But the legal avenue available to opponents was through environmental law because, across this country, if you want to stop the government from doing something—such as building a border wall or just allowing new housing—an environmental lawsuit is the clearest way to challenge it.
The lawsuits may not win but they serve their purpose by providing significant delays. The lawsuits also require resources and provide time for the public to think further about the sides. Delays can drive up costs and plans for communities and developers can change in the mean time.
The basis of the article about Minneapolis is the premise that the city and region need more housing, particularly with growing populations. But, building housing and changing regulations about housing is contentious and time-consuming. People disagree, even among those who might appear to be on the same side (environmentalists, pro-housing, etc.). Are lawsuits the way decisions about development and the environment should be made? Environmental lawsuits can help check problematic plans but they can also be less helpful. Are there better systems for working out differences of opinions about development?
Photo by Miguel u00c1. Padriu00f1u00e1n on Pexels.com
In 2018, UNESCO inscribed dry stone walling as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, stating that “the technique exemplifies a harmonious relationship between human beings and nature.” When building a dry stone wall, Kaneko told me, you have to work with the contours of the land and irregularities of each stone. John New, the chair of the West of Scotland Dry Stone Walling Association, told me that “when you’re building a stone wall, you become part of the environment. Brown hares will just come up and stop and watch you.” Deer too. Almost as soon as it’s built, a stone wall is inhabited by insects—a key indicator of biodiversity—and small animals such as voles, chipmunks, and wrens. In China, researchers have documented the remarkable diversity of plants thriving on ancient stone walls—even in urban environments.
In rocky regions around the world, groups are working to preserve and promote the craft of dry stone walling, touting the benefits to biodiversity and low carbon footprint. These are inherently local efforts because building with stone makes the most sense when it can be sourced locally. (In the past, farmers used stone unearthed while clearing the very fields they needed to terrace or fence.) In Scotland, for example, trucking in material for a stock fence from far away could cost upwards of $5,000, New said. The most ambitious recent dry-stone-walling projects, such as the multimillion-dollar effort to restore the stone walls of Italy’s Cinque Terre, are in service of historical preservation. But Stone Walls for Life, the EU-funded project organizing the Cinque Terre restoration effort, argues that the walls strengthen resilience to climate change, too, by improving drainage and preventing landslides. They plan to replicate this kind of undertaking around the EU.
In Japan, Kaneko told me, most of the people who still know how to build simple utilitarian stone walls are in their 80s. In the past, if a stone wall along a rice paddy or road collapsed, the community would gather to repair it. This collective experience was key. When I met him again at a Kyoto café (in the concrete Kyoto International Conference Center, near a concrete-encased river), Kaneko told me about a 1919 Journal of Engineering article that emphasized the importance of human skill and discretion rather than objective numbers in stone-wall building. Although perfecting the craft of stone walling takes a lifetime, Kaneko said that an amateur, with no formal engineering experience, can learn the basics in about four days. Through workshops all over the country, he and Sanada teach people to place stones with the long side angled down into the slope, to make sure that each large stone touches at least two others, and to fill behind the large stones with small rocks or gravel as they build. There have been attempts to standardize and mechanize dry stone walling, using, for example, software and a robotic excavator. But Kaneko says that in many cases, the sites where he works are too narrow or steep for a machine to access. To him, stone walling’s reliance on man power instead of machine power, and passed-down knowledge instead of equations, is part of its value. “I like the very wild dry stone walls,” he told me.
Embracing those qualities, though, requires trust and experience. In July, Kaneko traveled to the town of Genkai, on Japan’s Southern island of Kyushu, to repair the walls at Hamanoura Tanada, a scenic and historic site where nearly 300 small terraced rice paddies chisel the dramatic slopes above an inlet of the Genkai Sea. A few years ago, the town’s planning and commerce division invited Kaneko to teach five local construction companies how to build dry stone walls so they could preserve the traditional scenery. But even with that training, none of them was willing to take on rebuilding stone walls. It’s seen as a labor-intensive and risky job, Kaneko said. Companies that use concrete can reliably calculate the strength of their walls, but it’s nearly impossible to estimate the engineered strength of any particular dry stone wall. Although villages and private landowners can choose stone over concrete, there have been no mainstream attempts to return to dry stone walling for major new public-works projects in Japan, Kaneko told me. In the United States, most landscaping walls shorter than three or four feet don’t need to be permitted, Alan Kren, a structural engineer at Rutherford + Chekene, told me. To build stone walls on any larger scale would likely require new standards for using these old techniques.
