"green" means never having to say "fill 'er up"
when i don't have to fetch my pre-license teenager during any particular week, i can go almost two without ever starting up a car or even sitting in a car. back-to-back a school trip to washington dc with a saturday school day, and it can conceivably approach three, though you know already that the sun yesterday beckoned a trip to the car wash and a convertible cruise, so the record will have to wait.
i'm reminded of the rarity of this privilege among most people these days having been alerted to a comment thread attached to corey scuito's latest blog entry, "perverting environmental terminology". in the post corey properly skewers the "green" doublespeak being slatered on the "middlesex turnpike +3" environmental pig like so much lipstick. sprawl is the environment's invincible bogeyman, and no matter how you try to dress it up, scattering places to be across square miles, even despite copious leafy-ness among them, is never going to yield an environmentally-friendly result.
ironically, it's the car, when all is said and done, that has done as much as can possibly be done to ruin this great country of ours. the answer, of course, lies dormant within places like the red brick-lined streets of downtown lowell, though you'd never convince the suburban greenies about it. at the decidedly left-wing summer camp i'm delighted to visit with my kids each year, everyone decorates their name badges with some sort of "natural" (aka "green") scene, inhabited by all sorts of wildlife, from seagulls to squirrels. mine, on the other hand, is always festooned with the red bricked canals of my home town, a fact which never fails to raise comments from the environmentally self-unaware. "why did you choose a city scene?"
i choose it for two reasons, the first and most important of which is that the red bricked and canal-powered streets of downtown lowell are among the most environmentally-friendly environments ever and yet known to man. the second is that almost nobody can figure out such an incontrovertible truth without being hit squarely between the eyes with one of those bricks.
sea gulls are scavengers whose prolificism is born of nothing greater than man's abuse of the sea. (ever hang out by the gurry plant in downtown gloucester?) squirrels likewise represent little more than the triumph of human-based adaptation among the more opportunistic species of the planet, including possums, and pigeons. there's little "green" about them, or their environments. if you want to throw away your tv and your car, you'd find few better places in which to do it than downtown lowell. if a "green" revolution is ever to occur, it has to start in places like here. the key will be finding the kinds of industries and employment that can thrive here, like so many pigeons and sparrows and squirrels. some discussion in the comment thread on corey's post includes software, which isn't such a bad option, though, as you might see from my own comments there, i'm a bit less optimistic while the concentration of software geeks down here is less than "critical mass". musicians and artisans and artists are in far greater supply, though corey has his own well-reasoned critique for why this may also prove less than a "green" bullet. the suggestion for us all is to think more about this, and to contribute any way we can.
i have to tell you, from a purely selfish perspective, not having to visit a gas station in almost a month affords quite a bit of other things.
i'm reminded of the rarity of this privilege among most people these days having been alerted to a comment thread attached to corey scuito's latest blog entry, "perverting environmental terminology". in the post corey properly skewers the "green" doublespeak being slatered on the "middlesex turnpike +3" environmental pig like so much lipstick. sprawl is the environment's invincible bogeyman, and no matter how you try to dress it up, scattering places to be across square miles, even despite copious leafy-ness among them, is never going to yield an environmentally-friendly result.
ironically, it's the car, when all is said and done, that has done as much as can possibly be done to ruin this great country of ours. the answer, of course, lies dormant within places like the red brick-lined streets of downtown lowell, though you'd never convince the suburban greenies about it. at the decidedly left-wing summer camp i'm delighted to visit with my kids each year, everyone decorates their name badges with some sort of "natural" (aka "green") scene, inhabited by all sorts of wildlife, from seagulls to squirrels. mine, on the other hand, is always festooned with the red bricked canals of my home town, a fact which never fails to raise comments from the environmentally self-unaware. "why did you choose a city scene?"
i choose it for two reasons, the first and most important of which is that the red bricked and canal-powered streets of downtown lowell are among the most environmentally-friendly environments ever and yet known to man. the second is that almost nobody can figure out such an incontrovertible truth without being hit squarely between the eyes with one of those bricks.
