Transitioning to a More Sustainable Future

By Dom Nozzi

I’ve been waiting (and looking) for over 25 years to find effective catalysts to do what needs to be done very soon to transition us to a more sustainable, pleasant future. I have seen nothing that is even remotely effective. With the exception of high energy costs.

Pain? You bet. Our future, tragically, will need to include much bitter medicine to swallow as we must pay for the sins committed by our forefathers and foremothers over the past 80 or so years.

Primarily, those sins include the assumption that we should forever commit ourselves to only one lifestyle: auto-dependent, energy-consuming, high-consumption suburban life.

No one thought to do what ecology teaches us for survival: Be diverse and therefore adaptive to an inevitably changing environment, for those species which are not adaptive are in danger of extinction (as are societies/empires).

By not creating or allowing or subsidizing lifestyle choices such as rural or compact urban, we are in a precarious position. Because our community design is not diverse or adaptable in America, a change in one fundamental element of our world—oil prices—means that many of us will be forced to feel a lot of pain in the coming years (we cannot adapt painlessly to a change in oil prices).

For example, those who bought into the suburban American dream are seeing the value of their increasingly dysfunctional home value erode (much more so than housing in more walkable locations). And because they live in a remote place that requires a car for nearly every single trip, such people will have little choice but to suck it up and pay eternally increasing gas prices (not to mention the enormous household expense of having to finance multiple cars for the household—average annual cost for a car is now over $7,500 per year, I believe. I can think of a lot of things that would be better, financially, for a 2-car household to spend $15,000 per year on than depreciating cars).

Are there ways to transition to a more sustainable future, outside of higher energy costs? I don’t know of any. I do know of a number of civilizations which have collapsed because they were not able to adapt quickly.

As was once said by someone who’s name escapes me, whenever a civilization in history has had to make a choice between making a fundamental change in their behavior and extinction, they have nearly always chosen extinction. I’m committed to not choosing extinction, but am realistic enough to sadly conclude that avoiding extinction will mean pain for an unprepared society such as ours (a society with no rail system, and a society with insufficient housing set in compact, walkable, mixed use neighborhoods, for example).

I am committed to transitioning, for example, to a society with rail and walkable communities in the coming decades. Obama needs to immediately commit the US to be on that path (in a “Manhattan Project” sort of way). The sooner we set on that path, the less pain we will feel. But some pain is unavoidable.

Much of our future will be about demolishing white elephant mistakes we’ve made over the past several decades, and building or adaptively re-using more sustainable and more localized patterns. Probably much more re-using rather than new building, as we seem incapable of building walkable, lovable, charming development anymore.

We must also find the leadership to raise gas taxes now, while gas prices are low. Gas taxes are an excellent way for us to see effective demand destruction. By reducing gas consumption, we incrementally make ourselves less unsustainably dependent on increasingly hostile and unreliable oil producers.

Gas tax increases can help nudge us toward being less car-dependent. And gas taxes keep a lot more of our dollars here in the US, rather than enriching “petro-dictators.” My fear about gas tax revenue, though, is that it is likely to be used by Department of Transportation dinosaurs to have us continue to bankrupt and ruin ourselves by widening roads.

Where is Al Gore’s “lock box” when you need it?

 

Visit my urban design website read more about what I have to say on those topics. You can also schedule me to give a speech in your community about transportation and congestion, land use development and sprawl, and improving quality of life.

Visit:

www.walkablestreets.com

Or email me at:

dom@walkablestreets.com