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Community ain???t what it used to be ??? neighborhood challenges to churches and schools (part 2)

2008-07-03T13:11:05Z

Yesterday I wrote about a seemingly endless series of challenges to development activities, even relatively minor ones, proposed by churches and schools in and around my neighborhood. This bothers me because, if we are experiencing hostility between neighbors and even our most basic community institutions, the viability of multi-functional, sustainable neighborhoods and cities is called into question.

While I don’t believe that nonprofits deserve a carte blanche to do anything they want without being questioned, my perception is that there is a level of distrust and defensiveness in these cases that is out of proportion to what is being proposed. And, frankly, it seems most prevalent in upscale neighborhoods. I don’t think it is a coincidence that some of the greatest success stories concerning development within communities, sometimes with faith-based support, have occurred in recently downtrodden or relatively modest areas like Dudley Street in Boston, Old North in St. Louis, and Geeensburg, Kansas.

I don’t think it has always been this way. Are we as a society less communal and less trusting, more defensive than we used to be? If so, why?

I have a few theories. First, air conditioning. I’m serious. It makes more people spend more time indoors than we did, say, 50 years ago, which means less interaction. How many people sit on their front porches in the evenings now, if they even have them, in wealthy neighborhoods? Second, our addiction to automobiles. As my co-author Don Chen memorably wrote in our 1999 book Once There Were Greenfields, some people, particularly in low-density suburbs, “tend to interact with their neighbors mainly through their windshields.”

And, of course, we’re a more mobile society in other ways, too, with communities being more transient than they used to be.

Whatever the reasons, there has been a decided downturn in Americans’ affinity with both churches and schools. In his classic book Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam notes that, although the US continues to have more houses of worship per capita than any other nation on earth, “religious sentiment in America seems to be becoming somewhat less tied to institutions and more self-defined.” Weekly churchgoing remains popular in the US but has declined over the last half-century, as has church membership.

With respect to schools, Putnam notes that “participation in parent-teacher organizations has dropped drastically over the last generation, from more than 12 million in 1964 to barely 5 million in 1982 before recovering to approximately 7 million” in 1995. Putnam also uses survey data to document declining socializing with neighbors and the declining portion of people who say that “most people can be trusted,” which had fallen sharply to below 40 percent by the mid-1990s.

In my youth, neighbors were more accepting, I believe, because they were usually among those who attended the nearby churches and schools, or were friends with people who did. Today, given the decline in identification with these institutions, and decline in neighborhood social ties, neighbors see the local churches and schools not as part of their own kind but as other people, at best representative of a minority in the neighborhood. They are much less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt.

I also think that, at least with regard to neighborhood defensiveness with regard to development activities, including those undertaken by churches and schools, we in the environmental movement have played a role. For good reasons, beginning in the 1970s we created a system of laws and procedures, and a culture, that over time has made it relatively easy to challenge proposed development of all types, and to defeat proposals or delay them until proponents give up. People now consider it their right to fight proposed development wherever and whenever it occurs, and it has become an expectation in many places.

While there are important reasons to be glad for this – many, many bad projects have been halted because of environmental challenges, some of them litigated by yours truly – I think that, as the creators of this system, we now bear some responsibility for making sure that it is not abused. It is time for us as a movement to become more discriminating in what we challenge and what we applaud, and to speak more publicly and forcefully for as well as against things. Indeed, I believe it is irresponsible of us to say no without also indicating what would prompt us to say yes. We also must challenge those who oppose environmentally benign or beneficial projects in our name.

Many of my colleagues at NRDC agree and are now vigorously advocating reasonable, pragmatic solutions to our environmental problems. I’ve asked NRDC’s top leadership and our communications team to join our smart growth program in helping our constituency tell the difference between good development projects and bad, and to help them speak in favor when they are good. That is certainly what this blog will stand for.

Back in the neighborhood, it is a long walk, about a mile, from my house to what is without a doubt the greatest asset in our portion of the city: Washington National Cathedral. The foundation stone was laid in 1907 and it took 83 years to build. No matter what your religious or social affinity, you’d be hard pressed not to be moved and inspired by its majesty. Renters and homebuyers pay a considerable premium for being located nearby, especially if they have a view. The cathedral, one of the world’s largest, opens its doors to people of all faiths as they gather to worship and pray, to mourn the passing of world leaders, and to confront the pressing moral and social issues of the day. I can’t imagine our city without it.

