Welcome friends to meeting #7 of the bookclub where we read DrawDown, the book of climate change solutions. This week we discuss two chapters "Walkable Cities", page 86, and a special essay chapter, "The Man Who Stopped the Desert" page 118.
[From the DrawDown site: “Project Drawdown is the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. Our organization did not make or devise the plan—we found the plan because it already exists. We gathered a qualified and diverse group of researchers from around the world to identify, research, and model the 100 most substantive, existing solutions to address climate change. What was uncovered is a path forward that can roll back global warming within thirty years. It shows that humanity has the means at hand. Nothing new needs to be invented. The solutions are in place and in action. Our work is to accelerate the knowledge and growth of what is possible. We chose the name Drawdown because if we do not name the goal, we are unlikely to achieve it.”]
Announcement: next week we'll read one chapter instead of the usual two.
(Recommendation: Skip past current climate events section, and start reading at “I. Review”, thanks.)
I. Review
II. Walkable Cities, p. 86
III. The Man Who Stopped the Desert, p. 118
IV. Next Week's Reading
A lot happened this week - Friday June 1st was the start of hurricane season in the U.S. Volcanic lava flow now blocks evacuation routes on Hawaii's big island. Activists in Pakistan are publishing frequently to Twitter on their water shortage. Umar Arshad is evangelizing tree planting there.
In California our state senate passed a housing bill which rezones neighborhoods to usher in more housing development. Construction costs remain high while rebuilding from last year's wine country fires, Los Angeles fires, and the Montecito debris flow approach the midpoint of completion. Speculators are buying and holding while first-time home-buyers relocate to affordable locales, or borrow from startups, or people here and elsewhere submit all-cash bids.
Emergency preparedness for climate-induced weather events is progressing, but it's an uphill battle. Forest departments conducted controlled burns in California and Arizona this spring. Prescribed burns consumed underbrush to shrink this fall's wildfire spread potential. Thinning trees to prevent fire means we face reforestation needs ahead. Emergency telephone operators are being re-trained in reverse 9-1-1 techniques. Knowing the 58 different Reverse 9-1-1 technologies with different names for each of California's 58 counties prepares operators to quickly translate evacuation notification requests from CalFIRE, saving more time and lives than last year.
And Puerto Rico's hurricane casualty count has been updated to tragically high levels. But, this transparency buttresses pressure for faster response times from the federal government should a hurricane hit the island this summer. It's hard write a sentence to give that newspeg the justice it deserves; the rule of this bookclub is not to stop reading chapters because of overwhelming current events.
This week's chapters: Every week I think the chapter headline tells me enough, I get the basic idea, do I really need to read on? And every time I do read on, it's worth the effort. This week we have the first chapter I felt was "phoned in" but it has some good data points. The second chapter blew my mind.
I. Review
Last week we discussed "Compost" page 60 and "Turbines" page 2.
On composting, the chapter reinforced that action is helpful, but inaction is worse than absence of help. Composting creates fertile soil and conserves landfill space. But failing to compost is not just a wasted opportunity; organic waste deprived of oxygen decomposes to methane which contributes more to global warming than does CO2. (Please leave a comment if your city doesn't offer composting services with garbage collection.)
The composting chapter also reminded how recent these human-caused global warming practices are. A side article this host found on "Ephemeral New York" said in the 19th century, free-roaming pigs roamed the streets of New York, eating organic waste from the sidewalks. The pigs prevented pungent methane "stench", which the dandies in that painting (above right) surely appreciated.
II. Walkable Cities, page 86
David Shuster says a city’s friendliness springs from its parking lots. Specifically where they’re placed.
Shuster followed Jane Jacobs, whose seminal new-urbanist book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” built world-class cities from a foundation of three chapters on sidewalks.
Jacobs followed top-down city planner Robert Moses.
This chapter is short. Neither Shuster nor Jacobs nor Moses were mentioned.
Chapter summary:
* Humans walked for most of history; Florence, Marrakach, Dubrovnik, Buenos Aires, and Paris are walkable.
* Walkable cities are back in fashion.
* To attract pedestrians a city stretch must be 1) useful, 2) safe, 3) comfortable and 4) interesting.
* Urban planners should focus on infrastructure, not just the pedestrian, to create walkability.
* Environmentalists, epidemeologists, and economists see benefits in walkable cities.
* As urban populations grow, people will want more walkability.
* Look to resources like walkscore and LEED building certification to create walkability.
How the chapter applies today: One development cities like San Francisco suffer is empty storefronts, ironic given real estate is so hard to find. Empty storefronts give a "dead wall" effect unfriendly to pedestrians. Orinda square directors loosened zoning restrictions, allowed spaces zoned for retail to also house business offices. The area is transformed. It now teems with people. Years ago the square's shops all closed early, many spaces were vacant, one restaurant near the parking lot stayed open and the walk from dinner to the movie was a spooky paranoid one. Not anymore.
