Modeshift

Outside.in is a Web site launched last year to gather the panoply of writers doing place-based blogging. The site is the brain child of Steven Johnson, a  prominent writer and blogger in New York who’s written five books and contributes to, among others, the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Johnson was helped by John Geraci, a social media specialist, and John Seely Brown, the former chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation and member of the board of Amazon and the MacArthur Foundation. Outside.in has done a good job of raising venture capital because its business strategy is to adorn the local reporting and commentary with local advertising. When I log in, for example, the page that pops up is an amalgamation of articles nominally linked to Grand Rapids that are contributed by bloggers as well as mainstream and new media sites.

A few days ago Outside.in posted its ranking of “America’s Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods.” The number one position is taken by a Brooklyn neighborhood that I suspect is very close to Steven Johnson’s. The number two bloggiest neighborhood is the Shaw section of the District of Columbia. Neighborhoods in Portland, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, and Los Angeles also make the top 10, along with two inner ring suburbs of Boston (see pix).  Outside.in said it based the analysis on the company’s close tracking of local bloggers in over 3,000 US neighborhoods during the past six months, and by measuring a number of variables: total number of posts, total number of local bloggers, number of comments and Technorati rankings.

As a promotion vehicle, the list is very creative. But as a measure of urban vitality, Outside.in’s Top 10 bloggiest corresponds closely with the consensus list of America’s top big cities as well. Urban vitality has long been measured by conventional 20th century standards – income growth, job creation, real estate values, crime and safety. New tools of measurement also are becoming more accepted – acres of parks and open space, miles of regional rapid transit, number of LEED-certified buildings and green roofs, ability to attract and retain college-educated young professionals. The Outside.in ranking suggests one more measurement of a metropolitan region’s superior quality of life: the number of place-based bloggers. After all, the richness of the human conversation also points to a place that people want to be.

Nielsen Buzzmetrics, which has offices in New York and Cincinnati, is one of the top shops for using Internet search engine technology and sophisticated analysis programs to understand consumer attitudes and predict powerful trends. The company combs millions of conversations occurring on blogs, message boards, and in chat rooms, sifts out salient details, and analyzes the results to forecast consumer behavior and values. 

Earlier this month Pete Blackshaw, one of the company’s senior leaders, published a Buzzmetrics brand association map (see graphic) that outlines just how deeply environmental values and ideas have penetrated in American society.  The connection that Americans are now intuitively making between the term “eco-friendly”  and such things as building materials, transportation fuels, and lifestyle choices helps to explain why green ideas are so hot, and to some extent, why cities are experiencing a powerful demographic and economic revival.

The Buzzmetrics map illustrates how Americans have finally embraced the idea that environmental ideas, for too long associated with saving the natural world, apply to their personal realm. Now that is old news to the ecologically aware among us who eat organic food, ride public transit, turn off the lights, mulch with decayed leaves, fertilize with horse manure, and vote for green candidates. But for most Americans it’s a pretty new concept. More than almost any piece of data I’ve encountered, the Buzzmetrics map shows that more Americans than ever get the connection between stabilizing natural conditions and their own well-being. When ordinary folk can track the term “eco-friendly” to bamboo floors, the Prius, hemp clothing, and living cities you know we’re getting somewhere. Of such linkages are organizing principles made. It’s why New York Times columnist Tom Friedman earlier this month called green the “new red, white, and blue.”

What’s not as clearly shown in the Buzzmetrics association map is where green values are growing their deepest roots. But there’s a hint in the connections between the “eco-friendly” at the map’s center, and the outer ring’s proximity to “living cities,” “conservation,” and “lifestyle.”  Nowhere is “highway,” “big-box,” “parking lot,” “congestion,” “traffic”, “subdivision,” or any other brand associated with suburbs mentioned.