We are lucky that construction began a century ago. Would Washington National Cathedral be allowed in its neighborhood if it were proposed today?

Community ain???t what it used to be: neighborhood challenges to churches and schools (part 1)

2008-07-02T13:49:41Z

I’ve had this post milling around in my head for a long time. What finally prompted me to write is a ferocious battle in my neighborhood challenging a Baptist church’s proposed addition to its building. The addition would house a non-profit child care center, a language school for kids, and the Washington Conservatory of Music, which the church hosts.

Sounds fine to me. But some neighbors say that wouldn’t be the end of it. They say the church has also hosted all sorts of other nefarious activities, such as meetings of Overeaters Anonymous, summer camps, a girls’ chorus, the City Choir of Washington, and even a program for “troubled youth,” according to a quote in the neighborhood newspaper. What next, the neighbors must wonder. Pot-luck suppers? Musical classes for the homeless? The traffic and people are already unbearable, goes the argument.

Maybe it’s just me, but these sound like the sorts of things that churches have always done, and our communities are better because of it. I can’t imagine this kind of ruckus being raised in my youth. (And I’m glad, since my band used to rehearse in our church’s social hall and host musical performances there.) If it meant a little more traffic or whatever, that was OK, because our community was actually proud of this stuff. And by the way, I walk, ride my bike, and drive by the Baptist church in my neighborhood all the time, at all hours of the day. I have yet to see anything remotely approaching the “constant stream of traffic” cited by the complainants. In fact, there is hardly ever any significant traffic, by city standards.

The same neighborhood paper (they call themselves "a crusader of information" and love citizens-up-in-arms stories) also has an article about a different but nearby neighborhood’s recent victory, keeping a movie theater (below left) from following through on its plans to host Sunday morning services for an evangelical church.

“Some residents worried about the traffic and parking problems” (wouldn't the theater's usual movies present the same issues?) and others, well, just didn’t like the kind of church it was. They fought the plan on zoning grounds and eventually the theater withdrew its proposal.

Again, the contrast with the way communities used to operate is striking. When I was a child, my parents belonged to a congregation that didn’t yet have a building. So we met for services on Sunday mornings at a local elementary school until the church (Groce United Methodist in Asheville, above right) was built. Again, no big deal. Today, maybe sensitivities about separation of church and state have evolved to where public school use would no longer be seen as appropriate, but I can assure you it would not have been a problem to house the services in a private building such as a commercial movie theater.

People respected differences of religion, too. In the DC case, somehow I don’t think there would have been such strong objection if the theater had proposed, say, children’s matinees on Sunday mornings instead of evangelical church services. And, although I’m no evangelical, that rubs me the wrong way.

(For the record, at this point I’m what some people would call a secular humanist, with a trace of Buddhism lurking around. But my church upbringing had everything to do with shaping my adult values, including the environmental ones.)

There is yet another vigorous neighborhood fight in a different part of town over a proposed two-story Mormon church, with a sanctuary that will seat 240 members, on a street that already has 45 existing churches. The 46th, opponents say, would be out of character with the neighborhood. (OK, the proposed steeple is higher than even I would prefer, but it’s still quite a bit shorter than the steeple on the church that my friends Bob and Barbara attend, on the same street a mile to the south.) And in yet another part of town, neighbors challenged the permit for a Buddhist center on Massachusetts Avenue, a street well-known for its embassies, churches and other institutional buildings, on the grounds that the facility was not a “house of worship” under the law. (They lost.)

It’s not just churches that are drawing citizens’ fire: it’s schools, too. A neighborhood in suburban Virginia is fighting expansion of a Montessori school. (Talk about a menace to society.) And the neighborhood just south of mine in DC had a protracted, bitter fight over the National Cathedral School’s new athletic facility, even though it was mostly built underground. “Oppose the Coliseum – Don’t Throw the Neighborhood to the Lions!” shouted the signs in neighborhood yards. (The National Cathedral School is operated by the Episcopal Church, and serves girls in grades 4-12. It is on the grounds of Washington National Cathedral, a 57-acre site, only 14 percent of which may be developed.)

