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Bird On Fire, by Andrew Ross
Oct. 26th, 2019 02:54 pmSubtitle: 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. )
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. )