Lots of potential connections between this and the move to modernity more broadly:
-New crafts and methodologies that people know and use while older techniques fade away.
-Technological and scientific progress in new materials but costs with which we have not fully reckoned.
-Lost community moments replaced by private activity.
-Local efforts are difficult to sustain given broader global and social pressures.
The march of concrete will go on while some advocate for other options. And perhaps at some point concrete will be replaced by another material and the techniques of using concrete could be lost.
According to the Department of Energy, even though medium- and heavy-duty trucks account for only 4% of the vehicles in the United States, they consume 25% of total highway fuel and create nearly 30% of highway carbon emissions. Stricter standards on smog-forming emissions on trucks will take effect in 2027, which could force companies to turn to electric versions such as this Tesla fleet.
Since trucking is essential, even small improvements to gas mileage and emissions could go a long ways. I am not sure that having full fleets of electric trucks or even autonomous electric trucks in a few decades time would look that futuristic but it sounds like they could help.
I was reading through some newspaper articles from the 1990s about development in my suburban county. In an article on a $75 million bond proposal for county voters to preserve 2,300 acres of open space (which voters did approve), here is one explanation why county voters should increase their property taxes for this purpose:
Bond issue proponents have stressed that preserving open land will help everyone by making DuPage County an even more desirable place to live. Saving open space will improve wildlife habitats, help control flooding, improve stream water quality, avoid added congestion and protect property values, Oldfield said. (Lynn Van Matre, “DuPage voters to decide on open space,” Chicago Tribune, November 2, 1997)
The reasons listed for voting in favor of spending this money appear to split into two areas: (1) environmental concerns (wildlife, flooding, water) and (2) a particular quality of life marked by property values and limited traffic.
But, I wonder if the first category is a subset of the second set of concerns. Suburbanites in Chicagoland care about property values and have concerns about drug treatment centers, waste transfer facilities, religious buildings, apartments, and anything else they think threatens their financial investment.
Do suburban residents care more about environmental concerns or about what development might go into these open spaces? From the perspective of some (and this was also expressed in the article above), such land could be used for affordable housing or for community amenities. To keep it as open space means it could not be other uses that people could benefit from.
If preserving property values is the top concern regarding land development, this is the sort of decision that might be made. Such a decision does not come cheaply; local property owners pay more but they do so in order to hopefully boost their investment even more.
3D printing offers potential solutions to major challenges for the U.S. housing market: reducing the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change and rising housing prices contributing to surging homelessness. Some experts expect the American industry to boom in the next two to three years…
But 3D-printed houses are already 5%-10% cheaper than a regular build in the United States, according to Zach Mannheimer, CEO of Alquist 3D, which aims to build affordable 3D-printed homes to serve lower-income communities, and experts predict costs will go down as the industry expands. A 2018 study in the academic research publication IOP Science: Materials Science and Engineerings, based in the U.K., argues that 3D printing can cut costs by at least 35%…
If scaled up, 3D-printed buildings are significantly better for the environment than those that are built from scratch on-site. The building process cuts waste by 60%because it only manufactures the materials required. There’s no need to trim or subtract excess materials so they aren’t sending unused wood, concrete or glass for window panes to the landfill, according to academic research. And 3D printers work better with nontraditional cement alternatives such as “hempcrete” — a mixture of hemp, sand and other materials — than they do with regular concrete. That could encourage the concrete industry to pursue more sustainable alternatives to concrete, which creates significant greenhouse gas emissions in its production…
HUD seems optimistic about 3D-printed houses as a climate change solution. “3D printing is one of the promising advances in construction which the HUD team sees as having the potential to lower housing costs and increase energy efficiency and resilience,” a HUD spokesperson told Yahoo News in an email.
