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Living a Resilient Life

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(My feature from Strong Towns with its original quirks and a few different photos)
I lower the bar, making success easier to achieve, I stay away from the edge, so small mistakes don’t become catastrophes, and I focus my investments on multi-utility outcomes. These strategies have worked for me. 
I could make more money than I do. Lots of teachers coach, work as advisors for clubs, teach summer school, or have jobs on the side. I like my free time. My mindset is that my desires will need to conform to the income I can earn at the effort level I choose to give. The house I bought 9 years ago had to conform to the price point I was willing to commit to as a divorced guy with two daughters nearing college age. It had to be cheaper than renting with an upside for my dotage. 


Before I remarried most of our home improvements were DIY; not that my daughters and I were great at home remodeling but what work we could do had to be good enough. By the way, “good enough” ALWAYS is, it’s a tautology. I focused on insulation and weather stripping, and lots of deep cleaning, the girls did the painting and carpentry. One of my priorities was that the house be in a walkable neighborhood with good transit: I was not buying another car and paying for gas and insurance, nor was I prepared to schlep the girls everywhere.


When I did get re-married my wife was a kindred spirit. Having a partner who also enjoys NOT maximizing today’s purchasing power, who enjoys pinching a penny or two, and who will engage in long conversations about planning for potential setbacks goes a long way toward putting a plan for increased resilience in place. First, we agreed that not cranking up our lifestyle to correspond to the efficiencies that unifying our lives would allow was the smartest path; in truth we used the change to re-think a tremendous number of our expenses. 

What we’ve saved in not maintaining two cars, or going on fancy vacations, or upgrading to a fancier walkable neighborhood we’ve put into savings, more energy efficiency, greater food security, and redundancies for critical systems. 

And it’s a good thing we did.

The last 18 months have been an emotional and financial nightmare. While I was sitting beside my mother’s deathbed I was informed that the city’s work on modernizing the XIX century sewer lines had collapsed a shared pipe with a neighbor and that my share would come to a few thousand dollars. I had to pay for that while writing the check to bury my mother and to pay for the attorney to begin probate of my mother’s estate. My mother’s house, whose minimal value was reduced to effectively zero by some systemic flaws and code issues, also required a fair amount of time and effort for clean up. My parents’ midlife conversion to Mormonism left me a basement filled with long neglected food storage; a tremendously important object lesson for food related resilience to which I shall return. In the intervening months it became clear that my own home needed a new roof, our 36 year old boiler cracked, and some electrical outlets mysteriously started to go dead.

It would be reasonable to estimate that these and other expenses have had us unexpectedly pay out over $50,000 in cash in the last year. The result has been, as if Zeus had been our dinner guest, we are exactly where we were a year ago with our savings and we’ve still made extra payments on our mortgage, continued our food security payments to a local farmer, put in 14 new storm windows, and expanded our garden. 

Living so far from the limits of our means has made what could have been a crisis merely a frustrating time when progress on many fronts has been delayed.

There is much more to resilience than just money: there’s what you can do with money when you don’t need money. I mentioned our connection to a local farmer. We have an account with him where we have prepaid for whatever products he can supply, but we’ve gone beyond that with regular payments to him during the slowest months of the year with an understanding that if some circumstance of exceptional need were to occur, that we will be helped proportionately. Also in the area of food we have a larder with a few months to a year’s supply that we assiduously rotate(thanks mom and dad for the lesson!), and we’ve expanded our 45′ by 45′ urban farm to produce as much food and beauty as we can squeeze out of it.


We’ve also found that resilience breeds resilience. Our boiler cracked on January 1st. That’s just about when a boiler is going to give up the ghost in New England as that’s when winter shifts into high gear. But the new one we had the means to lay out for in cash never actually worked right all winter. The defect wasn’t discovered until August, even in Massachusetts not a prime time for heating, so that left us in the heart of winter without a central heating system and without the wood stove we had purchased as back up because our wood stove guy hates cities (but that’s another story). 

It turns out that miserliness regarding energy had made all of us less sensitive to temperature fluctuations, and the enormous investments in insulation, weather stripping, and new and refurbished windows allowed for the entire house to be kept adequately warm by merely turning on the heat in the basement apartment and letting the heat waft upward!


There’s so much more to it of course. I have 500 gallons of rain water storage to irrigate the garden when it gets dry, and we have emergency drinking water stored inside the house. My wife cans food, she and LuLu enjoy sewing, we keep loads of extra blankets and bedding in the house in case people need to come here (again) as a place of refuge; central Springfield has underground utilities so we’ve never lost electricity, even after Snowmaggeddon and a tornado. Our neighborhood includes most of the region’s emergency service headquarters, some power generation, and the region’s most important medical facility, with in house capacity for a month of independent function, is a 30 minute walk away.

