Stop. Listen. Wherever you are right now, can you hear traffic noise? 

While we wait for science to save us from COVID-19, I’m killing some time walking (alone) on a quiet street. All the streets are quiet now, especially in the 38 states (and rising) like this one with “stay at home” orders in place.

COVID-19 has quieted highways across the country, if not the world - temporarily. Fewer cars and more bikes and pedestrians are a sudden glimpse of a future predicted to arrive as soon as 2022, with twice the number of bike commuters in major cities worldwide, and therefore fewer cars on the road. 

Like everything else disrupted by the virus, traffic will be back, at some point. The noise of internal combustion engines is part of daily life, affecting you more than you realize. Today’s silent highways are another preview of a world coming soon, when quiet e-vehicles take over. In my lifetime, silence will fall on the interstates and other major roads, and it will affect all of us.

People don’t like to be next to multi-lane highways, a statement so obvious it’s embarrassing to say out loud. Sometimes the obvious is easy to overlook, though, in its power to shape the world around us. It's too obvious to consider so it doesn’t get considered at all. 

With highways, it’s the noise and the pollution and the trash and the way these massive transportation edifices make it difficult for those immediately adjacent to them to get anywhere, ironically. Don’t underestimate the noise. The US Department of Transportation says, “levels of highway traffic noise typically range from 70 to 80 dB(A) at a distance of 15 meters (50 feet) from the highway. These levels affect a majority of people, interrupting concentration, increasing heart rates, or limiting the ability to carry on a conversation.” Researchers have found links between noise and cardiovascular disease and Type II diabetes, as well as sleep disturbance and depression.

Our aversion to traffic noise and other highway impacts shapes land use and property values around busy roads. We’ve grown used to this, so we see it as natural and neutral, as though it’s always been that way and couldn’t be any other way. Neither of those things are true.

In cities, freeways were often sited as a deliberate strategy to “clear” neighborhoods seen as undesirable by those in the positions of power that mattered. After obliterating those often-Black, sometimes-other-marginalized-group neighborhoods, the highways made it easy for white residents with means to move to the suburbs, further hollowing out the city. There’s a sinister feedback loop that starts here, where the highway is built through the poor/black neighborhood because racism/NIMBYism/inability to resist, and then effects of the highway makes what remains of that same neighborhood have to struggle much harder. Just the presence of a limited access highway next door to a home will depress its property value. That doesn’t count the deleterious effects of disinvestment in neighboring properties as their values decline and as people with options are driven away by the noise and inconvenience. The worse it is, the worse it gets. 

All of this is sad but familiar, a story repeated through cities across the country. A new and different story is being written in Boston and Seattle, among others, where  freeways have been removed from the cityscape, buried or rerouted. In their place are open space and/or new lower-speed smaller surface roads. This realigns land use, property values, and in time, the perceived status of the whole neighborhood. That spiral reverses and suddenly the old neighborhood is a much more desirable place to live. 

We can’t get rid of all the interstates (can we?). Traffic has to go somewhere, plus interstates arguably serve national defense preparedness. But consider: We walk these pandemic-quieted roads in the twilight of the internal combustion engine, with climate change bearing down on us. Lot of plans around for climate action, with a commonality of the strategy of electrifying transportation, because we know how to generate electricity with renewable resources and because transportation and electricity generation are two of the big dogs in US GHG emissions. Solve those, and you’ve solved a lot of our climate issue. And so, EVs are on their way, probably with more mass transit and more getting around under our own power and more micro-mobility. All these modes have in common that they are so much quieter than the traffic roaring by on I-95, and so much cleaner. 

When the big silence falls on the highways near you, how will it change where you live? How will your life be better?

Will you remember the quiet roads of these pandemic days?






 

I’m an old, old hand at working from home. Been doing it at least part-time for almost 20 years. I know this will shock everyone who’s struggling to adjust, but at this point, I much prefer working at home to having an office anywhere.

Useful things I’ve learned:

Get real about your daily cycle. The constant distractions of a workplace make it easy to hide your ups and downs of focus and energy, but in your new workplace of one, there’s no hiding. I do the good creative work in early afternoon, the necessary but unfulfilling in the morning, and brainless stuff after four. It won’t work to browbeat yourself - just find your cycle and work with it.

