Shrinking by design: Reinventing civilization for our own survival

Image by Neil Wilkinson

Small is big. But it needs to get bigger.

A lot of people don’t have a clue about this yet – they’re still operating as if the Earth were a planetary version of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Tea-Party, where anytime they soil or use up the resources on the table in front of them, all they have to do is shout “Clean cups! Clean cups!”, move over a seat and start consuming/defiling a fresh array of china and scones.

But, as Alice asked of the Mad Hatter, “What happens when you come to the beginning again?”  No answer came.

The fact is, we have at long last come to the beginning again. Humankind has depleted or damaged nearly every habitable spot on the planet, not just through appalling ignorance about, and willful disregard for, the places in which we originally lived, but by constantly moving away from our hideous messes to the more pristine land just beyond. And then making more messes.

We’ve destructively expanded so much that we’re running out of everything we need to survive, both physically and economically – including time. So what now?

Luckily, David Beach has more answers than the Mad Hatter. He says we have to reduce – not just our individual consumption, not just our carbon footprint, but also the physical boundaries of the land we use. We have to live differently.

For a long time, the environmental movement has been focused on stopping pollution, said Beach, founder of EcoCity Cleveland  and director of the Green City Blue Lake Institute at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. But that approach goes only so far: With every corner of the planet connected and affected by shared air, water, weather and other natural systems, environmental poisoning can’t be stopped by shutting off some smokestacks or industrial drain pipes here and there, he explained during a recent interview at Green City Blue Lake’s offices. The problem hasn’t been caused by a few industries or nations.

“There’s not a bad guy that you can blame,” Beach said. “”It’s the design of our civilization. The only way to cure that is to have more of a design approach that helps everyone change their lives.”

In cities such as Cleveland, which combine aging industrial cores with suburban sprawl, he said, it’s imperative to have a regional plan that deals with the shifting population, decrepit  and/or abandoned buildings, toxic soil and water, and paved-over environments trapping the area in its physical and economic state of decay. For these metropolitan areas, Beach envisions much smaller, but much more densely populated, urban centers that are livable, walkable, affordable and enticing, with multi-unit residential building in mixed-use neighborhoods full of green spaces and efficient public transit that will entice suburbanites to move back in. That will mean dismantling a lot of foreclosed and emptied-out neighborhoods – not just pulling down and removing unsavable structures, but figuring out what to do with the suddenly vacant land.

A lot of choices exist.  Reforestation, gardens and urban farms, parks: “All of those work for me,” said Jim Rokakis, Cuyahoga County Treasurer and a founder/director of the county’s new Land Bank  . He explained that in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, many neglected old buildings and homes are past saving. Renovation would be prohibitive. Tearing them down is costly, too: With 18,000 homes to remove at $8,000-$10,000 each, it will take upwards of $150 million. The county doesn’t have that kind of money.

But the land bank can take over foreclosed properties, pay down the assumed debt with the $8 million per year in tax collection from the county treasurer’s office, and make the land available for inventive uses, Rokakis said. 

The change that results from land reuse in Cleveland – or Detroit or Miami or any of thousands of cities worldwide – sounds drastic and is. No one wants to have to suffer the kinds of catastrophes that require change on this scale, whether recessions, floods or wars. On the other hand,  no one can deny that catastrophes often eventually lead to rebirths of the best kind, letting redesigned, rebuilt cities and whole nations leap-frog into the future. 

But as Beach said, smart, effective, sustainable, economically positive redesigns can’t happen without regional plans.  Northeast Ohio – and probably a lot of other places –  doesn’t have one.

More about that next time.