Do you see a coliseum in the photo? See that green space? Green space that neighbors can use? (There's a lot more of it to the right of the photo.) That’s the new gym’s roof! That one went to court, the neighbors lost, and the gym was built. The neighborhood remains green and peaceful, there has been no significant traffic increase, and property values have continued to go up, despite the downturn in housing values elsewhere.

I could go on and on - there are stories of neighborhoods opposing nursing homes - nursing homes! My favorite of all these DC battles, though, is the instance about a decade ago when a tony neighborhood refused to let a charity run pass through, because it would have meant closing the street for two hours on a Sunday morning, once a year. I forget the charity, but I think it was medical – leukemia, maybe? The event had to be re-routed.

What the heck happened between my youth and now, to the point where what used to be regarded as community assets are now regarded as community threats? As my friend Merry wrote, “I've been thinking about this kind of thing a lot (neighborhoods and community, now vs. then) and feel like I am missing some key piece of the puzzle . . . as if I fell asleep for a few years (college & grad school?) and missed some major societal change that caused this.”

I’ll explore the possible reasons why in my next post.

Sprawl and highways hurt wildlife ??? so why aren???t states spending the available money to reduce the conflicts?

2008-07-01T13:33:04Z

While the emphasis of this blog is on community development and smart growth, one of the reasons I promote those solutions so enthusiastically is to reduce development pressure on our working and natural landscapes. Many species of wildlife, in particular, need room to roam in order to survive, and when we invade and divide their habitat we change our ecology and diminish the wonders of nature. Not good.

One of the most menacing man-made problems for wildlife is our road system, which according to the conservation organization Defenders of Wildlife affects animals both directly with vehicle collisions that cause roadkill and indirectly via degradation, fragmentation and loss of habitat.

According to Defenders’ Habitat and Highways program, “Recent estimates indicate between 725,000 and 1,500,000 animals are struck on our roads annually. Wildlife-vehicle collisions can take a toll on species at the population level and, in some cases, push some rare species closer to extinction. Statistics for human victims are grim as well — 200 fatalities, 29,000 injuries and more than $1 billion in property damage every year as a result of wildlife-vehicle collisions.”

Beyond collisions, roads fragment habitat by creating barriers that animals will not or cannot cross and survive. As the Biodiversity Partnership puts it, this “chops the landscape into smaller, disconnected pieces that cannot sustain healthy wildlife populations. Species dependent on habitat interiors or with large habitat area requirements are especially vulnerable to fragmentation . . . Only certain species, such as those that are adapted to habitat edges or dependent upon human activity, are able to persist in these fragmented habitats.” Plant communities are affected, too, because barriers interfere with pollination.

My friend Trisha White directs the Habitat and Highways program, and she and her colleagues have released a new publication highlighting the availability of federal funds to help reduce these negative impacts. It is called The $61 Million Question: How Can Transportation Enhancements Benefit Wildlife? and it is designed to help conservationists, departments of transportation, and resource managers tap the available resources for good pro-wildlife, transportation-related projects, many of which are highlighted in the report as examples.

The title is derived from the amount of money that could be available, on average, to each state if the states allocated one-twelfth of their available “transportation enhancements” funds equally among the twelve eligible categories, including wildlife projects. Sadly, only around $11.5 million, on average, is spent on wildlife from the available funds. Trisha and her colleagues hope to give the program a boost with the report.

(Transportation Enhancements is a federal program that recognizes the negative impacts that transportation infrastructure can have on communities and the landscape, and makes funds available for all sorts of great projects to compensate. Other eligible categories include bicycle and pedestrian facilities, scenic and historic easements, welcome centers and roadside beautification.)

As conservationist David Burwell writes in the report’s preface, “it is up to state wildlife agencies and citizen advocates to sit down with state transportation agencies and map out plans for accomplishing these important ‘wildlife retrofits.’ Many state transportation agencies do not have the in-house expertise needed to strategically program funds to maximize wildlife protection as a co-benefit of transportation planning and system management.”

Some of the best examples in the new report are wildlife crossing facilities that have been built beneath or above freeways and other roads. The crossing beneath Harbor Boulevard in Los Angeles, at left, was built with Enhancements funding and restores connectivity between patches of habitat. The photo comes originally from the Puente Hills Landfill Native Habitat Preservation Authority (all images in this post are from the new report), which was instrumental in getting the project done.