Your work station can’t suck. Make it as comfortable and pleasant as you can, and not somewhere that requires you to put everything away at night (like the kitchen table). It doesn’t have to be anything like what you have at work, though - use the couch, the deck, move from place to place, as long as…

Don’t ignore pain. Ergonomics matter, and laptops keep physical therapists in business. Even just propping your laptop up on a box and plugging an external keyboard into it can make a huge difference. Easy to let this fall apart at home, especially when you expect it to be short term, but it matters, especially because…

Don’t work round the clock. Keeping a schedule lets you relax into routine without having to create every day’s schedule anew. That schedule includes breaks. You move around a lot less at home, because the bathroom, coffee, etc.  are all closer. Make up for it with a walk around the block or the yard or better yet…

Customize your day. Want to try eating lunch as your biggest meal or exercising  during your midafternoon slump? This is your chance to give it a try, as long as you’ve got the flexibility. I often use exercise as an opportunity to let my mind work on an idea or problem, which means it’s most useful in the middle of the day, not before or after work.

Silence is precious, unless you want noise. Most places I’ve lived while working at home had traffic and neighbor noise around during the day. I need silence to do heavy-duty analytical thinking, but generally I work to music and/or the background hum of laundry or the dishwasher, which provide a nice feeling of busyness. Dull tedious tasks, like updating my website, are sometimes best done in front of the TV, just not the currently-terrifying cable news.    

What no one admits: If everything goes your way, an hour working at home is much better than an hour at the office (with a huge caveat to those with kids and/or pets demanding constant attention). Your mileage may vary here, but for me it’s at least 2 to one, especially for focus-intensive tasks like writing. 

Also posted on Medium

Also posted on Medium.

​Plant a tree, save humanity. Or rather, plant untold millions of trees and give humanity a fighting chance against climate change. That’s the bottom line of a lot of talk lately about a high-profile Science study, which broke the news that massive global reforestation could solve climate change. Many outlets spread the news, providing a glimmer of hope in the ceaseless bad news about climate. 

Despite all the press, the notion of reforestation to fight climate change isn’t particularly ground-breaking. E.O. Wilson had some global-scale thoughts about this “rewilding" some time ago. Data for Progress’s Green New Deal calls for reforesting forty million acres of the US in the next fifteen years. At the city level, making a warmer world more livable involves trees, to reduce heat island and ground-level ozone, make non-car transportation more appealing, and improve resilience to massive rain events. Cities like Los Angeles have new reforestation efforts  - 90,000 trees in two years! - and newly-created positions to oversee these efforts. Lots of people have this “more trees for climate action” idea because it’s a good idea: reforestation is not only effective, but nearly foolproof. An urban tree might die, but it can’t really backfire otherwise, and those trees that live provide a whole host of additional benefits beyond climate. Compared to any kind of new technological solution, planting trees is tried and true, and relatively cheap per tree. 

What does this look like, though?

​What about the people among all those trees? 

A future with a lot more trees could look a bit like the present in in the re-forest that already covers Connecticut, and to some extent, the rest of southern New England, as I mentioned in this previous post. As a refresher, European settlement and its attendant clear-cutting began in the 1630s in Connecticut. By 1820, only about 25% of Connecticut was still forested, but due to the opening of much more fertile farmland further west, Connecticut’s farm fields and pastures began to revert to forest starting around 1870. This tiny state is now around 60% forested. Yet with 3.6 million people, it’s certainly not wilderness - Connecticut is one of the most densely populated states. Lots of people, but also lots of trees. If you want to know about living alongside trees, this is the place to learn. 

This brings us to some math helpfully provided by the state of Vermont. They reckon an average acre of forest stores 107 metric tonnes of carbon (MtC). That’s pure carbon, not carbon dioxide, and not emissions like your car creates. By that more real-world measure, an average forested acre stores 393 MtCO2e, which is the annual emissions from 83 cars. 

One acre = 83 cars isn’t bad, but it’s also really simplistic. A forest isn’t just a forest - the kind of trees growing in the forest matters, as well as how old they are, how large they are, and most particularly, what’s in the soil around them. Generally, the best trees for storing carbon are those with heavy, dense wood, like oaks, for example. Just as logically, the larger the tree, the more carbon it stores, giving older, larger trunk-diameter (aka caliper) trees the edge as well as those with a larger ultimate size. In measures of annual carbon storage, the growth rate of trees matters, which is a little contradictory, since softer-wooded trees often grow more quickly. Confused yet?

Consider this, too: the management of the forest matters quite a bit, too, maybe as much as what’s growing there, because carbon remains stored in fallen leaves and branches, too. Organic matter in the soil may be the largest carbon sink in our hypothetical acre of forest, but to get that organic matter, the branches, leaves, and other tree detritus must be allowed to accumulate and decay naturally, not raked or removed. Fallen trees contribute to this total, too. 

