Yves here. Many of our very rational readers may feel that taking climate change remediation or containment steps at the local level is too modest an action to make any difference. But there are many reasons to do so. First, it is better to do what one can to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Second, having a reason for getting involved in your community is always a good thing, particularly in an era where local connections are likely to become increasingly important. Third, flexing activism muscles with zoning and local programs will build experience and skills that can be deployed in other political arenas.
By Cate Mingoya-LaFortune, a people-centered climate adaptation planner, community organizer, educator, parent, and cautious optimist. Raised in an environmental justice neighborhood, Mingoya-LaFortune is committed to furthering a future where all people live in clean, thriving communities. She currently serves as Groundwork USA’s chief officer of climate resilience and land use, where she directs climate adaptation capital projects, the Climate Safe Neighborhoods climate organizing initiatives, urban and community forest projects, and various cross-sector field-building collaborations. She is the author of Climate Action for Busy People (Island Press, 2024). Find her online at www.catemingoya.com
This adapted excerpt is from Cate Mingoya-LaFortune’s Climate Action for Busy People (2024, Island Press). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from Island Press. It is adapted and produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute..
If you want to have a voice in how policy decisions are made and resources are distributed in your local community, the data you collect will be critical. Generally, before they commit to spending tax dollars on a new program or policy, local government agencies want to understand the scope and scale of the problem and how they will identify and measure the success of an intervention.
If a neighborhood has few trees, the urban forestry division might evaluate the number of spots suitable for new trees before it commits to planting. Once planted, the department might measure the number of surviving saplings five years later to assess success. Before installing protected bike lanes, the transportation division might evaluate the number of cyclists and motorists on the road over 12 months and then take the same measurements after the protected lanes are built to see if improved bike infrastructure has impacted how people get around.
However, municipalities don’t always consider all relevant data and information before launching an intervention, which can have disastrous consequences for the people living there or the intervention itself.
Policies are courses of action your municipality has chosen to adopt through guidelines, regulations, funding priorities, or laws. Everything in your neighborhood—from where the parking lots are located, how tall the buildings are, and which neighborhoods have street trees—stems from an intentional decision guided by policies. Sometimes, decisions were made a century ago, and sometimes, codified last week. Still, those decisions can be changed to reflect current or aspirational values and norms.
At their core, policies are ideas the government has decided will help them achieve specific goals.
Do you know who has good ideas about how to change things for the better in your community? You. You’re well suited to transform the information you’ve gathered into municipal policy ideas through your collection of data, understanding local history, and conversations with community members.
Policy comes about via your elected and municipal officials, and there are many opportunities for you and your coalition to intervene in decisions being made. Understanding how policymaking happens will help you understand how to intervene. When you begin this work, it’s helpful to focus on four major areas for intervention: master plans, greening or resilience plans, local ordinances, and zoning. These four areas of intervention are how the bulk of decisions are made about prioritizing community needs and distributing resources.
Example Asks and Ordinances
Events such as votes on climate ballot measures don’t happen daily, so for your average community, realizing your priorities through existing municipal infrastructure makes sense. Below are a few examples of “asks” that you and your coalition members may consider advocating for and the processes or people you’d need to influence to make those asks happen.
Concrete examples prove that change is possible and is already being adopted by other communities (so what are we waiting for?). This can motivate elected or government officials worried about the feasibility of new programs, policies, and ordinances. Also, it’s easier to modify existing policies and ordinances than it is to draft them from scratch.
The Ask: New Local Ordinances that Improve Biking and Walking Infrastructure
The What: Petition your city or town council to draft, introduce, and pass ordinances that ensure that transportation improvements address pedestrian and cyclist needs along with those of cars. Most municipalities have a regular schedule for road and sidewalk repairs, and some cities have ordinances that link improvements to cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, such as quick-build bike lanes or curb cuts, to road repaving.
The Why: The hotter it is, the less likely people are to walk, cycle, and take public transportation, and the more likely they are to drive. Cars, however, generate a substantial amount of waste heat via their combustion engines, making walking along roads or active parking lots hotter than areas without running cars.1 The more heat there is, the more cars there are; the more cars there are, the more heat there is. Ordinances that allocate resources toward cycling and walking infrastructure help reduce the number of cars on the road, thus reducing the urban heat island effect and improving air quality.
Example Ordinance: In 2019, the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, passed the nation’s first “Cycling Safety Ordinance,” which requires the city to add permanent, protected bike lanes to major streets during scheduled reconstruction.2 The ordinance is expected to result in 25 miles of new, protected bike lanes over seven years.
