Civic Mindedness

Suum cuique: To each, his own (thanks Wikipedia).  Every person is different, and has unique talents, ideas, and opinions.  Here in Lexington, there are thousands of people that have all taken our education and life philosophies in different directions.  We all make daily decisions based on education and life philosophies. This is true for almost any city in the country.

As a collective whole though, many lack an understanding of how each decision we make impacts our economy, our city, and our environment.  We lack an understanding of the basic functions of a city or town, and how that works in conjunction with the people living there, and the environment both in the town and in the countryside.  Basically, we lack a civic mindedness.

Civic mindedness involves both understanding these issues, and engaging our leaders in conversation on these issues.  For example, we all understand the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?  Now, let's consider a road, two lanes (one each way), and during rush hour, that road becomes extremely jam-packed.  Everyone wants the road to be widened, so that the traffic will lessen during rush hour.  The reality, however, is that the capacity of that road now increases, and supports more traffic.  Widening a road to four lanes will only make things worse by creating even greater congestion.  It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Widening the road also causes a substantial increase in environmental impacts (urban heat island, stormwater runoff and pollution).  This problem, then, requires a basic understanding of the impacts of choosing to drive everyday, the real impacts of widening a road, and the costs of choosing to do that, as opposed to planning a city better.

In another example, many individuals are unaware that storm sewers (the grates along the curb) empty directly into local streams, full of whatever trash people toss out their windows (including cigarette butts), and the pollutants on the road surfaces from regular traffic flow.  Some even pour chemicals straight into the storm sewer.  When all these pollutants reach local streams, they kill aquatic life (fish, frogs, small insects essential to the aquatic food chain).  This subsequently has impacts downstream, i.e. Elkhorn Creek pollutants can impact the Kentucky River.  Then, eventually, a clean-up effort must be conducted, often an expense by the city, to restore a stream to healthy conditions--all because we, as citizens, failed to understand the impacts of our decisions.

Of course, there are some who do have a civic mindedness, and engage their community and leaders in critical thought.  For most civic actions, like land developments, road bulding/widening, zone changes, and such, public forums are held so that citizens can comment.  Recently, the Centrepointe project is an example of a land development that caused a significant citizen uproar, particularly with those who understood the impact it would have on the center of downtown.  In most instances though, the collection of individuals in these forums are not wholly representative of the community, and do not provide a substantial voice that understands the real impacts of such civic actions.  How can the political leaders make decisions that are in the best interests of the community, if the community is not knowledgeable on the subject, or chooses not to speak?  Then, how can the community be upset at the result?

Knowledge of these issues is important, because choosing political leaders for our community is central to those potential leaders understanding these issues.  If the citizen base does not understand them, then they certainly can not be expected to challenge the political leaders' knowledge of such issues.  Now, with this in mind, I would like to challenge each of you to become better educated on the impacts of shopping, driving, living, and dining decisions, both in your life and the life of our city, economy, and environment.  I would like to challenge you to participate more fully in our democratic republic--do not allow yourself to become a couch potato robot.  Our society is in a challenging situation, and needs greater critical thought and collective participation to become a city of the 21st century (and beyond)--not a remnant of the 20th century.

Transit vs Food Production

A common component of advocates for sustainability is the use efficient public transit, rather than automobiles, to transport people through urban environments. It could be said that a "green city" is one that does have diverse and efficient transit options. For public transit to be efficient though, the urban environment needs to be sufficiently dense. The density provides enough people to ride the transit, and pay for its construction and operating costs over the long-term. Research suggests that sufficient density for street cars would be at least 4-5 story mixed-use and multi-unit urban structures. For light rail, it roughly doubles that of street cars.

Opposite transit in the equation of sustainability is that of food production. It has become quite popular to buy "locally grown, fresh" products. Research (and common sense) shows this is substantially more sustainabile than the industrial farming process for several reasons. First, the transportation costs (both environmental and economic) are reduced because food does not have to be shipped from South America or China to reach the consumer in America. Second, locally grown food is often (though not always) produced on a smaller scale, with less harmful inputs, and less land-intensive production processes. Inudstrial farming processes put harmful pollutants into the water system, and deplete the soil of its natural ability to produce. Third, locally grown food provides a much greater ability for the seller to keep track of where the food came from. This is particularly important with the food problems we have had recently, and will continue to have in the future.

Now, why are these two elements opposite each other in the equation?

Well, lets take New York City, for example. The Big Apple has monstrous skyscrapers, and is one of the most dense places on earth. It consistently has 10-story or taller buildings throughout much of the city. It has a great subway system, though no street cars. Taxis and buses are often used as well. However, New York City because of its extreme density, and lack of urban spaces to produce food, necessitates food imports from extreme distances, and necessitates industrial agriculture to provide those food imports. It is, in effect, a completely unsustainable city with regards to food production.