The trees matter. The soil matters. What’s under the trees matters. The management (or lack of it) of the forest matters. And all these things matter tremendously, because climate change is a real, present, existential threat to humanity. 

As we dig into it, the details of our forest acre end up making all the difference in terms of its climate action benefit. There’s plenty of unanswered questions about the forest itself, but those questions multiply when we add people into the mix and start asking about what, if any, benefit we get from the trees in places closer to us - not an acre of forest, but a single red maple in the yard or a lone honey locust along the street. 

Can we fit some of this needed reforestation into places people live?

What’s the best way to do that, for climate and for those of us living in the Re-Forest?

What can we learn from the reforested places, like Connecticut, we already have?

 

Take a look at this picture. Where is this trail? Oregon? The Boundary Waters? Maybe Shenandoah? Nope, it’s just an ordinary trail in Connecticut. My state of residence for two years now is a surprisingly superlative trail state, with the venerable Blue-Blazed Trails comprising 825 miles packed within the third-smallest state. How does a tiny state that’s #4 in population density manage to have so much trail? 

The answer is in the picture, too: all those trees. There’s a lot of trees among the subdivisions and golf courses here. New England is the most heavily forested region in the US, which might surprise you if you know that the southern part of New England, including where I am, is also one of the mostly densely populated regions. There’s a lot of people, but there’s also a lot of trees. [Even if there’s a little less than there used to be, as reported here. ] Today around 60% of Connecticut’s land area is forested, plus a bit more than 60% of its urban areas are covered with tree canopy. That’s the highest percentage of canopied urban land in the nation. 

If you want to know about trees + people, this is the place. 

What’s really remarkable is that Connecticut is not just forested - it’s re-forested. European settlement started early here - the 1630s - so native forests had about two centuries of being transformed into a patchwork of agriculture and settlement stitched together with those famous stone walls. By 1820, only about 25% of Connecticut was still forested, but all those stones make better walls than farmland, especially compared with nearly everywhere to the west. As farming moved to more promising locations, the forest began to return. Re-forestation began around 1870 - a long time ago.  

What that means is that the Re-Forest outside my window wasn’t born yesterday. It’s century-old forest, at least in many places, giving it a maturity and richness that the relatively young forests of, say, the Midwest, just can’t match. If you’re used to these pale copies, the New England forest can be a little…spooky. It’s the hush of leaf mold underfoot. It’s the constant whisper of mountain laurel leaves. It’s the sheer size of forested areas and their single-track labyrinths. But most importantly, it’s the wildlife. Century-old forests, especially when they are large, are good habitat not just for birds and squirrels, but for bears and bobcats and the large coyotes of the East. 

You’re never really alone on that trail.

The wildlife of the Re-Forest lives among countless relics of this land’s  pastoral past. You can’t miss the stone walls, but there are building foundations, abandoned roads, and the occasional lost cemetery, too. It’s a Life After People vibe that reminds you, on your solitary hike, that lots of other people were here, and now they are gone. It’s easy to let your mind drift to colonists and settlers and start to hear faint footsteps behind you.

That’s ridiculously Euro-centric, of course. For every dead colonist in the Connecticut woods, there’s countless dead Native Americans, which is a morbid way to say that this land was home to humans for millennia before the Puritans landed. Where I live was Quinnipiac land, so you could meditate upon that while you hike, and the apocalypse of epidemic and genocide that followed first European contact. 

Millennia of human occupation surely left sign everywhere, but I lack the perspective to see it. In places, indigenous Americans altered the composition of the forest itself, crafting a massive permaculture garden of sorts. Did that happen here? One of the best permaculture candidates in the forest here would have been American chestnut (Castanea dentata), its grand canopy now long gone, reduced to saplings sprouting from ancient roots. Ashes (Fraxinus spp.) are joining the chestnut as I type this, due to the predation of emerald ash borer. This missing forest, these ghosts in the woods, includes the extinct and extirpated, too: the passenger pigeon, the Eastern elk.(There are reintroduced elk in other places in the East, but they are not the Eastern elk (Cervus canadensis canadensis), which has been extinct since 1880.) Gray wolves and cougars once hunted here. 

You’re never really alone on that trail, yet you’re more alone than you would have been, once.

You could think time began here with the arrival of white colonists from England (mostly), a false idea but an easy habit of long standing. It’s harder to see it from a different perspective, with not the men with muskets but the continent-blanketing trees in the foreground. The US Forest Service estimates that before Europeans arrived, about 46% of the land that would become the US was forested, around a billion acres. We’ve since lost about 256 million acres of that, and as of 2012, around a third of the US was forested land. Without even getting into the quality of virgin forest vs today’s woods, that’s a lot, an inconceivable amount, of forest that exists only in memory, with some of those memories a century-plus old. Ghost forest.  

