Tag Archives: green infrastructure

2014 Report Card

It’s taken me a while to get out a “year in review” post for 2014, but anyway, here it is. This won’t be a masterpiece of the essay form. I’m just going to ramble on about some interesting trends and themes from the year, along with a few relevant links.

The critical question this blog tries to answer is, is our civilization failing or not? I’ll talk about our human economy, our planetary system, and make some attempt to tie the two together.

Overall Human Health and Wellbeing. First, there are some very happy statistics to report. For example, worldwide child mortality has dropped almost by half just since 1990. What better measure of progress could there be than more happy, healthy childhoods? And it’s not just about increasing wealth – people in developing countries today have much better health outcomes at the same level of wealth compared to developing countries of the past (for example, Indonesia today vs. the United States when it passed the same income level). It’s hard to argue against the idea that economic growth and technological change have obviously eliminated a lot of human suffering. So, I think the important questions are, will these trends continue? Is the system stable? Can the natural environment continue to support this trend indefinitely? There may also be an important question of whether we had the right to exploit the natural environment to get us to the point where we are now, but that is an academic question at this point.

Financial System Instability. Let’s talk about the stability of our human economic system. The U.S. economy may finally seem to be picking up from the aftermath of the severe 2007-8 financial crisis, but it is certainly far below where it would be if that hadn’t happened and the prior growth trend had just continued since then. The rest of the world isn’t doing so well, however – Europe and Japan are looking particularly slow if not in an outright deflationary spiral, at the same time developing countries appear to be slowing down. Some are calling this a “new normal” for the world economy. More scary than that, the industry-written regulations and perverse incentives allowing the excessive risk taking that caused the crisis have not been fully addressed and the whole episode could recur in the short term.

Thoughts on Ecosystem and Economic “Pulsing”. 2007-8 was a textbook financial crisis – although it was caused by novel forms of money and risk taking beyond the direct reach of government regulators and central banks, it was not that different from crises caused by plain old speculation and over-lending back when there were no central banks around. It’s hard to draw a direct link from the financial crisis to ecosystem services, climate change, or natural resource scarcity. However, if we think about natural ecosystems, they are resilient to outside stressors up to a point – say, moderate fluctuations in temperature, hydrology, or pressure from non-native species. However, say a major fluctuation happens such as a major flood or fire that causes serious damage. In the absence of major outside stressors, the system will eventually recover to its original state, but in the presence of major outside stressors, even if they did not cause the flood or fire, it may never bounce back all the way. In the same way, our human economy may appear resilient to the effects of climate change, ocean acidification, soil erosion, and so forth for a long time, but then when something comes out of left field, like a major financial crisis, war, or epidemic, we may not be able to recover to our previous trend. This probably also applies to the effects of technology on employment, as discussed below. In the absence of major shocks coming from outside the system, we’ll see a long, slow slide in employment and possibly a long, slow rise in energy and food prices, with so much noise in the signal that it will be easy for the naysayers to hold sway for long periods of time. But when those major events happen, we may see sudden, painful changes that we have no obvious way of mitigating quickly.

Technological Change: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Automation, and Employment. After decades of slow but steady progress, these technologies are really coming into their own. Robots are being used to keep miners in line and to drive cars, for example. Manufacturing has become a high-tech industry. As computers and machines get better at performing more and more skilled jobs (book-keeping is one example), there is gradually less demand for the medium-skilled workers who used to do those jobs. High-skilled workers like computer programmers are doing very well, although I presume the automation will gradually creep higher and higher up the chain, so today’s safer jobs will be less safe tomorrow. At the same time these medium-skilled workers in developed countries are getting squeezed out, developing countries are not benefiting like they used to from their large pools of low-skilled workers as manufacturing becomes more and more automated, and can be done cost-effectively closer to consumers in richer countries.

