.M.I.’s co-founder and chief executive officer.) R.M.I. contributed to the design of 4 Times Square, which has many innovative features, among them collection chutes for recyclable materials, photovoltaic panels incorporated into parts of its skin, and curtain-wall construction with exceptional shading and insulating properties.

These are all important innovations. In terms of the building’s true ecological impact, though, they are distinctly secondary. (The power generated by the photovoltaic panels supplies less than one per cent of the building’s requirements.) The two greenest features of 4 Times Square are ones that most people never even mention: it is big, and it is situated in Manhattan.

Environmentalists have tended to treat big buildings as intrinsically wasteful, because large amounts of energy are expended in their construction, and because the buildings place intensely localized stresses on sewers, power lines, and water systems. But density can create the same kinds of ecological benefits in individual structures that it does in entire communities. Tall buildings have much less exposed exterior surface per square foot of interior space than smaller buildings do, and that means they present relatively less of themselves to the elements, and their small roofs absorb less heat from the sun during cooling season and radiate less heat from inside during heating season. (The beneficial effects are greater still in Manhattan, where one building often directly abuts another.) A study by Michael Phillips and Robert Gnaizda, published in CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980, found that an ordinary apartment in a typical building near downtown San Francisco used just a fifth as much heating fuel as a new tract house in Davis, a little more than seventy miles away. Occupants of tall buildings also do a significant part of their daily coming and going in elevators, which, because they are counterweighted and thus require less motor horsepower, are among the most energy-efficient passenger vehicles in the world.
Bruce Fowle, a founder of Fox & Fowle, told me, “The Condé Nast Building contains 1.6 million square feet of floor space, and it sits on one acre of land. If you divided it into forty-eight one-story suburban office buildings, each averaging thirty-three thousand square feet, and spread those one-story buildings around the countryside, and then added parking and some green space around each one, you’d end up consuming at least a hundred and fifty acres of land. And then you’d have to provide infrastructure, the highways and everything else.” Like many other buildings in Manhattan, 4 Times Square doesn’t even have a parking lot, because the vast majority of the six thousand people who work inside it don’t need one. In most other parts of the country, big parking lots are not only necessary but are required by law. If my town’s zoning regulations applied in Manhattan, 4 Times Square would have needed sixteen thousand parking spaces, one for every hundred square feet of office floor space.

The Rocky Mountain Institute’s showcase headquarters has double-paned krypton-filled windows, which admit seventy-five per cent as much light as ordinary windows while allowing just ten per cent as much heat to escape in cold weather. That’s a wonderful feature, and one of many in the building which people ought to copy. In other ways, though, the R.M.I. building sets a very poor environmental example. It was built in a fragile location, on virgin land more than seven thousand feet above sea level. With just four thousand square feet of interior space, it can hold only six of R.M.I.’s eighteen full-time employees; the rest of them work in a larger building a mile away. Because the two buildings are in a thinly populated area, they force most employees to drive many miles—including trips between the two buildings—and they necessitate extra fuel consumption by delivery trucks, snowplows, and other vehicles. If R.M.I.’s employees worked on a single floor of a big building in Manhattan (or in downtown Denver) and lived in apartments nearby, many of them would be able to give up their cars, and the thousands of visitors who drive to Snowmass each year to learn about environmentally responsible construction could travel by public transit instead.

Picking on R.M.I.—which is one of the world’s most farsighted environmental organizations—may seem unfair, but R.M.I., along with many other farsighted environmental organizations, shares responsibility for perpetuating the powerful anti-city bias of American environmentalism. That bias is evident in the technical term that is widely used for sprawl: “urbanization.” Thinking of freeways and strip malls as “urban” phenomena obscures the ecologically monumental difference between Phoenix and Manhattan, and fortifies the perception that population density is an environmental ill. It also prevents most people from recognizing that R.M.I.’s famous headquarters—which sits on an isolated parcel more than a hundred and eighty miles from the nearest significant public transit system—is sprawl.