Looking forward, we’re spending less and less on energy because of our investments in efficiency, and getting more and more food from our garden. If we ever needed a little money we could rent out the basement or do an AirB&B thing;if we ever needed a lot more money we could live in the apartment and rent out the other 3,000 square feet as residential or commercial space. Apart from the many bus lines and the regional rail service they connect to, our place has a Walkscore of 87 and rising so I envision a carfree retirement. I can see my doctor’s office from my living room window, and the Springfield cemetery from my front stoop: that pretty much covers all the bases.

Most importantly, we love our lives today, in the here and now. I like walking, my daughters and my wife love the garden. We feel good about using less, and about producing at least some of our own food. Nothing is better than watching the snow fall and knowing that we’ve already got the bread and milk and we can focus on alley sledding, snowball fights, and building snowmen. Seeing what we’ve already been able to get through fills us all with peace of mind as we march toward what has always been an uncertain future. 

“Basically Hartford”

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Springfield was founded to usurp the other outposts in the Connecticut Colony and be the northernmost fur trader on the Connecticut River. It wasn’t long before the annoyance that caused created a rift between Springfield and the more southerly Connecticut villages and Springfield switched allegiance to the Massachusetts Bay Colony; that circumstance has molded and shaped what Springfield would become ever since.

A recent publication has shown using commuting data just how much the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts is, not surprisingly, much more closely tied to Connecticut than to eastern Massachusetts:

So here we sit, economically tied to Hartford, but politically tied to Boston; neither one particularly interested in us either way. Given the horrific consequences of government intervention in cities post World War II I’d have to say that most of the neglect has been benign, but as the economic fortunes of Boston and Hartford continue to diverge my hometown is being treated, for good and for ill, like a child in a messy divorce.

Boston has thrown us a bone in the form of a $950 million dollar resort casino, mostly intended to take revenue from Connecticut’s enormous Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun resorts. Connecticut’s response looks to be a slots parlor between Hartford and Springfield to keep as much of Connecticut’s money in Connecticut as possible. Of course, what every child wants from the DisneyLand dad is more quality time; which Springfield wants in the form of commuter rail service to Boston, not just automotive visitation. 

It turns out, Hartford wants that too:


The truth is, mom is kind of keen on dad still, and it’s pretty clear that she wants more time with dad as well. Maybe “keen” isn’t the right word: she’s desperate, things aren’t going so well financially of late and mom’s dream hubby, New York City, barely knows that she’s alive.

Let me explain, Connecticut used the Obama shovel ready projects initiative to move forward on making improvements along the Hartford to New Haven rail line, thus connecting Hartford to New York City via Metro North. To garner necessary support for funding and to make the project more viable Springfield was included as the northern terminus of the project. And yes,that would also make a Springfield to Boston rail link a Hartford to Boston rail link. However, some people in the Nutmeg State (That’s Connecticut, I kid you not!) are realizing that the 12 round trips per day between New Haven and Springfield which THEY are mostly funding will be dropping as many non drivers as want to gamble a short trolley ride from the MGM Springfield casino. But, c’mon, what percentage of gamblers at casinos are old people who’d rather not drive?

Connecticut’s budget looks to be tight next year. I wonder how tempted the Connecticut DOT will be to only fund the New Haven to Hartford connection? Imagine Springfield’s newly renovated Union Station with exactly ZERO new service to New York via New Haven: $90 million to service local and regional buses, one train each way to Boston daily, the Vermonter, and some Northeast Regional shuttles. 

Remember, Boston stole away one of Connecticut’s largest corporations in just the last year. 

Years and years ago the Springfield paper ran a multi day feature comparing Springfield, Hartford, and Worcester. While Hartford is clearly the center of the largest of the three metro areas, and Worcester’s surrounding urban core is the smallest, Worcester was (and is) the most populous of the three, the most prosperous of the three, and the healthiest demographically of the three with Hartford at the bottom in all of those areas. Worcester has lost the least population, suffered the least White flight, and retained the largest middle class. Of course, Worcester is connected to Boston. Hartford should have been to Springfield what Boston is to Worcester, but that was not to be, if anything Hartford’s struggles have harmed Springfield as well. 

There are so many different ways to view the dynamics created by political boundaries running through places in ways not supported by reality. I want to follow up by musing on a few them. None of this is conclusive I realize, and I apologize to my readers for how poorly formed this all is as an argument. It is, very much in truth, as a child might feel as parents go through a divorce: the big people are going to make all of their choices for their reasons and we’re just going to have to adjust to the changes along the way.

Taking a big picture view can help. Everyone wants better connectivity to Boston; Hartford does, New York City does, Albany does, Vermont does, and Montreal does. Apart from NYC, all of these connections are most easily achieved only by going through Springfield, and even NYC sees a non-coastal (“Inland“) route through Springfield as by far the best way to improve speed and reliability to Boston by rail. 

Right now the greater Boston area is among the most prosperous in the world; Springfield and the Connecticut River Valley aren’t even an afterthought. Things change, however. It wasn’t that long ago that Boston was a basket case economically and WestMass was the more stable region. Today Springfield is lucky to have access to the money Boston’s prosperity provides in the way of tax dollars to help with local budgets. If many of the changes predicted by the thinkers I admire most (One of whom gave me the title for this post in describing where it was he started his train ride to Washington D.C., minute 46:00) come to pass, it may be the case in 20 years that Boston will be lucky to have a political connection to an area with meaningful agriculture and an elevation more than just a handful of inches above sea level.

Our best course is to unite at the very least on the Massachusetts side of the border along the Connecticut River corridor. Springfield, Chicopee, Holyoke, Northampton, and Greenfield when grouped together make for a formidable and fairly tight region. Dense, walkable core neighborhoods, cultural venues, renewable energy, water, spectacular agricultural land, and high quality recreational opportunities give us the chance to experience as wonderful a place to live as any, and if people to our north, south, east, and west see us taking advantage of that which is already ours, they may very well be more amenable to the idea of connecting to us. And if not, we won’t miss them anyway.

The Big E

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Things are where they are for a reason and The Big E is no exception. Following ancient traditions, American agricultural fairs began to expand in popularity and significance, with some arriving sooner rather than later, andsome growing in importance and popularity while others disappeared, all through the XIX and early XX century.

“The Eastern States Exposition” was a late comer to the field of ag expos but has since become one of the largest fairs in the country and the largest in the east. Given that many other such events preceded it in the region it is most likely that it’s climb to prominence relates to some advantages it presents to potential fair goers whether those fair goers are producers or consumers of agricultural products, and therein lies the substance of this post.

Given the success of the Big E along with the location of the northeast’s regional farm bank in Springfield I would hazard to guess that it represents a sort of frontier between the most significant and productive agricultural producers in the region, located primarily to the north and west, and transportation links both north-south, and east-west be they roadways, railways, or even the Connecticut River. In short, this was the ideal spot for bringing together the farmers and all of the rest of us who rely on them in this region.

It has meant a lot to us here in the region, though we’ve taken most of it for granted. Even Springfield’s long pro hockey tradition goes back to having an arena available to house it which the Eastern States Exposition provided. At the wedding we attended last weekend the groom announced which people had come from the farthest flung places, and while Australia topped the list, his mention of Springfield, Massachusetts brought an older woman scurrying to our table to tell us just how much she had enjoyed “New England’s Great State Fair”.


Kunstler repeats ad naseum that the future will belong to places with “meaningful connections to agriculture”, and if he is right I hope that being in a river valley with New England’s most productive soil and in a place where fossil water isn’t necessary for most production, and where the growing season may be elongating will serve us well. More importantly though, it is one of the few things that binds us as a community. 

I was contemplating just how unlovable most of our civilization is. It is impossible to imagine future generations of tourists visiting the ruins of our Wal-Marts and Target stores, and even our horrific auto centric town centers and institutions. Most of the ersatz communities we’ve built over the last 60 years (and 95% of what is built in this country has been built in that time) are unlovable and downright despairingly ugly. 
As humans we want more than to just survive, we want to be ennobled and uplifted. Perhaps 5% of our built environment does that, and perhaps 5% of our “cultural infrastructure” does that as well. I wouldn’t say that the fried dough and cheese curds on the midway are part of that 5%, but gathering and celebrating what farms, farming, and farmers do for us certainly is. Giving those of us not directly connected to our region’s agricultural past and present a means by which to come to understand it may be the only thing that gives us a fighting chance at a significant future.

¡Agua va!

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In what are now the great capitals of Europe it was considered normal behavior to throw one’s waste into the street. In some cases the collection of this human waste was irregular and considered of only minor importance to the overall function of the metropolis. As time passed and the scale of the issue (pun intended) grew in tandem with the suspicion that there was some connection between the practice and the crisis relating to public health formalized procedures for waste collection grew, and finally, in some cases only well into the XIX century, sewage systems were built at tremendous public expense.  
The topic of waste, from human to animal to industrial, in the modern city is an interesting one and one about which I have only read tangentially; I am certainly no expert on the topic. Drawing a parallel, however, between Industrial Age fecal waste and disease, and 21st century CO2 and climate change seems fairly simple and straightforward. 

  
Just as with human waste no one ever found the exhaust of fossil fuel combustion to be pleasant, but tossing it haphazardly into the public sphere for many seemed to adequately dilute its repugnance. Over time the growth of the civilization(s) producing the waste made both prior behaviors and prior tolerances inadequate relative to the amount of waste produced. Just, for example, as only the most enlightened Parisians could see the value of a thoroughgoing waste process, as most complained bitterly about the tremendous expense, today there are some who perceive more completely the importance of tackling the issues surrounding global warming, while others complain that doing so is throwing gobs of money at a non existent problem.