Will our society recognize and solve this employment problem? American corporate society, and its admirers around the world, are unlikely to. Something very similar to this happened with agricultural automation in the early- to mid-20th century, and with globalization in the mid- to late-20th century. As agriculture became more automated, many displaced workers moved from rural areas in the U.S. southeast to urban areas in the U.S. northeast, looking for factory work. Unfortunately, the factory jobs that existed previously were being moved to developing countries with abundant low-wage labor. The pockets of poverty, unemployment, and social problems created by these forces have not been adequately addressed to this day. To the individual worker, it doesn’t much matter whether your job is being taken by a local robot or an overseas human. Unemployment created by technological forces today could resemble what was created by globalization yesterday, only on a much larger scale. We can only hope that the larger scale will drive real political solutions, such as better education and training, sharing of available work, and more widespread ownership of the labor-saving technology.

Of course, one of the earliest and probably the most shameful example of a modern capitalist system generating wealth for an elite few at the expense of workers is the American slavery system of the 18th and 19th centuries. We just can’t trust amoral, self-interested private enterprise to maximize welfare in the absence of a strong moral compass coming from the larger society. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

Another example of extreme corporate immorality: Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook.

The Gospel of Shareholder Value. There is an important debate over whether people who run corporations have any ethical responsibility to anything other than profit seeking. Well duh, everyone on Earth has an ethical responsibility. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned. There is even evidence that the ideology of profit maximization is a drag on innovation. Except billions of people out there who have worshiped at business schools would disagree with me. And I don’t want to offend anyone’s religion. Noam Chomsky had a quote that I particularly loved, so I am going to repeat it here:

In market systems, you don’t take account of what economists call externalities. So say you sell me a car. In a market system, we’re supposed to look after our own interests, so I make the best deal I can for me; you make the best deal you can for you. We do not take into account the effect on him. That’s not part of a market transaction. Well, there is an effect on him: there’s another car on the road; there’s a greater possibility of accidents; there’s more pollution; there’s more traffic jams. For him individually, it might be a slight increase, but this is extended over the whole population. Now, when you get to other kinds of transactions, the externalities get much larger. So take the financial crisis. One of the reasons for it is that — there are several, but one is — say if Goldman Sachs makes a risky transaction, they — if they’re paying attention — cover their own potential losses. They do not take into account what’s called systemic risk, that is, the possibility that the whole system will crash if one of their risky transactions goes bad. That just about happened with AIG, the huge insurance company. They were involved in risky transactions which they couldn’t cover. The whole system was really going to collapse, but of course state power intervened to rescue them. The task of the state is to rescue the rich and the powerful and to protect them, and if that violates market principles, okay, we don’t care about market principles. The market principles are essentially for the poor. But systemic risk is an externality that’s not considered, which would take down the system repeatedly, if you didn’t have state power intervening. Well there’s another one, that’s even bigger — that’s destruction of the environment. Destruction of the environment is an externality: in market interactions, you don’t pay attention to it. So take tar sands. If you’re a major energy corporation and you can make profit out of exploiting tar sands, you simply do not take into account the fact that your grandchildren may not have a possibility of survival — that’s an externality. And in the moral calculus of capitalism, greater profits in the next quarter outweigh the fate of your grandchildren — and of course it’s not your grandchildren, but everyone’s.

Our Ecological Footprint. WWF issued an updated Living Planet Report in 2014 suggesting that our annual consumption of natural resources (including the obvious ones like energy and water extraction, straightforward ones like the ability to grow food, but also the less obvious ones like ability of the oceans and atmosphere to absorb our waste products) is continuing to exceed what the Earth can handle each year by at least 50%. We’re like spoiled trust fund babies – we have such incredible resources at our disposable, we never learn to live within our means and one day the resources run out, even if that takes a long time. As we recover from the financial crisis, we have a chance to do things differently, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future.