When I told a friend recently that I thought New York City should be considered the greenest community in America, she looked puzzled, then asked, “Is it because they’ve started recycling again?” Her question reflected a central failure of the American environmental movement: that too many of us have been made to believe that the most important thing we can do to save the earth and ourselves is to remember each week to set our cans and bottles and newspapers on the curb. Recycling is popular because it enables people to relieve their gathering anxieties about the future without altering the way they live. But most current recycling has, at best, a neutral effect on the environment, and much of it is demonstrably harmful. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart point out in “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,” most of the materials we place on our curbs are merely “downcycled”—converted to a lower use, providing a pause in their inevitable journey to a landfill or an incinerator—often with a release of toxins and a net loss of fuel, among other undesirable effects.

By far the worst damage we Americans do to the planet arises not from the newspapers we throw away but from the eight hundred and fifty million or so gallons of oil we consume every day. We all know this at some level, yet we live like alcoholics in denial. How else can we explain that our cars have grown bigger, heavier, and less fuel-efficient at the same time that scientists have become more certain and more specific about the consequences of our addiction to gasoline?

On a shelf in my office is a small pile of recent books about the environment which I plan to reread obsessively if I’m found to have a terminal illness, because they’re so unsettling that they may make me less upset about being snatched from life in my prime. At the top of the pile is “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil,” by David Goodstein, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, which was published earlier this year. “The world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil,” Goodstein begins. In succeeding pages, he lucidly explains that humans have consumed almost a trillion barrels of oil (that’s forty-two trillion gallons), or about half of the earth’s total supply; that a devastating global petroleum crisis will begin not when we have pumped the last barrel out of the ground but when we have reached the halfway point, because at that moment, for the first time in history, the line representing supply will fall through the line representing demand; that we will probably pass that point within the current decade, if we haven’t passed it already; that various well-established laws of economics are about to assert themselves, with disastrous repercussions for almost everything; and that “civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.”

Standing between us and any conceivable solution to our energy nightmare are our cars and the asphalt latticed country we have built to oblige them. Those cars have defined our culture and our lives. A car is speed and sex and power and emancipation. It makes its driver a self-sufficient nation of one. It is everything a city is not.

Most of the car’s most tantalizing charms are illusory, though. By helping us to live at greater distances from one another, driving has undermined the very benefits that it was meant to bestow. Ignacio San Martín, an architecture professor and the head of the graduate urban-design program at the University of Arizona, told me, “If you go out to the streets of Phoenix and are able to see anybody walking—which you likely won’t—they are going to tell you that they love living in Phoenix because they have a beautiful house and three cars. In reality, though, once the conversation goes a little bit further, they are going to say that they spend most of their time at home watching TV, because there is absolutely nothing to do.” One of the main attractions of moving to the suburbs is acquiring ground of your own, yet you can travel for miles through suburbia and see no one doing anything in a yard other than working on the yard itself (often with the help of a riding lawnmower, one of the few four-wheeled passenger vehicles that get worse gas mileage than a Hummer). The modern suburban yard is perfectly, perversely self-justifying: its purpose is to be taken care of.

In 1801, in his first Inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson said that the American wilderness would provide growing room for democracy-sustaining agrarian patriots “to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” Jefferson didn’t foresee the interstate highway system, and his arithmetic was off, in any case, but he nevertheless anticipated (and, in many ways, embodied) the ethos of suburbia, of anti-urbanism, of sprawl. The standard object of the modern American dream, the single-family home surrounded by grass, is a mini-Monticello. It was the car that put it within our reach. But what a terrible price we have paid—and have yet to pay—for our liberation from the city.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Urban Releaf

http://www.urbanreleaf.org/

The Urban Releaf Organization is a non-profit organization devoted to planting trees and gardens in generally low to middle class neighborhoods and other nearby areas to increase awareness of the environment. Trees are planted along streets and around houses or neighborhoods that have little reminders of ecology around them. One of their main focuses is on planting these trees to educate the youth in not only respecting the environment but also to inspire them to become educated. The organization hopes that by bringing this nature around children will help improve the actual communities and also aid in the environmental development of these communities.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Nay Aug Park

http://www.nayaugpark.org/


I wanted to do this blog on something I have experienced myself. Nay Aug is a community located righ in the city of Scranton PA. I was born here and have experienced the beaty and natural setting of this urban park many times. It includes many walking paths, a museum, a zoo, a scenic bridge, and a pool with water slides. Many community activities are held there such as benefit walks and car shows.All in all its just great to have a natural place like this in Scranton to get away from all the aspects of the city.