In list after list of the cleanest, safest, most exciting, and best places to live and do business in the United States, American cities are showcased — Tulsa, Knoxville, Charlotte, Boston, Seattle, San Diego, Dallas, Portland, Chicago, Charleston. Suburbs are almost never mentioned, and for good reason. Suburbs represent a brief experiment in wasteful patterns of 20th century development that the 21st century has only begun to punish with falling real estate values, rising taxes and living costs, struggling schools, increasing violence, and deteriorating infrastructure. Funny. Those are the very same conditions that in the 20th century prompted people to flee cities.

It turns out that cities, with their parks and water fronts and transit lines and historic neighborhoods, existing infrastructure, and countless flat roofs that can be turned into urban gardens, are a lot easier to make greener and more energy efficient than suburbs. And now that downtowns are magnets for new housing, cities are also producing the human communities that young people, empty nesters, and couples without children say they can’t find as easily in the suburbs. The Buzzmetrics brand map shows that underlying the gathering mass movement in America back to cities is an intuitive understanding that cities now are cleaner, greener, and much more adaptable to the century’s new market conditions than the suburban places from which they came.   

Flip, you may recall, is this blog’s effort to call out particularly good applications of interactive multi-media to the exquistely difficult work of reshaping America’s resource-wasting and demoralizing patterns of development. To an extent that is at once stupefying and aggravating most American communities have zoned themselves into corners of the 20th century — stressing separateness, division, car dependence, racial purity, and income stratification — that make no sense fot the mashup that is the 21st century. Put another way. Old school zoning sucks.

But just try convincing a community that fought like hell to install zoning to consider amending its approach to try something better. Right now the “better” is master plans that set out specific goals — like how many acres of farmland to preserve, how many miles of streets are needed, how much open space is adequate — and then set zoning regulations and incentives in place that actually achieve those goals. If your master plan says residents want a community that is environmentally sensitive, provides economic opportunity, wants to preserve a  high quality of life, it behooves citizens and leaders to spell out exactly what that means. For decades, our master plans and zoning rules have been approximations and guesses and interpretations of what constitutes the good life. And in the process of negotiating the details we’ve managed to turn most of our places, and especially our suburbs, into rioutously unappealing places to be. That’s why cities and rural areas are attracting legions of new residents.

Still, advocates for a better way can’t start in this arena without plenty of data. And here, too, citizens are generally mismatched against the planning professionals and developers accustomed to gathering the data to make their case, and expert in using the numbers. In some instances counties make a stab at evening the playing field, providing good mapping and data retrieval capabilities. But it’s hard for citizens to find their way to the source. For example, Allegan County, a rural county along the Lake Michigan coast about 120 miles northeast of Chicago, has invested in terrific GIS mapping equipment and software, but it’s not connected in any meaningful way to the Internet or to the townships. In fact, Allegan’s GIS department doesn’t play a substantive role in master planning or zoning in one of the state’s growing counties because citizens aren’t easily able to get to the data.  

That’s not the case here in the fast-growing counties of northwest Michigan. Local government officials, developers, citizen activists, non-profit organizations, and the business community have access to an interlocking network of land use data that has helped provide the foundation of a very rich regional discussion about growth and development.

The Northwest Michigan Council of Government, for instance, maintains a first-rate Web site that contains data sets on population, permits, school data, and employment that is current to the month and essential for understanding demographic and land use trends in 10 counties. 

Just as impressive is the Land Information Access Association’s work to install interactive land use maps on the Web sites of township and county governments. The maps provide a bird’s eye picture of housing, population, environment, and other trends in full color. The Traverse City-based technology shop, founded by Joe VanderMeulen, is a hive of cutting edge thinking about how to make it easier for citizens to apply GIS capabilities.

Arguably the best example is what LIAA did for Leelanau County, which has a collection of on-line land use maps that show land use changes over time, sensitive areas, topographic contours,  impervious areas, and other visual representations that are essential to a reasoned debate.   

There are many reasons why northwest Michigan has generated a nationally significant response to how to grow a beautiful rural area without wrecking the resource and scenic values that make it so special. We have great organizations capable of managing new technology in a way that adds to the public interest. Data is the coin of the realm in land use policy and practice. We got the data here. It’s a mouse click away. 

