Climate Cities
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Images of dense development
Just wanted to point out a great website, "Visualizing Density," a product of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (LILP). I'm not feeling like my usual prolix self today, so I'll let them do the talking:Sprawl is bad. Density is good. Americans need to stop spreading out and live closer together. Well ... that's the theory, anyway. But, as anyone who has tried to build compact development recently will tell you, if there's one thing Americans hate more than sprawl, it's density ... One reason people reject density is that they don't know much about it -- what it looks like, how to build it, or whether it's something they can call home. We have very rational ways of measuring density, but our perception of it is anything but rational.
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When vacations turn into work
If I was a real blogger, I would occasionally post little bits that didn't really have much to do with my principle concerns, but which I found illuminating or amusing, right?
I submit this, which just surfaced as I was clearing my desk: "The Tyranny of the 2nd Home."
It's even in the "Escapes" section.
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Schwarzenegger to California farmers: Considuh this a divorce
There’s a fair amount of debate on Gristmill about how much green cred to give the Governator — that A-list action hero of enlightened Republicanism. I don’t follow California politics closely enough to venture an opinion. But I do know that promoting a policy that will result in yet more suburban sprawl and evict small- […]
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Lots of good stuff north of the border
The Vancouver Sun has the scoop. First, the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, just released a draft "eco-density" plan that sounds, at least to my ears, like exactly the right way to deal with the city's expected population increase: curbing sprawl by concentrating new housing in compact, transit-friendly neighborhoods:
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Nice Berk If You Can Get It
Berkeley, Calif., goes all crazy with the green ideas Six months ago, voters in Berkeley, Calif., overwhelmingly approved a measure to reduce the city’s emissions 80 percent by 2050. Now proposals have been laid out to accomplish that goal, including requiring builders to use green materials, making landlords provide free bus passes to tenants, informing […]
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On moving to New Orleans, a city defined by water
Wayne Curtis is a freelance writer who’s written for The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, American Scholar, Preservation, and American Heritage, and is the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. He recently traded Maine winters for New Orleans summers. Thursday, 24 May 2007 NEW ORLEANS, […]
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The Bronx Is Up and the Battery’s Under the Hood
New York City will convert entire taxi fleet to hybrids The big yellow taxis of the Big Apple will all be hybrids by 2012 under a plan announced yesterday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The city has been testing 375 hybrid cabs for 18 months, and will soon begin converting its 13,000-vehicle fleet. “It will be […]
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Concrete images of a greener society
Global warming activists have often advocated policies based on numerical goals or painted scary scenarios of the future. But there is a third way to advocate for long-term policies: propose solutions that contain a positive vision of a fossil fuel-free society.
The importance of this approach was underlined to me when I heard Betsy Rosenberg of the radio show Ecotalk interview Chip Heath, an author of the business-oriented book, Made to Stick. She asked Heath what he thought of the phrase "20% by 2020," that is, reducing carbon emissions by 20% by 2020. She thought it had a nice ring to it ... until Heath responded, well, no, nothing turns people off like a bunch of numbers. Instead, the author advised environmentalists to use "concrete images."
Therefore, instead of talking about numeric targets for carbon emissions reductions in order to avoid hell on earth, I'd like to try to paint a picture of how to create a society that might be better than the one we live in now. In that spirit, let me propose the following scenario:
