Conscious Choice: Eco Cities

May 2000 | Citizen at Large

Eco Cities

by Jay Walljasper

Almost from the beginning, the environmental movement in the United States has looked upon cities as necessary evils. Tracing their roots back to John Muir and other worshippers of wilderness, American environmentalists have generally viewed any landscape shaped by human hands as tainted and thus not a priority for ecological preservation. People may need to live in cities for crass economic reasons, but advocates of the green gospel have preached that redemption from the ravages of environmental destruction can only be found in the untrammeled lands of the rural countryside.

The sad irony of this is that through the decades environmentalists have unwittingly boosted the most spectacular ecological crisis of the twentieth century: the suburban American lifestyle. By dismissing cities as cesspools of pollution and overcrowding, greens have helped encourage millions of people to forsake traditional urban neighborhoods for sprawling acreage outside the city limits. They may be seeking a closer connection to nature among the green lawns of suburbia, but the truth is that suburban living really means countless hours in the car, cruising down endless miles of pavement, passing ceaseless stretches of housing developments, all of which depends on limitless supplies of fossil fuel, pesticides, lumber, farmland, and other environmentally costly resources. A shopping trip to the mall has replaced stopping at the neighbors for coffee and conversation, not only in suburbs but nowadays in most cities and villages too.

Many environmentalists may huff that they spurn America’s consumer-crazed ways, preferring the simple joys of a life lived in harmony with the land. But when you add up the environmental toll of eco-enthusiasts loading up SUVs with outdoor gear on a Friday afternoon and driving to their country home in some lovely (at least for now) rural setting, a weekend of shopping at the mall looks almost altruistic by comparison. The pollution price tag is even higher for people who permanently leave the despoiled city and move to some pastoral paradise only a seventy-five-minute drive from the office.

I don’t condemn people for their spiritual attachment to the wonders of the wilds, but let’s not confuse it with a treading-lightly-on-the-Earth lifestyle. The average low-income Chicagoan — who takes the CTA, shops at neighborhood stores, and shares a small apartment with family or friends — leads a much more ecologically sustainable life than your average Sierra Club member.

The good news is that over the last several years, American greens — at least some of them— are beginning to recognize this. Two of the strongest new currents in environmentalism, Green Cities visionaries and the environmental justice movement, place the health of cities at the top of their political agenda.

The environmental justice movement sprang up in response to widespread public feelings that most ecology groups care more about the fate of wetlands and endangered species than people. Indeed, many folks living in African-American and Hispanic urban ghettos, Indian reservations, and working-class neighborhoods began to wonder if they themselves were not becoming endangered species, surrounded by all the toxic hazards in their communities. In the early 1990s, a series of epidemiological studies confirmed their suspicions with medical evidence: poor and minority Americans, most of whom live in inner cities, are exposed to far more environmental hazards than their white middle-class counterparts. This sparked a quick reaction from thousands of grassroots groups around the country demanding a halt to waste incinerators, freeway expansions, toxic dumping, industrial emissions, leaking landfills, radiation exposure, and other environmental threats to their communities. After decades of being dismissed as a hobby for well-heeled tree-huggers, the cause of environmentalism gained millions of supporters of all races and income levels. While these new activists don’t always see eye-to-eye with mainstream environmental organizations, they have succeeded in making the movement as a whole pay more attention to the ecological concerns of cities.

Inspired in part by this grassroots agitation to remedy the environmental ills of urban America, the Green Cities movement looks at how to make cities more healthy and more livable. Their ideas run the gamut from resurrecting local streams from the culverts and drainpipes where they were long ago banished to setting aside vacant lots and rooftops for orchards and vegetable patches. An emphasis on more parkland and nature preserves also sits near the top of the Green Cities agenda, as part of the movement’s mission to give city dwellers a fuller and more harmonious connection with nature.

But perhaps the main aim of the movement is to reduce radically the role of the private automobile in urban life. Much of the unpleasantness and many of the pollution and public-safety perils in American cities can be easily traced to the way cars rule the road. Ever since World War II, public officials and transportation planners have restlessly defaced and carved-up urban neighborhoods to speed the flow of traffic.

Advocates of urban ecology (most of whom are younger than your typical green) are now striking back with well-thought-out alternatives to automobile-dependent urban development. They emphasize public transportation, bicycling, and walking as well as urban villages, which reduce the need for travel by meeting people’s basic needs in neighborhood shopping districts.

In a time when American cities still face daunting economic and environmental challenges, this energy from a new wave of environmentalists directed at improving the livability of urban areas is great news indeed.

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