We’re one-tenth of a penny short of $3-a-gallon gas today here in Michigan. Energy analysts predict that the price will approach or exceed $4 by mid-summer. Welcome to the new world of gas price politics and the emerging new culture of energy efficiency in America.  It’s a whole lot easier to make the case for land and energy-conserving development patterns, energy efficiency, and a new economic development strategy in the United States when consumers’ ire is stoked by the price at the pumps. There are two things that really get America exercised: the price of gas and who was shown the door at American Idol.

Last night Democratic candidates for president convened in South Carolina to talk about guns, abortion, and the Iraq war. They didn’t talk about home prices that are flat or declining in most American suburbs, the enormous and widening income gap between the super, super, super rich and everybody else, the drought on the Colorado Plateau or anything else about global climate change, the declining performance of the American economy, and certainly not about the rising cost of gasoline. Nor did they talk about reasoned responses like building high speed rail and regional rapid transit, designing communities that bring people together instead of spreading them out, investing in clean energy sources, and initiating a high-tech investment program designed to conserve natural resources. 

But so long as gas prices keep climbing, they’ll soon talk about all of these interlocking issues. The reason: the cost of fuel is a priority for the majority of  Americans who live in suburbs and rural areas, and spend hours each day in their vehicles. That national wail you’re about to hear. It’s the sound of people forced to spend $80 to fill their tanks.

A reliably accurate guide to where we are heading with fuel prices is published every week by the Energy Information Administration, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy. The issue, as these charts show, is supply and demand. The EIA reported that gasoline stocks nationally are 3.2 percent lower than they were a year ago, and prices are 3 percent higher. Moreover the trend lines for supply, demand, and price are moving in ways that will squeeze consumers much harder. At the end of April, gasoline supplies fell to 194.2 million barrels, almost 20 million barrels less than they were at the start of March. Demand, meanwhile, reached 9.163 million barrels a day, or 151,000 barrels a day more than at this time last year. Prices, in other words, are heading higher, significantly higher. 

To a suprising extent, millions of Americans and hundreds of astute leaders at the local level have already entered the era of energy efficiency. In Knoxville, Tenn., for instance, downtown lofts are selling out before the buildings are finished even as home values in the suburbs languish. In Minneapolis, the Hiawatha light rail line  is attracting vastly more riders than planners initially expected. It’s also generated more than $1 billion in new housing and business development around transit stops. Ford is selling so many Escape and Mariner hybrids that dealerships are apportioned allotments and routinely have none on the showroom floor. California voters last November approved a $37 billion “Rebuild California” bond program that calls for investments in natural resource conservation, public transit, energy-efficient affordable housing, neighborhood school construction, and highway modernization, not capacity building. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a new vision for his city on Earth Day that calls for very similar public investments to lower fiscal costs, improve the quality of life, respond to global climate change, and ensure New York’s global competitiveness. 

Sooner, and not later, presidential candidates will start talking about the same ideas. It’ll come when they encounter voters at campaign rallies toting big white signs with red numbers, just like those at convenience stores, that document the rising price of gas.

Benzonia, our little town of 500 in northwest Michigan’s Benzie County, is abuzz with the story of Ellie Mae, the little black, nearly 18-year-old dog that turned up alive and well after wandering in the woods here for two weeks. Ellie Mae, of course, is the canine matriarch of my family. I reported in an April 12 post that she’d walked off the back porch in half a foot of snow and never returned. She’s back, is in good health, lost some weight, but otherwise is nosing around just like she’s always done.

For years, ever since I picked her up as a stray puppy off a highway in southern Virginia, she’s been my shadow. Ellie Mae’s attended public meetings, run road races, followed me around concerts and parties and gatherings of every sort. She’s spent nights in the car while I attended conferences. She’s run for eight or ten miles on forest trails, ahead of my mountain bike, and logged thousands of miles jogging with me. We’ve hiked the Appalachian Trail in several states. She posed with me in a picture in the Los Angeles Times. After we opened the Michigan Land Use Institute in 1995 in a historic house up the road, she spent years being the first to greet visitors at the door.

