Sunday, February 23, 2014

Reid Ewing et. al -- "Growing Cooler" as Ecological Sustainability

In the Ewing et. al reading for this week, he focuses on two major concepts: the current vehicle and fuel technology available in the United States and the continuing national trend of urban sprawl. Ewing explains the connection between the two as one of the nation's most pressing issues: global CO2 emissions. Ewing explains that although the United States has made much needed advances in vehicle and fuel technology, these improvements will not render any results in mitigating CO2 emissions as a whole. He attributes the faultiness of these seemingly beneficial improvements to the ongoing suburban sprawl occurring throughout the states. He claims that if we do not make a collective effort to stop and even reverse outward development, we will see that these technological advances alone will not make enough of a difference. In this sense, transportation carbon dioxide reductions can be viewed as a three legged stool: one leg as fuel economy, one as the carbon content of the fuel itself, and the third being vehicle miles traveled (VMT). If all three are not taken into consideration when attempting to reduce carbon dioxide, results will stagnate.
Relating this issue back to the first week of class when we read David Orr's piece about technological and ecological sustainability, we can understand Ewing's offerings as ecological sustainability in response to existing technological sustainability efforts. Improved vehicle fuel economy and hybrid vehicles have been a progressive response to climate change, however, Ewing proposes more needs to be done to ensure that the limitations of technology will not affect sustainability as a whole. In David Orr's piece, we find that ecological sustainability in contrast to technological sustainability acknowledges human limitation and how our limitations are compounded into the technologies we build. Because of this, it is necessary to go beyond even the most advanced technology and to restructure the system of land use planning in its entirety. We can improve our vehicle and fuel technologies as much as we want and can, however, if we do not switch our development patterns to be more compact, we will be unable to work in tandem with technology. Therefore, it is vital to the success of sustainability that we also strive towards educating developers, planners, and jurisdictions on more sustainable ways to approach regional planning. Furthermore, I believe that Ewing's perspective is an example of ecological sustainability because David Orr explains this type of sustainability as one which works within predefined ecological processes. Although redevelopment inward toward city centers may not exactly replicated ecological processes, compared to the outward expansion the nation has been experiencing for decades, compact development patterns will help to mitigate our human disruptions on nature.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Why have we created cities we do not care about?

The prevalence of suburban ghost towns dotting the nation is skyrocketing. This is due to various reasons, however, much of this trend is due to our tendency to continue to build and develop outward -- in sites which are situated on virgin land. This movement toward decentralization has had various impacts for the sustainability of a city's life span and has resulted in city abandonment all throughout the nation and beyond. I believe our haste to leave these deteriorating cities behind is rooted in our inability to maintain the basic vitality of these communities. Similar to how the threat of the atomic bomb contributed to the dispersal of urban centers in post World War America, failing infrastructure and lack of investment in major cities and towns has further fueled this dispersal to areas which are deemed more promising today.
Growing up in Chicago, I have very personal ties to the neighborhoods which I have spent the majority of my life. However, the city extends beyond these particular places which are closest to me and it is important to acknowledge that much of the deterioration of the city is actually happening in neighborhoods which are unfamiliar to me. Raised in a fairly affluent middle-class neighborhood on the city's Northwest side, the everyday experiences of those residing on the city's crumbling South and West sides are foreign to me. Regardless of community affiliation, I believe it is extremely crucial to save Chicago from becoming a ghost town, to save us from experiencing a situation similar to what Detroit has found itself in after it's manufacturing economy declined. With the decline of a city comes great social consequences which spill over into surrounding areas and cannot be easily remedied. Massive displacement of those most vulnerable (poor, working class, minority communities) presents a larger social misfortune as they have no where to turn to elsewhere. As these people are forced out of the city and into low-income areas of surrounding towns and suburbs, there begins a downward cycle of middle-class flight to more prosperous areas, causing businesses to invest elsewhere, eventually contributing to the inability of the city to sustain itself. Therefore, urban sustainability not only concerns environmental factors that we may be prone to focus our efforts on, but arguably more importantly, urban sustainability concerns the vitality of the city center itself and its ability to pass it's culture, history, and prosperity onto next generations. 

Monday, February 10, 2014

21st Century Energy: Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil's "sobering thoughts" of the 21st century seem to follow the perspective of technological sustainability over ecological sustainability. He proposes five major drawbacks of the transition to new energy sources, all of them concerning the shortcomings of technical sustainability to adopt a certain standard of strategies which are environmentally conscientious. Smil acknowledges that current technologies have not been developed which will make the shift from fossil fuels to renewable resources easy and seamless. Current technologies are incapable of managing the energy density of renewable energy which would be necessary to meet the energy density of the fossil fuels that we are currently relying on. Smil approaches the concept of sustainability by exposing the technical limitations of both the natural world's ability to generate energy and the limitations of technologies which humans have created to harness natural energy. Smil does not mention a transition of public attitude as the necessary element of a sustainable future, but rather focuses on a transition of improved technologies and policy.
If we do not meet our energy needs by 2112, it is due to the fact that the supply of fossil fuels is adequate for generations to come, new energy technologies are not developed enough for us to fully rely on them yet and their production and dissemination will not be economically feasible or distributed evenly enough for successful results. Therefore, meeting our energy needs by 2112 is most likely unattainable given the current status of sustainable technological improvement and appetite for unsustainable energies.
A more optimistic story would be concluded with the attainment of our energy goals by 2112. In this case, society at large is able to collectively acknowledge a more environmentally conscious mentality. Economic growth and development is also able to occur in areas which it was previously lacking, giving way for updated, more expensive technologies. To be sustainably successful is to be able to achieve the enormity of technical and infrastructural requirements that will be necessary to make a difference on a global scale.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Living Planet Report 2012

"Ecological overshoot" is when humanity's annual demand on the natural world has exceeded what the Earth can renew in a year. This term explains how it is physically possible to consume for than one years worth of biocapacity, in that it takes the Earth more than one year to generate the renewable materials that people have used in a given year. This is because these renewable resources can and currently are processed for human consumption faster than they can be produced in the natural world.
There are obvious, direct implications for this magnitude of consumption concerning the environment and it's biodiversity. These consumptive practices will no doubt weaken the ecosystems they exploit as biodiversity will cease to thrive. There will be additional stresses on the resources people around the world depend on daily. We are currently finding ourselves in a growing biocapacity deficit as the global population continues to exponentially rise, particularly in dense urban areas. The rising population has generated a larger ecological footprint, as over-consumption and over-industrialization have created a deep dent in the supply of resources we depend on and pushed the limits of natural biogeochemical processes. 
Reversing this trend will become increasingly difficult in the near future because it will rely on a large scale shift in the focus of global economic policy toward the sustenance of the natural world. Mitigating current climate trends and reducing out global ecological footprint is not out of reach, however, it will require large scale conservation and restoration efforts.