Other Big Stories from 2014:

  • World War I. 100 years ago, World War I was in full swing. Remember The Guns of August? Well, that was August 1914 they were talking about. Let’s hope we’re not about to blunder into another conflict. But (and I’m cheating a little here because I read this in 2015), the World Economic Forum named “interstate conflict” as both high probability and high consequence in its global risk report.
  • Ebola. Obviously, Ebola was a very bad thing that happened to a whole lot of people. To those of us lucky enough that we weren’t directly in its path, it is a chance to selfishly reflect whether Ebola or something even worse could be coming down the pike. Let’s hope not.
  • Severe Drought and Water Depletion in the Western U.S.: California has been in the midst of a historic drought, although they got some rain recently. Some are describing this as the new normal. Besides rainfall, glaciers, snowpack, and groundwater all seem to be disappearing in some important food-growing areas.
  • Solar grid parity is here! At least some places, some times…

Conclusion. Yes, I think we are on a path to collapse if nothing changes. And I don’t see things changing enough, or fast enough. There are glimmers of hope though. Lest you think I offer only negatives and no solutions, here are two solutions I harp on constantly throughout the blog:

  • Green infrastructure. This is how we fix the hydrologic cycle, close the loop on nutrients, begin to cleanse the atmosphere, protect wild creatures and genetic diversity, and create a society of people with some sense of connection to and stewardship over nature. Don’t act like it’s such a big mystery. It’s known technology. There has been plenty written about trees, design of wildlife corridors and connectivity, for examples. There is simply no excuse for cities to do such a crappy job with these things.
  • Muscle-Powered Transportation. Cars are clearly the root of all evil, the spawn of Mordor, as I pointed out several times (sorry, I just sat through 6+ hours of Hobbit movies). Unless you are perhaps that rare hobbit who can own a car without your morals being completed corrupted by its evil powers. But for the rest of us, I explained several times why getting rid of cars would be good. Here is just one example:

One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.

green infrastructure, happiness, and the ginkgo-stinkgo tree

Do trees make people happy? Well yes, I think most people subjectively just have a sense this is true. But for the cynics out there, there is also hard scientific evidence. People have tried all sorts of economic approaches – correlations with real estate markets and willingness-to-pay surveys – for example, to try to estimate the value people place on trees. (Can you measure happiness in dollars? The average man on the street might say no, but the average economist might say it’s the best of many imperfect options for measuring value.) Medical researchers have tried having people walk around cities with brain scanners on their heads. This is a new one to me though – correlating tree coverage with antidepressant prescriptions. And the correlation is there.

Growing evidence suggests an association between access to urban greenspace and mental health and wellbeing. Street trees may be an important facet of everyday exposure to nature in urban environments, but there is little evidence regarding their role in influencing population mental health. In this brief report, we raise the issue of street trees in the nature-health nexus, and use secondary data sources to examine the association between the density of street trees (trees/km street) in London boroughs and rates of antidepressant prescribing. After adjustment for potential confounders, and allowing for unmeasured area-effects using Bayesian mixed effects models, we find an inverse association, with a decrease of 1.18 prescriptions per thousand population per unit increase in trees per km of street (95% credible interval 0.00, 2.45). This study suggests that street trees may be a positive urban asset to decrease the risk of negative mental health outcomes.

And in other urban tree news, you can collect ginkgo berries, take out the nuts, roast them and eat them. The only problem being that they stink to high heaven and are mildly poisonous. Ginkgos are very interesting trees though, sort of an ancient cross between trees and ferns if you believe this article.

Believed to be truly indigenous to only a single province in China , this 270 million year old species belongs to an ancient lineage of species that have since disappeared for one reason or another over the past few millennia, making Ginkgo biloba (known as a ‘living fossil’) the sole extant representative of what was once a vast and diverse group of organisms. In fact, the ginkgo tree is so unlike any other living plant species that this tree has it’s own genus, family, order, class and division. To put this into terms that may be easier to conceptualize: the only thing that ginkgo trees have in common with other plants is they are also plants. This means that pretty much everything about their genetic make-up, physiology, general behavior, reproductive strategies (including their mobile sperm; a trait particular to ferns, cycads and algae) and even their ability to photosynthesize is anywhere between slightly-off to fundamentally different from any other living plant. Oh, and you can eat it’s seeds…

