Getting to Ground Zero

By Jane Holtz Kay

As rescue workers dug through Ground Zero, the remains of the World Trade Center, its developer declared his consideration -- his "leaning" -- towards building four 50-story towers to replace the two destroyed. The vision was less than visionary. The news was more macho than memorable.

Scorning the terrorists, those monolithic icons now etched as charred images in the national nightmare, would flout the deed with a living, breathing, resuscitating quartet. "Take that," the structures would say to the world. "Take over," "make profit," they would also say as developers now grab for the gold in Lower Manhattan, trying to reconstruct the wasteland with zero public input.

But can't we get off to a new start? As Washington works out future military plans, it is essential to move and build with intelligence, not agoraphobia. We must attend to tomorrow's city-building and mobility. As cities grow and attract more Americans, we can not flee into our selves. We must guard their envolution and enforce their existence as an antidote to transportation and settlement practices of the past that destroyed our environment.

A bail-out plan to the failing airlines may seem appropriate enough. For now. But we should pause before we extend such Marshall plans to support the subsidized glut in American consumption.

Too many fuel-hogging planes, too little energy-saving rail; too many out-of-scale towers, too few dense, low-lying, livable cities have marred our diversity and humanity. Furthering those subsidies can only compound the tragedy by damaging not only everyday mobility and the environment but national security as well.

The tragedies of September 11th might also remind us that we are facing not only a planet in peril from clashing ideologies played out in terrorism but an earth in crisis from environmental abuse. When we allow exploitation of resources, abuse of species, misuse of ecologies, and contribute to global warming, we are committing "a slow-motion terrorism," RhysRoth, co-director of Climate Solutions, an organization fighting climate disruption, puts it.

The super-scaled towers that over-reach and destroy community and the life of the sidewalk reflect our over-consumptive use of the planet. By wrapping windy highrises with heat-sink parking lots, we scorn the truly urban lower-scale, dense transit-oriented settlement of our great historic cities.

By building sprawling McMansions every which way on subsidized highways, we ravage our open space and farmlands. And by expanding these highways instead of rail alternatives, we swallow roughly three-fifths of our transportation budget ... and deprive ourselves of personal and national security alternatives to move.

Our population will increase by 128 million in the next fifty years. Does that mean we will continue to consume still more of the land-losing l.2 million acres of farm land and 80,000 acres of wetland a year? Does it define an ever expanding life driving still more CO2-spewing cars and planes that heat and deplete the globe? What will make us embrace alternate ways of living and building?

There are some positive measures underway. More cities are structuring themselves around public transportation. More rail is struggling to reach out to Americans only too glad for alternatives in these terror-tinged days. We have learned that national security should not depend exclusively on air. National security and everyday mobility alike call for a choice of long distance movement. At the least, why not give Amtrak the 15 billion dollars for development over five years it requests?

The aftermath of the war of the "greatest generation" paved the way for an environmental feeding frenzy which dictated a socially, economically and environmentally pernicious pattern. This is the time to change that pattern. Hopefully, this "first war" of the new century need not undermine heightened environmental consciousness and a truer and better concern for urban needs.

Originally published in www.tompaine.com

Back to Articles Index