The Field

Goodbye Worldchanging

I just read the disheartening news that Worldchanging is closing its virtual doors.   Where will I go now for thought provoking sustainability essays?  I hope the idea of bright green environmentalism will live on and thrive regardless.

What to do during Earth Hour

This post comes early or late, depending on your geographic position, but we've still got a few minutes yet till 8:30 local time, so it's not technically late from my point of view.  I was thinking of things to do during Earth Hour:

*Trivial Pursuit, anyone?  Play board games. 

*A stroll through the neighborhood at night can be fun.

*Munch on food prepared without electricity. 

*Try to read by candlelight and be thankful for electricity.

*Your electronic toys are all effectively broken for an hour and reading isn't much of an option.  After you've played a game or two, what could you and your significant other possibly do to pass the time in your dark, romantically candlelit dwelling?  Hmm...

Comparing the Walkability of two suburban neighborhoods

So we had a good walk the other day, setting out from our apartment through the neighborhood and the big nearby open space via trails and sidewalks to explore a different open space we’d never been to before.  On the way back, we stopped at the clubhouse for some free tea and coffee, and then walked to the grocery store to pick up a few things before having dinner at a local pizza place and finally returning home.  This combination of walking for both recreation and utility in the same trip would have been very unlikely only four and a half miles away in the neighborhood where I grew up, but it is quite easy here. 

 

This neighborhood, at least our section of it, was built around 2003 and seems to have had at least a modicum of thought put into it.  It consists of high quality apartments and townhomes, with restaurants and businesses built into the neighborhood along a main street, and single-family detached houses, which, although much, much too large in my opinion, are nonetheless quite attractive with varied designs, hidden rear garages and lots of neat little parks interspersed to make up for the fact that the houses occupy almost their entire lot and are very close together.  Solar pv’s on the roofs are quite common.  And, even unfinished though it is with the aforementioned empty lots, there’s a lot of necessities and community assets within a short walk for everyone in the neighborhood. 

 

Oddly, as if to emphasize how nice it is, there’s an adjacent block of houses west of us that, despite being built only a year earlier, are depressingly 20th century.  They’re big and blocky, ugly and monotonous, with comparatively few parks, no mix of housing types, and no businesses.  You’d think nothing had been learned since the days when my parent’s house was built.

 

My parent's house and the neighborhood where I grew up are old fashioned in all the wrong ways.  The neighborhood is a typical late 20th century American suburban neighborhood, dating to about 1980.  It's a big rectangle of single family detached houses dropped on the landscape like a bomb just beyond the preexisting edge of the city.  The houses are a study in how not to design a house.  They’re drafty, dark, inefficient, and generally look like a large car garage with a sad living quarters attached to it.  They care nothing for the landscape or their orientation relative to the sun, and the limited number of designs repeat, creating a confusing labyrinth along the unnecessarily wide streets. 

For comparison, I used Google Earth to find useful things within a 1 mile radius of our apartment and within a 1 mile radius of my parent’s house. 

 

Here's a list:

 

Parent’s house (built about 1979):

* Recreation: good access to parks, open spaces, trails, and rec centers.

*Schools: a public elementary, middle and high school.

*Restaurants: 3 (1 local coffee place at 0.93 miles,

1 local burrito place about same distance and a Starbucks at 1 mile.)

*Gas stations: 1 at 0.95 miles.

*A small amount of other business and retail.

[To be fair, a number of things nearly make the cut: a Sonic at 1.01 miles, a Subway at 1.02, a bank 1.05, and a grocery store at 1.06.]

 

Our apartment (2003):

*Recreation: good access to parks, open spaces, trails, and rec centers.

*Schools:  1 pre-school, 1 k-12 private school and a community college.

*Restaurants: ~30 ranging from fast food to coffee places to casual to slightly more fine dining.

*Grocery stores: 2 (3 if you count Walgreens, 4 if you count the new Walmart being built.)

*1 public library.

*Gas stations: 2.

*Churches: 5(!)

*Banks: 3.

*Various other retail and businesses.

 

 

Our new neighborhood has the same strengths as my parent’s neighborhood (good access to recreation and schools) plus a lot more.  It’s the clear winner for providing its residents with lots of the things they need and want within a short, easy walk. However, just because something is within a mile radius doesn't mean it's a mile walk.  Everything is farther away when you account for the often meandering paths one must take to reach one's destination.  This makes it even more important that developments have well designed density with things close at hand.  Again using Google Earth I determined the distance by the shortest walking route to a couple destinations in each neighborhood. 

 

Walking route to the nearest restaurant: 1.2 miles from my parent's house vs. 0.2 miles from our apartment.

 

Walking to the grocery store: 1.33 miles from my parent's house vs. 0.66 miles from our apartment.

 

Of course 1.33 miles is by no means a long walk, but if you don't want fetching a half gallon of milk to take all afternoon and if you have to carry everything you buy home on your back that extra 2/3 of a mile makes a big difference in deciding whether or not you're willing to hoof it.  I'm grateful that we have so much so close, as it allows us to save gas while getting exercise and fresh air. 

 

But it could be even better.  For instance:

*The neighborhood could be more bike friendly – our apartments should rent bike lockers in addition to the car ports and garages.

*All the roof space on top of the apartments is wasted.  It should be used for community gardens, or covered in solar panels, or a mix of the two.

*The houses here are way too big.

*The neighborhood should be even denser with more apartments and townhomes and yet more businesses, all without sacrificing comfort.

*Better access to public transit like buses and rail (which should exist.)

 

Will people get out of their cars if walking is a reasonable alternative?  I do.  Given all the benefits, personal and ecological, of a dense, walkable neighborhood, I can’t understand why anyone would ever be allowed to again build like they did in the bad old days of the late 20^th century.