The Ask: Modify the Parks Master Plan to Include Splash Pads and Misters When Parks Are Built or Redeveloped or to Replace Aging Pools
The What: Departments of parks and recreation often produce master plans for large individual parks (think Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California) or the entire parks system. These plans cover everything from the presence (or absence!) of drinking fountains to the repair, replacement, or decommissioning of park infrastructure.
If your community is vulnerable to heat, work with your coalition to submit recommendations that the parks department modify its master plan to prioritize the installation of splash pads and misters at local parks and playgrounds when they are built or renovated and the transition of decommissioned or failing pools into splash pads instead of shuttering them.
The Why: Diving into a pool on a hot summer’s day can be a great way to beat the heat, but there are a few challenges to using pools as a climate adaptation strategy that might have you looking toward misters. Increasingly, municipalities are decommissioning pools that have reached the end of their lives as pools are expensive to rebuild or maintain. Even if your local pool stays open, that doesn’t mean it’s usable by those most needing relief.
Some residents at risk of heat-related illnesses are unable to swim or have disabilities that keep them from getting to or enjoying the pool. People who work outside the home may not be able to get to the pool during open hours, and nationwide lifeguard shortages are reducing those open hours significantly. Splash pads and misters are great alternatives to pools. They provide accessible, intergenerational access to cooling down; don’t require skilled personnel, such as lifeguards, to oversee them; can be run day or night; and, compared to pools, are relatively cheap to install and maintain.
Splash pads require a fair amount of drainage to prevent stagnant water or localized flooding, but misters—which express a fine water vapor like what you might see sprayed over vegetables in the grocery store—require little to no drainage while offering similar benefits to splash pads.
Example Ordinance: The Park Improvement Projects Master Plan developed by the Louisville, Kentucky, Parks and Recreation Department calls for installing “spraygrounds” (interactive splash pads and misters) in park redevelopment and construction. Although not binding, the master plan does guide the investment in the Louisville park system, which currently enjoys more than thirty spraygrounds.
Using Collective Power to Benefit All
No one has a complete and undeniable approach to greening our cities without unintended consequences. Still, there are ways to be thoughtful about your impact and use your collective power to advocate for resilience policies and programs that benefit all. As cities and states develop their climate resilience plans, they must have residents and local advocates at the table and include multipronged strategies that allow for wealth building for those long kept out of the housing market due to their race or class, the stabilization of rents, and a push toward establishing more decommodified housing through the support of community land trusts and housing cooperatives.
They must allow for the creation of local jobs without disproportionately siting toxic industries in Black, Brown, immigrant, and low-income neighborhoods. They must provide for transportation and commerce without exposing those most vulnerable to plumes of black carbon-laden exhaust. Just and effective solutions meet the demands of the climate crisis and do so without causing harm to those who have already weathered the burden of injustice for too long. If a neighborhood’s flood risk is reduced but long-term residents can no longer live there, one crisis has just been swapped out for another.
As you continue along your journey in fighting against the climate crisis, use whatever resources or privileges you have not just to advance positive change but also to make sure those who that change will most impact are actively in the room and are being listened to. Drawing attention to the lived experiences and ideas of those often excluded from processes is a huge and undervalued step toward operationalizing the values of equity and justice.
Eco-socialism, as I now envision it, will necessarily come to mean a diktat. It must come to that after all the dithering by the current PTB and even the best efforts of the many well-intentioned others have failed. Should it even occur, it might be too late. I am very, very sorry to have come to that conclusion. There are, of course, other elements to the impending catastrophe of human overshoot, the decline of the insects for only one. Steve Keen on energy. I’m old, I lament for all life on earth and humanity is only one species. We may be the worst one.