This website is dedicated to the resteration and preservation of this historical park. It is a not profit organization dedicated to raising funds to keep the park in great shape. Some sponsers include PNC bank and Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs.

CNI Urban Nature Week

http://www.childrensnatureinstitute.org/

The Children's Nature Institute is a non-profit orgainization that has provided free outdoor education programs to more than 250,000 underprivileged students throughout Los Angeles area. The Children's Nature Insitiute gives kids the opportunity to visit, explore and become familar with nature each year.
The Children's Nature Institute also has a week dedicated to Urban Nature. During this week the orgainization and the community will work together to plant trees and gardens in 5-10 inner-city and low-income schools throughout Los Angeles. It also shows children what little things they can do to help preserve nature, even in there own communities. They have many wonderful programs for students of all ages like Tykes on trails, Family walks, and variuos school programs. Their goal is to educate children as much as they can about nature, and how to keep nature in the cities.

Build It Green

http://www.builditgreen.org
Build it green is a non-profit organization that works to promote green architecture in California. Founded in 2003 the organization focus's on resource conservation, water conservation, air quality and energy efficiency to better the environment as well as the lives of thousands of people choosing to go green. The organization works with the local government in promoting green building solutions throughout the state.

Build it green was the result of a merging of corporations focused on green resources and green architecture. The goal of the organization lies in promoting green architecture and providing consumers with relative information that can help them transform their home.

CENYC - Greenspace at President Street

CENYC - Greenspace at President Street


The Council of the Environment of New York City's Open Space Greening (OSG) project was founded in 1975 by Liz Christy. Since then, over sixty vacant lots across Brooklyn, Manhattan and The Bronx have been bought, fixed up and turned into extravagant gardens where neighbors can eat, play, watch movies, put on performances and garden together.

One garden, located on one of Brooklyn's busiest streets - 5th Ave. in Park Slope, was a lot of land that was originally a green thumb garden where locals used to grow fruits and vegetables in the 1970's but quickly became a littered lot in the 1980's. It was saved from auction in 1999 and is now a part of The Brooklyn/Queens Landtrust. The Council of the Environment of New York City funded the renovation and helped turn the littered empty lot into a colorful flower garden appealing to the eye. Designed with a colorful wall mural, a wrought iron fence, a cobblestone patio and a blue stone pathway, locals often use this urban nature space to host picnics, throw summer parties and hold outdoor movie events.

Urban Green Partnerships

http://urbangreenpartnership.org/ Urban Green Partnership, or the UGP, was founded in 2005. This company works to try and educate people on 'living green'. They do community outreach programs like 'phillygreenfest', a green street party that is held on south street. greenfest 2009 was a complete success! In the year 2010 they plan on holding a 'wasteless' competition between all of the businesses in the south street headhouse district. this competition is challenging these businesses to cut down their individual use of electricity, water and gas for three months next year. along with these different community outreach programs they are working on their flagship project Philly 2 zero, a 3 story mixed use building. The building will capture and reuse 100% of the rainwater that falls on site. The finished structure will be as green as possible with modern day technology. The building will house an ecolab that will serve to test new green products and systems. The UGP will be working in partnership with 'the big green building' on this project. Even though this group has not created a park they are working to green up Philadelphia's environment, and they have created a 'green space' once a year in their 'greenfests' on south street. The building they are currently working on will also be a 'green space' that will benefit Philadelphia. By bringing more green technology into the area I feel people will be more aware of their environments and thinking about how they could change and impact their world for the better. There is a lot of really interesting information throughout this site, and to think that next year we could actually ride the train to south street and visit the 'greenfest'! Here is a direct link to the project details if anyone would feel like checking it out for themselves: http://www.p20project.org/

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Philadelphia Parks Alliance

http://www.philaparks.org
The Philadelphia Parks Alliance is an origanization supporting the sustaining and developing parks and "green" areas in the Philadelphia area. This group believes that revitalizing parks will help to attract businesses and people to the region, therefore raising housing values and economic activity, as well as giving Philadelphians a safer and cleaner place to play, exercise and relax.

nnyn

http://www.nnyn.org/aboutus.html

NNYN stands for Nurture New York's Nature. They are a not-for-profit organization that wants to promote and show the importance of developing environmental solutions in New York city. This organization was a response to Christo and Jeanne Claude's installation, The Gates, and was aloud by the artists to be used in promotions and for products.