  

Seriously, think of it. People walked out their doors and ambled along streets made filthy with human excrement and not only thought “Yeah, I can live with this”, but aggressively fought against efforts to improve the situation. In one hundred years, in two hundred years I think that people will look back on the latter XX and early XXI centuries and our attitudes toward air pollution in much the same way that we look back on the shit laden urbs of the XVII. 
  

I always wonder at how films often ignore this part of late pre-industrial and early industrial life; is it too disgusting to depict for our modern sensibilities? 
  

However that may be, imagine being that person who doesn’t mind the feces in the streets. Imagine being told that perfectly good pavements, pavements that would last decades if not centuries, were to be torn up only to be rebuilt with a hugely expensive, much more expensive than the road system itself, system of underground tunnels that you would never see just to carry off an effluent that you were completely inured to anyway! Ridiculous!
  

Now imagine being the person who understood that the viability of the entire system in the long term, given the continued creation and agglomeration of waste and its negative feedbacks, was dependent upon making adequate accommodations for removing and processing that waste. You would be right to reject the arguments of the pro poop-in-the-streets crowd, you would be correct in thinking that the enormous investment in an altered infrastructure was rational, reasonable, and necessary. 
Another point of comparison between the two gets to the heart of the problem with both a laissez faire economic model and democratic governance; because the costs (disease, climate change) accrue to everyone equally going to great pains to remove your waste from the public sphere does nothing for you unless everyone does so, and both waste streams could not be removed from the public sphere without a large public investment. The solution to Madrid’s waste problem wasn’t 14,000 septic tanks, it was a sewer system. 

This isn’t meant to be an essay on rail vs automobile transportation per se, but re-densifying and producing more wealth with less energy is obligatory if we plan to keep the project of civilization going at any level. Investing in enormously expensive but remarkably efficient electrified steel wheel public transit, for example, while removing subsidies for all but the most necessary rubber wheeled roadways would be one strategy for reducing co2 waste from the air. It is top-down, and non incremental. It is also, using just the math of energy efficiency relative to transportation, one of the few ways to perpetuate modernity. Keeping all the roads paved and using an individual internal combustion engines, or even individual electric vehicles running on rubber tires and asphalt roads to effectuate every commercial, social, political, and educational interaction is the equivalent of throwing our crap onto the street.
We need to be able to do nearly everything we need to do by walking, biking, and as a last resort, taking mass transit. Waiting for 100,000,000 driverless electrified uber cars won’t do it. Pinch points, peak times, and above all, energy profligacy, make the endeavor nothing more than a distraction. Rearranging life so that we don’t need personalized mobility devices is what has to happen, and “market signals” have already proven too slow to spark the necessary transformation. 

I see it happening in the Knowledge Corridor; from New Haven to Holyoke there is now an archipelago of renovated train stations and platforms connected with updated rails. Increased daily service is set to begin and electrification should follow soon after that. Most people view the entire process as a huge waste of money; why would anyone want to go from New Haven to Springfield on a a choo-choo when, vroom, vroom, we’ve got cars to do it? 

They are one version of modern day poop-in-the-streeters.

25 or 5 to 4(.45)?

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25 and 5 are the numbers you often hear when people express the percent of the world’s energy consumed by the United States compared to its share of world population. Those numbers pop up again when discussing the related percentages of total resources used and, coincidentally(?)the percentage of the world’s prison population. Delving into the numbers with more precision it becomes clear that the numbers are rough estimates. “The Story of Stuff” puts our resource usage at 30%, Wikipedia puts our percentage of world population at 4.45%, and total energy use is placed at between 19% and 24% depending on the source.

A much more difficult to locate number is the percentage of primary energy production, which for the United States stands at 14.6%. As the question is asked, or avoided; “What can be done in the United States to maintain our quality of life in the face of dwindling fossil energy?” the answer may very well be present in those numbers and some comparisons to other parts of the world, or at least one other part of the world: Europe.

Leaving aside for one moment the fact that reality doesn’t care if you like it or not, most Americans, and even most of the pundits with whom I agree equate reduced energy usage with a reduction in general quality of life as measured in wealth. There are a number of things to unpack here up front. Critics of the “American Way of Life”, of which I number myself, see a change of lifestyle which is less consumption oriented as not only not altogether a bad thing, but as a good thing in and of itself. Be that as it may, for most people “Quality of Life” = “Wealth”, and “Wealth” is measured by the resources over which a person has control.

What I propose here is looking coolly and rationally at some numbers related to population, and energy usage and production while at the same time I make some observations regarding quality of life which, while by their very nature are subjective, may respond to the question of maintaining it.

Even taking the lowest number relative to our share of world energy usage, 19%, in the United States we consume between four and five times “our share” of world energy: 19/4.45 = 4.3. We also produce energy at 3x the rate of the world as a whole: 14.6/4.45 = 3.3. In Europe they have roughly 11% of the world population and consume 20% of the world’s energy. Do you see where I’m going with this? Europeans consume energy at a much greater rate than the world’s population as a whole but they consume at much less than the American rate, making them virtual energy misers compared to us: 20/11= 1.8. Notice that their rate of energy usage falls not only below the American rate of usage, but also well below the American rate of production, so much so in fact that it is almost 50% below the American rate of “over-production”.