Along with housing bobcats and passenger pigeons and memories, that forest stored carbon, and of course, it could again. The Green New Deal report by Data for Progress estimates that reforesting 40 million acres by 2035 could offset a whopping 600 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050. 

Forest quality and composition matters in this, but notice that 40 million acres, while a lot, is quite a bit less than that 256 million acres we’ve lost since Europeans arrived. Reforesting 40 million acres would entail restoring forest vegetation to around one in six of every acre that’s not forest now but was in 1630. That seems much more doable. 

Would that reduction in emissions make a difference? In a word, yes. Six hundred million tons is about 8.5% of 2017 US greenhouse gas emissions. For reference, the 2025 target set for the US in the Paris Agreement was/is 16% below 2016 emissions. People in the know generally agree that the Paris Agreement’s goals were too little, and of course, it’s anyone’s guess whether the US will ever honor those too-little goals. But still: it’s about half the 2025 targeted reduction, from trees. 

Don’t let anyone tell you climate change is hopeless. One answer is right there in the numbers. North America would re-forest itself if we humans got out the way. It tries to do it constantly, in old fields and vacant lots and maybe your unmowed yard. Some forest, missing chestnuts, missing ashes, probably missing lots of other species, could retake the rest of the range of pre-settlement woods, like it has in New England. The trees would inherit the earth.

Imagine that Re-Forest, and ask yourself what other relics might rest beneath that canopy of leaves, like the colonial stones outside my window. Maybe this house. Maybe your house or your street. If we don’t find an answer, through re-forestation or otherwise, to our manmade climate catastrophe, this forest could be haunted by the passenger pigeon, the Eastern elk, and… us. 

It’s October. Every door creaks, every picture has eyes that follow you, every call is coming from inside the house. Night falls sooner, mist swirls, dry leaves - or footsteps? - whisper along every path. Bats fly out of the tower on the old house at the edge of town, and surely phantom hitchhikers wait along every lonely road. 

Picture these spooky scenes. Where do you see them happening? Everybody knows a spooky place. A place that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Not just dangerous, but eerie. Maybe not now, but years ago when you were a child, you knew a place like this - the haunted house, the old cemetery, maybe just the basement or attic. 

Remember it, then ask yourself: have you really outgrown spooky places? What scares you, and where is it? Maybe it’s Area 51. Or your favorite Bigfoot hotspot. Or Point Pleasant, West Virginia, or (the former) Edmonson, Kentucky. 

We’re justified in fearing some places, because they are contaminated, a scarier scare for the fully grown than whatever’s going bump in the night. Paranormal or aliens or radiation, eerie places are fascinating in a way that your run-of-the-mill dangerous place is not. Show me a dangerous intersection, and I’ll show you a place you avoid but never think about. But what’s eerie combines fear with mystery - and mystery is a potent, enduring universal attractant. 

Mystery, in fact, is one of the aspects of landscapes we find attractive, according to research on the subject. That general rule is this: that we are intrigued by scenes that we can’t immediately understand fully, because they invite exploration and hint that there’s more to be learned from them. Spooky places are mysterious, but they also scare. Two reasons to notice them, remember them, and care what happens to them, for good or ill. Another general rule: we place less value on what’s overgrown and unkempt, because those places look like no one else values them. But what good is a well-maintained spooky place? It’s just ordinary. A greater feeling of abandonment makes an eerie place eerier, and perhaps that much more mysterious/frightening. Our feelings about them are, in a word, contradictory. 

Also contradictory is that spookiness can protect a place. We aren’t indifferent toward places we fear, and indifference is the real enemy here. Indifference is what makes a place invisible, and that invisibility makes it ripe for a new Wal-Mart or subdivision or what have you. That protection can create a space for nature. To see this in action, you wanna see something really scary. Like Chernobyl.

In 1986 an accident at Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant caused one of its reactors to explode. At least 50 people were killed immediately, and 120,000 residents were evacuated. The site remains radioactive today. A vast 1,000 square mile exclusion zone surrounds the site, including the abandoned city of Pripyat.  

Today, Chernobyl is famous not just for the disaster, but also as a haven for wild horses, elk, boars, bison, and most especially wolves. There’s room for them to live and thrive (radiation notwithstanding) because we humans are too afraid to enter that place enough to disturb them. Chernobyl is the perfect example, because we’re afraid not just of the place, but of objects and resources, like timber, that might be extracted from that place, and it’s a big place - 1,000 square miles! Big enough for wolves to thrive. 

