Bird On Fire, by Andrew Ross
Oct. 26th, 2019 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeSubtitle: lessons from the world's least sustainable city.
I have just been listening to a lecture on Behaviour and Conservation Ecology for my upcoming exam, which reminds me I still haven't written this book up. The reason it reminded me is that my lecturer was talking about eco-tourism, its positives and negatives and whether it's ultimately an oxymoron. Economic inequality was a lot of what he was talking about: one of his points in that direction being, if a region's biodiversity supplies a lot of money to the local economy from tourism, but all of that money is routed to the wealthy, locals may break the laws which support biodiversity because they see no other way to get anything out of it, out of what should be theirs already. 'If I don't take something, I'll get nothing' is often an accurate line of thinking, and so successful conservation is going to have to involve making it inaccurate.
Which is, on a different scale, the central argument of Bird On Fire, a book about the city of Phoenix which would seem like a satire if it didn't keep recomplicating itself. The name Phoenix (which replaced the earlier less dramatic Mill City and Pumpkinville) deliberately prophesied the rise of something new and great, from the ashes of the area's last great society, the Hohokam, who first impressively managed and then mismanaged their water resources, before 'collapsing' (or, changing into something which left fewer urban remnants). 'Rising again from the ashes' went on to describe Phoenix's progress through economic boom and bust cycles. The city rose to prosperity first on military manufacturing and second on property development, its expansion into the desert making economic sense because of the promised opportunity to expanding further into the desert afterwards. Some of the people interviewed in the book are genuinely confused that this might trouble anyone. Why wouldn't you expand for the sake of expansion? Why wouldn't you do it in a desert?
(The kitten at this point interjects with a string of gibberish. This \may be a statement of the kitten's economic philosophy, but I think the statement is really 'Anything that moves is a rodent, especially fingers.' Exponential growth makes sense when you're a kitten).
The book profiles farmers whose life prospects are based around the idea that somebody in the near future will want to buy their land off them to build on, and the idea that Phoenix as a city has land development as its soul is deep-rooted even in people with no immediate stake in that development.
What I find myself writing, as I try to summarise this book, are the things which struck me about it, as in 'hit me over the head painfully'. There were a lot of those. Phoenix may or may not actually be the world's least sustainable city, but it gets onto the short list honestly, by way of pervasive attitudes that approach the comic, (federally subsidised libertarians, senators who when asked about climate change reply that carbon dioxide is not an evil gas and that greenhouses are where life flourishes best), and by the way a landscape of inequalities allows mismanagement to drain quietly downwards until it is concentrated into atrocities. Anti-immigrant prejudice which wraps itself in environmentalist language to the point where leaving bottled water on common border-crossing routes is classed as littering, and taken to be a greater crime than building the deterrent of death by thirst into policy. Attracting companies to the region by saying at one and the same time 'This is a lovely landscape for your high-level employees to live in', and 'This is a landscape which won't reduce your profit margins with any requirements that you not poison it', resulting in a clear divide between wealthy clean neighborhoods and poor poisoned ones, where poisoned means 'terrible long-term health consequences for residents, with supposed regulatory bodies specifically tasked with not regulating.' That was the part of the book I was least prepared for. The idea of moving into neighborhoods like that without having been warned, or having been warned but without any choice.
I can list these points, and others less dire: white artists who campaigned strenuously and successfully for micro-level inner city revivification to replace the building of macro-level conference centres, while non-white non-artists had a much harder time protesting similar issues; new enclaves of green building which cancel out their advanced eco-friendly designs by being miles from anywhere else; a burgeoning solar industry, threatened by wavering government subsidies. What I cannot do well in this kind of summary, not when it's been weeks since I finished the book, is get across the degree to which it's a successful portrait of complexity. The interactions between local and federal policy to create the economic conditions, the haste with which any ecological notion which gets public traction is jumped on commercially for both good and bad, and the ways in which moves toward sustainability are made, with every one of the issues above is not just being engaged with by one group, but by three, in partial disagreement. For any two categories, it seems, somebody's in both of them.
The book's message, in so far as it has just one, is: sustainability strategies which do not address inequality will be only superficially successful, because the neighborhoods of people whose voices don't sound very loud in City Hall will remain holes in the regulatory net, and because sustainable living options which are more expensive than unsustainable options won't be adoptable by people in poverty. Sustainability cannot succeed while niche.