It’s a bit of a messy operation collecting the seeds which are often produced profusely by female trees and lie unmolested by fungi, insects or most pests of any kind save for some adventurous squirrels which occasionally eat the seeds. I find some rubber or latex gloves and a plastic bag are your best bet for collecting the seeds in addition to some grubby clothes that you don’t mind smelling cheesy for a little while. The scent from the fruit tends to linger when it gets on fabric or clothing and so you might want to try extra hard to remember not to wear anything that you are particularly fond of when engaging in the participatory act of ginkgo seed collecting.

I think it’s cool that some people do this, but I personally am not going to take up this hobby right now.

November 2014 in Review

At the end of October, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2.  I’ll give November posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-6):

  • There is mounting evidence that the world economy is slowing, financial corporations are still engaged in all sorts of dirty tricks, and overall investment may be dropping. Financial authorities are trying to respond through financial means, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future. (-2)
  • Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook. It’s true that the tobacco companies ultimately were called to account, but not until millions of lives were lost. Will it be billions this time? (-2)
  • Glenn Beck has gone even further off his rocker, producing a video suggesting the U.N. is going to ration food and burn old people alive while playing vaguely middle eastern music. One negative point because some people out there might not laugh. (-1)
  • The new IPCC report predicts generally negative effects of climate change on crops and fisheries. The good news is it doesn’t seem to predict catastrophic collapse, but we need to remember that the food supply needs to grow substantially in the coming decades, not just hold steady, so any headwinds making that more difficult are potentially threatening. (-1)

Positive trends and predictions (+6):

  • A lot is known about how to grow healthy trees in the most urbanized environments. But only a few cities really take advantage of this readily available knowledge. (+0)
  • As manufacturing becomes increasingly high-tech, automation vs. employment is emerging as a big theme for the future. The balance may swing back and forth over time, but in the long term I think automation has to win. New wealth will be created, but the question is how broadly it will be shared. The question is not just an economic one – it depends on the kind of social and political systems people will live under in various places. This might be why the field of economics was originally called “political economy”. So I’m putting this in the positive column but giving it no points because the jury is out. (+0)
  • Google is working on nanobots that can swim around in your blood and give an early diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. (+1)
  • Economic slowing is probably the main reason why oil prices are way down. Increased supply capacity from the U.S. also probably plays a role, although there are dissenting voices how long that is going to last. I find it hard to say whether cheaper oil is good or bad. I tend to think it is just meaningless noise on the longer time scale, but you won’t hear me complain if it brings down the price of transportation and groceries for a year or two. (+0)
  • Millennials aren’t buying cars in large numbers. I don’t believe for a second that this means they are less materialistic than past generations, but I think a shift in consumption from cars to almost anything else is a net gain for sustainability. (+2)
  • I discovered the FRAGSTATS package for comprehensive spatial analysis of ecosystems and habitats. This gives us quantitative tools to design green webs that work well for both people and wildlife. Bringing land back into our economic framework in an explicit way might also help. (+1)
  • “Perennial polyculture” gardens may be able to provide food year round on small urban footprints in temperate climates. (+1)
  • A vision for smart, sustainable infrastructure involves walkable communities, closing water and material loops, and using energy wisely. Pretty much the same points I made in my book, which I don’t actively promote on this site;) (+1)

Hope for the Future Index (end of October 2014): -2

change during November 2014: -6 + 6 = 0

Hope for the Future Index (end of November 2014): -2 + 0 = -2

smart, sustainable infrastructure

This long report is called Infrastructure Crisis, Sustainable Solutions: Rethinking Our Infrastructure Investment Strategies. They try to take all the talk about sustainable and smart infrastructure and boil it down to some actionable recommendations and goals. It’s worth a skim. Just to give some highlights, here are four goals they recommend for 2040:

  • Convert 95% of all types of energy use to renewables; fully deploy efficiency to cut demand 60%

  • Wring out water waste by 60%; integrate across water-wastewater-stormwater silos

  • Upgrade 75% of neighborhoods to“Very Walkable”; connect cities with high speed transit

  • Ensure 90% of products are managed by producers after use, and most ‘waste’ material is recovered by local industry

They talk about green infrastructure elsewhere in the text. Actually, it is now called “natural infrastructure”. People are probably a little burned out on the green buzzword. Some other interesting buzzwords they use are “sustainable asset management” and “performance-based infrastructure”.

more trees!