Nuclear contamination is authentically terrifying, but there’s also a thousand horror stories about mutants, people or animals or viruses, and about you yourself becoming mutated. We can’t see radiation or contamination, so we can’t tell if it’s gone or increasing or creeping up behind you. That’s sinister. At this point, thirty-odd years on, the sheer size of the abandoned area around Chernobyl is unnerving because who knows what’s really in there? If you go in and get into trouble, no one can hear you scream. It’s self-perpetuating spooky.

Bring contamination closer to home, subtract the radioactive wolves, and you come to Love Canal. Love Canal is a former subdivision near Buffalo, NY, made infamous as a toxic waste disaster. The homes and, incredibly, an elementary school, were built on the site of an abandoned canal project (hence the name) that was used as a chemical waste dump in the 1940s and 1950s. A disease cluster in the neighborhood prompted grass-roots investigation, revealing that chemicals were leaching through groundwater into area basements and yards, as well as the school playground (!). A lengthy and intense struggle by neighborhood activists (mostly women) led to the relocation of over 900 families, and eventually to the creation of Superfund by the federal government in 1980. The disaster exponentially increased public awareness of the dangers of industrial pollution, particularly in working-class areas (like Love Canal) and minority neighborhoods.

Today the site of these vanished homes is a parcel of approximately one square mile, comprised of meadow, more or less, and scattered trees. It’s a savanna with crumbling driveways and roads, surrounded by chain link fence. A landscape that’s terrifying, if you’re old enough to remember Love Canal as breaking news; unsettling, if you are one of the residents across the road wondering about the genesis of their ailments; welcoming, if you are a rabbit or possum or deer. 

Industrial contamination is scary stuff, and the nature of pollution underground, in ground water, or in the soil, or in your basement courtesy of your sump pump, is, again, hidden and mysterious in its extent and severity. They say it’s gone. Is it? The idea that we’ve unleashed dangers we can’t control, be they industrial or nuclear, is a very disturbing one - and a fascinating one, as illustrated by most Twilight Zone episodes, a lot of science fiction, and any scary story about repeating names while looking in a mirror.   

Spooky/ nature spaces don’t have to be famous. I used to live near Split Rock, an overgrown abandoned quarry and industrial ruin in Syracuse, New York. Already you see the eerieness, right? - “abandoned quarry,” “industrial,” “ruin” - but there’s more: in 1918 a factory making explosives for World War I exploded, creating a horrific fire that killed fifty men and critically injured fifty more.

Today the Split Rock  quarry is a big blank spot on the map, approximately 900 acres of woods and brush - and according to some, paranormal activity. It’s a place where roads dead end, with a few rusty “Danger - no trespassing” signs for atmosphere. There’s plenty of good reasons to leave the place alone: old quarry cliffs and holes, industrial ruins, worrying contamination from that munitions plant, and the very real danger of getting lost in the deep, dark, possibly haunted woods.  While not truly urban, Split Rock is close enough to the city to keep me alert for urban ills. There may be a few of those there, plus the occasional ghost hunter, and surely mountain bikers using the unofficial trails. But mostly, Split Rock is left to the deer and the coyotes and smaller creatures. 

Set aside the specters and the chemicals, look at these places as natural landscapes, and you’ll find they look pretty good. Sinister places benefit us just like any natural area, benefits like cleaner water, reduced flooding, less urban heat island, and carbon sequestration, the whole ecosystem services  bundle. These processes are going on in each of these places; some of them are doing all three. They benefit us even while we fear them, and their enduring mystery helps keep us from destroying them, thus protecting their ability to continue helping us. 

Fear can create space for nature to recolonize, recover, even thrive. Contaminated sites are especially good at discouraging development, partly because they tend to have sticky legal issues about what’s there and whose fault it is and who should do what to clean it up. 

Yet plenty of eerie places have no natural value. Most buildings reputed to be haunted are just buildings - ecologically speaking, the most haunted house is just a house, unless it’s got an overgrown yard. Lots of horrifyingly contaminated brownfields are redeveloped  into utterly mundane things, like freeways or strip malls, and people forget what they were. Even the sites of authentically horrific events like Civil War battles, can struggle against encroaching development. Sites like Chancellorsville, where 24,000 men died in 1863, arguably could benefit from being more spooky, thus helping preserve them. 

What makes the difference, turning an unsettling place into a natural space as well? Is there a way to harness spookiness to help preserve natural areas? Can we use this without it backfiring and creating a place so eerily fascinating that people love it to death? 