What this means is that, theoretically, United States energy production could drop by nearly half and the energy would be available to live at more or less a European level of quality of life. The great obstacle to this, of course, is the way in which we have arrayed ourselves across the terrain. The great disparity which exists in energy usage between Europe and the United States is in transportation at the personal level, i.e. greater dependence on private automobiles necessitated by our sprawling development pattern and the larger size of our domiciles which then require more energy to heat and cool.

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Traveling 10 miles to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk does not improve the flavor of the milk, and spending an hour to get to work does not make us more productive once we’ve arrived, on those things I think rational people can agree. Living in smaller homes, even apartments, and at greater densities however is not as straightforward. While many Americans prefer living in urban situations and are willing to pay a premium to do so, most Americans with the wherewithal to choose have opted for a suburban “spread out” lifestyle. To many this way of life is synonymous with “The American Dream” and in the words of the aptly named Dick, Cheney it is not negotiable. As Leigh Gallagher points out in her new book “The End of the Suburbs” (p 65) however, “The American Dream” not only predates suburbanization as a mass movement, at its core it has no connection to it and, given the nature of our energy conundrum, it is now antithetical to it.

We can live (and leave to our children) a better, richer life, the original core of the American Dream, if we embrace an American version of European urbanism. I have seen and written about the disconnect which exists between what is generally viewed as “economic prosperity” and quality of life in Europe. In one of my favorite cities in Spain the average worker’s salary is €13,040 a year, and there is a high unemployment rate, but the community is vibrant, mobile, and secure. People walk down beautiful streets with friends, chat at outdoor cafes, play sports, watch fútbol at bars, and shop for fresh local produce at public markets. Europeans report higher life satisfaction, and live longer lives, along with having more free time than their American counterparts, and it is “neat” that young Americans are embracing this lifestyle in greater numbers than ever, what seems clear is that, like it or not, it is the only means by which we can continue to be prosperous.

Current energy usage in the United States at the household and per capita level should give us a good indication both of the places which are most capable of providing this less energy intensive lifestyle and the reasons for their greater efficiency. The Pacific Northwest and the Northeast are the leaders in household and per capita energy miserliness. The Northeast due to its greater population densities, the Northwest somewhat for that, but mostly due to its moderate climate requiring little in the way of household heating and cooling.

This chart shows the regional differences in household energy use:

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We cannot increase in size the Pacific moderate climate region, in fact we may be doing the opposite. The good news is that we have space for millions upon millions of Americans in places where the infrastructure has already been built to facilitate a more efficient way of life. The very cities and towns which have suffered the greatest population drain in the post World War II era are the ones which now have the capacity to receive an influx of people and the design to do so in an energy efficient manner. Peer reviewed data provided by Mathew Kahn of UCLA not only confirms that northeastern and urban lifestyles reduce gasoline usage, but his work on urban vibrancy and energy use demonstrates that there is beyond simply that a positive feedback loop to be tied into which hints that energy efficiency will not just improve, but rather it will improve at an increasing rate as re urbanization takes hold.

Further good news exists in the fact that these places are in the parts of the United States where water is most plentiful. This water produces sustainable energy as it falls from high terrain to sea level, creates transportation corridors in the form of rivers and lakes, irrigates crops, and provides drinking water to populations. The water cycle is one of the simplest ways to tap in to solar energy.

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How can civilization survive in North America in an energy scarce future? Urbanism.

Memento Mori

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There are so many realities, paradigms, truths, and facts fighting for my consciousness and attempting to direct my actions that it is easy to be overcome by cognitive dissonance. Issues like climate change, fossil fuel depletion, government debt, personal debt, water shortages, de-industrialization, and the loss of topsoil to name just a few are clearly significant issues.

If one takes just the issue of climate change, at this point over 97% of peer reviewed papers on the issue arrive at the conclusion that global warming is man-made. Within that cohort there are highly qualified individuals who believe that we have already passed a tipping point and that the impacts of global climate change will not only be severe, but that those effects will be seen sooner rather than later and that they will likely lead to near total human die-off. What seems to be a larger group of qualified experts, perhaps still the minority, see the tipping point as not too far off, but believe that fossil energy use must be curtailed severely, immediately cut in half, in order to avoid catastrophic consequences. They go so far as to claim that even the rapidly depleting fossil fuel resources that could be extracted and used to perpetuate modern civilization cannot all be burned.

