David George Haskell:
Sharp blades and muscles: These are the lab tools used lately by my class. We’ve been mapping and eradicating privet from Bluebell Island, a local hotspot for wildflowers. Privet is a non-native invader and it overshadows and kills native plants.
More proof that we’re responsible for the balance of life in the Anthropocene.
Jim Robbins, writing for the New York Times:
The death rate of many of the biggest and oldest trees around the world is increasing rapidly, scientists report in a new study in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. They warned that research to understand and stem the loss of the trees is urgently needed.
Matt Novak:
Jellicoe was talking to the Associated Press in 1960 about his vision for a radically new kind of British town—a town where the bubble-top cars of tomorrow moved freely on elevated streets, and the pedestrian zipped around safely on moving sidewalks. For a town whose main selling point was the freedom to not worry about getting hit by cars, it would have a rather strange name: Motopia.
Mireya Navarro and Rachel Nuwer, reporting for the New York Times:
So, six years ago, after the Army Corps of Engineers proposed to erect dunes and elevate beaches along more than six miles of coast to protect this barrier island, the Long Beach City Council voted 5 to 0 against paying its $7 million initial share and taking part.
Many of Long Beach’s 33,000 residents would come to regret it.
Pay now, or pay a lot more later. The residents of Long Beach, New York, discovered that the hard way after Sandy. There’s a lesson in there for the rest of us. I’m just not sure we’ve been paying enough attention.
Now Long Beach officials say they are reconsidering. “It’s no longer a hypothetical,” Jack Schnirman, the city manager, said. “It’s a reality, and we have to rebuild in a way that takes into account catastrophic storms in the future.”
Sigh. Two things: One, haven’t they ever heard of the precautionary principle? And two, there’s a reason they’re called barrier islands. When you build on the barrier, what’s protecting you?
Veronique Greenwood reports on pioneering work by Rob D’Anjou, a grad student who discovered that fecal sterols, “the last chemical hurrah of poop”, can record detailed settlement patterns in lake sediment cores.
No false color here. This Landsat 5 image shows the southern coast of Myanmar in all its splendor.
Add another to the list. Though it’s not exactly new, the recent spate of severe weather has given the compensation issue new life.
We need more images like this. And everywhere.
Reuters:
The finding will give renewed urgency to the nearly 200 countries attending international climate talks in Doha, Qatar, which run until 7 December and aim to galvanize ambition in fighting climate change by limiting warming to below 2C, a goal nations agreed in 2010. Temperatures have already risen by 0.8C since pre-industrial times.
Teresa García Alcaraz describes a project in Caracas where a local professor of architecture is helping slum dwellers name their streets and pathways, which had never been done before.
Julián Blanco residents would no longer have to say, for example, that they lived in the yellow house next to the stairs just before the place where Pablo’s grocery shop is, and after the blue metal door where Luís used to repair motorbikes.
Because there aren’t any literal foot soldiers in a cyberwar, test cities for war-games don’t have to be full size.
Lamar Anderson details a Dutch architect’s proposal for a single-family tower, the idea being that building up would allow for higher density detached living. It’s clever, but there probably comes a point when people get sick of climbing stairs.
The flight from Boston to Chicago isn’t the most scenic, but if you’re lucky enough to snag a window seat—no mean feat these days—study the patchwork landscape with a discerning eye about 40 minutes into the flight. You’ll notice something a bit peculiar, at least for North America. Instead of the usual tableau of square or rectangular farmsteads, you’ll see ribbons of agronomy. They’re a Canadian ghost of geography, a relic from when the region was known as Nouvelle-France.
Back in the early 17th century, France was trying to stabilize its colonial foothold in the New World. Cardinal Richelieu, an advisor to the king and powerhouse in French politics, hatched a plan to encourage more intensive settlement. As a part of that, he parceled the land similarly to the way it was divided in France—long, thin strips oriented perpendicular to a transportation route, which in New France was primarily the St. Lawrence River. The layout traces its roots back to medieval times, but what’s more intriguing, at least to me, is how ribbon farms—or rather the lack thereof in the much of North America—shaped attitudes toward transportation.
Part of the beauty of ribbon farms is how easy it is to transport goods from them. Moving around the farm itself is a bit more difficult—the farthest part is much farther away from the house and barn than the most distant part of a square farm. But between farms and from farms to market, ribbon farms are superior. Roads running past ribbon farms can serve more addresses over the same distance. Neighbors are a short walk away, cities and crossroads closer than you’d expect. Since the system started with the transportation network and built out from there, ribbon farms have certain efficiencies square farms never could.¹
Much of arable North America, though, was not allocated in ribbon farms. The Public Land Survey System carved up large portions of the United States into one square mile sections, each of which were subdivided to create farms and aggregated to form townships. Canada adopted a similar system for its prairie provinces, called the Dominion Land Survey. Under such schemes, farms are more square than linear, a quirk of geography that I believe influenced the development of the entire nation.