Green Spaces Alliance

Green Spaces Alliance of South Texas is a non-profit organization created to promoting "Green Spaces". Some of the main focuses are to preserve the air and drinking water that we utilize today. However, Green Spaces Alliance's top priorities is to maintain more physical and cultural landmarks of the communities involved.

http://greenspacesalliance.org/

Sims Bayou Urban Nature Center

Sims Bayou Urban Nature Center is an nonprofit orginazation located in southern Harris County in Houston , Texas. It was founded by the nonprofit Greater Park Place Community Development Corporation in 1997 to help revive this abused area. This center serves as a great place for amy natural outdoor activities and has been able to bring in many volunteers. Many programs have been created for this specific Urban Nature Center. The official website, contains a schedule and fee for the tour which contain gardens, ponds and many more native environmental aspects of the area, a description of the programs avaible, adoption categories, and even a blog area. There is also contact information and mention of their nature store.

Local Action For Biodiveristy (LAB)

http://www.iclei.org/index.php?id=6238

Local Action for Biodiveristy is a gobal urban biodiversity initiative that works closely with local and regional authories in order to manage and conserve biodiversity. Estbalished in 2006, the goal of LAB is to improve biodiversity management at a local and government level by notifying the puclic of the importance of biodiversisty and the importance of governments to enfore the maintenance of such areas.

Urban Green Council

Urban Green Council

This council is the New York chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council. They are a non-profit organization. They aim to have cities and the environment coexist together peacefully. They were established in 2002. Urban Green has a great website as well as a pamphlet that gets out to engineers and architects around the country. They hope to have more buildings established with green spaces, as they in in Battery Park. This is a great organization worth checking out.

Urban Ecology

http://www.urbanecology.org

Urban Ecology was founded in 1975 by visionary architects and activists who believed that cities should serve both people and nature. From the beginning, Urban Ecology has used urban planning, ecology, and public participation to help design and build healthier cities

The Urban Forest

link to website

The Urban Forest tries to find the meaning of what an urban forest actually is. To do so, research is taken place in both Germany and also in the United States. Results tend to be similar yet different at the same time. The urban forests in German cases and also in American cases serve many of the same purposes. This site tries to overcome the obstacle of the contradictory perceptions of urban forest and city, and tries to show how it may be possible for one to compliment the other.


EarthCorps

http://www.earthcorps.org


EarthCorps is a non-profit organization that provides programs for young adults to learn environmental conservation techniques. Founded in 1993, the group is dedicated to build a global community through local community-based environmental restoration. EarthCorps takes polluted environments and revives them into self-sustaining ecosystems. The organization is composed of environmental leaders from over 60 countries, which work on projects in the Puget Sound region and Cascade Mountains.

About America's First Zoo

The Philadelphia Zoo is an organization that has dedicated there website to educating and informing society about the rare and endangered species from all over the world. The organization Victorian garden houses more than 1,300 species, all with their own spacial exhibits that resembles each species original home. The Zoo is family friendly place to visit and explore the world around you, right here, in the backyard of Philadelphia's Urban nature. https://www.philadelphiazoo.org/about/AboutZoo.htm

conservation.org

Conservation.org officially known as Conservation International is a website dedicated to the preservation of earth's natural resources.Their vision is to obtain a "healthy prosperous world in which societies are forever committed to caring for and valuing nature for the long-term benefit of people and all life on Earth."They have a variety of resources for taking action as an individual or a group, newsletters, web links to related websites, programs and events and even career opportunities.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

URBAN GREENSPACE INSTITUTE:)


Urban Greenspace Institute is an organization that's mission is: To ensure that parks, regional trail systems, greenways and greenspaces are integrated with the built environment in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region; and to promote urban greenspace efforts nationally and internationally.
The website shows in great detail how much they are dedicated to their work and even have information for those who want to get involved. They are also connected and helped create other environment non-profit organizations.