While there are still multiple barriers to overcome, the advantages listed above sound intriguing. If costs are consistently lower, building speed is quicker, and there are sizable environmental payoffs, this could interest many in the housing industry ranging from those looking to make money to people searching for cheaper housing.
All those advantages noted above lead me to wonder about barriers to entry in this field. Can conventional builders pivot or would they rather continue with their approaches? Are there companies more in the tech or manufacturing fields who would get into housing? Can we envision a point where individual property owners could use 3D-printing to do their own thing?
With one person in the article estimating only 10 such homes were built in the United States last year, even a small increase in numbers next year could lead to a sizable percentage increase.
Clearing the leaves from your lawn is part of a set of practices and displays involving the lawn that are related to social class. This includes a green lawn and a weed-free lawn. However, will these practices be disrupted if new recommendations suggest leaves should stay on the lawn because they are good for the grass and soil?
I can imagine this as part of a new set of lawn practices in the coming decades. This could include less grass. Grass that is not necessarily green. Fake turf. More stones, gravel, and rock. No watering. Smaller yards or no yards. Overall, less emphasis on a particular kind of lawn and more variety.
But, this could take a while. Practices regarding clearing leaves have a long history. Social norms take time to change. It could happen in a few communities or among influential people that lead the way. Maybe it requires some influential social media actors.
In my own yard, in recent years I have cleared a good number of the leaves and left others. Some get blown away and others buried by snow. Not every leaf has to go. Some stay in the bushes and beds. This year, I piled some leaves in a new garden we started earlier this year. We will see what is left in the spring and how the new growth begins.
The idea hit James Evans like an empty soda can, or maybe it was a discarded candy wrapper. Evans, an engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation, was driving one day in 1984 when he saw litter blowing out of the back of a pickup truck. Littering was a growing problem in Texas at the time, and while Evans knew that his department didn’t have the resources to combat it, he saw a prime opportunity to promote volunteerism. One year later, Billy Black, the public information officer for the Tyler District of the Texas Department of Transportation, collaborated with Evans and organized the first Adopt-a-Highway program.
How the Program Works
The program varies slightly by state, but volunteers typically apply to adopt at least two miles of highway for two years, and are responsible for cleaning that stretch at least four times per year. In return, the adopter’s name is recognized on a sign along that stretch of highway. The Adopt-a-Highway program saves taxpayers millions of dollars in cleanup costs and allows state governments to allocate transportation funds to other projects. The number of state employees devoted to highway cleanup and beautification has plunged since the advent of the Adopt-a-Highway program. A number of states, including New Hampshire, have Sponsor-a-Highway programs, where volunteers make donations to pay for maintenance crews to clean a stretch of highway in exchange for recognition on a sign…
The Adoption Movement Spreads
The Adopt-a-Highway program was a huge success in Texas and other states soon took notice. The program, or a variation thereof, eventually spread to all 50 states, as well as Puerto Rico, and several countries, including Australia, Japan and Spain. The most common adopters are civic groups and local businesses, though individuals occasionally adopt. Celebrities, including Bette Midler and Robin Williams, helped raise the profile of the program by adopting their own stretches of highway. Today, a handful of for-profit companies manage the sponsoring of highways by large companies looking for positive publicity and what amounts to advertising space on a small billboard.
The description above hints at the convergence of multiple forces: a growing environmental movement, efforts to encourage civic engagement and pride, looking for ways to cut government costs, and opportunities for some marketing.
But, this could be put simply: largely for free, Americans clean up highways. Groups and individuals take time out of their schedules to pick up garbage and debris. Americans love driving and the way of life it is tied up with so much that they clean the highways that enable quick travel via car. Adopt-a-highway works because Americans like highways so much.
Consider an alternative approach. Instead of cleaning up littering and criminalizing the practice, what about deemphasizing highways and major roadways and pursuing other forms of transportation and denser housing? This may seem like a difficult task but so is cleaning the tens of thousands of miles of highways, whether through paid employees or mobilizing volunteers all over.