Then, you have on the opposite end of the spectrum a low-density, proto-typical American city, like Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville has a metropolitan population of just over 1 million. It has no street car or rail transit, and the bus system is like many others in the U.S., barely getting by. It is very suburban, and thus low-density, with strip malls, shopping malls, business parks, industrial parks, and other features that fail to create a more sustainable urban form. This city, like most others across the country (except for rust-belt cities like Detroit, Akron, etc that are losing population) takes every available piece of land on the suburban fringe and fills it in with automobile-oriented urban form. It too fails to provide urban spaces for a food production.

If both of these are wrong, what is right?

Well, during the later 19th/early 20th century, a fellow named Ebenezar Howard developed a concept called the "Garden City." His idea was create a central city hub, and then create sub-cities or towns placed radially out from the central city. In between the central city and the towns were to be farming, parks, and other green spaces that helped sustain the all the city and towns. These agricultural and green spaces would be kept as such for eternity, so as to keep the system in balance.

Howard's design and planning ideas were partially attempted in many places across the globe. Some towns were built to mimick the Garden City, but were never fully implemented as such due to a variety of reasons, including politics, technology, and even the general thought that it was not a good idea. Because many of these attempts were never implemented effectively, they failed to actually do what Howard had intended: be self-sustaining.

Current society faces far different land planning issues than Howard faced 100 years ago. But his general concepts are still relevant. We must realize that while it is important to have a dense urban core for both transit efficiency and mixed uses, and consistent density throughout our towns, villages, and cities, it is equally important to keep the density from crossing a point of unsustainable impacts on agricultural production. Furthermore, to counter-balance such density issues, we also need to create more permanent land trusts for food production within cities. Rather than continue to expand outwards without thinking, lands need to be planned, and growth patterns need to be planned. Just because America is a democratic society does not mean that we should abandon better land use practices for the rights of an individual to do with his land whatever he chooses. This is worse for all of us.

Watersheds

Many have become exposed to the concept that water flows toward a stream, and then "downstream" from that point.  Watersheds are the units in which these streams drain, i.e. a drop of water can hit at the top of a watershed, along a ridge, and flow toward a stream, within the watershed.  Within watersheds, there can be forests, lakes, cities (or parts of), and all of these attributes affect the water quality within the watershed, as well as the water quality exiting the watershed.  

http://www.wildeducation.org/programs/nww06/watershed_illustration.html

The image above illustrates the concept well.  It is important to look at watersheds, at a local scale (subwatersheds) and at larger scales (regional watersheds, if you will) so as to understand where water quality inputs are affecting the system.  

Development can, and often does, negatively impact water quality in watersheds.  Primarily, this is due to the installation of impervious surfaces over what had previously been pervious, or able to allow water to infiltrate.  Thus, in developed areas, stormwaters "runoff" impervious surfaces much more quickly than in undeveloped areas, quickly trickling to the lower point of the watershed, and into stream and river systems, causing flash floods.  

Citizens living "downstream" from these developed areas are often the ones who experience the effects of flash floods.  They are outraged, as they have the right to be.  However, the answer is not to create more engineering marvels along the banks of the stream to prevent floodwaters from reaching their floodplains.  No.  The answer is to treat the source of the problem.  We can no longer build enormous amounts of impervious surfaces, such as substantial surface parking lots, and big-box stores, and ignore the negative effects of such elements.

Let's consider a situation.  If we do continue to develop as we have, and flash flooding continues to increase in downstream areas, it requires spending millions of dollars not only to prevent further flooding to occur (which actually is bad, because it causes even more damage farther downstream), but it also requires that those with home insurance covered by flooding get paid, which in turn causes others' insurance rates to raise slightly.  Then, we have issues with economics of people being unable to afford house insurance, and other governmental spending to fix issues that could have been prevented in the first place.  

Furthermore, we go on pretending that what is currently occuring is good, and that we also can play God Almighty and control nature's forces (which are unpredictable) by building more levee and flood containment systems.  Even more, we have to deal with degradation of streams, which results in decrease aquatic species (yes, that means less fish for us to eat), and thus greater food prices.

This is not a worst case scenario.  It happens every year, across the country, with seasonal rains and flooding.  It is occuring more frequently in recent years due to the greater severity and intensity of storms.  So, this is not an issue to be taken lightly.  This affects all Americans at their pocket books.  Unfortunately, leadership in many locations continues to evade these issues, rather than confront them head-on, and educate the American public about the problems.  Then, the American public, which is wholely good at heart and in intent, could begin to demand better development methods.  Grassroots.  Democracy.  We need government for regulations, but we need the bottom-up to actually understand and retain the issues that are presenting themselves to us.