A lifeline hidden in the farm bill

Ok, so the farm bill is chock-full of earmarks. Let's admit it. The very members of congress who valiantly stormed into Washington to "rid it of special interests" all have their hands in the goody bag. The House and Senate are now both thoroughly behind it, and Bush's veto will be nothing but a speed bump. Until this morning, I would have had nothing good to say about the farm bill - lavish subsidies forked over to large agribusiness lobbyists, which make it even harder to be the family farmer from the actual photo ops used to sell the bill.

But this may have changed when I heard of one goody in particular added by Montana's senator Max Baucus: a chance to buy up $250 million worth of Plum Creek land to prevent real estate development.

“Max doesn’t want to see these prime hunting and fishing lands turned into golf courses, condos and strip malls,” said Baucus spokesman Barrett Kaiser. “Private timberland is being gobbled up for development, and this provision gives states the tools they need for land conservation.”

I've previously blogged about the dilemma Montanans face when it comes to curtailing sprawl. Many communities have little power in deciding how their cities grow, because so much of the land is owned by a single landowner. Missoula county, for example, cannot impose any zoning regulation without the full consent of Plum Creek, who doesn't have much of an incentive to cut off their real estate options. We're stuck in a frustrating situation.

So, leaving aside the fact that this legislation is buried in a "farm" bill, it's hard to pass up on this valuable tool to conserve some of the most threatened open space and help our cities to stay compact and vibrant. Understandably, critics from out of state are pointing to the money trail between Plum Creek and senator Baucus. David Freddoso writes in National Review Online,

"However green it may seem, this provision is little more than a massive corporate subsidy for a single company."

fair enough. But isn't the reverse just as true?

"However much like a massive subsidy for a single company it may seem, this provision is green."

In other words, it's both. It doesn't just seem green, it is an important conservation tool. And it leaves us in a funny spot between taking the ideological high ground of denouncing these sneaky methods and pragmatically availing ourselves of whatever lifeline is thrown to us in a desperate situation.

I think I'd take the lifeline.

Gas price insanity!

In case you haven't noticed, gas prices are up. 44% of Americans say this is their number one economic concern, well ahead of finding a good job or paying for health care. The message is loud and clear: we want our cheap gas back!

Responding to the demands of the American public, politicians everywhere are scrambling to do something about it. But what can they do? Congress is now engaged in a heated debate over whether U.S. strategic oil reserves should be scaled back, as if freeing up this .01% of oil savings will even make a dent in the price. President Bush is about to embark on another mission to Saudi Arabia to plead with King Abdullah to amp up oil production. The Saudi patriarch said "no" back in January, but maybe if we communicate that we really, really, really, really want it he'll relent. How embarrassing? And now some senators want to threaten to cut off arms deals, in order to put some pressure on the Saudis.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York:

"We are saying that we need real relief, and we need it quickly. You need our arms, but we need you to cooperate and not strangle American consumers."

But now Iran might cut oil production. Just to watch us squirm.

Of course, we cannot forget that two out of three of our presidential candidates have actually proposed a temporary elimination of the federal gas tax. Only a year after the Minneapolis bridge collapse, and we already want to drain highway infrastructure of its funding in search of quick relief.

And in the midst of this, most hard-headed economists are actually telling us that gas prices are too low to cover their true costs. But, as Hillary tells us, these "elite" brainiacs don't really care about the American people anyway. And passionate environmentalists see higher gas prices as a way to finally goad us into conserving resources and transitioning into a sustainable society. But don't listen to those wacko tree-huggers.

During the course of any addiction, a person will resort to increasingly desperate measures to get quick relief. First, he'll drain through his savings to buy the drug. He'll lose his job and sell his belongings. Then he'll squeeze every ounce of assistance and compassion out of family and friends. Finally, he reaches a point of desperation when there is an existential decision to make: come clean or self-destruct - enter into the painful process of rehab or break into a convenience store for quick relief.

Kunstler on my radio

For the last few weeks, I've really been enjoying James Howard Kunstler's new podcast, Kunstlercast. He's every bit as acerbic and knowledgeable on the microphone as he is at the keyboard, addressing such subjects as green building, gentrification, starchitects, zoning, landscape art, and just about anything to do with the "tragic comedy of suburban sprawl." I happen to think that most of his opinions are right, but more than anything he feeds into that contrarian impulse inside - even when he's blasting the very profession that I'm entering into.

Here's Kunstler on planners:

"Well these poor bozos, they come out of planning school because they made some bad choice or they were deceived into thinking that they were in a design discipline, and then they spend the next 40 years working for a city piling up a pension plan. They hate their work; they hate themselves for doing it. They realize that the whole thing is a mummery.