Many off-gridders have glanced at their water bills and decided they’d rather use the water that falls from the sky for free, but some states make rainwater collection systems very difficult to install in your home, or have strict limits on how much rainwater can be harvested and how it can be used (for example, Colorado only allows certain properties to collect 110 gallons, which can only be used outdoors). For waste management, installing a septic system in a crowded urban neighborhood will be nearly impossible, and many states have extremely strict regulations surrounding the installation of composting toilets (not to mention extremely strict regulations about what you can do with all that waste once you’ve collected it).
Additionally, local municipalities might have laws that supersede or enhance statewide restrictions, and Home Owner Associations (HOAs) may have rules that prevent you from making the changes necessary to your home. These rules can beprettycomprehensive, too—some HOAs don’t allow clotheslines for drying clothes, for example, and can even forbid solar panels for aesthetic reasons. Condominium boards may also resist some of your off-grid choices. Bottom line: before you do anything, check the local laws and regulations that might apply to you.
Finally, while installing solar panels on your property is more or less legal in every state (and many states encourage it), not all states or local municipalities will allow you to actually disconnect from the power grid. If you feel it’s important to literally be off-grid, you’ll need to do some digging before you assume anything; and in multi-family structures like condominiums it might even be physically impossible to accomplish. Of course, the flip side to remaining connected is that in many cases you can sell excess electricity back to the grid—and if your solar rig fails at halftime during the Super Bowl, you’ll still have power…
Of course, if you’re going to grow your own food in the city, you’ll need enough space for that, too. It’s not impossible to find city homes with yards or large outdoor spaces where you might be able to grow your apocalypse garden (and even raise chickens!), but those houses will obviously be more expensive. And your property deed or local regulations might limit your ability to have “livestock” of any kind on your property (and your neighbors may or may not be excited about those chickens).
Three things strike me after reading this:
Suburban life is ruled by a series of local regulations. Suburbs on the whole might have similar guidelines and expectations compared to other kinds of places but local control can lead to oddities.
The ability to live in one’s own residence is connected to community regulations and a social contract with surrounding residents. This leads to two questions: can a resident go off the grid and should a resident go off the grid? What would the neighbors think?
I wonder how many suburbs are prepared for this possibility. Even if regulations make it more difficult to go off the grid, what would happen in communities if someone really wanted to pursue this and they had the resources and means to pull it off?
The company’s proposals promise a reprieve from California’s existential crisis about its way of life, suggesting that the environmental consequences of the state’s notorious sprawl can be reformed with rooftop solar panels, induction cooktops, electric cars, and careful bookkeeping. The threat of wildfires can be held at bay by stricter building codes. These proposals preserve the idea that, although the climate may be changing, the California dream of sunshine, a single-family home, and a two-car garage needn’t change at all.
But the debate it intense about whether the sustainable features of the development offsets what suburbia brings:
Cheap fossil fuels, the supremacy of private-property rights, and the maximization of shareholder value have, for decades, dictated the patterns of land use in America. People need homes, and, in Southern California and other growing metropolitan areas, those homes get built in areas far from the centers of cities. Disasters that follow this approach are attributed to natural causes or climate change, rather than to the avoidable flaws of poor planning. Consider the Marshall fire that burned a thousand homes last December, including all of a hundred and seventy-one properties in a nineteen-nineties-era subdivision built on the outskirts of Boulder County, Colorado—or the disappearance of water from exurbs constructed in the two-thousands in the Rio Verde Foothills, outside of Scottsdale, Arizona. Even reasonable predictions on a twenty-year event horizon are seen as fussy impediments to construction…
California has a severe housing shortage; a recent state assessment called for more than a million new units in Southern California to meet demand. Barry Zoeller, an executive at the Tejon Ranch Company, told me, “That’s going to have to take, in our estimation, a combination of both infill development in urban areas and also new master-planned communities of sufficient scale that can also meet climate-change criteria.” But many environmentalists argue that the imbalance between jobs and housing in Los Angeles can not be solved by building houses that are a thirty-minute drive from the city’s outermost suburbs. “Aren’t there better places to build?” Pincetl asked. “Yes, but you don’t own the land, so no.” She added, “If we’re turning over the provision of housing and the land markets to private entities, their motivation is not to house people. Why are private-equity firms coming into the real-estate market? Tell me. Not to provide housing.”…
I used my phone to scan QR codes and open the self-entry locks on a handful of model homes by Lennar, KB Home, and Toll Brothers, among others. The houses were built close together. They were large and well appointed, with gray laminate floors, giant appliances, many bathrooms, and cold air-conditioning. Some stoves at Valencia were electric, but many were still gas ranges—the era of banning natural-gas hookups hadn’t arrived when this development was approved. Some of the planned homes were already sold out, and a steady stream of racially diverse prospective buyers in luxury cars made their way around the neighborhoods-to-be. It looked like every other subdivision I’ve ever been in: paved-over farmland with a few transplanted trees, an island in a landscape hostile to pedestrian life. Maybe I just wasn’t seeing it with new eyes. The wind blew hot and the sun beat over the newly built homes, and from far away came the faint screams of people riding the roller coasters at Magic Mountain.
