What Can Planners Do?By Jane Holtz Kay As the wettest, driest, coldest, warmest superlatives of weather hit our piece of the planet in rapid succession, giving pause to the ordinary citizen, how can planners confront the future shock of global warming? Our threatened shorelines, sinking islands, drought-hit farms, undermined species, and melting glaciers define the erratic climate that creates today's landscape. And as temperatures soar at the pace predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, change is the only constant.
It's hard enough to deal with the profession's ordinary upsets such as Oregon's Measure 37. With a quixotic climate causing uncertain sea levels, planners could find that efforts to save and ameliorate vaunted landscapes and cityscapes have become an exercise in futility. For almost a decade, the job has belonged largely to the activists, climatologists, and environmentalists struggling to find solutions that range from the sensible (reducing emissions by converting to energy-efficient lighting adding insulation, finding fuel alternatives , and taxing greenhouse gases) to the surreal (thoughts of wrapping Switzerland's melting Alpine glaciers with insulating foam). Today, the Environmental Defense Fund, finds a surge of activity at the state level, from clean energy through wind turbines and Photovoltaics, to renewable investment portfolios in Colorado and California, to the cap-and-trade system created by nine northeastern states to reduce the heat-trapping emissions from utilities. Still, the Bush administration remains hostile, despite the fact that America's five percent of the world's population contributes 25 percent to its greenhouse gas emissions. As Congress debates the McCain-Lieberman proposal to restrict carbon dioxide emissions, the administration's rejection of reduced standards, already adopted by 141 industrial nations, remains an embarrassment. "In this country, buildings and their construction account for nearly half of the greenhouse gas emitted and energy consumed each year," writes Edward Mazria, a Santa Fe architect and author of The Passive Solar Energy Book, first published in 1979 and complemented by Mazria's own work with thermal storage walls and roof ponds, intended to save energy and mitigate the urban heat effect. Confronting the design and construction sector is a key to turning down the global thermostat," say advocates of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards. Unable to find allies in the nation's capital or among everyday citizens, many meteorologists and climatologists--not to mention activists, backers of sustainable development, and some planners--think locally when it comes to climate-related issues. Predictably, Portland, Oregon, is on high alert in such green activities with self-described "ex-planner," Michael Armstrong leading the city's Global Warming Action Plan for green buildings, vegetated roofs, transit-oriented development and fossil fuel reduction. Portland's Office of Sustainable Development boasts multiple officials imposing greenhouse gas reduction standards on their work. But elsewhere, myopia is rampant. In Boston, citizens planners an the media virtually ignored an EPA study predicting that coastal waters would rise 22 inches in the next half century as the result of storm surges and floods. Official New York is similarly slow to catch on, although the Regional Plan Association ahs called for rooftop tree-planting program and other measures that would offset heat island effects, says executive director Robert Yaro. Private organizations and institutions have stepped in to fill the gap. At Columbia University, the Urban Planning Program's Cool City Project is promoting green roofs to reduce the two-to-ten degree summer temperature peaks, have electricity, retain stormwater, and improve air quality. A sustainability task force created by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is "actively engaged to direct development and density where there is transit and reduce auto-delivered emissions," planning spokesperson Rachaele Raynoff says.
Knowledgeable New Yorkers also worry about the danger of rising waters and the need for flood barriers and controls to block another nor'Easter from hitting the subway system and larger landscape. In a talk at the New York Science Academy last winter, Douglas Hill, author of The Baked Apple: Metropolitan New York in the Greenhouse, ticked off possible solutions such as the barricades put up in Venice and the Netherlands, which has also cut inlets for storm surges and begun a program for amphibious,--yes, amphibious--homes. Nationwide, diverse constituencies support transit-oriented community design and smart growth, which could cut down the 80 percent of fossil fuel emissions from the transportation sector, stop the loss of greenfields and ensure the biodiversity that softens the impact of a capricious climate on our last chance landscape. In the face of indifference at the top, an advance guard of environmentalists, activists, and local officials is thinking of ways to avert climatic catastrophe. But it has jet to follow the classic axiom of a profession that preaches the importance of making "no little plans." This article appeared in the August-September 2005 issue of Planning magazine, the journal of the American Planning Association.
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