Finally they gaze at that golden, glowing finish line of retirement. And then they can go to a place where it’s exciting, that’s mixed-used—a place that, in short, displays all the qualities that they’ve been preventing from occurring in the place they’re in charge of for their whole career. Or they move to Key West, or Europe, or some other place."

Yet many planners still love the guy, which only supports my hunch that the planning profession is probably the most self-loathing discipline in recent history. Ever since Jane Jacobs.

It's also fun to hear some examples from the upstate New York area, where I was born.

Envisioning the new Bonner

The Bonner/Milltown area right outside of Missoula is undergoing several substantial changes all at once, with the removal of a century-old dam and the indefinite closing of the Stimson lumber mill. So it makes sense that the residents would want to think carefully about what kind of town they would like to be transformed into. Last week the community council met to decide whether to apply for an EPA smart growth grant that had been proposed months before. Unfortunately, the public who had gathered there in support of the grant were not allowed to speak, and the grant request was withdrawn by the commissioners only two days before the deadline.

The good news is that the council has decided to make Monday's meeting into a forum on smart growth, inviting some speakers in and emphasizing that the public will be allowed to comment. The meeting will be at 7:00 at the Bonner Public Library. It's too late to apply for the grant this year, but this is a great time to start drumming up support for next year's application. It is important to go into anything like this with a healthy amount of consensus and good information.

Here's how the letter from the Missoula County office of Planning and Grants put the goals:

"To assess the challenges and opportunities that come with these changes, the community [of Bonner/Milltown] is requesting assistance through the Smart Growth Implementation Assistance Grant to envision and articulate a plan for the area that can concentrate growth in existing neighborhood and town centers and encourage mixed uses, help to position the community for emerging economic and demographic trends, utilize current infrastructure rather than expand it, encourage walkability, and maintain a distinctive sense of place. This Implementation Assistance Grant will help the community minimize water quality impacts from development, particularly important because the area sits at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers. These discussions will also foster the sustainable redevelopment and cleanup of a brownfield site, and provide opportunities for housing that current and new residents can afford."

Those who oppose these goals should come up with salient arguments against them, and they should provide an alternative picture of what they would like the Bonner area to change into. The old line that the town should just stay the way it has always been is obviously not an option in this particular case.

Another good way for Bonner residents to prepare would be to look at previous recipients of the grant and see what effects it had on those communities. The EPA website has a list of "success stories" from previous grantees all over the country. It could be helpful to read through these and determine whether this definition of "success" meets your own definition.

Book: A Pattern Language

A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al., has to be one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. Thirty years later, it has grown into somewhat of a movement. Set up as a do-it-yourself reference book for building everything from metropolitan regions to window panes, it actually serves equally well as comprehensive philosophy of life. The patterns are heavily analytical (Alexander is not afraid to put precise numbers on just about anything) and are presented as "deeply rooted in the nature of things," yet they are intended to be pieced together by individuals in unique ways, even as a form of poetry. The larger the scale of the project, the more gradually it must be formed from grass-roots action and the cumulative input from thousands of small decisions. This is how a town is built, according to Alexander.

The medium of a blog post does not lend itself well to a full-scale summary of the book, because of the sheer volume and diversity of topics covered. The patterns range from highly practical to radical to the point of absurdity, like the suggestion that zoos ought to be abolished and instead wild animals should be unleashed to roam around an interconnected greenway in urban areas. If I could discern one underlying idea, it is that our built environment should be composed around the limits of human proportions rather than according to a modern rationalized form.

Here's my reaction to a few of the more interesting patterns that pertain to urban design:

Pattern #21: Four-Story Limit. There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy. In any urban area, no matter how dense, keep the majority of buildings four-stories high or less. It is possible that certain buildings should exceed this limit, but they should never be buildings for human habitation.

This is the difference between Paris (La Defense excepted) and New York. Alexander takes four-stories to be the maximum amount people would be willing to walk up stairs and the furthest any dwelling should be separated from the vital social realm of street life. He cites evidence to suggest that high-rise buildings are correlated with mental health problems. This is probably the most famous of the patterns, and the precise psychological effects have been heavily debated by environmental psychologists. Yet it fits entirely within the larger picture, that buildings should be created around human potentiality and foster social connections.