Back in the ‘90s, there was an interdisciplinary effort to design a warning landscape to scare away humans (or any other intelligent life) in perpetuity from nuclear waste storage sites like Yucca Mountain and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, has since gone kaput as a doomsday nuclear storage facility, but the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in neighboring New Mexico is socking away nuclear waste underground, and still asking how to keep people away long after our civilization and language have crumbled into dust. 

Fear, made to act as a warning. Spookiness to save your life. Think about it, maybe while you ignore the tapping at the window and tell yourself the shadows on the stairs aren’t moving.

Also posted on Medium.

I'm writing a section for my next book about climate change predictions for the US by region. Wanna know what those predictions are? Look out the window. 2018 has been a real preview of the future, with above-average temperatures everywhere, soaking rains in the East, and drought and fire in the West. What matters is the long-term trend, not any individual year, but still, 2018 gives us a chance to see which everyday systems are not going to work for the warmer world. Ordinary things we take for granted. Like what happens in your yard when it rains.

Although I started my career as a landscape architect, full disclosure: I have always found stormwater management a little dull. These days precipitation of all kinds has become way more exciting, in the worst way, due to the increasing frequency of seriously scary storms. I write this with one eye on updates about Hurricane Florence inundating the Carolinas. My house up here in Connecticut has weathered nearly 50 years of coastal storms, including Hurricane Irene, in 2011, and Superstorm Sandy  just a year after that. Average annual precipitation here is about 47”. In recent decades, the Northeast as a whole has seen a marked increase - more than 70% - in the amount of rain falling during storms. This is a surprise/not a surprise, because these more frequent, rainier storms are part of climate change predictions for the region. And climate change, as you know, is a show already in progress. 

My house is in the woods between two seasonal creeks, with a walkout basement.  The whole property is sandy soil full of New England rocks, so drainage would seem to be a no-brainer. The previous owners of the house certainly thought so, since this house came to us with its sole drainage strategy as standard gutters and downspouts. This utterly predictable set-up is supposed to catch the water as it runs down the roof, funnel it through to eight points around the base of the house, and dump it out on the ground there, at the end of the downspouts. Those downspouts? They end 8” from the foundation of the house. A few have splash blocks that carry the water 24” from the foundation, if they don’t overflow. An absolutely typical setup, found on countless houses, maybe even yours.

What’s wrong with this? It works as intended, which means all the water captured by the gutters is dumped right next to the foundation, at the end of those downspouts. There the water can infiltrate into that rocky, sandy soil and go on its way through the hydrologic cycle and out of my life, and that works fine - most of the time. The walls of our basement testify that it didn’t work fine once, maybe twice, in the life of the house, when a flooding event marked the walls a few inches above the floor. Hmm. 

So we extend the downspouts, which is ugly, easy, and temporary. We need something more permanent, which would, in the past, have meant running those downspouts into a set of pipes to take that water, underground, to one of our creeks. The easiest way to route those pipes is across the driveway, which a landscaper suggested we do. You don’t really know what’s under a 50-year-old gravel driveway, but it’s probably not solid bedrock, a distinct possibility anywhere else in the yard. 

But wait: think about that tried-and-true set of underground pipes and the gutters in 10” (Irene) or 20” of rain? (Sure, 20” is a lot of rain, but Hurricane Harvey (2017) dumped up to 60” of rain on Texas, so…) Simply: everything overflows, and everything backs up. Only so much water can fit through those pipes at once, then water starts to pool. Water coming from the house and backing up means way too much water around the house’s foundation, and that means way too much (ie any) water inside the house. 

If you don’t want a lake in your basement, you need drainage meant to handle a deluge-worth of water. Yet it’s overkill to run the LA River through your yard. It’s hideous, and it’s right outside your house, and also: groundwater recharge is a thing. Sure, Connecticut’s had two badass storms in the last seven years, but it’s also just emerged from a two-year drought, because climate change is about weirder weather, not just warmer weather. Who wants to spend the next drought staring at a yard built for floods? 

A layered system seems to be the answer: a normal rainy day system to work all the time, with a gullywasher system for the next epic storm. The gullywasher layer doesn’t have to work very often, but when it’s needed, it really has to work, because it’ll be that epic storm. When the deluge comes, you’ll need to get in and out. Maybe that’s the classic supermarket run for bread and milk, but it could be for emergency services to rescue you. It could even be for you to evacuate. It’s important, that rare thing in home landscaping that actually is life or death. So nope, keep that pipe away from the driveway, aka the sole route in and out. Look around and imagine a foot or two of rain, and give it somewhere to flood that isn’t where you’ll be or how you’ll get out. 