Other types of projects include acquiring habitat to re-establish habitat connectivity, installing fencing or other structures to guide wildlife towards crossings, identifying collision hotspots through tracking, telemetry, and cameras, evaluating roadside vegetation, removing invasive species and planting native species along right-of-ways and on neighboring properties, and many more listed in the report.

Download it here.

The Best vs the Good

2008-06-30T22:37:04Z

I recently wrote about NRDC's public opinion research program and promised to tell additional tales from the often-humbling land of surveys and focus groups.

In the category of humbling, we were recently told that the American public is deeply skeptical about the environmental movement; folks believe environmentalists, writ large, to be deeply impractical beings.

This finding came from the same researchers who worked on the global warming project I detailed in Pascal's Wager.

In a slide titled "The Best is the Enemy of the Good," the researchers told us that theoretical debate "turns off" large numbers of Americans and that scientific back and forth is inherently considered theoretical and thus impractical.

That opinion is even held by many of what are considered to be "thought leaders," the people who tend to be the most engaged in current affairs and those whose opinions tend help shape public perceptions.

So how do we fix our bad reputation? The researchers told us that environmentalists must talk about concrete solutions that can be quantified and measured. We need to talk about jobs created, dollars saved and lives improved.

They told us that we must make the idea of "practical" our benchmark for success. Its a message that we at NRDC are taking to heart and that is increasingly being reflected in our work.

Take the ads we developed and placed in Washington on behalf of many environmental groups during the recent debate on the Climate Solutions Act proposed by Senators Lieberman and Warner.

As you can see from the sample above, the ads featured the faces of American workers and spoke of jobs that can be created by global warming solutions. And we supported our advertisements with practical analysis such as that presented in a report -- Job Opportunities for the Green Economy -- published by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and in a series of fact sheets by NRDC.

Furthermore, we will work to bring our message of practical solutions to ever broader swaths of the American public. Solutions like those presented by a group formed to give unemployed vets of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the training they need to get so-called green jobs.

NRDC excels in science, law and policy. And our advocacy for the last 40 years has also been deeply rooted in practicality. It's one of the things that most drew me to the organization three years ago and it's what our members constantly tell us they admire most about NRDC.

Our challenge then is to persuade those who are not NRDC members. I shudder to ask, but anyone out there have any ideas how we at NRDC and in the broader environmental movement can shake our bad rep when it comes to practicality?

Let's Respect the Public With More Information

2008-06-30T14:00:00Z

We need a lot more environmental information to begin to address the lack of public understanding of environmental harms.

This may seem obvious, but it isn’t. At a meeting a few years ago, I was shocked to find the head of a state water agency opposed to an effort to provide the public with more information on sewage overflows. His argument was that he didn’t want to scare the public, and that the public wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand the information.

About our families swimming in sewage, I thought?

Sewage overflows happen much more frequently than they should. In the Clean Water Act of 1972, Congress set a goal for our waters to be fishable and swimmable by 1983. Yet today, fewer than one half of our waters have even been assessed. Of those, only about half meet their designated uses. And for most of those, the designated use is something less than fishable and swimmable.

Take our beaches, for example. In 2007, the NRDC released the results of our annual water quality survey. The results were startling. In 2006, pollution caused a record number of beach closings nationwide. Closing and advisory days topped 25,000 – more than had ever been recorded in the survey’s 17-year history. The public needs to know about this. And yet, agencies are wary of releasing information that would hold them responsible.

In one EPA negotiated undertaking I was involved with, we were discussing the possibility of electronic filing of permit applications, permits, and monitoring data. Many dischargers were first supportive – after all, it would save them time and money. But once they realized that if electronically filed it would be easily accessible, they changed their minds. They knew that publicly available information leads to more awareness, more attention, and more enforcement. They were not sure that was good.

In my opinion, this is backwards. If there is a concern about the reaction, the answer is to provide the public with more, or better, information, not less. We should have more respect for the public.

To solve this problem, we need to begin by providing the public with more information – much more information than they currently have. But we also need to provide them with better information. It’s not just about quantity, but quality. The information should be about the full range of effects – health, environmental, cultural – and not just about the associated costs.