hola Ax – my own opinion is it is too late – the momentum of the oligarchs is a steamroller worldwide, their addiction to power and the greed that enables and creates an enormous blind spot to the results of their actions – truly effective change, as a delay tactic only, would take a dictat as mentioned – what will occur imho is continual techno-grift-fixes that are bandaids on a mortal wound, if even that, and the continued degradation of the environmental support system for all life – the examples, like the insects you mention, are many……too many – also old and have been disgusted for a while – in the mid 60’s use to pile friends in a car and toast a fat one and drive by the Rouge Plant back then when the pollution was so thick it looked like early evening on a sunny day – also remember the Cuyahoga River on fire in Cleveland – as i’ve stated before we as a species are a pathogen with the lone ability among species to objectify our existence, unlike all the rest of life we both lament – these days i try to follow the golden rule as best possible without being a fool –
Dylan explains it well for me in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” –
here’s a link to the lyrics only – https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/its-alright-ma-im-only-bleeding/
This has been long understood:
https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Austerity-Environmental-Decision-Making/dp/0822328658
The Moral Austerity of Environmental Decision Making: Sustainability, Democracy, and Normative Argument in Policy and Law Paperback – June 17, 2002
by John Martin Gillroy (Editor), Joe Bowersox (Editor)
In The Moral Austerity of Environmental Decision Making a group of prominent environmental ethicists, policy analysts, political theorists, and legal experts challenges the dominating influence of market principles and assumptions on the formulation of environmental policy. Emphasizing the concept of sustainability and the centrality of moral deliberation to democracy, they examine the possibilities for a wider variety of moral principles to play an active role in defining “good” environmental decisions. If environmental policy is to be responsible to humanity and to nature in the twenty-first century, they argue, it is imperative that the discourse acknowledge and integrate additional normative assumptions and principles other than those endorsed by the market paradigm.
The contributors search for these assumptions and principles in short arguments and debates over the role of science, social justice, instrumental value, and intrinsic value in contemporary environmental policy. In their discussion of moral alternatives to enrich environmental decision making and in their search for a less austere and more robust role for normative discourse in practical policy making, they analyze a series of original case studies that deal with environmental sustainability and natural resources policy including pollution, land use, environmental law, globalism, and public lands. The unique structure of the book—which features the core contributors responding in a discourse format to the central chapters’ essays and debates—helps to highlight the role personal and public values play in democratic decision making generally and in the field of environmental politics specifically.
There is a persistent confusion between “human species” and “civilization society”, especially “modern civilization society”.
There is nothing worst or even bad about the ba m’Buti expression of species human, for example. They have left the rainforest intact as rainforest for themselves to live in. The same might be said of other Indigenous Peoples. If they too are killed off in the Bonfire of the Ecosystems, that is not their fault. That is strictly and only the fault of the Modern CivilizationLords who created this problem and keep enforcing it.
There is nothing wrong with seeking ways to down-civilize and down-consumptionize to see what happens. This article may well point to ways to do that.
The mood of this piece leads me immediately to other thoughts on the immediacy of our collective dilemma. We (the US and its captured) have (sadly) generally been instructed by a formidable (mis)education system: Wall Street, concealed by the chimera of Madison Avenue has built on a foundation of consumerism. Undoing that is of critical concern. I fear it will not be pretty.
That is the elephant in the room. I expect, Americans at least, would be in favor of destroying whatever remains of a habitable planet if they knew how much they would have to personally sacrifice.
Are you sure about that? Maybe there are some Americans who place Social Class Revenge above
personal comfort and convenience. Maybe if someone offered a genuinely plausible way for several million Vengeance-Americans to adopt certain discomforts and inconveniences which are strategically designed and tactically tailored to inflict a greater cost and pain on the OverClass Enemy than on themselves; they might well adopt those those strategically designed and tactically tailored inconveniences and discomforts in order to inflict that greater pain on the Enemy.
While I appreciate the approach of this article, the practical examples given are very heavy on embodied-energy infrastructure. Perhaps that is wrong headed? I imagine we must learn to adapt via evolving social structures and mutual aid. We started a food growing cooperative in our area, with decidedly mixed results. People don’t seem to know intuitively how to organize along these lines, because that cultural know how is gone. There’s a lot of learning to do, and in a hurry.
Indeed. Splash pads… really? More thinkpiece drivel under the auspices of Serious Concern.
…maybe a poor example, but under-served, inner-city life in the summer can be insufferable without some way to cool off. The “misting” example is a more doable neighborhood solution than creating large, verdant (cooling) green space for mom’s and kids.
I design and promote park lands in my community. They are as important to build and maintain as any other city infrastructure.
Providing informed neighborhood input is essential, but not easy.
The one most important thing that municipalities can do right now to deal with inequality and the environment is to stop preventing the construction of apartment buildings through zoning and all the other trickery.
And this piece has nothing to say on the topic except to actually imply opposition to building new apartments with some utopian vague comment about “decommodified” housing, which, if any will ever get built, it will be a very small number compared to what developers could build tomorrow if given the chance.
If we waited for food to be “decommodified” we’d all starve, but since only the very unluckiest end up homeless while we wait for the Godot of “decommodified” housing, liberals are A-OK with it.
We have people living in tents and under bridges right now. It has been shown again and again that the twin problems of lack of development and landlord collusion are the main sources of this problem. And this person wants to talk about misters versus splash pads. Classic liberalism.