Here’s how: Roads snaked out to farms where they were needed, which is to say nearly everywhere. Farmsteads, and later suburban houses, were more or less evenly distributed across the landscape rather than concentrated next to existing roadsides. The fact that the farm, not the transportation, came first is important. In New France, transportation was clearly the foundation. But in much of the rest of North America, parcels were delineated first. Transportation routes followed, a geographic case of the tail wagging the dog.
Here’s why that matters: With ribbon farms, the expectation is that transportation is king. Living under such a plan, I imagine networks have a certain planning primacy which dictate certain characteristics of the parcel. But when the U.S. started with square farms, the process and the results were the exact opposite. We plotted the farms and then pondered the logistics. In that context, it’s no surprise that we feel transportation should come to us instead of the other way around. As Americans, we pick a place to live and then figure out how to get where we need to go. If no way exists, we build it. Roads, arterials, highways, Interstates, and so on. Flexible and distributed transportation networks are really the only solution compatible with that way of thinking. Trains, which rely on a strong central network, never had a chance. We were destined for the automobile all the way back in 1787, when we first decided to carve up the countryside into tidy squares.
Town, section, range. Pick your plot, worry about the details later. It’s the American way, and it’s driven the psychology of an entire nation.
Satellite images courtesy Google Maps.
Related posts:
Jason Motlagh, reporting for the Washington Post:
According to a new study, oil palm plantations over the past two decades have cleared about 6,200 square miles of primary and logged forested lands. Palm oil deforestation and hunting have combined to cut Bornean orangutan populations down to 54,000, half the total of the 1980s, according to environmental groups. At this rate, some predict the iconic animal could be extinct within a matter of years.
Maggie Koerth-Baker, writing for the New York Times Magazine:
In the Twin Cities, scientists have found distinct differences between the plants that grow in urban neighborhoods and those that grow in more rural settings. This doesn’t mean that in one place there are lots of potted geraniums and in another there are native tallgrass prairies. Rather, it turns out that what grows wild in the city is very different from what grows wild just a few miles away.
And as Koerth-Baker goes on to point out, that’s not always a bad thing. But it does raise a few questions. Do we understand the changes we’re making? And of those changes we make, which can or should be changed?
John Byrne, reporting for the Chicago Tribune:
While it’s true the standard payment for a single CTA trip will remain $2.25, the mayor’s transit agency plans a 16 percent increase to the cost of a 30-day pass and higher jumps for one-day, three-day and seven-day passes. About 55 percent of CTA commuters use some kind of pass.
It’s now cheaper to pay per trip if you’re a commuter on a “regular” schedule. If you have two jobs, the monthly pass is still a better deal, but I’m guessing people with two jobs can least afford the fare hike.
Speaking of…
The mayor suggested commuters who don’t like the new fare structure are free to get behind the wheel, setting aside the fact many Chicagoans who rely on the CTA to get to and from work don’t have cars.
“Now you, as a commuter, will pick. You can either drive to work or you can take public transportation, and the standard fare will stay the same,” Emanuel said.
A reprehensible position. The people who can least afford the hike have the fewest choices, as Byrne rightly points out. Either Emanuel doesn’t understand that—he’s a smart guy, so I doubt it—or he just doesn’t care.
Not sure how I missed this, but Adam Rogers is bang on with this installment of the Observation Deck. The crux of the matter is not in the nitty gritty logistics, but on a larger scale—do we protect cities by starting fresh or by re-engineering the old?
I’ve been seeing maps like these for years, but now that they’ re in the New York Times, I’m guessing (hoping?) more people will take notice.
Thomas Kaplan, reporting for the New York Times:
The city is now seeking to rein in what it sees as a glut of parking. On Monday, a City Council panel is scheduled to consider new zoning regulations that would reduce how many parking spaces must be built with new residential developments in Downtown Brooklyn, and allow developers who already have excess parking to reclaim the unneeded space for other uses.
A harbinger of things to come?
Eric Moskowitz, reporting for the Boston Globe:
Among Greater Boston workers, white commuters who drive have the shortest trips to work — averaging less than 27 minutes each way — and black bus riders the longest, exceeding 46 minutes each way. But a gap exists even among those who take the same mode, with shorter commutes for white workers whether they drive or ride mass transit.
The biggest gap is by bus. Black commuters spend an extra 66 hours a year waiting, riding, and transferring than white bus riders, according to a new analysis from Northeastern University’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy.
Longer commutes aren’t just an inconvenience, either.
The commuting times, calculated from data collected between 2005 and 2009 through the US Census’s American Community Survey, mean black workers spend an average of 80 more minutes a week than their white counterparts navigating the bus system.
“That’s easily a parent-teacher conference, or time to get your household finances in order,” Chang-Diaz said. “That is a very stark reality for people.”