Cut for being the part where a motion toward essay-hood fizzles out, leaving behind some vaguely related thoughts, and not getting as far as Always Coming Home. Although that book is relevant, for the way the people in it think differently about growth and wilderness and history. (Though it is also true that I am being reminded of Always Coming Home by things up to and including the shape made by boat wakes on the harbour).
I haven't read very much about sustainability, or anything which attempts an overview as complex as Bird On Fire, which is probably why it reminded me more than anything else of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. I'd be interested to go back and reread those books now, because they're about a whole swathe of questions about which I was completely uninformed when I was read them, and am now incompletely uninformed.
I've just been listening to a lecture which included a bit of writer Emma Marris, who argues for a new definition of nature, a post-wilderness definition, where novel ecosystems are normal, and the goal of conservation is not to get back to wilderness, because there has been no wilderness for a very long time. (See Holmberg, Amazon, for one thing). The definition of nature as wilderness is the one used for Mars in Robinson's trilogy; the reigning ecological debate in that book is about somewhere pristine. That is no longer a conversation we can have about the Earth.
My instinct when I hear this position stated is, "Yes, and?" because it is a message which I have to some degree assimilated. And the discussion it was imbedded in, of what kind of ecology we should prioritise (Restoration? Reservation? Reconciliation?), seems a little moot, at the rhetorical level our lecturer is conducting it. But that rhetorical level, many steps removed from the actual doing of science, is not insignificant, while there are people who base their thought on it.
This lecturer is very critical of the language used about 'invasive' species, most commonly applied in New Zealand to mammalian predators. The war on rats, marauding cats, stoat incursions... He isn't opposed to the killing of these animals, a lot of his recent research work has been isolating and testing semiochemicals for use as rat baits which don't need to be replaced weekly, so that landscape-scale trapping will become feasible in a way it never has been. But he is opposed to language which makes it easier to think that causing a rat to die painfully over a period of days is ethically neutral. The same kind of language which can make it easier to go into the desert and puncture water bottles with a light heart.
The great reigning conservation initiative in New Zealand is Predator-free 2050 -- an eradication plan less comprehensive than it sounds but still more comprehensive than anything which has ever been done (or anything which seems possible, using the technology we have). Attending a lecture on this made me sharply aware of how I don't usually respond to things with scientifically appropriate levels of doubt. I saw Predator-free 2050 out of the corner of my eye and felt a small glow of happiness, a sense that something was going right, with the underlying assumption that a project like that wouldn't be being advertised if it was not possible, and another underlying feeling that the killing of rats is something to feel happy about.
And this kind of realisation also pokes me to wonder what the current lecturer is not saying, wonder whether a scientist wearing the white lab coat of truth might not be about to break the door down and shout, "Michael, my old nemesis! Still pouring your nonsense into the ears of New Zealand's youth! Thus do I robustly refute you!" A little part of me is always wondering the same when reading non-fiction about a subject I don't have much knowledge of, while my main instinct, with well-written non-fiction, is to dive in and go where it takes me.
[Edit: oh, I forgot to explain the icon. Another thing Marris talks about is the successful use of nuclear reactor cooling canals as a habitat for endangered crocodiles. She considers this a success of reconciliation biology, a slightly different spin to Werner Herzog's 'Soon, it will be the crocodiles who stare in puzzlement at our ruins', but they're the only two people I've heard talking about nuclear reactor crocodiles.]
I have just been listening to a lecture on Behaviour and Conservation Ecology for my upcoming exam, which reminds me I still haven't written this book up. The reason it reminded me is that my lecturer was talking about eco-tourism, its positives and negatives and whether it's ultimately an oxymoron. Economic inequality was a lot of what he was talking about: one of his points in that direction being, if a region's biodiversity supplies a lot of money to the local economy from tourism, but all of that money is routed to the wealthy, locals may break the laws which support biodiversity because they see no other way to get anything out of it, out of what should be theirs already. 'If I don't take something, I'll get nothing' is often an accurate line of thinking, and so successful conservation is going to have to involve making it inaccurate.