Just about everything related to the global warming movement pushed by modern politicians is a product of 1)computer simulations replacing actual temperature readings, which had been trending downwards since the 1940s, 2)ignoring the actual energy cost of the “solutions”, like electric cars and windmills. which actually are more intensive energy consumers than fossil fuels, due to the entropy related losses of electric transmission and batteries, (3)the huge initial energy losses of building, and subsequently maintaining, windmills and solar systems, and (4)the huge cost of energy sources that produce power intermittently to the electric grid…
Hence, the profound skepticism of physicists and engineers toward these projects…They are aware that entropy is a remorseless law of Nature….
Actual temperature readings (backward look) are up, up up. Actual events seem to be outstripping models in frequency and severity. So, yes, models were cautionary, and undershot. AI can only crunch the data it is presented, at a higher speed, and with more dot-connecting, right or wrong. As it’s based on a compendium of data from Hmans, more often than not it will not only be flawed, it will be badly flawed.
My two alloy-laden non-copper bearing pennies.
I have no problem with questioning the remedies that are being put forth by our betters, as they will be more energy-intensive than promoted and will invariably lead to furthering the climate crisis. But to deny global warming is just plain idiocy. The globe has warmed to almost 2°C above pre-industrial times and is rising much faster than the most dire predictions-with the exception of climate alarmists such as Guy Macpherson etal. We need to accept that nothing can be done to stem the inevitable demise of current biosphere conditions. Take heart in knowing this is only a temporary condition lasting only a few weeks on a planetary scale. The earth will eventually recover and new life forms will eventually fill the niche. Hopefully upright hominids will not be part of the biotic mix.
Amazing to see actual fact-free pseudoscientific climate change denialism in the wild, and in 2024, no less! Wow!
You say temperatures are trending downward since the 1940s? So my lifetime of ever longer summers has just been a hallucination? Not to mention all the official temperature records from all over the world? Link please?
If temperatures are going down, not up, then why are all alpine glaciers shrinking by leaps and bounds instead of growing, why we don’t experience little ice ages, why the river that runs through my hometown stopped freezing in the winter 40 years ago and kids and all cannot skate any longer (it was a big thing when that happened with the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, which is 5 degrees north of my hometown)?
If temperatures and heatloads are actually trending downward, then that should be reflected in growing icecaps, glaciers, etc. And if not right now, then any time now.
Meaning that if you are correct, then the global warmists are wrong. And if you are right and they are wrong, then you have a tremendous contrarian-investing opportunity laid out at your feet. Because if you are correct, then the rolling cancellation of property insurance for places right next to a “rising sea and rising hurricanes” will be discovered eventually to have been a chicken-little panic. And if you buy up all the present seaside property you can in the popular parts of Florida, then you or your heirs will be in a position to make millions of dollars as the climate-runaways become climate-returnees, when the Chicken Littles are shown to have been wrong.
So invest everything you have or can borrow into Florida seaside property. What are you waiting for?
Fortune favors the bold.
An example I can give, within our (large) corporation we had a group of fierce eco warriors who, with wildly popular support, replaced all plastic/paper cups with ceramic mugs, all plastic cutlery with real, purchased eco friendly dishwashers (dishwashers use surprisingly less water, hence why cottages use them avoid septic tank waste), diverted all organic waste to a nearby vermiculture farm (which supplies enriched soil to all local farms – the farmer would actually come with her truck to collect the waste). Paper was made scarce, including most photocopiers, which was an easy cost savings. Junk food in vending machines was replaced with healthy snacks in baskets. Vending machine coffee was replaced with ethically sourced. Even before COVID we had been moving toward a hoteling model which allowed for more work from home and for more effective use of capacity.
The big surprise was just how willing and enthusiastic everyone was to embrace any and every eco-related initiative, we thought there would be much resistance, there was almost none. Everyone wants to do something, just give them something to do.
When it came time to build our latest skyscraper the eco dimension was heavily represented on the advisory council to the architects, all of the above was incorporated and there was strong momentum to ensure the building was meeting LEED standards. Every 3 floors is segregated as its own eco-system, providing as much as anyone would need to minimize movement or need to go elsewhere. Emphasis was placed on providing bike infrastructure and the building location was chosen to make transit and biking more attractive than driving, which it demonstrably has done (the vast majority of our 50+ story tower arrives by subway or train, which we’re situated right on top of). The huge number of bike racks are interesting because they’re heavily secured (three security checkpoints and the room itself is locked) but also have shower and locker rooms which are extremely convenient, and connected to our gyms.