The last couple of years she hasn’t seen too well and doesn’t hear much and waddles around the house on legs that aren’t nearly as springy as they once were. None of us anticipated, though, that she’d trudge off into the snow, so far that we couldn’t find her. For two days after April 10 we looked in the neighborhood, spread the search to surrounding fields and woods, and when we didn’t find any sign, determined that she’d gone off to the great dog hunting ground. 

The day that we ended the search it really struck me.  She was four months shy of her 18th birthday and lived a long and joyous dog life  — full of romps and nose-scharfling in stuff that smelled deliciously foul. She didn’t have a sick day in her life so far as I could tell. I’d finished work that night in my home office and headed upstairs to go to bed. Ellie Mae always followed me, her nails clicking on the wood floor in the hall, and then into the bedroom where she curled up on her bed at the foot of ours. That night, though, she wasn’t there. No shadow. No padding past the bath. No curled up black form, sleek as a seal. No head raised and ears pressed forward when I entered the room.

Ellie Mae has always been independent, so I just figured she’d had enough and didn’t want to make a mess or a fuss about it. Time to go. She went.

Turns out she’d just gotten lost and couldn’t find her way back home, though in this small town there is plenty of evidence emerging now that she tried. So here’s what happened.

On April 24, two weeks to the day after Ellie Mae disappeared, Barbara Stow, a friend who owns a nice piece of ground above the Betsie River (see pix) more than a mile west of me, was walking along the bluff near her house. She heard a plaintive wailing below her, near the bank of the Betsie, and saw a black form, an animal, maybe a dog. It was making quite the scene. Barbara said she wasn’t sure right away what to do since the river bottom was muddy and it wasn’t clear whether the animal was injured, tied up, or caught in a trap. The animal was far enough away and the ground leading up to the river was tangled and soft. She put on her boots, called some friends to help, and when they arrived at her house went down to investigate. As they closed in on the animal they realized it was a dog, that it wasn’t hurt or restrained. And when Barbara took a second look, she turned to her companion and exclaimed, “That’s Ellie Mae!” They gathered her in their arms, walked her up the bluff and Barbara fed her a raw egg and some Rescue Remedy. Meanwhile her neice called my house to let my wife know Ellie Mae was alive. Like everybody who’s heard this story, Pam just cracked up. She called me at the office in Traverse City. “You have to come home. You’ll never guess what’s happened.”

The way she said it, I knew. “Ellie Mae’s back,” I said. “She’s alive.” Then I cracked up. ”She’s been out there two weeks,” I laughed. ”Two weeks. What did she eat?” 

I was surprised how good she looked. She’s thin and needed a bath, sort of how she looked when she was coaxed out of a drain pipe in the median of US 29 near Blacksburg where I found her in the early fall of 1989. She was about 7 weeks old and was standing along the highway’s edge, trying to cross. But the backdraft from the big trucks kept blowing her back into the median. I saw her for the the first time through the windshield, a little black ball tumbling backwards. I stopped and when she saw a person coming her way, she dove into the drain pipe, just far enough beyond my outstretched hand to remain free. It took an hour to coax her out. I scooped her up in a towel, put her on the floor of the passenger seat. She didn’t move in the car, or in the house, for a full day. After that, she never stopped moving.

You knew right away she was feral, born and raised in the woods. She scratched at the trees for grubs to eat and buried each morsel of food I gave her. Even as a puppy she hunted insects and chipmunks. Once as a three year old she flushed a rabbit from an old stump behind my house in Manistee County, tracked it down with her speed and quickness, and ate it with blood lust in her dark eyes. I figure it was that wild instinct that kept Ellie Mae alive for one week of fairly heavy April snows, and a second week of cold nightime temperatures. 

She tried to let people know she was in trouble. As she slowly made her way down a network of gullies to the Betsie River, about 1.5 miles from here, she howled. We learned that over the last two days. People heard her but figured it was a coyote. She didn’t quit, though. Two days ago she howled and someone heard.