And we need to make the information available. The internet is a truly terrific opportunity for this (if you’re reading this blog, I hope you’ll agree). Environmental information should all be up on the web so anyone can find out about the permit (or lack of a permit) for the factory or whatever is down the street from one of their kids’ schools.

This is one of NRDC’s goals. We believe that an informed citizenry is an active citizenry – one more likely to hold the federal government to its promise of providing clean water for our families, and for our kids.

A tale too typical: the endangered Heart Theater in Effingham, IL

2008-06-30T13:14:22Z

Over the weekend my colleague on the LEED for Neighborhood Development Core Committee, Ken Potts, e-mailed me and others about another of the country’s historic movie houses at risk of demolition. It wouldn’t take all that much money to save it: Ken reports that, at Saturday’s auction, no one met even the minimum bid of $110,000.

My guess is that, given the trend back to town center living and shopping, the Heart could house a viable entertainment business in only a few years if someone has what is called in the real estate biz “patient capital.”

Effingham is a small city of just over 12,000 residents in south-central Illinois and the home of, among other notables, former NBA center Uwe Blab. It has other historic properties as well, such as the county court house you see with this paragraph. According to the local newspaper, theater owner Mark McSparin had received many inquiries about the Heart, and was quoted as being optimistic about the auction. Unfortunately, that didn’t pan out, and now the building may be dismantled and sold in pieces, destroying its historic identity.

The web site Cinema Treasures reports that the Heart Theater, which opened in 1941, was an early example of adaptive reuse of an existing structure, built inside what had formerly been a garage. The theater originally contained 750 seats, but was downsized to 500 seats in the 1970s. The Heart closed around 2002, reopened in 2003 and was closed again in 2007. Comments on CT’s web site reveal more about the Theater’s history and viability as well community interest.

If you know anyone who might be interested in saving the Heart Theater, please get in touch, and I will give you the relevant contact information.

All of us know stories of historic Main Streets and historic theaters that have been lost in the past decades. Cinema Treasures, which is dedicated to saving the country’s great “movie palaces,” has a “most endangered” list along with updates on news of both restorations and demolitions. It’s a noble effort by a couple of dedicated enthusiasts, and I hope they make a difference. It would help make our communities more sustainable in a very literal way.

What shade of green are you? I'm leaning toward avocado green.

2008-06-28T10:31:44Z

Most of the time I work hard to edit out any “eat-your-broccoli” language in NRDC’s green living communications because I don’t think it’s realistic to do everything out there that’s possible all of the time. On www.simplesteps.org it’s more about trying to balance the occasional compromise I might have to make to weave an eco-action into a life already packed with to-do lists.

So my general bent, in a fair-trade nut shell, is to start with the simple steps that are easy to incorporate into my routine (like washing clothes at a lower temperature) and then add a few things that require more commitment but are important to me personally (like culling the toxic cleaners out from under my sink and replacing them with safer alternatives). And if I happen to stop for a latte on the way to work having forgot my reusable cup next to the kitchen sink, I’ll gladly accept a disposable cup, swallow down my caffeine and then, to horrors of all horrors, might toss the cup into an ordinary trash bin never to be sorted and recycled.

I rationalize this pick-and-choose behavior by telling myself that Karma will even things out for me, especially since I’m trying so hard with the laundry. But this morning, I’ve just been reading the news of the day about the political situation in Zimbabwe. It seems that “President” Mugabe is busy at work starving his citizens and snuffing out democracy.

You might be asking, what does this have to do with swapping out my conventional light bulbs for energy-saving bulbs? Well, I’m struck by our good fortune as Americans. We might have a few kinks in our political system, but it works and it’s stable. We might have high gas prices, but we can still park the car without fear that someone is going to steal the tires and set the newly tireless car on fire. And we might all be paying more for food, but at least we can buy it.

My aunt, who lives in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, says that you can’t find much on the shelves these days besides green dish washing soap. They (and the dogs) are mostly living off the garden’s avocado tree. In light of all this, it almost seems indulgent to say nonchalantly, “Do what you can when you can.” In fact, it’s a privilege to have the luxury of standing at the washing machine and deciding to wash the rocket-man pjs at 40 degrees instead of at 60 degrees.