This was a largely bottom up movement enthusiastically embraced by the top down, impacts were measured, captured and documented in our ESG reports. Hence why I’m a fan of ESG – regardless whether corporations are evil, regardless whether ESG is accurate, it gives incentive to be good corporate citizens, to “Do Something ™” rather than nothing, even if many of these corporations would contribute most by simply ceasing to exist.
Thank you for that lovely good news. The security on the bike racks is encouraging, there are so many stories of bikes getting stolen straight out of bike rooms. It often seems likely that security guards are complicit. For me, fear of theft is the main reason I don’t ride my good bike around town much (the weather and cars/bad drivers being the other reasons). There’s a big difference between riding around on a low-end bike and a high-end bike, in particular, the low-end bike just can’t handle hills.
This sounds like an opportunity for “middle-end” bike designers to design a bike which can handle hills, but is too ugly to appear to be worth stealing. Would people in your position buy such a bike if someone were able to invent such a bike?
( I remember reading that in High Classical Communist China there was a single State Bicycle Company. I don’t know what it was called. It made a range of bicycles from the ” Iron Water Buffalo” to the “Graceful Swallow”. I imagine it is the Western equivalent of the “Graceful Swallow” bikes which get stolen.
I don’t know if it, or they, still exist. But it seems to me that if an “Iron Water Buffalo” could be built in China then, that its equivalent could be build in America now.)
Literally any bike will get stolen, that’s why I prefer the cheaper ones for city riding, or just bikeshare.
Chinese city streets used to be famous for their sea of bikes, so sad about that. I didnt know about the model names.
Caring about the “eco dimension” when constructing a skyscraper – or any large building for that matter – is akin to planting trees in a newly bulldozed suburban development.
It’s all ego-driven – done for the mental benefit of the complicit.
You prefer destroying a much larger amount of land to build a ton of smaller buildings? Seriously, I’m curious what kind of logic is going on here. Unless you expect people to live in tents (and die of exposure).
Well, here in bumphuc flyover cum glitzy mountain town, we get mid-rise millions dollar plus condos encroaching on old historic traditional downtown neighborhoods, PLUS 2-3 acre ‘ranchettes on the edge of town- sprawlin’. It’s a two-fer.
Only thing I have seen out of it is property tax increases, diminished quality of life, increased frustration and antipathy from old-timers to the new-comers.
Latest subdivision: “Sandhills”, ostensibly for the cranes who used to alight in the spring and autumn on their migratory pass-thru, but now have lost their habitat to amenity-adoring humans. The subdivision names and street names— memorializing that which they destroyed…. paradox or irony: sumbeach!!!
The grizzly bear on California’s state flag comes to mind. Also, the F-15 Screaming Eagle. Homo sapien is a very tormented specie deserving of oblivion.
This sounds more like a feel good sci-fi short story than reality…
If it actually happened as reported, then it would not be sci-fi. It would be sci non-fi.
Perhaps the actual physical address and name of the building in question could be supplied so that the intrepid journalist or citizen-journalist could study it and see if this actually happened as hereinabove reported.
If it did, then the further question of whether it would be helpful if replicated enough times could also be explored.
I am curious about the utility of 50-story buildings in general. Going by unsubsidized prices and direct experience, height does not seem to confer much material utility or even ecological virtue signaling.
It has been noted that only Radical Conservation will slow the rate of global warming and maybe even bring it to a stop or even a re-cooldown some day.
The problem with Radical Conservation is that ” you can’t get there from here”. Not in a militantly waste-based and aggressively anti-conservation civilization, you can’t.
So maybe people will have to try moderate conservation first to see if they can stand it. If they can, they
might contemplate how radical conservation beyond that might be designed and achieved in such a way as to be a bearable tradeoff for a good chance of long-term survival in return.
This article and some of the links it links to might show a way for people to achieve some moderate conservation and discover that they don’t mind it. Such people might then figure out how to become part of a multi-million-person strike force willing to wage Civil Culture War against the Radical Waste / Radical anti-Conservation supporters in order to destroy them and their power in society so as to get them out of the way of deepening and broadening moderate conservation till it becomes radical enough to make survival possible.
Americans can’t have nice things because other Americans destroy those nice things – vandalizing restrooms, ripping out young trees, vandalizing playgrounds and schools, the list is long. Where I live there was no end to the complaints when bike lanes were put in reducing two car lanes to one in each direction. By and large, Americans are an angry, selfish, and violent lot. This is not hyperbole.
>>>By and large, Americans are an angry, selfish, and violent lot. This is not hyperbole.
And made this way by those who profit from theft hidden from sight by the created violence.