This article in Landscape and Urban Planning is all about street trees. You would think this topic would have been exhausted, that is the technology would have been perfected, by now. And it has, in a few places. I am convinced it is not that leading edge knowledge about trees needs to be advanced all that much, but most cities are completely ignorant of what the best practices are. People in charge don’t know what they don’t know and have zero interest in finding out.

Street trees are an integral element of urban life. They provide a vast range of benefits in residential and commercial precincts, and they support healthy communities by providing environmental, economic and social benefits. However, increasing areas of impermeable surface can increase the stresses placed upon urban ecosystems and urban forests. These stresses often lead tree roots to proliferate in sites that provide more-favourable conditions for growth, but where they cause infrastructure damage and pavement uplift. This damage is costly and a variety of preventative measures has been tested to sustain tree health and reduce pavement damage. This review explores a wide range of literature spanning 30 years that demonstrates the benefits provided by street trees, the perceptions of street trees conveyed by urban residents, the costs of pavement damage by tree roots, and some tried and tested measures for preventing pavement damage and improving tree growth.

green web

From a blog called Better Institutions, I like this concept of a “green web”, which combines a more traditional green belt outside the city with a network of green spaces and corridors inside the city. This is the real green infrastructure vision – a system that connects patches and larger habitats and brings people, plants, and animals together and allows them to move around in a safe and low stress way. This post isn’t about that though, it’s about urban planning – green infrastructure is potentially one of the key intersection points of water, energy, transportation, air, food, climate, ecology, and urban planning.

Source: http://www.betterinstitutions.com/2014/11/green-webs-connecting-not-containing.html

Source: http://www.betterinstitutions.com/2014/11/green-webs-connecting-not-containing.html

habitat fragmentation and connectivity

Did you ever wonder how to quantitatively analyze the quality, shape, and degree of connectivity of natural habitats? Well, there’s an open source app for that, called FRAGSTATS, and good documentation that describes the theory behind it. To summarize, it looks at area and edge, shape, core area, contrast, aggregation, and diversity. Here are just a few quotes describing some of the metrics.

“Core area is defined as the area within a patch beyond some specified depth-of-edge influence (i.e., edge distance) or buffer width.”

“Contrast refers to the magnitude of difference between adjacent patch types with respect to one or more ecological attributes at a given scale that are relevant to the organism or process under consideration.”

“Aggregation refers to the tendency of patch types to be spatially aggregated; that is,
to occur in large, aggregated or “contagious” distributions.”

“FRAGSTATS computes 3 diversity indices. These diversity measures are influenced by 2 components- richness and evenness. Richness refers to the number of patch types present; evenness refers to the distribution of area among different types.”

trees!

Here’s a long document from the “Trees and Design Action Group” in the UK about everything to do with planting trees in the city. Of particular use to me are some good references on dealing with underground utilities, species selection, and just lots and lots of great pictures. Even some nice stats on the odds of being killed by a tree compared to car accidents and cancer (the odds are very low, but not zero).  Trees really can be done a lot better than most American cities do them.