Which is, on a different scale, the central argument of Bird On Fire, a book about the city of Phoenix which would seem like a satire if it didn't keep recomplicating itself. The name Phoenix (which replaced the earlier less dramatic Mill City and Pumpkinville) deliberately prophesied the rise of something new and great, from the ashes of the area's last great society, the Hohokam, who first impressively managed and then mismanaged their water resources, before 'collapsing' (or, changing into something which left fewer urban remnants). 'Rising again from the ashes' went on to describe Phoenix's progress through economic boom and bust cycles. The city rose to prosperity first on military manufacturing and second on property development, its expansion into the desert making economic sense because of the promised opportunity to expanding further into the desert afterwards. Some of the people interviewed in the book are genuinely confused that this might trouble anyone. Why wouldn't you expand for the sake of expansion? Why wouldn't you do it in a desert?
(The kitten at this point interjects with a string of gibberish. This \may be a statement of the kitten's economic philosophy, but I think the statement is really 'Anything that moves is a rodent, especially fingers.' Exponential growth makes sense when you're a kitten).
The book profiles farmers whose life prospects are based around the idea that somebody in the near future will want to buy their land off them to build on, and the idea that Phoenix as a city has land development as its soul is deep-rooted even in people with no immediate stake in that development.
What I find myself writing, as I try to summarise this book, are the things which struck me about it, as in 'hit me over the head painfully'. There were a lot of those. Phoenix may or may not actually be the world's least sustainable city, but it gets onto the short list honestly, by way of pervasive attitudes that approach the comic, (federally subsidised libertarians, senators who when asked about climate change reply that carbon dioxide is not an evil gas and that greenhouses are where life flourishes best), and by the way a landscape of inequalities allows mismanagement to drain quietly downwards until it is concentrated into atrocities. Anti-immigrant prejudice which wraps itself in environmentalist language to the point where leaving bottled water on common border-crossing routes is classed as littering, and taken to be a greater crime than building the deterrent of death by thirst into policy. Attracting companies to the region by saying at one and the same time 'This is a lovely landscape for your high-level employees to live in', and 'This is a landscape which won't reduce your profit margins with any requirements that you not poison it', resulting in a clear divide between wealthy clean neighborhoods and poor poisoned ones, where poisoned means 'terrible long-term health consequences for residents, with supposed regulatory bodies specifically tasked with not regulating.' That was the part of the book I was least prepared for. The idea of moving into neighborhoods like that without having been warned, or having been warned but without any choice.
I can list these points, and others less dire: white artists who campaigned strenuously and successfully for micro-level inner city revivification to replace the building of macro-level conference centres, while non-white non-artists had a much harder time protesting similar issues; new enclaves of green building which cancel out their advanced eco-friendly designs by being miles from anywhere else; a burgeoning solar industry, threatened by wavering government subsidies. What I cannot do well in this kind of summary, not when it's been weeks since I finished the book, is get across the degree to which it's a successful portrait of complexity. The interactions between local and federal policy to create the economic conditions, the haste with which any ecological notion which gets public traction is jumped on commercially for both good and bad, and the ways in which moves toward sustainability are made, with every one of the issues above is not just being engaged with by one group, but by three, in partial disagreement. For any two categories, it seems, somebody's in both of them.
The book's message, in so far as it has just one, is: sustainability strategies which do not address inequality will be only superficially successful, because the neighborhoods of people whose voices don't sound very loud in City Hall will remain holes in the regulatory net, and because sustainable living options which are more expensive than unsustainable options won't be adoptable by people in poverty. Sustainability cannot succeed while niche.
Cut for being the part where a motion toward essay-hood fizzles out, leaving behind some vaguely related thoughts, and not getting as far as Always Coming Home. Although that book is relevant, for the way the people in it think differently about growth and wilderness and history. (Though it is also true that I am being reminded of Always Coming Home by things up to and including the shape made by boat wakes on the harbour).
I haven't read very much about sustainability, or anything which attempts an overview as complex as Bird On Fire, which is probably why it reminded me more than anything else of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. I'd be interested to go back and reread those books now, because they're about a whole swathe of questions about which I was completely uninformed when I was read them, and am now incompletely uninformed.
