« Transit Maps of the World | Main | So Much For That » Ah, Sprawl10 Mar 2008 01:12 pm
Washington Post reports on Virginia's treeless towns, stripped bear by the rapid pace of new development. Avoiding this kind of things is one of many reasons to favor dense development of parcels that do get developed, the better to leave more space adequately undeveloped. Photo courtesy of the World Resources Institute Comments (28)
Did no one listen to the Lorax? thedramatist.blogspot.com 
Suburb (noun): A place where the trees are cut down and the streets are named after them.
but Matt, no one wants to live in Manhattan! I kid of course. It is funny that even a moderately zoned place like Illinois' Oak Park is considered dense compared to most modern developments, yet mention dense zoning and people's gut reaction is "OMG China Town Manhattan". Walkable, nice architecture, plenty of parks and trees, serviced my mass transit (PACE bus, CTA bus, and stops on the El's green and blue lines).
If a BEAR strips in the woods...
but Matt, no one wants to live in Manhattan! I kid of course. It is funny that even a moderately zoned place like Illinois' Oak Park is considered dense compared to most modern developments, yet mention dense zoning and people's gut reaction is "OMG China Town Manhattan". Walkable, nice architecture, plenty of parks and trees, serviced my mass transit (PACE bus, CTA bus, and stops on the El's green and blue lines).
What do Virginia's forests and Roger Goodell's files on Bill Belichek have in common? They both eventually get fed through a wood chipper.
I live in Virginia, and you should see some of these places in the summer. The heat shimmers off of an ocean of asphalt roofs and pavement, and the rivers of jammed cars pumping their carbon monoxide into the air. Not a tree to be seen (except a few scraggly ones put up in the medians for "decoration"). The problem with Virginia developers, in particular, is that they know no other kind of development. They denude the land, put up endless numbers of McMansions, townhouses and strip malls on inadequate roads, and leave gridlock and blight in their wake. Do they care? No. Not one damn bit. Some of them own country estates in Middleburg, and make damn sure they don't live anywhere near the sprawl they create. Do the county councils that are in the developers' pockets care? No. All they can see is the increased tax revenue. Virginia used to be a beautiful place to live. What a horrible legacy we're leaving to our kids.
I live in DC and I favor dense development, in the cities as well as the burbs. One reason housing in cities like DC and San Francisco is so costly is that existing property owners want to protect their view, worry about parking, etc. But the evil developers in Virginia and elsewhere are simply following consumer demand. Most people with cash want a big house. Tacky, tasteless, but true. When gas is $10 a gallon, things will be different, but that's still a ways off.
I agree with your sentiment, but call BS on the photo. That is not a photograph of clear cutting or of land that has been graded in advance of construction. It looks more like a forest fire took those trees out. Densification is necessary to stem the loss of greenfields. Unfortunately, it is easier for developers to construct projects on the urban periphery, where NIMBYism is less pronounced. Try densifying the urban core and every neighbor for blocks is showing up at public hearings crying about traffic, when their primary objective is shutting down a noisy construction project that will wake them weekend mornings. These "environmentalists of convenience" are nowhere to be found when the project is beyond earshot.
This is largely a Southern problem, from my observations, and you often see that 'developers' and 'Republicans' are interchangeable in the local, political vernacular. In addition to denser, city-based living, there are also positive steps in areas like 'conservation suburbs' where a development can condense single-family homes in, say, 25 percent of the suburb and leave the remainder of the land dedicated for greenspace. Trees are still cleared, but less so with positive conservation steps taken.
Matt's pushing all of my buttons today. I grew up not too far from this and we had bears (!) that would occassionally show up and eat some apples from our trees. All paved over now. paved paradise and put up a parking lot and all that.
Claudius, But that's what the "freemarket" wants. You should be ashamed for wanting something other than what the free market dictates. Ok, end sarcasm. I agree that the developers and councilmembers don't care about what their new projects look like or how people live or what it may do to the environment. It is like that all over. The opposite end is how they are trying to make midwestern cul-de-sacs in the middle of the desert in the Southwest. So sad...
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Noise pollution is undoubtedly an externality born by your neighbors.
the picture looks an awful lot like the cover to Thomas Pynchon's novel 'Vineland.'
Matt, my suburban town in CT is filled with trees. We got the deer, coyotes, badgers, wild turkeys, hawks, eagles, the occasional bear. Ton of other wildlife. With the big storms lately, the bigger threat is trees falling over and knocking down houses than deforestation. This doesn't have anything to do with density but rather the type of development and poorly thought out zoning rules. Oh, that's right. I forgot. Zoning is da anti-christ.