Ghost streets of a non-development

Wow, what a wasteland this blog is, huh?  Not updated in three quarters of a year.  Maybe its purpose no longer seemed defined to me, since my fiance and I moved to a new neighborhood and I no longer visit or clean up the field regularly.  Also, laziness. 

Speaking of wastelands, there are two empty lots, one west of the restaurants and another east of the clubhouse, on opposite sides of the pleasant apartment/townhouse neighborhood we live in now.  The west one was graded at the same time as the rest of the neighborhood back in 2002, and since then a bank has been built in one corner and some townhomes in another corner, and a strange road to nowhere paved through the middle of it, but most of it remains ceded to the weeds.  The developers haven't even gotten that far with the other one.  Neatly hidden from view in the neighborhood by a fence, the area was graded in 2006, and the development that was started has yet to be finished.  Concrete gutters define streets never paved and the edges of nonexistent sidewalks.  Water lines were apparently installed, shown by manhole covers, fire hydrants and sewer line caps.  And that's it.  Concrete lines and rusting iron circles that will disappear beneath colonizing plants in a few years time if no one does anything with it.  Prairie dogs will return, and snakes likely already find the heaps of broken concrete piled down the middle of one of the non-streets to be excellent habitat.

I find it interesting to explore, as I would any ruin, although it isn't so much a ruin as a complete failure to build in the first place, which is itself an interesting occurrence.  And if, as I suspect, this and the other lot represent small ruins of the unsustainable, then its return to nature is fine with me.  But if someone built a dense, walkable neighborhood with a few more restaurants or other businesses to add to the local repertoire there, I wouldn't mind. 

The mystery and desolation of the office building

I've always been struck by how much of our civilization can at once appear to be new and well maintained and completely abandoned.  My fiancé and I went for a walk today down the hill along Walnut Creek, where there is a hodgepodge of open space, golf course, and office buildings that appear to have been dropped randomly on an otherwise untamed landscape.  It was cold, and the wind made it frigid.  The scarf my love made for me for Christmas performed admirably, but even its powers could not contend with the wind forever.  Nonetheless, it was a good walk, and we managed to get through half of it before the sun went down and the cold became unbearable.  We walked west on the path from the Westview recreation center past scenes of native grasses and golf course greens and the occasional cottonwood, with the sun in our eyes.  Despite the sun, it was a little hazy and the slightest wind was freezing, in true January style.  But for the occasional private plane overhead and cars in the distance, it was quiet, the plants dormant, the animals absent. 

Then we came to the end of the open space and the trail at Simms Street and crossed over to a place I've often driven past but never actually been.  To the left there was a stand of trees in shallow, frozen water with many small birds in them, the first sign of any animals we'd seen.  And to the right, an empty parking lot and an office building.  Two Subaru's parked near the front were the only sign of any human presence.  There was a pristine sidewalk between the parking lot and the overly manicured bluegrass that surrounded the facility.  I could easily believe that we were the first to ever bother walking on it.  Also adjacent to the sidewalk were several small buildings of mysterious purpose.  My mate and I both have often wondered just what goes on inside office buildings, but never wanted to find out firsthand.  Just then, the distinct feeling was that nothing went on inside this building.  These places are like ruins, built long ago by a strange people possessed of unknowable motives.  Built, and then mysteriously deserted, left to be watered by automatic sprinklers and guarded by silent robotic security cameras.  Just as confounding as and no more lively than an ancient monolith, kept in impeccable condition for reasons beyond comprehension.  There were obviously people here once, but why did they build this place, and why did they just as soon abandon it?  We knew that on any given weekday you would likely find the parking lot full of cars, yet even then I'd wager you could scan the landscape and not see a single human.  The place could have been dropped on the ground by a passing spaceship. 

We made our way around the building, picking our way over the unnecessary lawn, which obviously served only to attract geese and store their feces.  Behind the building were -- guess what -- stone monoliths!  They presided over an eerily empty park-like area for employees.  Beyond it the road ended in a useless little circle.  A barbed wire fence formed the boundary of the premises.  We found a spot where the fence's bottom wire was missing, and slipped under.  The creek and an expanse of short-cropped grass stretched ahead, toward grassy hills and the mountains.  Ahead and to the right was a building of even more mysterious purpose, which sits shrouded from view by a screen of pine trees planted when it was constructed several years ago.  We probably weren't technically supposed to be walking back there, but we didn't see any no trespassing signs.  We walked across the field and rejoined the creek, which now had a two-track road running parallel to it that appeared to still be in use.  On the creek were more animal signs -- tracks in the snow.  The tracks were a few inches across and had five toes -- a raccoon, or a badger perhaps, I'm not sure.  The road there made a handsome trail, offering great views of the rolling grassland and mountains as it ran along the creek and passed through a stand of cottonwoods before turning up a hill.  I wish it were an official trail open to the public.  By the time we reached the bend where the road left the creek the sun was down and the cold was getting more bothersome, but I felt obligated to follow it as far as the top of the small hill, so we briefly went up for a look.  Nice view.  There were coyote, or maybe fox tracks in the hard patches of snow persisting on the road. 

We hurried back, trudging through the biting wind.  It was painfully cold.  From the back, the office building vaguely resembled a ziggurat, adding to its air of mystery and desolation.  I think I've always had a sense of this quality, but I first identified it outside the Standley Lake water treatment plant a few years ago.  It can be seen in office buildings, railroad tracks, industrial sites, the empty streets of a suburban neighborhood (especially new ones) and in the deserted and artificial environs of many a video game.  I've never known what to make of it.