I've just been listening to a lecture which included a bit of writer Emma Marris, who argues for a new definition of nature, a post-wilderness definition, where novel ecosystems are normal, and the goal of conservation is not to get back to wilderness, because there has been no wilderness for a very long time. (See Holmberg, Amazon, for one thing). The definition of nature as wilderness is the one used for Mars in Robinson's trilogy; the reigning ecological debate in that book is about somewhere pristine. That is no longer a conversation we can have about the Earth.
My instinct when I hear this position stated is, "Yes, and?" because it is a message which I have to some degree assimilated. And the discussion it was imbedded in, of what kind of ecology we should prioritise (Restoration? Reservation? Reconciliation?), seems a little moot, at the rhetorical level our lecturer is conducting it. But that rhetorical level, many steps removed from the actual doing of science, is not insignificant, while there are people who base their thought on it.
This lecturer is very critical of the language used about 'invasive' species, most commonly applied in New Zealand to mammalian predators. The war on rats, marauding cats, stoat incursions... He isn't opposed to the killing of these animals, a lot of his recent research work has been isolating and testing semiochemicals for use as rat baits which don't need to be replaced weekly, so that landscape-scale trapping will become feasible in a way it never has been. But he is opposed to language which makes it easier to think that causing a rat to die painfully over a period of days is ethically neutral. The same kind of language which can make it easier to go into the desert and puncture water bottles with a light heart.
The great reigning conservation initiative in New Zealand is Predator-free 2050 -- an eradication plan less comprehensive than it sounds but still more comprehensive than anything which has ever been done (or anything which seems possible, using the technology we have). Attending a lecture on this made me sharply aware of how I don't usually respond to things with scientifically appropriate levels of doubt. I saw Predator-free 2050 out of the corner of my eye and felt a small glow of happiness, a sense that something was going right, with the underlying assumption that a project like that wouldn't be being advertised if it was not possible, and another underlying feeling that the killing of rats is something to feel happy about.
And this kind of realisation also pokes me to wonder what the current lecturer is not saying, wonder whether a scientist wearing the white lab coat of truth might not be about to break the door down and shout, "Michael, my old nemesis! Still pouring your nonsense into the ears of New Zealand's youth! Thus do I robustly refute you!" A little part of me is always wondering the same when reading non-fiction about a subject I don't have much knowledge of, while my main instinct, with well-written non-fiction, is to dive in and go where it takes me.
[Edit: oh, I forgot to explain the icon. Another thing Marris talks about is the successful use of nuclear reactor cooling canals as a habitat for endangered crocodiles. She considers this a success of reconciliation biology, a slightly different spin to Werner Herzog's 'Soon, it will be the crocodiles who stare in puzzlement at our ruins', but they're the only two people I've heard talking about nuclear reactor crocodiles.]
no subject
Date: 2019-10-28 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-29 12:05 am (UTC)I just wrote an exam essay on this... Even if the pinch of resources currently being sprinkled out were able to achieve the goal, which is a very complicated and expensive goal, I would be worried about what would immediately happen to, say, rabbit populations. It isn't as though stoats have ever stopped eating rabbits, which was the job we introduced them to do, while also eating a lot of other things we wish they wouldn't.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-29 01:10 pm (UTC)new enclaves of green building which cancel out their advanced eco-friendly designs by being miles from anywhere else
This has been a pet bugaboo of mine ever since our very first book club book, The Green Metropolis. Ever time I see a LEED building out in the exurbs I let out a moan of despair. (My synagogue, bless their heart, is very proud of being LEED rated. Part of the points for that rating, I know from The Green Metropolis, comes from the fact that it has a sidewalk. That sidewalk connects to the neighboring nursing home . . . and then it ends. To walk to either building from anywhere else--such as, for example, the nearest bus stop, half a mile away--you must, at one point or another, walk in the ditch that lines the shoulderless six-lane road. I am as far as I know the only person to do so.)
no subject
Date: 2019-11-01 10:45 pm (UTC)When I landed in Montreal last year I tried to set off walking from the airport toward the centre of the city, which was not only an impressive misunderstanding of scale (I didn't have maps! What was I thinking?) but also pretty much impossible. I could have followed a major road along a bike lane, but I retreated instead, thank goodness. I don't suppose it's actually true that there are sidewalks everywhere in cities in New Zealand, but still, I'm used to default walkability in a way I hadn't stopped to think about.