As I write this, Ellie Mae is sleeping by my desk, just like she always does. When I get up, so will she. We’ll head upstairs. It’s a gift. Somehow Ellie Mae was guided to safety and then came back home. 

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of a select number of Republican leaders in the United States who makes any sense, turned up at the American Museum of Natural History on Sunday to deliver an Earth Day plan for his city that should be the basic text for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States. A full account of the 127 steps the mayor proposed is here. The big pieces are significantly improving and expanding the region’s rapid transit system, investing in open space and energy efficiency, reducing pollution, responding to global climate change, and making sure that the one million more New Yorkers expected over the next generation have good, affordable, accessbile housing.

A Mode Shift plan if ever there was one. It looks forward, understands the confluence of market, demographic, and environmental conditions that are changing the world and New York, and offers a cogent plan of action that is reasonable, affordable, and necessary. The plan builds on the decades of investments that New York made in its transit system, water infrastructure, parks, streets, housing, and schools to produce a place that is safer, more energetic, more lively than it was when I was growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s. 

The Bloomberg plan also bears remarkable similarity and consistency with the new economic development strategies already in place in California (the $37 Rebuild California program passed last November), Knoxville, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and many more American places. Sooner or later, and hopefully sooner, citizens will require presidential candidates to outline their plan for improving America’s competitiveness and quality of life. Mayor Bloomberg developed the cogent answer: “We need to increase open space, expand housing, deal with our congested roadways, create better mass transit options, increase our energy sources and stabilize our water supply or we simply won’t be able to continue the high quality of life we now enjoy.  If we act now, we’ll have a better future, a better quality of life, and more importantly, our children and their children will too.”

Meanwhile here in Michigan, we are teetering on the edge of fiscal collapse, losing our bright young college educated people, and are immobilized by leadership that looks backward instead of forward. There is no better recent example than the sparring that occurred last month over a resolution to respond to global climate change at the monthly meeting of the Grand Traverse County Board of Commissioners, leaders of the largest county in northern Michigan and the fifth fastest growing county in the state. A revealing account of the frighteningly and laughably ignorant oppostion to the resolution by three Republican commissioners was published in the Traverse City Record Eagle on Earth Day.

One commissioner, Margaret Underwood, said, “I believe the Sierra Club, along with Al Gore, President Carter and the United Nations are socialistic organizations that are trying to change the government of this country, and I am opposed to everything they support or try to (foist) on us to do. I cannot support this unproven theory of global warming.”

A second commissioner, Sonny Wheelock, piped up,”We know that the Earth was covered with layers and layers of ice in the past and it all melted away. I don’t believe that dinosaurs driving around in Mercedes (are) what caused the problem.”

The best, though, came from Commissioner Dick Thomas: “I think it would be happening if there were no people on Earth,” he said. ”They have recently discovered that the polar ice caps on Mars are shrinking. So what would cause that on both the Earth and Mars, that would be the sun, so we should e-mail the sun and tell it to cool down a little bit.”

A state’s reputation, its ability to generate good jobs, its brand is determined by the quality of its leaders. In New York, California, Washington state, Virginia, New Mexico, and Tennessee, leaders see energy efficiency, land conservation, pollution prevention, rapid transit investment, and natural resource conservation as part of a new economic development strategy as well as solutions to global climate change. In Michigan, leaders “email the sun.”

Since 1996, nine states in the American Midwest have been gradually inching forward on a proposal to establish a 3,000-mile high speed train network linking 100 of the region’s big and small cities. Chicago would serve as the hub of the The Midwest Regional Rail System. Spokes would include Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Columbus, Des Moines, and many other large cities served by trains capable of traveling 110 mph, which would make the travel time and ticket prices downtown to downtown more competitive than on an airplane.  In 2004, a feasibility study found that purchasing the 63 train sets needed to operate the system would cost $1.1 billion, and upgrading the existing tracks to accomodate high speed rail would cost a little more than $2 million a mile or $6.6 billion. The expense of building the system would be 80 percent federal and 20 percent

In essence, for the same cost as building less than 120 miles of new Interstate freeway, the Midwest could design, construct, and operate a 21st Century passenger rail network that would make the region’s transportation system competitive with that of western Europe. Moreover, the feasibility study predicted that the system would generate so much passenger traffic, over 10 million riders a year, that annual revenue by 2014 ($528 million) would exceed the operating and maintenance expense ($453 million). 