My strategy is something like this: some of those underground pipes attaching to the downspouts, but with the ground surface sloped to form swales that will move the water away from the house and into the creeks when all hell breaks loose. An old idea, the dry well, may come into play here, too, as a way to provide a place for water to pile up, so to speak, in the epic storm, and a place for water to infiltrate the rest of the time. Circling back to that recent drought, this also could be a good place to install a cistern, if the next drought or the one after that is worse. 

If climate change affects simple home landscaping to this extent, it really does affect everything. The strategy of layering everyday systems with ones for catastrophic events is a good one, and maybe one that can work elsewhere. Your yard seems ridiculously trivial, but aren’t you likely to shelter at home if/when the big one hits? A little planning can create a lot of resilience, or at least more than you’ve got now, exactly where you’ll need it when the storm comes. 

This post is a preview of a sidebar in my upcoming book about the neglected city, Design by Deficit. Also posted on Medium. 

​Syracuse, New York, the city where I used to live, is a shrubby place. By that I mean that unmaintained land within the city quickly becomes colonized by woody vegetation above waist height, but below the height of shade or canopy trees. This is the ecological process of succession, but it’s succession with a twist: it’s being done by what Peter del Tredici calls, “cosmopolitan urban vegetation.” This mix of natives and exotic invasives includes several of the Most Wanted on the list of invasives in the US: shrubby honeysuckles, autumn olive, Japanese knotweed, and of course, public enemy #1, buckthorn. This paper called out Syracuse as one of the only cities in the US where overall tree canopy is increasing, probably because of the buckthorn. That’s a lot of buckthorn. At least it’s too cold here for kudzu ...so far.

Syracuse isn’t alone. Cities in the eastern US, particularly those that have lost industry and population, have shrubby places in part because of this collection of large invasive shrubs, and the rainfall to support them. Numerous other trends converge in shrubbiness: vacant land, abandoned properties, tight municipal budgets that restrict mowing, but also an increased value placed on wildlife habitat and natural-looking landscapes. 

Urban shrubbiness sits at the junction between two established findings about human behavior and vegetation. In this research, tree canopy is the panacea, or nearly so. Tree canopy does it all - we think better, behave better, feel better, and like places and communities better when there are shade trees, to paint this research very broadly. Yes, these are largely studies finding association, not causation, and experiments are hard to design on this topic, but the association is consistent across many studies by many people, and in the end, there’s not much downside to planting trees, as we argue here. But on the other hand, there’s cues to care and loose space, research and theory that argues that we generally perceive apparently unmaintained land (such as that covered with successional vegetation) as out of control and outside the rules, fit for transgressive activities like vandalism. Tall dense vegetation - shrubbiness, again - has been shown in numerous studies to be a less preferred environment that makes us feel insecure, perhaps because we doubt our ability to navigate through it or discern threats within it. 

So shrubbiness is both good and bad, from a human behavior standpoint. Which wins out- the positive or negative impacts, or is it a draw? For that matter, invasives, or the cosmopolitan cocktail of urban vegetation, are a mixed bag ecologically as well. Invasives (like buckthorn) are demonized because they damage biodiversity and don’t do all the good things that their less-competitive native counterparts do, but sometimes, well, a tree’s a tree. They all photosynthesize, and mitigate heat island, and help slow stormwater runoff - or do they? There’s an implied balance sheet here, weighing the good and bad impacts of unmaintained urban understory vegetation in terms of social, economic, and ecological good. 

A tree isn’t a tree when it’s buckthorn vs. white oak, but many of our best and most sophisticated ways to measure urban vegetation in quantity (meaning on more sites that you can visit in person) sees those as the same.

In the lack of distinction lies the mystery; this devil’s in that detail.

What’s the impact of the shrubby city, and how do we find out? What about drier cities or ones without a Syracuse-caliber winter? Is the impact different there? If the environment matters, shouldn’t these differences matter, too? As climate change makes some places wetter as it dessicates others, and we all get hotter and hotter, we may find we want to know whether shrubbiness is working for or against us. Invasive large shrubs aren’t going away. We might as well understand what they’re doing to us.

This post is a preview of a sidebar in my upcoming book about the neglected city, Design by Deficit. Also posted on Medium. 

If you spend a lot of time outdoors, like I do, you’re more or less perpetually alarmed about Lyme disease. Even more alarming are the array of other tick-borne diseases  that are way scarier, but reported at much lower levels - SO FAR!! As always, it’s easy to panic, and difficult to know what to do. 