sea gulls are scavengers whose prolificism is born of nothing greater than man's abuse of the sea. (ever hang out by the gurry plant in downtown gloucester?) squirrels likewise represent little more than the triumph of human-based adaptation among the more opportunistic species of the planet, including possums, and pigeons. there's little "green" about them, or their environments. if you want to throw away your tv and your car, you'd find few better places in which to do it than downtown lowell. if a "green" revolution is ever to occur, it has to start in places like here. the key will be finding the kinds of industries and employment that can thrive here, like so many pigeons and sparrows and squirrels. some discussion in the comment thread on corey's post includes software, which isn't such a bad option, though, as you might see from my own comments there, i'm a bit less optimistic while the concentration of software geeks down here is less than "critical mass". musicians and artisans and artists are in far greater supply, though corey has his own well-reasoned critique for why this may also prove less than a "green" bullet. the suggestion for us all is to think more about this, and to contribute any way we can.
i have to tell you, from a purely selfish perspective, not having to visit a gas station in almost a month affords quite a bit of other things.
posted by kad barma at 11:52 AM
3 Comments:
Thanks for the repost. You made me think of my favorite Jane Jacobs quote:
"It is neither love for nature nor respect for nature that leads to this schizophrenic attitude. Instead it is a sentimental desire to toy, rather patronizingly, with some insipid, standardized, suburbanized shadow of nature—apparently in sheer disbelief that we and our cities, just by virtue of being, are a legitimate part of nature too, and involved with it in much deeper and more inescapable ways than grass trimming, sunbathing, and contemplative uplift. And so, each day, several thousand more acres of our countryside are eaten by the bulldozers, covered by pavement, dotted with suburbanites who have killed the thing they thought they came to find. Our irreplaceable heritage of Grade I agricultural land (a rare treasure of nature on this earth) is sacrificed for highways or supermarket parking lots as ruthlessly and unthinkingly as the trees in the woodlands are uprooted, the streams and rivers polluted and the air itself filled with the gasoline exhausts (products of eons of nature’s manufacturing) required in this great national effort to cozy up with a fictionalized nature and flee the “unnaturalness” of the city." - Jane Jacobs, Death and Life Of Great American Cities, 1961
Or, as I've also heard it put, probably by many people but I'm mentally attributing it to James Howard Kunstler, and paraphrased, "Bedford Woods", "Pheasant Lane", "Farm Gates Estates." Why is it that suburbanites fail to see the irony in naming subdivisions after what it is they destroyed?
I liked Corey's point about us being part of nature. I fear a group out here who think the "World" would be better off without humans.
My beef, and I worry that I will be seen as some sort of "leveler" here, is that we have those who have theirs in a band around Boston (or Lowell) and then want to preserve "nature" at the expense of those trapped in unsatisfactory (ghetto like) city living. living in some of the mill buildings in Lowell would be great by my lights. Living in some inner city locations would not be so good.
We need to find opportunities for the lower deciles to improve their lot. When I was young folks would comment on Negros (the term of the day) owning big shiny Caddies, disproportionate to their means. Later I came to realize that restrictive covenants kept them from purchasing up in terms of housing. We have the same thing today, but with a different vector. This distortion of the economy will have adverse impacts on farm and timber land.
Regards — Cliff
Cliff - you're right in many ways. Human warehousing is outright wrong and Lowell has been affected by it heavily over the years. Too many people have died in fires or of disease from horrible living conditions.
However, to keep quoting Jacobs, there is a very important line between high density and overcrowding. 16 people living in a triple decker in Centralville with porches for everyone is very dense, but it's downright palatial compared to some downtown condos like mine. I was just visting an old friend who moved to a triple decker in Mount Vernon in Lawrence. If it wasn't so run down from neglect, what a great neighborhood that could be! This ignores how many cars that generates today, I know. On the other hand, 12 people living in a single-family house in the Highlands with an Escalade out front is overcrowded. I'd say it's fair to say that sort of living is blight.
However, to my knowledge, things are never as bad in Lowell as they used to be, living condition wise. We spent a few decades tearing down half the city to clear that whole thing up. Good luck finding younger people who know what the word "Cold Water Flat" even means! Unfortunately, what we built instead of a more livable neighborhood was a suburban-style disaster.
Besides, the flip-side of slum clearance is the law of unintended consequences. I was talking to someone recently whose mother ran an Acre boarding house many decades ago. Too many people to one bathroom the city said (it was a lot, like 15). She couldn't afford to re-fit the bathroom, so that was one woman out of a job and 17 people out of a home. You hear similar stories about abandoned buildings downtown that can't come up to code on elevators, sprinklers, and handicapped accessibility. It's a very, very fine line to walk. Fire traps are bad. Excluding those that can't walk from life is bad. Tearing down a vibrant city to spread it out in aluminum and cheap frame buildings, subdivided carefully by income, is very, very bad. And that's what we've chosen to do because we didn't like the problems of the past.
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