It’s a privilege to swap out my regular bulbs for energy-saving bulbs. And in fact, I’m starting to think that the simple steps we can take to improve our environment are less and less an option. And more and more a responsibility. How can I simply pass along the responsibility of my social contract to Karma to square away?

No. I think it’s time for me to up the ante and get serious about the things that I can do to lighten the load on our planet, like voting with my dollar and taking some action beyond the walls of my home. Especially since I’m not worrying about where the next avocado will come from or if my country’s economic and political system will implode.

Maybe I’ll put together a new initiative called Not-So-Simple-Steps for those of us out there who are ready to go the next mile. Now that we’ve gotten the most toxic products out of our kitchen shelves, it’s time to get them off the grocery shelves. Because we are lucky to have things on the shelves, so let’s make the most of it. To kick start my week-of-the-fourth-of-July resolution, I’m off for a latte—with my reusable cup—to kick start my list of the not-so-simple things I’m going to tackle before the end of the year.

Tainted Wood: Illegal Logging is Pushing Tribes to Extinction

2008-06-27T16:44:30Z

Let me tell you a story about illegal logging pushing tribal families to extinction.

The story begins a few days ago, when a colleague emailed me a YouTube video documenting the discovery of the Tsohon-djapa, a previously uncontacted tribe in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Standing next to their grass huts, with bodies painted red and black in preparation for war, the Tsohon-djapa are shown shooting arrows up at the airplane, hoping to bring it down. As Jose Carlos Mireles, the one responsible for discovering the tribes, says, “They probably thought our plane was a giant bird.”

The futility of this effort brings home the point. When it comes to the mounting pressures of the industrialized world, these tribes have no defense.

With demand for luxury wood products in the United States on the rise, illegal loggers are pushing further and further into the rainforest in search of mahogany and cedar, and into the areas tribes like the Tsohon-djapa call home. The illegal loggers bring with them violent conflict, introduce deadly disease, and destroy the ecosystems upon which the tribes depend. In contrast, the plane that took these pictures is the least of their worries.

The Tsohon-djapa are but one story. There are many others. By some estimates, there are 100 such tribes left in the world, most of them in the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon. In the remote Peruvian rainforest alone, the last families of the Mascho Piro, Yora, Matsigenka, and Amahuaca are threatened.

When we talk about extinction, it’s often in the context of protecting an endangered species. But this is a story about endangered families. It reminded me – as I hope it does for you – of the need to protect human diversity.

In countries like Peru and Brazil, all of the market incentives reward deforestation. Increased consumer demand from the United Stated – the wood from one large mahogany tree alone is worth more than $100,000 when used in furniture and luxury wood products - has driven illegal loggers further into the rainforests, and the areas these tribes call home.

William Laurance, a tropical biologist with the Smithsonian Institution, was quoted on Dot Earth as saying: “The new roads open up the frontier for waves of unplanned and illegal logging, land colonization, and land speculation that is nearly impossible for the government to control... It’s a formula for environmental and social chaos.”

The problem of tropical deforestation has received increased attention recently. The cutting of forests in tropical countries accounts for about 15-25% of all of the greenhouse gas emissions. There are now discussions of how to use the emerging carbon market to slow deforestation. However, creating such a market for forest carbon is extraordinarily complicated and will take several years at best.

If we are to save these uncontacted peoples, we cannot afford to wait. We have to take steps now to curb illegal logging. The United States, which alone is responsible for more than 80% of the mahogany exports from Peru, can provide real leadership. Click here to help save the Tahuamanú Rainforest, an NRDC Biogem.

First, consumers here can educate themselves so they can make informed decisions about what wood products they purchase. Click here for a consumer wood guide we published.

Second, the United States Government should make sure that all of mahogany and other timber trade is legal and sustainable.

Finally, we need to step up our cooperation with Peru and Brazil and other key tropical countries to improve forest governance and to put an end to illegal logging.

Think globally, eat locally? Maybe, maybe not . . .