Pattern #10: The Magic of the City. Put the magic of the city with reach of everyone in a metropolitan area. No one downtown can serve more than 300,000 people .. between 2 and 9 miles apart. Pattern #12: Community of 7000. Decentralize city government in a way that gives local control to communities of 5000 to 10,000 persons. Pattern #14: Identifiable neighborhoods. Help people to define the neighborhoods they live in, not more than 300 yards across, with no more than 400 or 500 inhabitants.

Here the concentric circles of human interaction are precisely defined. 300,000 is the population necessary to inculcate an undefinable cultural vibrancy that the city offers. Larger than this, and too many people are pushed to the margins. 7000 is the ideal unit for a self-governing democracy, so that no citizens should be two friends away from the highest point of the political hierarchy. Finally, Alexander's picture of the neighborhood has probably been the most influential for New Urbanists. 500 is the maximum number of people who can form a relational identity group that is capable of making cooperative decisions.

All of these levels of "community" are delineated spatially. A neighborhood cannot exceed a 3 block radius from any residence or people would not walk, and it cannot be bisected by a major road, and various geographical barriers can be used to separate out these population groups.

Pattern #18: Network of Learning. Instead of the lock-step of compulsory schooling in a fixed place, work in piecemeal ways to decentralize the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city. Pattern #26: Life Cycle. Make certain that the full cycle of life is represented and balanced in each community. Set the ideal of a balanced life cycle as a principle guide for the evolution of communities. Pattern #40: Old People Everywhere. Old people need old people, but they also need the young, and young people need contact with the old.

A Pattern Language calls attention to a form of diversity that is often overlooked. Modern institutions, from grade-schools to retirement villages, are often formed around rigidly segregated age groups. As an individual passes through life, he is jolted from one context to another, losing the potential for a seamless fabric of memory attached to a particular place. And as a society, we lose out on the perpetual exchange of learned wisdom and creative energy that has long passed between the young and old. How can these peer groups be geographically integrated throughout the city? Alexander discusses specific ways to design small-scale institutions that can be mixed into the larger setting of the city.

There are hundreds of other patterns. How can design make the most of natural light? How can we minimize the damage done by automobiles? (parking should never take up more than 9% of the land. Pattern #22). What types and sizes of housing are appropriate for different family units? How can design reflect a healthy balance of privacy and community? How can naturally flowing water give life to urban areas?

An endless number of paths to explore. I'm holding onto this book. It took eight years to write but may taken even longer to properly read.

Growing some food

With the first signs of a legitimate spring here, we began planting our little garden plot against the house.

It seems that three different major trends are coming together: historically high transportation costs, a renewed appreciation for local foods, and questions about the viability of the American suburban experiment. At the center of these trends, back-yard gardens have been in the news lately.

From the Wall Street Journal,

"Farmers don't necessarily live in the country anymore. They might just be your next-door neighbor, hoping to turn a dollar satisfying the blooming demand for organic, locally grown foods.

Unlike traditional home gardeners who devote a corner of the yard to a few rows of vegetables, a new crop of minifarmers is tearing up the whole yard and planting foods such as arugula and kohlrabi that restaurants might want to buy. The locally grown food movement has also created a new market for front-yard farmers.

"Agriculture is becoming more and more suburban," says Roxanne Christensen, publisher of Spin-Farming LLC, a Philadelphia company started in 2005 that sells guides and holds seminars teaching a small-scale farming technique that involves selecting high-profit vegetables like kale, carrots and tomatoes to grow, and then quickly replacing crops to reap the most from plots smaller than an acre. "Land is very expensive in the country, so people are saying, why not just start growing in the backyard?' "

And Micheal Pollan from his article "Why bother?" in the New York Times Magazine,

"But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind. ...

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate."

A silver medal for cycling

Missoula has just been recognized (again) by the League of American Bicyclists as a silver level Bicycle-friendly Community. This is a genuine accomplishment, since out the 212 towns that have applied since the program began only 84 have been given a bronze or above. Missoula's commitment to alternative transportation has always been fairly obvious, but it's nice to see how we stack up to an objective nationwide benchmark. Next is gold.

I noticed that the Bicycle-friendly communities website didn't have any pictures for Missoula. We somehow managed to inherit the pictures from Milwaukee, including a random shot of some Santa Claus convention. That won't do. I decided to take a couple of pictures on my walk home from downtown this afternoon, in case the good folks at the League want some royalty-free photos.




Update: A Complete Streets bill has just been introduced in the House, which would require transportation plans to provide fair access to roads for all users. The senate received a similar piece of legislation back in March. This is a bipartisan endeavor that deserves to be passed. The Complete Streets website offers some practical ways that you can lend support to this bill.