The Midwest Regional Rail System represents what is arguably the most economically, environmentally, technically, and culturally sound public investment under discussion in the nine–state region. But for more than a decade it’s been almost entirely just that, a discussion. No surprise. The barrier that prevents the idea from doing much more than creep forward is money. Neither the Federal Railroad Administration, nor any of the Midwest states have $700 million a year laying around for passenger rail in the Midwest. When it comes to big transportation investments, the region and the Federal government are still wedded to energy-wasting, environment-damaging, culturally dislocating highway construction. 

Proponents of the regional high speed rail network, particularly the departments of transportaton in Ohio and Wisconsin, are not giving up. This month, the Wisconsin DOT published a reader-friendly economic analysis that takes into account the systems’ Mode Shift benefits. The study by the Frederick, Maryland-based Transportation Economics Management Systems found the system would reduce energy use and global climate change emissions, conserve land, and improve the ability of cities to design new communities and job centers around train stops. The system would generate 15,000 jobs a year during the decade of construction, and produce more than 57,000 related permanent jobs in the region, said the study’s authors. The high-speed network also would add $22.2 biilion in new economic activity. Almost $5 billion of that figure comes from transit-oriented development around stations.  In other words, the Midwest Regional Rail System could produce a convenient, efficient, job-producing passenger rail network that replaces the slower and less robust Amtrak system, and prepares the country’s heartland to speed out of the 20th century. 

Judging from how Americans are flocking to trains, and developers are surrounding station stops with new transit-oriented housing and business construction, the Midwest is likely to be just as  eager to invite high speed rail into its midst. Texas is considering a high-speed rail system that would link San Antonio to Ft. Worth and Dallas, and Killeen and Temple to Houston.  Southern California is experiencing record ridership on its rail lines between Los Angeles and San Diego. The Boston to Washington corridor continues to attract ever larger numbers of riders.

Last month I was in Salt Lake City for the New York Times and found ample evidence of the market’s embrace of rail transportation and transit-focused development. More than $1 billion in new housing and retail development is planned or under construction around the Salt Lake Valle’s rail stops.  Salt Lake City and its closest suburbs in 1999 finished the $520 million, 19-mile, 23-station TRAX system, which carries more than 55,000 riders a day, well ahead of ridership projections. Voters have also repeatedly passed sales tax increases, including one approved last November, to spend $2.5 billion more in the next decade to complete 26 additional miles of light rail, 88 miles of heavy commuter rail line and nearly 40 extra station stops. The only American metropolitan area that is building more regional rapid transit capacity is Denver, which is constructing a 151-mile system.

Last year, Amtrak ridership reached a record 69,000 riders a day on 300 trains. The greatest growth rates occurred among the 23 short-distance routes where states contribute money to Amtrak and dictate routes. Of the 11 routes that saw the fastest increase in ridership, three were in the Midwest, including the Blue Water train that links Chicago to Michigan (10.9 percent increase), the Chicago to St. Louis train (8.3 percent) and the Hiawatha that ties Illinois to Wisconsin (10.5 percent).

Summed up: High speed passenger rail is a smart investment for this century. Every candidate running for statewide office, and every presidential candidate that campaigns in the delegate-rich Midwest ought to be asked their position on constructing a regional high speed rail network. The Midwest Regional Rail System, more than any highway, needs to be built.   