The Natue Conservancy

http://www.nature.org/?src=t1

This organization deals with the preservation and preserving of our nature and life. They are the leading conservation organization around the world, to protect lands and waters for nature and people. This organization works in all 50 states and more than 30 countries. With the combination of great science and smart partnership, this organization has been quite successful throughout the past 58 years. With organizations like these ones, it makes it much more suitable to live in most parts of the world today.

Nature in the City- Urban Biodiversity

The article Nature in the City- Urban Biodiversity explains that not only is urban nature true and not an oxymoron, but that cities have more nature and biodiversity than the stereotypical rural areas. The article explains that because most of the population lives in cities, that urban nature connects all these people to the natural enviornment. The articles also goes on to explain that while the opposition believes that urbanization can and will destroy our natural resources, that if peoplde changed their relationship with the enviornment that it will cause a want for "ecological restoration." While many people do not have the time or resources to go out and see the Grand Canyon or the Rocky Mountains, if we start to educate people about their local enviornment it will cause people to go out, explore and appreciate the enviornemnt around them. Urban nature is alive and thriving and is critical for ecological sustainability.

Urban Nature

Imagining an Urban Nature Agenda

This article comes from Center for Ecoliteracy is about urban nature support and the divide between nature and human activity. It shows urban nature encouragement through connection of place and urban nature agenda and shares views of urban environmentalists.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Friends of the Wissahickon

This is the link to the Friends of the Wissahickon web page. FOW is an organization created to protect the ecosystem of Valley Green Park, a part of Fairmount park in Philadelphia. the organization was founded in 1924, it currently has 1,600 members who have donated or volunteered for the organization. volunteers can sign up to clear, build, and maintain trails. Donations are used to protect the environment in Valley Green by preventing the purchase and development of it's land. The Wissahickon Valley, aka Valley Green, aka West Fairmount Park, is a beautiful example of a natural escape from the urban environment of Philadelphia. In the park there is a wide valley of forest with the Wissahickon Creek traveling south-east down in the middle. there are paths to explore and ducks to feed. people walk, jog, bike, hike, and ride horses on the trails in the park and on forbidden drive, the main trail the runs along the creek.

PHILADELPHIA GREEN

Here's a link and description of Philadelphia Green:

A program of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Philadelphia Green® is the nation’s most comprehensive urban greening program. Since 1974, Philadelphia Green has supported the development and ongoing care of community gardens, neighborhood parks and high-profile public green spaces in Philadelphia.

Working in partnership with neighborhood residents, community organizations and city agencies, the program uses greening as a community building tool. It educates and empowers people to make the city a more attractive and livable place through horticulture.

Friday, October 9, 2009

WESTERN VIEWS OF NATURE

Here's a fine overview of Western views of nature from the Hebrew bible through John Muir and preservationism. (Here's the original link.)

Western Views of Nature

Hebrew Bible

1. Spiritual value beyond the natural world
• Creator God is separate from and transcends nature.
• Religious worship should be directed to the Creator.
• Humans are a special creation: they are the only part of creation that are created in God’s image.
• Humans are given “dominion” over nature.

2. The spiritual value of creation
• God made creation and called it good (before humans were created).
• Creation manifests God’s glory and is alive and responsive to God.
• Humans are a creature of God along with all other species.
• God cares for all of creation, which is God’s, not the possession of humans.
• Humans are given the duty of stewardship, protecting God’s creation.

Ancient Greek Philosophy
Plato (ca. 400 b.c.), Aristotle (ca. 350 b.c.e.), and Neo-Platonism (3rd century c.e.).
• Plato and Neo-Platonism clearly placed highest spiritual value on a transcendent world and devalued the natural world.
• Aristotle assumed that nature was essentially good and continuous with spiritual reality. However, he too espoused a form of “transcendental dualism.”

