Also posted on Medium.

​Call it biking the urban wild. Portland, Oregon, is developing a citywide off-road trail network, called the Portland Off-road Cycling Master Plan. Conventional planning processes will produce a network of single-track trails through natural areas, instead of the much more common paved bike/pedestrian trails. Portland is reported to be inspired in this effort by the broad popularity of mountain biking within the area, but the advantages of “wild” urban trails over conventional multi-use paths are worth considering anywhere. A network of single-track through the city is a network of urban wilds, with a built-in community of people to use them. 

What are these advantages? First, there’s the array of benefits to physical and mental health that come with exposure to everyday nature, particularly vegetation. Key to this list are lower perceived stress, greater time spent exercising, and improved mental focus. These three benefits lead to a host of secondary effects, from lower blood pressure to better mood and social relationships. Research on this nature-health connection generally finds that benefits are significant, but small, meaning that the ideal way to benefit from them is through activities done on an everyday basis. Thus, the trail through the natural area across the street is potentially much better for your health than the trail at the state park twenty miles away. It’s the everyday that makes the difference. 

Key to the the mental health benefits is mindfulness, or the necessity of being present and focused on the moment. The more rugged surface of unpaved trails promotes this, as does the narrowness of single-track. The limited views through trees and shrubs promote the feeling of being away from the city, even in locations well within city limits. This feeling of being away, or “extent,” is also key to achieving health benefits from nature, as is the feeling that a landscape can’t be understood completely at a glance, that it contains scope for exploration. 

Biking or running on a trail is obviously good for the trail user’s health, but it’s also good for everyone else’s health, in terms of the climate change mitigation benefits of urban wilds. The abundant vegetation of natural areas in cities sequesters carbon, which aids in offsetting climate change. These same natural areas also help cities adapt to the impacts of a warmer, more volatile climate, through lowering the temperature of adjacent areas and creating more area for rainwater from storms to infiltrate.  

Urban trail networks of any kind fight climate change by promoting human-powered transportation over cars, but an urban off-road network in an outdoorsy town like Portland goes further. If many people - Portland found 12% of county residents - are already doing single-track recreation, they are likely driving to those trails. Trails in the city eliminate at least some of those trips. This is not to say that trail users will never drive out of town, but as with everything having to do with lowering our impact on climate change, it is what you do routinely that matters, not the special occasion. It's the Tuesday night ride, not what you do one Saturday each summer.

An urban wild network promises major advantages to local wildlife and its ability to withstand the disruption of climate change. A substantial challenge for wildlife of warming temperatures and changing precipitation levels is the ability to move fast enough to keep pace with a livable climate. For some creatures, this means moving up in elevation or farther north to stay with cooler temperatures, while for others it means moving to stay with adequate moisture levels. Cities and many suburbs are obstacles to this movement, because they interrupt the habitat necessary to allow wildlife to travel. This fragmentation of habitat is offset by urban wilds, especially those that occur in a connected network, because the wild areas provide wildlife corridors, a kind of safe route for creatures to move through the city. Even manicured lawn, like in the top photo, is inhospitable to many organisms. Even though it’s green, it lacks sufficient shelter and may well lack adequate food and water sources as well. 

There are more benefits - reduced maintenance, improved views from adjacent properties - but this short list illustrates the advantages of a wild trail network like this in an urban area, that are not available with a more conventional trail network. Intriguingly, a wild trail network may be much less expensive, and therefore far more feasible, to build in urban areas that already have ample amounts of vacant lots, brownfields, and other urban wild spaces. Traditional trails are surprisingly expensive to build, so the cost difference between simply adding single-track to existing wild areas and clearing those areas,  establishing lawn, and constructing an asphalt trail, could be quite substantial. Since urban wild spaces are usually seen as waste space, using these spaces more or less as they are to get a desirable recreation and health benefit is well worth considering, for many places other than Portland. Maybe your town needs some killer in-town single-track, too.

Blaming immigrants is nothing new. As a nation composed almost entirely of immigrants (brought by force or by choice) and their descendants, xenophobia has shadowed the American immigrant dream across the centuries. We honor the grit and drive of our own forebears even while we loathe new arrivals. 

In 2015, I published Immigrant Pastoral: Midwestern Landscape and Mexican-American Neighborhoods, a book about how new and old Mexican heritage communities inhabit and shape the physical form of their neighborhoods and small cities. I completed this research in 2009, but it presaged the current national conversation, both about the perceived value or hazard of welcoming immigrants and about "forgotten" places like the small cities of the rural Rustbelt. 

Immigration from Mexico has since fallen, mostly due to birthrate decline in Mexico and to economic conditions in the US - fewer jobs, fewer people come to take them. Nonetheless, here we are in the midst of the most intense episode of immigrant-blaming in my lifetime. 

I grew up in rural Indiana, and I’ve seen the changes wrought in small Midwestern cities by globalization – economic changes in agriculture and manufacturing as well as the surge of new immigrants in the 1990s. The Rustbelt’s problems are real, but blaming immigrants (much less refugees, which are an entirely different group) for them is just plain wrong – factually wrong and morally wrong.