Perhaps not since the very first one 37 years ago has Earth Day attracted the credibility or the genuinely intense national and global focus that it has this year. Thousands of grassroots celebrations, including the annual march in downtown Traverse City today, are occurring this weekend. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a moderate Republican, introduced a green investment plan and policy strategy for transforming the nation’s largest metropolis into an even more transit-friendly, energy-efficient, environmentally-sensitive place to live and do business. In Dallas, people “danced for the planet.”  The covers of Outside, Vanity Fair, and dozens more national and regional magazines focused on Earth Day related personalities and issues. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, outdueled Arnold Schwarzenegger for the cover of Fortune’s green issue. Tom Friedman, the New York Time’s foreign affairs columnist, in a widely read Sunday Times Magazine cover piece all but placed a personal call to Al Gore to be the nation’s first “green president.” The U.N. Security Council this week, for the first time, formally assessed the consequences of global climate change to international security. As Larry the Cable Guy would say, “I can do this all day.”

What accounts for Earth Day’s flush of new energy? Here are three reasons among many. Global climate change is providing new evidence of the power of science, policy, and economics to help people recognize an urgent threat and seize on realistic and necessary solutions. Businesses and governments have plenty of irrefutable evidence that the new path to prosperity is closely tied to using natural resources, particularly energy, much more efficiently; pollution, it turns out, is the same thing as throwing away money. And the right wing attack on environmentalism and environmentalists has run its course. When a southern American city is drowned by a hurricane, the tundra is melting in Alaska, and a drought worsens conditions for agriculture on the Colorado Plateau it’s just plain silly, and enormously damaging politically, for the Republican leadership to be so lame on things green.

Here’s one more thought. Earth Day’s attractive maturity is tied to how the generation that brought it to life has gotten much more comfortable with its competing values. Earth Day, in effect, also is Boomer Day. It celebrates the essential conflict — the duel between self interest and the public interest – that has made the Baby Boom generation both mystifying and miraculous. Earth Day, and the ideas and practices that it represents, is the Baby Boom’s greatest contribution to our time because it’s truly us. The day reflects Baby Boomer’s  conviction that we can have it all if we just tweak and adjust and think much differently about how we integrate manmade and natural systems.  Now that it’s completely plain that the more sensitively we treat the earth the better off we’ll be in every aspect of our lives, Baby Boomers have the satisfaction of knowing that they were right. 

The first Earth Day, Wednesday, April 22, 1970, was a beautiful spring day across the United States. The event’s founder, Wisconsin’s Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson, and its coordinator, Harvard law student Denis Hayes, envisioned a national day of ”teach ins,” similar to those occurring on college campuses to rally support to end the Vietnam War. Senator Nelson, who died in 2005, said his “primary objective in planning Earth Day was to show the politial leadership of the nation that there was broad and deep support for the environmental movement.” Senator Nelson was amazed at how the country responded. Pete Seeger performed at the Washington Monument. Mayor John Lindsay banned cars on Fifth Avenue in New York to make room for demonstrations and events. Public speeches, parades, rallies, marches, sit-ins and teach-ins occurred in thousands of communities. Congress closed and political leaders went home to participate in local gatherings. The first Earth Day prompted legislatures in 42 states to pass resolutions commemorating the date, and 20 million Americans took part in Earth Day activities, the largest national demonstration in American history.

Earth Day certainly made its mark on me. I was a Highlands Junior High School eighth grader and had just turned 14 on April 22, 1970. The White Plains public schools in New York were closed to allow students to participate in dozens of activities around the city. I convinced Andy Feinman, the other half of what our kindergarten teacher affectionally referred to as the “gruesome twosome,” to come with me to paint the grimy walls of the White Plains train station and to help drag tires and other old stuff from out of the bushes and the nearby Bronx River.  Joe Lelyveld, who would later become the paper’s executive editor, reported on our work in a front page article the next day in the New York Times. “Students from Highlands Junior High School painted the city’s ramshackle train station and landscaped its grounds,” he wrote. 

Though we didn’t know it then, Earth Day came to represent my generation’s best and worst traits. I wanted to make my life matter, to engage in good work that helped people and made a difference. That’s the focus on the public interest that made Baby Boomers tolerable. But I also wanted something back: recognition, money, satisfaction, notoriety. That’s the focus on self involvement that drives our parents and children bananas. It turns out that we’re really an investment oriented bunch. We like to put energy into saving the world. But we also look for a personal return.