Do the county councils that are in the developers' pockets care? No. All they can see is the increased tax revenue. Notably, one of the things they don't see is the increased spending on infrastructure and services, such as schools.
A few things: 2. I do environmental review for the City of Los Angeles, and trust me, there are a lot of environmentalists of convenience out here, too. Just take a look at the cover story in last week's L.A. Weekly, an anti-density screed written by their theater critic on behalf of rich Westside homeowners who think everybody in the city can live like the Brady Bunch in single-family houses. 3. The photo shows the aftermath of a forest fire, not clear-cutting or demolition. 4. Just pointing out that it's kind of interesting that most developed parts of L.A. have a lot more trees than they ever did naturally. The water needed to feed those trees is part of the environmental problems out here.
If you support the post 1964 immigration regime, without which the US population would be stable around 225 million or so, rather than rapidly climbing toward 500 million and beyond, your lamentations of the loss of green space are irrational at best, political opportunism or crocodile tears at worst.
Er, Matt, This picture looks to be a picture of slash-and-burn deforestation in some LDC; going to the actual Flickr site seems to suggest it's Madagascar. IF the MSM did this sort of thing, what would the blogosphere say?
Matt's blog policy is to put a photo, any photo, to break up the monotony of NBA/slagging McCain posts. Thus, any Iraq post has a photo yanked from the DoD; I'm sure those combat photogs are proud to have their work used in such a manner.
Klug is right and I stand corrected. This is slash-and-burn forestry on Madagascar, neither a typical North American forest fire nor a typical North American clearcut.
If you support the post 1964 immigration regime, without which the US population would be stable around 225 million or so, rather than rapidly climbing toward 500 million and beyond, your lamentations of the loss of green space are irrational at best, political opportunism or crocodile tears at worst. If you support a government policy, which you probably do, that supports allowing people to have more children than replacement level, your lamentations of the loss of green space are irrational at best, political opportunism or crocodile tears at worst. (Note: Are "political opportunism" and "crocodile tears" really the worst you can think of? No imagination)
This is largely a Southern problem, from my observations, and you often see that 'developers' and 'Republicans' are interchangeable in the local, political vernacular. Also synonymous: 'county commissioner'. Cue battles at the outskirts of city limits. We do have trees, though, and bears who stray too close to picnic baskets, I mean dumpsters every so often.
I thot that was a picture of a close up on youporn.
Rambuncle, The United States _doesn't_ have a birth rate above replacement, and if we reduced immigration the birth rate would decline even more, since 1st generation immigrants tend to have higher birth rates. Encouraging people to have more children would just bring us a bit closer to the replacement rate, not to exceed it.
"stripped bear" Oh no, another Spitzer* scandal? All I gotta say is keep it within the species - zoonotic STDs are not your friend. * idiot. {shakes head disparagingly}.
Rambuncle, I try to be civil on the internet. I could be a great deal more vituperative, but why? It wouldn't serve any purpose whatsoever. In any event, Hector and I are right - the birthrate of native-born Americans is below replacement level, and it is to post-1964 immigration, which progressives love for a number of reasons, not the least of which is pure political calculation, that the US owes the vast majority of its population growth since then. And it is population growth, more than any other single factor most progressive soi disant friends of the enviroment lament, that is behind environmental degredation in the United States. But the environmental crusade is often less about preserving nature than it is another rock to throw at class enemies of the bobo élite, hence these utterly insincere laments for green space that, being the good hipster urban dwellers that they tend to be, bloggers tend not to spend any time in. Actually, judging from his picture, I don't think Yglesias goes in the sun at all, but that's a cheap shot. The glow of an LCD does that to everyone's complexion. Anyway, for these opportunists, environmentalism is great when it provides an excuse to rail at Republican county commissioners, presumably Republican-voting exurbanites, and especially Southerners, not so much when it would mean fewer future Democrats. Given the choice between an immigration moratorium that would help preserve the American environment, and by keeping global consumption lower, the world's as well, and one that will harm both by dramatically increasing the number of high-consuming Americans, 90% of progressives choose the latter because it strengthens their political position. So, in the interest of greater clarity, I'll add cynicism, bad faith, and hypocrisy to the list of accusations.
Comments closed March 24, 2008. |
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Heads in the Sand
It is indeed always sad to see a bear, forced into destitution by loss of its habitat, turn to stripping to pay the bills. Plus they leave claw marks on the brass pole.
Posted by James Gary | March 10, 2008 1:30 PM