Transcendental Dualism
“Dualism”: binary split into two. “Transcendental”: one of the two is higher and is related to transcendental reality.
• There are two realms of reality: the natural world, and a transcendental world, which has highest spiritual reality.
• Human nature is dualistic: mind versus body, reason versus emotions, with mind and reason corresponding to the transcendental realm, the body and emotions part of the natural world.
• Social dualism: sex and race showed same dualism: men (associated with mind and reason) higher than women (associated with body and emotions).
• Nature-culture dualism: Culture is associated with mind, males, and the transcendent. Nature is associated with body, females, and is inferior to culture.
• Domestic and tame animals are superior to wild animals.
“It is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful. The same holds good of animals in relation to men; for tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved. Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.”
--Aristotle, Politics

Medieval views of nature

“Organicism”
• Nature has an inherent vitality of its own: anima mundi.
• Different things in nature interacted like organs in a body.
• The natural and supernatural realms can interact (magic).
• Hierarchical view of cosmos and of society (feudalism).

Nature as book
Late Medieval period up to 18th century.
• Nature is God’s creation.
• Nature is orderly and intelligible.
• Thus creation tells us about God. To understand the mind of the Creator, we can “read” his “book.”
• Nature has value as God’s creation and as a medium to learn about God, but does not have truly inherent spiritual value in and of itself.

Nature as chaotic “wilderness”
Associated particularly with early Protestant John Calvin (1509-1564) and Puritanism.
• A fallen world of nature: when Adam fell from Grace, his world also fell–from a Garden of Eden to a contaminated place.
• Nature is chaotic, disorderly, ever-changing without pattern or predictability.
• Therefore nature is not intelligible and is dangerous.
• We need either to wall out the wilderness, or conquer and tame it and turn it into a Garden based on human spiritual design and control.

Enlightenment
Particularly the 18th century. Germany (Kant), France (Voltaire), England (Hume), the U.S. (Thomas Jefferson), but continuing today.
• A response against medieval faith, “superstition,” religious wars, and witch hunts.
• Associated with humanism, rationalism, & science.
• Optimistic concerning knowledge (reason & science), society (movement toward democracy & away from monarchy), material well being (allied with scientific and technological advances).
• Nature is orderly, acting according to natural “laws,” and works like a clock (“mechanism”).
• We can understand natural laws through science and reason, which are the surest sources of knowledge.
• The knowledge we gain is not limited to individuals, particular circumstances, or social groups: it is objective and universal.
• Our scientific knowledge enables us to have power over nature and manipulate it for our benefit.

Romanticism
Especially 1750-1870, but continuing today.
• In part a reaction against the rationalism and mechanism of the Enlightenment.
• Nature has high value. It is either a direct manifestation of spiritual reality, or has its own spiritual value.
• There is a close correspondence between the natural world and human nature.
• Reason is suspect. The goal is not abstract knowledge but communion. The world is more complex and fluid: intuition, emotions, & the contemplation of beauty have particular value.
• The arts are particularly valued as a medium for representing the spiritual dimension of reality and expressing sensitive experience of it.
• Social vision: simpler, pastoral lifestyles close to nature are superior to the nightmare of urban technology.
• The “Sublime” is prized: the awe-inspiring majesty of nature, which suggests its spiritual dimension and our place but our smallness within it.

“Conservation”
• Not the general term of conserving nature, but a specific philosophy of resource management.
• Began in Europe in the eighteenth century, a form of the Enlightenment’s rational search for order, progress, and material well-being.
• Championed around 1900 in the U.S. by Gifford Pinchot, the “father of American forestry.”
• For Pinchot three are main options:
• nature could be left unused and thus wasted;
• it could be ruthlessly exploited and used up, leaving nothing for future generations;
• or it could be managed for greater efficiency and long-term productivity.
• The third option is necessary for economic prosperity and as the only moral stance concerning future generation.
• “Anthropocentric”: nature’s value is only found in its use for us. By itself, it has no moral or spiritual value in itself. Nature is something to be controlled, managed, and consumed by humans. Nature unused by humans is a waste.
• This is the dominant view in American forestry.


“Preservationism”
• Championed by John Muir (1838-1914), Wisconsin-born California nature writer.
• Proposed as an alternative to the anthropocentric conservationism of Pinchot.
• “Biocentric”: nature has intrinsic value. The ideal is to preserve nature as it is for its own sake.
• The proper human “use” of nature is aesthetic and spiritual, which ideally leaves nature undisturbed.

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I would add to the above survey a number of other perspectives, including deep ecology and ecofeminism. There are many ways to define deep ecology, and here are two of its primary points according to Arne Naess:

* The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent worth). These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes.