2008-06-27T13:48:12Z

I’m not sure I quite understand the fervent passion of what seems to be a full-fledged movement to get consumers to buy and eat local, but I can think of some very good reasons to do just that. For instance, maybe you want to support local businesses of all kinds, including farms (I do). Or maybe you want to keep farming competitive to help save the local countryside from sprawl (I do, again). Or maybe you like the sense of community that comes with patronizing a community farmers’ market or co-op (my favorite reason), or like the nutritional value of eating the freshest produce.

Count me in. But I don’t necessarily buy that becoming a “locavore” is inherently better for the environment. The emissions-reduction argument in favor is well-stated on the web site Sustainable Table:

“A tremendous amount of fossil fuel is used to transport foods such long distances. Combustion of these fuels releases carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and other pollutants into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change, acid rain, smog and air pollution. Even the refrigeration required to keep your fruits, vegetables, dairy products and meats from spoiling burns up energy.”

But the real answer may be sometimes yes, sometimes no. As Roberta Kwok writes in Salon,

“But what if conventional distributors make up for the long journeys by driving big trucks packed with produce? Let's say a distributor travels 1,000 miles and carries 1,000 apples to market, while 10 local farmers each drive a pickup 100 miles and carry 100 apples each. The local farmers log fewer food miles but cover the same total distance -- and use a comparable amount of fossil fuels -- for the same amount of food.”

Kwok did some back-of-the-envelope analysis on five categories of produce on sale in supermarkets and farmers’ markets in California. She found that locally grown squash was indeed more carbon-efficient in its transportation. But, for apples,

“While the two local apple farmers traveled one-tenth the distance, their loads averaged less than 700 pounds -- and generated six times more carbon dioxide per pound of apples than the semi-trailer trucks.”

The plot thickens. Kwok cites a bunch of reasons why the calculations aren’t at all simple, especially when you dig into such issues as intermediary distributors, the per-pound fuel efficiency of trucks typically driven by farmers and those driven by supermarket wholesalers, and the miles driven by consumers to the store or market. A number of studies from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and researchers in the United Kingdom and New Zealand suggest, though, that in many instances the big supermarkets probably beat the local farmers on limiting carbon emissions.

Michael Specter, writing in the New Yorker, makes many of the same points:

“Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that it is actually more “green” for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that ‘the efficiencies of shipping drive a ‘green line’ all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity.’
“The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. ‘In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity,’ [researcher Adrian] Williams explained. That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower . . .
“Williams and his colleagues recently completed a study that examined the environmental costs of buying roses shipped to England from Holland and of those exported (and sent by air) from Kenya. In each case, the team made a complete life-cycle analysis of twelve thousand rose stems for sale in February . . . the carbon footprint of the roses from Holland—which are almost always grown in a heated greenhouse—was six times the footprint of those shipped from Kenya. Even Williams was surprised by the magnitude of the difference. ‘Everyone always wants to make ethical choices about the food they eat and the things they buy,’ he told me. ‘And they should. It’s just that what seems obvious often is not. And we need to make sure people understand that before they make decisions on how they ought to live.’”

I recommend both articles, as well as the analysis and links on the Sustainable Table site, which collectively are rich with information if not consistency. As I said, there are lots of reasons other than the carbon consequences of “food miles” to buy and eat local. But we cannot say unequivocally that carbon emissions reduction is always among them. Another glass of Bordeaux, please.

The light bulb, the cocktail party, and you

2008-06-26T23:12:43Z

Years ago, when I was young, I spent most of my time working on energy efficiency technology policy. Now I spend most of my time working of renewables, but from time to time, my colleagues forget and ask me questions that are way over my head. And so it was that I was recently pressed to provide our board with simple answers to all the questions they might possible get asked at a cocktail party.

One of the issues that everyone asks about is mercury in compact fluorescent. I wrote one of my early blogs about it, and spent a good chunk of my talk for the board focusing on it. My main message on CFLs and mercury is that if you care about mercury pollution, one of the best things you can do is use more CFLs. But if after using a CFL, we can recycle it, that's even better. So I was happy to see this story that Home Depot is going to start to take CFLs back for recycling.

NRDC's real expert on bulbs and all energy efficient appliances is Noah Horowitz and I encourage you to read more about him and his great work here and here. Now Noah is one of those incredibly smart people that have the ability to make very complicated topics comprehensible. And he helped me do that with bulbs for the board. So without further ado, here's the presentation I gave at NRDC's most recent board meeting.

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