This is a decades-long issue as suburbs, first found in the United States in the 1800s, exploded in popularity and policy in the 1900s. With the expansion of driving and highways, the postwar suburbs sprawled in all directions from big cities and have not stopped since. All of this comes at an environmental cost: all of the materials used, the pollution from all of the driving, the inefficiencies of single-family homes, and the loss of land and habitat.
There are numerous ways to make suburbs more sustainable. This includes the moves suggested above as well as increased suburban densities, mass transit options or walkability or other transit options so that driving is not the only options, and better locations nearer population centers and jobs and away from important land and habitats.
So, where exactly is the line where suburbs might be “sustainable enough”? The article above suggests this line is in flux as communities, states, and other interested actors negotiate and set regulations for new development. It is unlikely that all suburban development will be banned or limited and it is unlikely that all suburban development will just happen without any questions about the environmental costs. This line can also vary across contexts as the local concerns are different outside of Los Angeles than they might be outside Columbus, Ohio or Jacksonville, Florida.
Mr. Jacobs is an ecologist and a Catholic who believes that humans can fight climate change and help repair the world right where they live. While a number of urban dwellers and suburbanites also sow native plants to that end, Mr. Jacobs says people need something more: To Reconnect with nature and experience the sort of spiritual transcendence he feels in a forest, or on a mountain, or amid the bounty of his own yard. It’s a feeling that, for him, is akin to feeling close to God…
Mr. Jacobs, for his part, looks around at all the pristine lawns (“the lawn is an obsession, like a cult,” he says) and sees ecological deserts that feed neither wildlife nor the human soul. “This is a poverty that most of us are not even aware of,” he said.
And he has started a movement to promote better ecology:
About 20 years ago, he began compiling quotes from the Bible, saints and popes that expound on the sanctity of Earth and its creatures, and posting them online. He considered naming the project after St. Francis of Assisi, the go-to saint for animals and the environment. But, not wanting to impose another European saint on American land, he instead named it after Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th Century Algonquin-Mohawk woman who converted to Catholicism as a teenager and, in 2012, became the first Native American to be canonized…
Three years ago, Mr. Jacobs took a step further, teaming up with a fellow Catholic ecologist, Kathleen Hoenke, to launch the St. Kateri Habitats initiative, which encourages the creation of wildlife-friendly gardens that feature native plants and offer a place to reflect and meditate (they also teamed up to write a book, “Our Homes on Earth: A Catholic Faith and Ecology Field Guide for Children,” due out in 2023). They enlisted other ecology-minded Catholics, and have since added an Indigenous peoples program and two Indigenous women to their board.
What exactly is the connection between religious faith in America and the suburban lawn? Two hints above:
Religious traditions have something about how to approach the earth and land. Jacobs draws on Catholic theology, tradition, and practice to develop both his personal personal practices and an organization that now has members around the world. In a country where a majority of residents are Christians of one tradition or another, how many suburbanites draw on religion to help them interact with their yard and nearby nature?
Legally Sociable 