So on the one hand we have the debate over whether or not fracking and the tar sands are (relatively speaking) environmentally safe, and able to extract large enough quantities of energy over a sustained period of time to perpetuate business as usual. If not, then it’s fairly clear that an “energy cliff” looms. On the other hand, everyone agrees that the processes which are required to create usable carbon energy from the Bakken, the Marcellus shale, and the Alberta tar sands require much more energy input than traditional extraction and production techniques, and just the CO2 put into the atmosphere from using these resources on the consumer end will put us over the top vis a vis climate change. And this is just scratching the surface of either issue.

The truth is that, if one just looks at the handful of topics listed above, one can see that any serious treatment of any one of them requires an understanding of most of the others in order to be at all thorough. Given the complexity and uncertainty involved with each issue what that means is that chaos theory is really all anyone has left to fall back on. I can’t possibly know how these interrelated concepts will impact one another with sufficient certainty to select a coherent plan of action, especially when one adds to all of this the tendency of the mind to view preferred options as more likely even when the evidence is contradictory.

This all comes from what I see as an enormous internal conflict I’m experiencing. One of the reasons I chose to by a home in a walkable neighborhood close to public transportation, a regional rail hub, and, potentially, a navigable river, is that I see an increase in the energy costs related to transportation especially increasing dramatically in the relatively near term. I’ve behaved in certain ways based on that belief. Beyond that I’ve invested around $20,000 in making my home more energy efficient, and I’m trying to alter my employment situation such that I can walk to work. All of these decisions can also be seen as just generally “good” even if the prediction of much higher future energy costs never takes place. And, as is obvious from the blog, I want to live downtown anyway (See “Motivated Reasoning”?), but what about my attitude regarding the MGM plan for the South End?

On almost every other issue I see things, with a nod to the aforementioned chaos theory, from a radical environmental point of view. My focus is local, community oriented, and is generally anti-corporate, anti “business-as-usual”. Whence cometh then my passion for the MGM plan? Memento mori. I’ve been watching, waiting, at times actively participating in what I’ve hoped would be a process of renovation and revitalization of my community. As I look back now I see that I have been engaged in this for 35 years, and while, yes, of late I have seen some very tender “green shoots” of slight incremental improvement, most of the last 3 1/2 decades have seen decline and decay. I have to admit that not only is there no inevitability to my city’s comeback that, even should it arrive, it could very well be too late for me to ever experience it.

I prefer incrementalism, I prefer taking the long view, but given that casino development is inevitable in this part of the state, for good or for ill, I can’t help but see this as not only incorporating so much of what I’ve always wanted to see returning to the downtown (none of which includes “gaming”), but the design is so nearly perfect with respect to its “urbanism” that, even should the “casino” concept fail(whatever that might mean), the programming could be changed to reflect whatever the city needs.

Incremental change can, should, and hopefully will continue to occur not only including the green shoots, but also the renovated intermodal transportation center. If everything comes crashing down, and I mean the “everything” which my opening paragraph implies, then nothing matters in the long run, and whatever faux prosperity can be experienced for whatever temporary period will have to be its own reward. If, on the other hand, human ingenuity happens to steer civilization through these hazardous times, then this one huge step forward for the city could be not just a game changer but a complete course redirection.

Resilience

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I remember hearing the argument years ago that Israel was the model to follow when it came to the prevention of terrorism, and I remember thinking just how idiotic that was: Keeping 99 out of 100 terrorists from successfully attacking you is not preferable to not having any terrorists want to attack you. By the same logic it makes more sense to live where there are fewer disasters than to live in a place which must constantly successfully overcome them.

For decades it seemed to me that my community was the former. Except for the occasional heavy snow I can’t recall any climatological events that caused any real disruption in my life beyond a day of school being cancelled. In just the last three years I’ve experienced just how disruptive a tornado, a freak early snowstorm, and a couple of hurricanes can be, though I can happily report that I feel as though my neighborhood, while not immune to natural disasters, is not at all fragile either.

These storms have been record breakers in terms of wide spread utility losses as well as the extent and the expanse of the damage they have done, and yet what I’ve found is that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that my decaying industrial age urban core neighborhood is much more resilient than many a modern edge city or suburban area.

When my neighborhood, my street, even my house, were directly in the path of this tornado I saw how quickly order was established and recovery took place. Being only a few blocks from hospitals, police and fire headquarters, and even emergency shelters gave me and my family a sense of security; a “sense” which never had to grow beyond anything but a sense because having electric, phone, and cable lines all below ground, and having outlets which satisfy all of our basic needs within walking distance, we never actually experienced any diminution of life.

Ambulances lined up in the aftermath of the June 6th tornado, photo taken from my front door.

Police at the intersection of Maple and Union Streets immediately after the tornado of June 6th, 2011

So when a major disaster actually struck as close as a disaster can strike, granted, without actually destroying my home (which just a few dozen yards of course deviation could have caused and only good fortune can explain), my life was only minimally disrupted. On the other hand, the Halloween snowstorm of 2011 devastated thousands of square miles north, south, east, and west of my home, and yet my neighborhood was left completely unscathed. While almost literally everyone else I knew was without heat, without power, without water, without phone service, without an Internet connection, and without access to gasoline, I not only had all of those things, but found found myself in no need of the latter because everything I could want was within walking distance. We opened up our home to family and friends and it functioned as a shelter for more than a week.

