Phoenix, Arizona |
By Andrew Ross, The New York Times, November 6, 2011
THE struggle to slow global warming will be won or lost in cities,
which emit 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. So “greening” the city
is all the rage now. But if policy makers end up focusing only on those who can
afford the low-carbon technologies associated with the new environmental
conscientiousness, the movement for sustainability may end up exacerbating
climate change rather than ameliorating it.
While cities like Portland, Seattle and San Francisco are lauded for
sustainability, the challenges faced by Phoenix, a poster child of Sunbelt
sprawl, are more typical and more revealing. In 2009, Mayor Phil Gordon
announced plans to make Phoenix the “greenest city” in the United States.
Eyebrows were raised, and rightly so. According to the state’s leading
climatologist, central Arizona is in the “bull’s eye” of climate change,
warming up and drying out faster than any other region in the Northern
Hemisphere. The Southwest has been on a drought watch 12 years and counting,
despite outsized runoff last winter to the upper Colorado River, a major water
supply for the subdivisions of the Valley of the Sun.
Across that valley lies 1,000 square miles of low-density tract
housing, where few signs of greening are evident. That’s no surprise, given the
economic free fall of a region that had been wholly dependent on the
homebuilding industry. Property values in parts of metro Phoenix have dropped
by 80 percent, and some neighborhoods are close to being declared “beyond
recovery.”
In the Arizona Legislature, talk of global warming is verboten and
Republican lawmakers can be heard arguing for the positive qualities of
greenhouse gases. Most politicians are still praying for another housing boom
on the urban fringe; they have no Plan B, least of all a low-carbon one. Mr.
Gordon, a Democrat who took office in 2004, has risen to the challenge. But the
vast inequalities of the metro area could blunt the impact of his
sustainability plans.
Those looking for ecotopia can find pockets of it in the prosperous
upland enclaves of Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and North Phoenix. Hybrid
vehicles, LEED-certified custom homes with solar roofs and xeriscaped yards,
which do not require irrigation, are popular here, and voter support for the
preservation of open space runs high. By contrast, South Phoenix is home to 40
percent of the city’s hazardous industrial emissions and America’s dirtiest ZIP
code, while the inner-ring Phoenix suburbs, as a legacy of cold-war era
industries, suffer from some of the worst groundwater contamination in the
nation.
Whereas uptown populations are increasingly sequestered in green
showpiece zones, residents in low-lying areas who cannot afford the low-carbon
lifestyle are struggling to breathe fresh air or are even trapped in cancer
clusters. You can find this pattern in many American cities. The problem is
that the carbon savings to be gotten out of this upscale demographic — which
represents one in five American adults and is known as Lohas, an acronym for
“lifestyles of health and sustainability” — can’t outweigh the commercial
neglect of the other 80 percent. If we are to moderate climate change, the
green wave has to lift all vessels.
Solar chargers and energy-efficient appliances are fine, but unless
technological fixes take into account the needs of low-income residents, they
will end up as lifestyle add-ons for the affluent. Phoenix’s fledgling
light-rail system should be expanded to serve more diverse neighborhoods, and
green jobs should be created in the central city, not the sprawling suburbs.
Arizona has some of the best solar exposure in the world, but it allows
monopolistic utilities to impose a regressive surcharge on all customers to
subsidize roof-panel installation by the well-heeled ones. Instead of green
modifications to master-planned communities at the urban fringe, there should
be concerted “infill” investment in central city areas now dotted with vacant
lots.
In a desert metropolis, the choice between hoarding and sharing has
consequences for all residents. Their predecessors — the Hohokam people,
irrigation farmers who subsisted for over a thousand years around a vast canal
network in the Phoenix Basin — faced a similar test, and ultimately failed. The
remnants of Hohokam canals and pit houses are a potent reminder of ecological
collapse; no other American city sits atop such an eloquent allegory.
Andrew Ross is a professor of
social and cultural analysis at New York University and author of “Bird on
Fire: Lessons From the World’s Least Sustainable City.”
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