We can't close this chapter discussion without mentioning: San Francisco's "scooter wars." New tech companies placed scooters all over the city with an "ask forgiveness instead of permission" strategy. The scooters are rentable with a swipe of attached credit card readers. City dwellers recoil: companies obstruct pedestrians with maximum-visibility-parking, standing scooters away from building walls. Others, like former mayor Willie Brown, feign neutrality in words while endorsing their novelty with photo ops.
The scooters satisfy half the walkable criteria:
* scooters are useful
* scooters are NOT safe for older pedestrians or disabled
* scooters are NOT comfortable for everyone
* scooters are interesting
These bicycle alternatives also draw customers away from Uber cars. More people on a sidewalk increase safety; safer sidewalks attract more people. With less retail (Radio Shack closed last year, a fantastic used bookstore closed too,) walkable stretches of cities are dropping their "useful" and "interesting" scores from the four-point list (above.)
"Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves." - Jane Jacobs
The scooters are colorful and lively. If we ever sought the ghost of Jane Jacobs, sidewalk scientist, for counsel, now. would. be. the. time!
III. The Man Who Stopped the Desert page 118
A special chapter of the DrawDown book! Most chapters are standard textbook chapters: informative. A few are essays, italicized in the table of contents. These tend to be more inspirational than the others. This one is no exception.
Meet Yacouba Sawadogo of Burkina Faso, Africa.
"Climate change is something I have to say about" he said through a translator.
He does not read or write, or know his exact age. The droughts of his area in the 1980s led to a famine, and his experimentation in the Bush.
This chapter is excerpted from the book "Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth".
His farm in northern Burkina Faso was large by local standards -- fifty acres -- and had been in his family for generations. The rest of his family abandoned it after the terrible droughts of the 1980s, when a 20 percent decline in annual rainfall slashed food production throughout the Sahel, turned vast stretches of savanna into desert, and caused millions of deaths by hunger. For Sawadogo, leaving the farm was unthinkable. "My father is buried here," he said simply. In his mind, the droughts of the 1980s marked the beginning of climate change, and he may be right: scientists are still analyzing when man-made climate change began, some dating its onset to the mid-twentieth century. In any case, Sawadogo said he had been adapting to a hotter, drier climate for twenty years now.
The zai. "Zai" pits were already tradition in his area, small pits dug to catch very rare rainfall.
Sawadogo is an innovator. First he dug bigger pits from his neighbors, then he added manure during the dry season, which the villagers derided. He piled displaced soil downslope from the pit.
Sawadogo added termites. These pests tunnled and aerated the clay-hardened soil.
He said people laughed at him! But he watched his crop yields grow. He also arranged stones into borders outlining planting squares and stone lines separating sets of zai rows to interrupt water runoff.
Trees, out of nowhere, sprouted from some zai pits. Manure had carried over varied tree seeds.
Sawadogo is a pioneer in what VU University of Amsterdam environmentalist Chris Reij calls "farmer-managed natural regeneration" or "agroforestry." Wind-blown sand used to cover seedlings. Trees block wind and provide shade to overwhelming heat.
"Trees are like lungs" Sawadogo said through a translator. He said the more trees you have, the more trees you get.
Water tables. In the 1980s, water tables in the area were falling by a meter per year. Beginning the late 1980s, after Sawadogo started his practices, despite growing population and no increased rainfall, water tables started to climb. By 1994 rainfall increased, which many attribute the rising water tables to, but that's incorrect, Reij said.
There is more. I rented the movie on Sawadogo "The Man Who Stopped the Desert" on Amazon. He is now known all over the world but a sad development updates this story. The land he regenerated was annexed by the government save for an acre or two. They’re urbanizing the annexed land. Sawadogo is raising money to buy the land but listen to this - the property line they drew to annex his acres placed stakes in the middle of his father's grave and the middle of the floor of (it's difficult to discern) either his brick granary headquarters where he trades millet seeds, or his brick home!
Sawadogo doesn't understand the mean sentiment, but he's famous now and he possibly saved the entire human species by developing methods to stop a desert. AH! People are so jealous, why on earth did they place stakes in both those places?
Sawadogo is still alive and I am sure you can donate to his fund to buy the land which seems to be rising in price. UPDATE: He is on facebook.
IV. Next Week
Next week we're going to read only one chapter. Let's read ...”Bioplastic” page 168. Seeing that typed out it's hard to just read a single chapter and not add a second. But we're sticking to our commitment. We can return to two chapters per after next week.
Thank you for coming!
← DrawDown #6: Compost and Turbines for the Apocolypse
(Cross-posted from offlinereport.net.)