This matters. Many people say outright that they do not live in cities for reasons of safety and security. Beyond the fact that urban living is far safer than people think, and life in the exurbs somewhat more dangerous than many believe, city centers may be more resilient than other places in 21st century America.

I’m not sure what scientific methodology could falsify this claim, though I would love to see a study addressing this(Here’s an article published after I wrote this post)My evidence expressed here does not go beyond the anecdotal, obviously, and a thoroughgoing analysis would need to take into account the frequency and expanse of the various types of disasters, and statistical evidence of resiliency of design typologies. Regardless, I feel comfortable saying that the infrastructure which forms the foundation of my life in a material sense is strong, and includes numerous redundancies.

Every variety of transportation other than air transport has my neighborhood as its hub: My neighborhood. That’s public and private, local and regional, “rubber wheeled” and “steel wheeled”. There are two energy generating facilities visible from my backyard and that electricity seems to make its way here along a very stable transmission network as my home has never been without power, to my knowledge, since I moved here four years ago. My water comes from a system the Romans would have been proud of: It flows from the hills west of the city downhill to the valley in which the city rests. The region is not prone to drought. The regional hubs and switching stations of every major modern communication system are also, again, in my neighborhood. (Beyond all this, there are farms, many of them, in nearly all of the towns around my hometown: One of the great benefits of being a region which experienced only negligible population growth in the last 75 years.)

What all of this means is simply that if ANYONE in my region is “online” then my neighborhood will be online. I can’t imagine that being a bad thing in an age of uncertainty.

From another perspective, looking up instead of down i suppose, I’m curious to see if the realities of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy will begin to justify the claims of James Howard Kunstler relative to the future of the largest urban centers. Mr. Kunstler has often said that the conditions of “The Long Emergency” will prove too difficult for cities which have grown too large to adapt to the realities of our changing natural, energy, and economic circumstances. He has stated that New York City itself may see relative decline in the near future. While New York clearly has many more redundancies than my own community in the way of infrastructure, they are at such a scale, and under such constant pressure to work at absolute peak efficiency that I wonder if they can bounce back effectively from this and any subsequent disasters. To be continued?

(To quote the hosts of the Today Show just now: “…more than two million people still without power mostly in New York City’s outer boroughs and the New York suburbs.”)

My Motivated Reasoning

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I brainstormed titles and urls for this blog and its accoutrements for a few hours and then went over them with my wife. There were a few I liked apart from Rational Urbanism: Sense and the City; Real Urbanism; and Urban Sense among others. I decided on “Rational Urbanism” because with so many of the issues which matter most to me I could see how irrationality was a tremendous perpetuator of problems.