Immigrants aren’t the problem in small rustbelt cities – they are part of the solution. When your town has lost its major employer, its sons and daughters to brain drain, and struggles with falling enrollment in its school, you need people. Not just any people: people with ambition and energy in the prime of their working lives. People who will renovate houses and shops, start businesses and church congregations, and send their kids to the local schools. People like immigrants. 

Much of what's being said right now positions these as opposing sides in a zero-sum game, as if anything gained by immigrants is a loss for pre-existing residents. That's not at all what I saw or found. While immigration from Mexico has decreased in recent years, the need for rebuilding small cities like the ones I studied has only increased. In this effort, every hand is needed. Insisting those hands must be white and native-born simply makes solving difficult problems even more difficult. No one can turn the clock back to 1950 or 1960 for these communities, and anyone who says he can is delusional, lying, or worse, conning you. No matter where the new arrivals come from, they are an important part of the future of these places - not the end, but the future. As I said in Immigrant Pastoral's final chapter:

Today new immigrants will step into the United States for the first time. As you read this, someone is renting their first home or starting their first day of work in their new life north of the border. New ethnic businesses will open, and somewhere in the US, a native son or daughter of Mexico will buy his or her first home.

Someone will drive through the center of his hometown and wonder when the old hardware store became a tienda. Someone else will discover multiple Spanish-language radio stations on the dial in rural Ohio, and somewhere someone will curse the new arrivals in her town for speaking Spanish, for standing out, for being the face of change in a place she thought was unchangeable.

All these people, together, are the future of small cities like those in this book—the future of Wellington, of Springfield, of Unionville. The worn condition of the town around them attests to the challenges of its recent past, to its inability to relinquish a way of life that has vanished into the globalization of the United States. There is no future in attempts to recreate the past. Instead these people, Mexican-Americans and other Americans, have to learn to live with each other to create a future for these small cities. The next chapter of these places will be written in both Spanish and English. 

There’s an absurdity to releasing a report on community microgrids the day before Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 presidential election. Nonetheless, Neighborhood Microgrids: Replicability and Revitalization, presenting the findings of a year-long study on the potential of community microgrids for urban neighborhood revitalization, hit the inboxes of all those who contributed expertise or interest to the project on that day. The days since have been, shall we say, less encouraging about clean energy and climate action. A sampling: 
"catastrophic...polluter-controlled government", " no way to overstate the disaster", "After this election, can we still save the planet?"

Every new technology depends on research funding, government incentives, and the like until it reaches the point of viability through economic forces alone. Has the US transition to clean energy reached that point? What stands between that point and where we are now, and how can those necessary developments and supports happen in a suddenly hostile environment? 

Consider: 

Infrastructure investment:
The most obvious idea is to link clean/innovative energy systems to the handful of statements about federal investment in infrastructure that’s come out of the Trump camp. Some see this as poised to become a give-away to a few friends, yet as perhaps the only mainstream bipartisan idea to arise from Trump, infrastructure investment deserves a little more confidence. It’s easy to dismiss this, as some are, as investment only in fossil fuel infrastructure, and thus backward progress on climate change. Is it possible to do large-scale investment in infrastructure that can only serve fossil fuels? Roads can't refuse to carry electric cars or bicycles. Can electric lines refuse to carry power generated through renewables?  

Flexibility could be key for whatever infrastructure actually gets built: flexibility in terms of fossil vs renewable fuel. Infrastructure has a long lifespan, so regardless of political viewpoint, flexibility is smart investment, good design, and responsible stewardship of public funds. Community microgrids are a good example of this kind of flexible infrastructure, because they aren’t dependent on fuel source. They could be constructed as a neutral groundwork, then gain the addition of renewable power generation later on. 

Bi-coastal coordination:
Eban Goodstein's "The Post Election Climate for Climate Action" webinar on Nov. 16 raised the possibility of coordination of climate change action between California and New York. These two states together form 21% of the national economy; 36% with the rest of the West Coast and the reliably blue states of the Northeast. Can multi-state standards and policies drive adoption of clean energy technologies nationwide through sheer economic dominance? This is not so different from emission standards for cars and their impact on vehicles nationwide. New York’s REV and California’s Renewable Energy programs as well as the climate change action plans for New York City and Los Angeles provide a ready foundation for such coordination.

Sub-federal action:
Everybody’s saying it: local, state, and regional government can do a lot. Legal hassles, impeachment, internecine Republican quarrels, sheer inexperience or ineptitude - all of these spell increased dysfunction in DC, not a federal government actively pulling the country back into the 20th century. The void created by dysfunction could be filled by greater local and state action, making clean energy development at a local scale more important. How do you fix The Grid at a local scale? With microgrids. 

Creative class competition:
States that went Trump have a new PR problem in the 
old competition for creative class professionals and the industries that need them.  For confirmation of that, see everything about the disconnect between the coasts and the interior, and the shock of realizing that disconnect exists. As Silicon Valley tech leaders call for California’s secession, we’ve yet to grasp the impact of 2016’s acrimony on demographic shifts among people with the power to choose. Want to tell the creative class your city is open for business?  Clean energy systems and rock solid infrastructure ready for additional load are assets - but only if they are readily visible. What does a clean energy-friendly community look like?