* The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantially smaller human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires a smaller human population.

Note how the first point (re use-value of nature) is a radical departure from both conservationist and preservationist philosophies (see descriptions below). Greg Garrard draws out this distinction in Ecocriticism:

Whereas "shallow" approaches take an instrumental approach to nature, arguing for preservation of natural resources only for the sake of humans, deep ecology demands recognition of intrinsic value in nature. It identifies the dualistic separation of humans from nature promoted by Western philosophy and culture as the origin of environmental crisis, and demands a return to a monistic, primal identification of humans and the ecosphere. The shift from a human-centered [anthropocentric] to a nature-centered [ecocentric] system of values is the core of the radicalism attributed to deep ecology, bringing it into opposition with almost the entirety of Western philosophy and religion. (21)

The key phrase above is "instrinsic value of nature" versus the extrinsic value of nature perceived as commodity, which is a perspective deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian ideologies and found among both conservationists and preservationists.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

WHAT IS A WEED?


The below is a wonderful little piece on weeds: what is a weed? what's the difference between a "weed" and a "plant"? what values and beliefs shape our attitudes about weeds? Although the article focuses on rural and suburban notions of weeds (e.g., agriculture, lawn aesthetics), you may also find these value systems among people living in urban settings like Philadelphia.


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The concept of a weed has been around for a long time, but it is poorly defined. An example of an older book about weeds is A Manual of Weeds (1914) by Ada Georgia, while a more recent book on the same topic is Weeds of the Northern U.S. and Canada (1999) by France Boyer and Richard Dickinson.

There appear to be three dominant perspectives on weeds: agricultural-ranching, suburban, and ecological.
The agricultural perspective considers any plant a weed if it competes with crops for the available nutrients and moisture in a field. Such plants can lower crop yield or cause crop failure. Closely related to this is the ranching perspective, which replaces the agricultural perspective in those areas where rearing of livestock is dominant. The ranching perspective considers any plant a weed if it presents a threat to livestock or reduces the quality of forage that is otherwise available. As a result, livestock gain weight less readily, or they may become ill or injured, sometimes fatally by the uneconomic properties of weedy plants. I combine the agricultural and ranching perspectives together because they are driven primarily by the same economic motives in rural areas.

The suburban perspective considers any plant a weed if it invades the lawns and gardens of suburban homeowners and other managed landscapes of mainstream society, which includes the lawns and gardens of banks, schools, churches, malls, government buildings, industrial parks, etc. In the context of this perspective, plants are valueless weeds unless they have been made available through the mass market and have price tags attached. The ideal plant of the managed landscape in suburbia has the following characteristics:

1) It is an introduced species that is poorly adapted to the surrounding environment.
2) It is a sterile hybrid or patented cultivar.
3) It is difficult to maintain and often short-lived.
4) It doesn't spread readily to places where it doesn't belong.
5) It has obvious aesthetic or culinary properties.
6) It has to be purchased at a store or through a catalog.

The weediness of a plant is defined by the absence of the preceding characteristics. Thus, suburbia considers any plant a weed that is well-adapted to its environment, prone to reproduce itself and spread, requires little or no effort to maintain, has no obvious aesthetic or culinary properties, and doesn't require money to acquire.

The ecological perspective considers any plant a weed if it is a pioneer species that thrives in a degraded habitat with a history of disturbance through human agency. Such weeds may be native or introduced. There are also superweeds that have the capacity to invade high quality natural areas. Superweeds are usually introduced plants with few natural enemies in the area of invasion. By forming dense colonies, they displace native plants and reduce biodiversity. The more ordinary kinds of weeds are not considered a significant threat to the natural environment because they tend to disappear after artificial disturbances have been removed, while superweeds are dreaded by nearly all ecologists.

In the United States, the agricultural-ranching perspective dominated people's opinions about weeds prior to World War II, and it is still very influential. Both of the books that are cited above have been strongly influenced by this perspective. One reason for the dominance of this perspective was that most people lived on farms, ranches, or rural areas that were economically dependent on such commercial interests. After World War II, however, the suburban perspective on weeds became more dominant as most people became homeowners in suburban areas that were not dominated by agricultural-ranching interests. The ecological perspective on weeds became influential during the 1970's and thereafter as people and government leaders became more concerned with environmental issues. Today, all three of these perspectives coexist among members of modern society, even though they are not entirely compatible with each other.