There are a few types of irrational thinking, and also logical fallacies, which pop up the most frequently. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, post hoc ergo propter hoc, wishful thinking, appeals to authority or common belief, and begging the question come to mind. While some may find my “appeals” to Jane Jacobs, William Whyte, Kunstler and the like to be examples of appeals to authority (I’m not sure I would totally disagree all the time!) my point is usually to confirm that the point I am attempting to make is supported by others who have studied the same or similar issues, not that it simply settles the argument. That said, I try to be aware of my own weak spots and biases and take them into account as I contemplate the issues manifest in this blog.
I must be most on guard for motivated reasoning. I want my hometown to thrive. I want more than almost anything to live in a country where urban areas are healthy and vibrant. Having had that desire and having felt that urge for nearly 40 years now I can tell you that I am aware of my own biases. I cannot tell you how many times I listened to presentations and read forecasts which foretold of an urban renaissance in Springfield…and I believed every word because I so wanted to believe every word. But things have not turned around. By and large, although there are many ways in which the city has improved, overall decline continues, if unevenly.
This is where the battle begins to take shape. I live in a place that I love; right now. If my neighborhood never improves, if it declines somewhat even, I will still prefer this neighborhood to most other neighborhoods quite simply for its “bones”. This isn’t to say that there is no level of decline which could cause me to change this attitude: I am certain that there is a level of decline which would cause me to regret my decision to live here and to have set down roots here. At the current rate of decline, however, I could happily live here until being removed from my home feet first in some 40 years.
This makes it easier for me not to engage in wishful thinking as well. I happen to be a non-believer in anything and all things “supernatural “. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard people claim that the fact that they want “thus and so” to be true somehow makes “thus and so” true. It doesn’t. I have developed such a revulsion for wishful thinking that, if anything, I have to be on guard for unwarranted pessimism much more than its inverse. That said, it isn’t as though my city needs to turnaround or I’m not going to be able to live where I live happily. But the truth is I do want the city’s fortunes to change.
Here’s the rub: I think this city (and others as well) are about to experience a tremendous rebirth. Civilizations are no different from any other organism in one very important way: If they expend more energy than they acquire over time they perish. If a cheetah gets one calorie more than it expends in hunting, killing, and consuming a gazelle, then it lives, if it gets less, then it dies. Any excess energy can be used in leisure, which for a cheetah, I suppose is just not having to be engaged in hunting another gazelle.
Energy is becoming more expensive, in that it’s taking more energy for us to acquire energy. If you look at the Chilean mine disaster, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the arguments surrounding tar sands, and countless other events related to the more and more heroic efforts to which humans have got to go in order to satisfy our desire for energy, it is clear that that the cheapest to obtain and best quality forms of fossil fuel energy have already been tapped.
Coal, natural gas, and especially petroleum have been the greatest and most concentrated forms of energy humankind has ever discovered. The “cheetah/gazelle” ratio of oil found in Texas one hundred years ago was about 100/1. Around one unit of energy was expended to acquire 100 units thereof. That’s a lot of laying around on the savannah, or in other words leisure time and luxury! Now we’ve gone about extracting this energy in a way similar to the way one might pick apples from an apple tree, keeping in mind that this “tree” bears fruit once every couple hundred million years even if the fruit lasts indefinitely while on the tree. First we pick the best fruit from the lowest hanging branches. After a short time, however, all of the best and easiest to obtain fruit is consumed and we have to start either taking lower quality fruit which hangs low or we must leverage greater energy (climbing) or technology (a ladder) to acquire more fruit. Over time we constantly balance ease of acquisition and quality until the only good fruit is very, very hard to reach, and the only fruit which is fairly easy to reach is of the poorest quality.
This is where we are. We wouldn’t be drilling two miles beneath the Gulf of Mexico if there were sufficient oil available in shallow water. We wouldn’t, be expending huge quantities of energy to extract usable energy with an almost negligible cheetah/gazelle ratio from the tar sands if there were another Ghawar or Cantarell oilfield ready to be tapped.
Fossil fuels exists in certain quantities. Once we use them, they are gone.We have used up much of the highest quality and easiest to extract fossil fuel resources.
Fossil fuels give us much more favorable cheetah/gazelle ratios (EI-EO) than renewables or nuclear. The leisure/luxury excess we’ve enjoyed over the last couple of hundred years is going to shrink. (If renewables gave us better EI-EO we’d be using them in such ways that they would eliminate extraction of the lowest EI-EO fossil fuels. Extraction of low EI-EO fuels is determined by overall energy costs over the long term.)
We are going to have to be more energy efficient or die.
Traditional land use typologies, i.e. cities and farms, are more energy efficient than suburban sprawl development.
Urban living is going to become central to our response to reduced EI-EO.
I want this to be true. And it is true.
Some arguments simply aren’t worth having. That cities are more efficient than suburbs is self evident. If you have an acre of land and you spread your house across the entire acre making it in-arable, it is less efficient than placing a concentrated domicile at a corner of that land and farming the rest. Walking requires less energy than driving, maintaining a linear mile of infrastructure for 1,000 people costs less than 10 linear miles for the same number of people. Europe uses a fraction of the energy we do in the United States mainly due to a development pattern which segregates urban from rural more sharply. The most energy efficient metropolises in the United States are the least suburbanized.
Interestingly, while looking up the data for confirming my assertion I found a presentation which ostensibly attempted to give an even handed overview of suburban vs urban energy uses and it gave one nod to the suburbs: Newer homes in the suburbs are more energy efficient than older homes in the cities. Think about it. What an idiot! That isn’t an argument for the energy efficiency of suburban type development! Had those homes, or better yet, the energy expended in constructing those homes, been spent in the city building new homes there or improving old ones, then we would have both the energy efficiency inherent in a traditional development pattern and the increased efficiencies which come from the use of modern construction materials and techniques.
Furthermore, steel rails and water transport are the most energy efficient types of non pedal transportation in terms of energy costs per mile. As James Howard Kunstler points out with great frequency, most of our older cities are located where they are for a reason. Usually proximate to bodies of water which gave them their initial competitive advantage in transportation.
Many of our older cities, Springfield included, sit on conjunctions of waterways, and rail lines. Some, like Springfield, also have a combination of rainfall and changes in elevation such that hydro-power is available to be harnessed (Not to mention water for drinking!), winds blow fiercely and frequently making wind power another potential resource. Notice how competitive advantage swings not only from suburb to city, but from southwest to northeast!
There it is. My motivated reasoning. Nearly all of the demographic shifts which have almost crushed cities in the northeast will reverse, leaving Arizona and Nevada as the arid wastelands they should be.  Commuting costs along with the other energy inefficiencies of suburban living will drive the middle class back to cities and when I die in peaceful old age it will be in a city dealing with the problems of increasing population and gentrification, and not the decline and death mirroring my own inevitable demise.