It’s a new day, but the keys to tech success, innovation and resourcefulness, are as valuable as ever. The task now is to apply them to finding ways to move forward. 

Full text of Neighborhood Microgrids: Replicability and Revitalization

​A post in response to The World in 2050: Creating/Imagining Just Climate Futures, an online conference organized by the University of California- Santa Barbara Environmental Humanities Initiative 

I am inundated with climate change talk this week, the sea-level of information rising past my ears. An online conference, the brilliant idea and no doubt laborious undertaking of UCSB’s EHI program, can be described, with misleading simplicity, as a collection of YouTube-like videos and online discussion forums. In no way do I wish to downplay the work involved or the sophistication of the organization of this event, but for those fresh to the idea with this post, that’s a pocket description good enough to go on with. For the real thing, see here or my earlier post about the conference here.

New perspectives beget more new perspectives. Naomi Klein's “this changes everything” implies that climate change and its impacts are too big to affect only the usual suspects in environmental issues. Participation in climate change is not voluntary. Its impact is coming for you, even if you don’t believe in it or if you’ve elected to do something with your life that has nothing to do with climate change - or so you thought.  

If this changes everything, it changes your field, your career, your day-to-day. How will it change environmental design fields? Bill McKibben’s conference keynote gave me his idea of “changing the zeitgeist,” as he says that’s what movements do - they spur this change in spirit and that makes their impact much bigger than it would be otherwise.

What would it mean to change the zeitgeist of architecture and related fields?

It would mean changes in the technical, practical craft that lies at the heart of these professions; changes to the daily grind of practice and course curricula of degree programs; shifts in the skill sets we own as our core, regardless of where we as individuals stand politically or geographically.

It would mean changes like: 

The rise of reuse
Dig very far into conversation about climate change impacts, mitigation, and adaptation, and you find population decline or shifts. This ranges from the radical and apocalyptic - massive population declines due to disaster or choice - to the moderate and incremental - people moving back to the city core from suburbs. These scenarios share the image of a built environment grown too large for its current residents, the footprint of a former age profligate with square feet and asphalt. What will happen to these redundant buildings and parking lots and sidewalks and so on? A large part of what we do as architects and what we learn in degree programs is about construction - how to build, how to detail, how to communicate to others how we want these things done. That emphasis should shift from use to reuse, flipping the script of new construction as the norm and adaptive and material reuse as the specialty. New construction and manufacture of materials takes energy and resources, as does demolition. What’s needed is greater thrift with materials and  existing conditions.
​
Transportation after cars
You saw this coming when you saw the huge carbon footprint of transportation in this earlier post: that’s 25% in transportation alone. Others have noted that this is a promising place to cut; Erik Assadourian's conference keynote goes farther and calls for essentially no private cars, part of the One Planet Lifestyle. “No private cars” is a tangible goal, and it’s also a firm foothold to imagining the design implications of the coming world. We know how to do this; it’s how cities used to be, and how many of our older city cores still are, really, imperfectly adapted to the age of the automobile. Without cars, does your city look like the 19th century, or is it something different - an update or a new creation? We’ve spent a long time and a lot of ink mourning the passing of a host of other characteristics of that 19th century pre-car city, the collateral damage of our love affair with combustion: the front porch, the walkable city, street life, neighborhood social ties, etc. We could put those pieces back together with our 21st century necessities and preferences. What’s your neighborhood without the car? Your subdivision? Your house? (That’s a great studio project - someone make a note.)

Infrastructure off the coast
McKibben also noted the spatial correlation between the location of a majority of US infrastructure and coastal areas that will be inundated as sea levels rise. Even without the private car, that still leaves energy, utilities, water, wastewater, and other transportation - and remember, that’s more important without that car. Interconnection is a basic characteristic of infrastructure, so if you lose a large proportion of it, no guarantee that what’s left will work on its own. Decentralization is the way of the moment (the zeitgeist?) because of calls for greater resilience to events like Superstorm Sandy, but we need to push that further. The bottom line seems to be that the center of the country will need infrastructure to serve more people (one of those population shifts), and it will need to be more modular and decentralized, and of course, we need to accomplish this with a minimum of GHG production. Meanwhile, in the developing world, improvement in services in some places has come through a kind of leapfrogging approach that skips development of large centralized 20th century installations (eg the interstate highway system, the electrical grid) in favor of the direct adoption of current decentralized technologies (eg: cell phones, portable solar chargers for devices, water sterilization pens). This kind of lighthanded, individual service provision is a new model for us here in the US, but we’re tiptoeing toward it as smartphones replace land lines. Maybe it’s time to borrow back some of that technology and mindset for our own country.

Whether these are the right new emphases or not, we environmental designers need to lead our own change in this, because the world is changing and we need to change with it if we’re going to keep shaping it. We are, by nature, doers more than dreamers, people who chose the practical route over art school (or after art school). People like us, who aren’t professional advocates or activists for the environment, are exactly what the fight to grapple with climate change needs. This is your problem, not just someone else’s, because…this changes everything, and everything includes you.