As an example of this lack of compatibility, consider Medicago sativa (Alfalfa). Alfalfa is highly regarded as a forage crop and a source of hay for livestock, particularly in the Western states. As a member of the legume family, it helps to replenish worn-out agricultural soil by fixing atmospheric nitrogen. From the agricultural-ranching perspective, Alfalfa is more often regarded as a valuable crop plant than a weed. However, suburban homeowners and ecologists have a different assessment of this plant. Alfalfa is just another weed to be eliminated from the suburban perspective because it can invade lawns and gardens. It is not particularly attractive, nor is it highly regarded as a source of food for humans, however acceptable it may be to livestock. Similarly, Alfalfa is regarded as a weed from an ecological perspective because it is an introduced plant from abroad that displaces native plants. It also has a tendency to thrive in habitats where there has been a history of disturbance, which is typical of weedy plants.

Other examples could be given in which a given plant species is highly regarded from a suburban perspective, but regarded as a weed from the agricultural-ranching and ecological perspectives, and similarly for those species that are highly regarded from an ecological perspective. It is well known that ecologists often find themselves in pitched battles against real estate developers, farmers and ranchers, and other commercial interests over the preservation of habitat containing rare species of plants. However, there are also plant species that are regarded as weedy pests from all three perspectives, one of which is Conium maculatum (Poison Hemlock). However, this does not mean that Poison Hemlock is devoid of value, as I will attempt to explain below.

Personally, I'm more influenced by the ecological perspective than the others, although I include many species that are regarded as weeds in fields and pastures, as well as lawns and gardens. Examples of common field weeds include Thlaspi arvense (Field Pennycress) and Abutilon theophrasti (Velvetleaf), while examples of common lawn weeds include Taraxacum officinale (Dandelion) and Plantago rugelii (Broadleaf Plantain).

One characteristic of all three perspectives is that weedy plants are regarded as having little value, and thus homeowners, business establishments, ecologists, farmers, and ranchers expend considerable time, money, and effort in getting rid of them. There are some ecologists, however, who have a higher opinion of weedy plants (I happen to be one of them) because they assume important roles in the functioning of the ecological system and are interesting subjects of intellectual inquiry. Furthermore, some weedy plants have produced practical benefits that further the interests of modern society.

Why are weeds more valuable than many people realize? I suggest the following reasons:

1) Some weedy species are pioneers of degraded landscapes where the soil is worn-out or nearly destroyed. Such weedy species are necessary to the healing process of the landscape, as their decaying organic matter improves the quality of the soil and the sets the stage for the succession of non-weedy plants.

2) Some weedy species are pioneers of disturbed landscapes where the soil is high quality, but exposed to erosion by wind and water. Such weedy species quickly cover the exposed soil and prevent erosion from occurring until they are replaced by non-weedy plants.

3) Weedy plants are often important sources of food and cover to various kinds of wildlife, including mammals, birds, and insects. For example, the caterpillars of Danaus plexippes (Monarch butterfly) feed on Asclepias syriaca (Common Milkweed), while the the caterpillars of Papilio polyxenes asterias (Black Swallowtail butterfly) feed on Daucus carota (Wild Carrot) and Pastinaca sativa (Wild Parsnip).

4) Weedy plants are potentially important sources of food, medicines, herbicides, and other products to modern society. For example, Fragaria virginica (Wild Strawberry) is one of the parent species of the hybrid strawberries in supermarkets. A powerful herbicide has been derived from Centaurea biebersteinii (Spotted Knapweed), while the fiber of Cannabis sativa (Marijuana) can be used to make paper, rope, or clothing.

For these reasons, I think weedy plants are entitled to greater respect than they have received from the past. Even professional ecologists have a tendency to underestimate their value to the environment. I hope that this website will rectify some of these misperceptions, even though it is clear that some weedy plants present a major threat to commercial interests, while others are superweeds that can invade natural habitats.

THOREAU'S "WALKING"

The "Walking" we have in our ecocomposition anthology is an excerpt from Thoreau's essay. If you're interested in reading the entire essay, click here.