September 2014 in Review

At the end of August, my Hope for the Future Index stood at +1.  As I did last month, I’ll sort selected posts that talk about positive trends and ideas vs. negative trends, predictions, and risks. Just for fun, I’ll keep a score card and pretend my posts are some kind of indicator of whether things are getting better or worse. I’ll give posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-8):

  • The drought in California’s Central Valley and on the Great Plains continues to get worse. (-1)
  • There are signs that Europe may be in a long-term economic depression. The term “new normal” is being batted around to describe a possible long term slowdown in growth affecting the entire world. (-2)
  • Governments and corporations are starting to use armed drones in crowd control. (-1)
  • In a new simulation of a society with increasing resource scarcity and technological innovation, increasing resource scarcity wins. (-1)
  • Meat and dairy consumption can’t continue rising at their current rate forever. (-1)
  • Herman Daly reminds us that the most common measure of economic growth does not distinguish between costs and benefits. Benjamin Friedman, in arguing that there is a moral imperative for economic growth, also used a more socially inclusive definition of growth than the most common one in use today. (-1)
  • The Ebola outbreak continues to get worse and worse, although people are arguing that this is not the type of plague that could threaten civilization itself. (-1)

Positive trends and predictions (+8):

  • Some countries have more sustainable policies than others, and the world could become more sustainable if we all copy the best examples. But even then, the world would probably not be sustainable enough. (+0)
  • People have come up with some novel ideas for backyard wildlife habitat. (+1)
  • Big companies are figuring out how to set up units that innovate more like startups. (+1)
  • Walkable cities with green infrastructure may help boost creativity and problem solving. There is plenty of evidence that walkability might be the single most important key to more sustainable cities. (+1)
  • There have actually been small advances in telepathy. Too soon to say if this will be used for good or evil. (+0)
  • There is a new generation of robot vacuum cleaners. Anything that can free humanity from the drudgery of house work has to be a good thing – almost any other use of our time has to be more productive, creative, or at least more fun. (+1)
  • There is some buzz about sustainable consumption. I just don’t know – the whole concept of “consumption” as an end in itself seems unsustainable to me. (+0)
  • There is also continuing buzz about “green growth” and “de-growth”, but in my opinion very little evidence that these ideas are catching on. (+0)
  • We were reminded that green infrastructure is more than just stormwater management. It’s a beautiful vision to link stormwater management, urban trees and parks, corridors and rural reserves together. But we need more people to share the vision and make it happen. (+1)
  • Another way to make cities a lot more sustainable is to have the price of parking actually reflect its total economic, social, and environmental cost, including the opportunity cost of the oceans of land that are just wasted. (+1)
  • Worldwide child mortality has dropped almost by half just since 1990. (+2)

Hope for the Future Index (August 2014): +1

August 2014 change: -8 + 8 = 0

Hope for the Future Index (September 2014): +1

green infrastructure reminder

The American Society of Landscape Architects reminds us that green infrastructure is more than what we used to call stormwater management practices. It’s a network of designed and natural ecosystems linked together to perform critical functions cheaper and better than purely manmade systems could:

Green infrastructure includes park systems, urban forests, wildlife habitat and corridors, and green roofs and green walls. These infrastructure systems protect communities against flooding or excessive heat, or help to improve air and water quality, which underpin human and environmental health…

Here are just some of the many benefits that these systems provide all at once: green infrastructure absorbs and sequesters atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02); filters air and water pollutants; stabilizes soil to prevent or reduce erosion; provides wildlife habitat; decreases solar heat gain; lowers the public cost of stormwater management infrastructure and provides flood control; and reduces energy usage through passive heating and cooling. In contrast, grey infrastructure usually provides just a single benefit.

“All at once” and “single benefit” are key phrases. You have entities like wastewater authorities, transportation authorities, parks and wildlife agencies that are each trying to maximize the single benefit they have been tasked within the limited budget each has given. Each is trying to be efficient, but together they are inefficient, redundant, and even working at cross purposes. There is nothing responsible or ethical about sitting inside your bubble making “cost-effective” decisions that ignore everything happening outside your bubble.

This article drills down to a fantastic wealth of references that we should all take a year off and read.

(By the way, this article also contains some questionable numbers about at least one program I happen to be familiar with. But never mind, the concepts are right even if the numbers are questionable.)