Those rare-but-scary other diseases make solutions that only work on Lyme, like vaccinations, only so promising. More promising are solutions targeting these diseases’ common factor: what people are doing, what ticks are doing, and where they meet each other. 

There’s some surprising tidbits to be found in this. Like this: most people are infected with Lyme in their own yards, during daily activities, not out in the woods on that hike or camping trip. Maybe this is because we think about ticks in the woods but we don’t at home. Or perhaps people who choose to be out in the woods are people more likely to know about ticks and take those precautions - you were wearing special hiking clothes anyway - while people doing daily activities in their yards are just people, without that self-selection effect. 

You can’t stay in the house forever, so can you de-tick your yard or de-Lyme your ticks? Another surprising fact: deer aren’t the main villains here. The tick in question is the deer tick (aka blacklegged tick), so white-tailed deer get blamed for this modern plague. But a closer look at the life cycle of Lyme-infected ticks reveals the key middleman is much smaller and more common: the white-footed mouse. As mice tend to be, they are around in large numbers, unnoticed, and closer than you think. You see deer, but not mice. This particular mouse likes woodsy areas and their edges. Your yard will do fine, especially if you live in a heavily wooded area like much of New England, ground zero for Lyme. 

It’s tough to exclude mice from your yard. You can fence out deer, but just try fencing out mice. What really works to suppress mice is eating them. Since you probably don’t want to try that yourself, it’s lucky that foxes are very happy to do that job. A 2017 study found that indeed, where there are more foxes (and some other European predators, where the study was set), there are lower numbers of Lyme-infected ticks and ticks in general. Surprising again, the key dynamic in play seemed to be that mice move around less when there are predators around, as the study’s authors speculated. There are still mice around, but they are kept under wraps by the foxes, so they encounter fewer ticks. 

Red foxes are champion mouse eaters, and where foxes are, there tend to be other creatures. Some of these, like opossums and possibly turkeys, eat a lot of ticks, which helps in a different way. Others could help in a less direct but effective way by serving as alternate hosts for ticks. This means the ticks bite other creatures, like squirrels, that are less likely to carry Lyme disease instead of disease-carrying white-footed mice, and therefore never become infected with Lyme. You may still get bitten, but you won’t get infected if the tick that bites you doesn’t carry Lyme. 

How do you get foxes on board in your backyard fight against tick-borne disease? You do it with landscape management, looking at your yard and neighborhood as habitat. This starts with trees. A landscape with very small patches of forest is good for mice, but not larger animals that prey on them or on ticks. A landscape with larger patches of forest has the potential to house foxes and possums and so on, thus keeping the lid on mice and ticks and Lyme.  In urban areas, tree canopy is often referred to as the critical factor in the presence of foxes and other larger wildlife. It stands to reason, though, that what’s under those trees matters, too, as well as what kind of trees they are. More diverse woodlands with greater diversity of plants at ground level, especially native plants, tend to be home to greater diversity of wildlife. 

What else makes up the low-Lyme landscape? At a more detailed level, it’s less obvious what’s good and bad. Leaf litter is the natural cover of the forest floor, but it’s also habitat for deer tick nymphs and larvae. Brush and tall grass create good wildlife cover, but they are also the preferred spots for adult ticks to lie in wait for someone to bite. Every creature needs a water source, but dampness and humidity are key to deer tick survival. Obviously there are a series of trade-offs here that merit more study to discover the right balance. Foxes in particular need den sites, hollow logs or buildings to dig under or similar. But these same denning sites can also make the fox’s larger cousin, the coyote, at home, which brings us to one last surprising fact.  

Where there are coyotes, there are fewer foxes, because the bigger, stronger coyotes tend to kill the foxes. So if more foxes means less Lyme, do more coyotes mean fewer foxes and therefore more Lyme? That’s exactly the suspicion of a few researchers studying the matter, who note that the key factor in the outbreak of Lyme in New England may have been the arrival and establishment of coyotes in the region. 

So stay tuned, but consider what a low-Lyme landscape might be. Maybe also consider what the fox is worth to you that keeps you from getting Lyme disease, and what the forest that nurtures that fox is worth, too. The assortment of creatures living around us and the web of their interactions with each other plays a surprisingly key role here. You can surround yourself entirely with pavement and buildings. You can do the vegetated version of that with closely mown, chemical-soaked lawn. Or you can have a diverse, intact woodland edge ecosystem that works just well enough to allow predators like foxes to keep the mice and their ticks in balance, without making coyotes too much at home. Wild, but not too wild; just wild enough.