Earth Day, and environmentalism, is the perfect synthesis of those competing values. As a public school student I was interested in protecting forests in New England in large part because I liked to hike in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Maine’s Mahoosics. As a young freelance writer in the Deep South in the early 1980s, I reported on and ended the use of a Dow defoliant that was damaging the western North Carolina woods and the people who lived there. I also discovered an insatiable market in the mainstream media for investigative environmental stories that I rode into the Washington bureau of the New York Times. I got the job by nailing an interview with Bill Kovach and Howell Raines, the bureau chief and deputy, that occurred on Earth Day in 1985. Ten years later,on April 22, 1995, Earth Day’s 25th anniversary, I left the Times as a full-time correspondent to found the Michigan Land Use Institute, a statewide non-profit environmental research, advocacy, and communications organization that is now one of the largest state-based green groups in the country.

Yesterday while running in the Platte Plains section of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (see pix), this idea of Earth Day’s real meaning to the Baby Boom generation — weighing the public interest and self-interest – came to me.  The 71,000-acre national lakeshore, which was established six months after Earth Day, is where our region’s green forests, blue skies, and sable sand beaches meet Lake Michigan’s clear water.  A decade ago, when the Michigan Land Use Institute was brand new, we helped protect Sleeping Bear’s boundary from an ill-advised idea to swap private land for public land for a new golf course within the park’s boundaries. We made the case that allowing such a swap in one national park would compromise the legal principle — the authority of government to take private land for public purposes for perpetuity — that had established every national park since Yellowstone. My glorious run, alone with the trees and the spring peepers, on trails that dipped and rose over Sleeping Bear’s dunes and swales, was made possible in part because I’d played some small role in ensuring that the park’s boundaries were not compromised.

Every decade or so I celebrate Earth Day by doing something big.  This week I bought a brand new Mercury Mariner hybrid, which gets 30 miles per gallon. I drove it out to Sleeping Bear, about 10 miles away, comfortable in the knowledge that I was reducing emissions of global climate change gases, national security threats caused by dependence on foreign oil, and my own fuel bills. The car’s purchase, moreover, is made possible by the salary my environmental organization pays me, along with the fees my environmental freelance reporting generates. 

My friend Andy Feinman, who lives in Albany with his wife and two sons and is a stock analyst, called this week. We both celebrate birthdays around Earth Day. I told him I’d sold the Oldsmobile van that replaced the Oldsmobile Bravada that replaced the Ford Ranger that replaced the Ford Explorer that I used to drive. We talked about the high mileage, new technology, and the hybrid’s efficiency and reasonable price after discounts. ”It’s amazing,” he said. “You’re still driving American cars.”

“The Mercury is a good car,” I responded. “Besides, this is Michigan. Driving American is a good thing here.”

Summed up, my new green car serves several noble public interest goals, and a couple of satisfying self-interest needs, too. And there you have it, the essence of Earth Day as Boomer Day.

For longer than I care to recount Rush Limbaugh has been in my life. My work takes me on the road, as it’s done for three decades now, and sometime in the early 1990s I scanned the AM dial and happened on his show. He was an amusing host then; funny, well-informed, voluble, not nearly the sanctimonious blowhard, fabricating tool of the radical establishment right that he’s become. Rush attracted so many listeners to his noon to 3. p.m. show that his fans gathered in “Rush hour” lunches around the country. It was pretty plain that he was important. In 1993, on the same day that the World Trade Centers were bombed the first time, I was among a group of New York Times national correspondents who’d gathered at the upper West Side Manhattan townhouse of our national editor, Soma Golden Behr. We were talking about the increasingly aggressive and rightward shift we were seeing around the country — property rights everywhere, Sagebrush rebellion  in the West, the re-emergence of the Klan in the South, the skinheads in Detroit. I’ll never forget Peter Applebome, who was the Atlanta Bureau Chief, noting the emergence of “this guy” Rush Limbaugh who’d attracted quite a following in the South. Other correspondents chimed in that they’d been listening in their territories too.

I listen to Rush much less frequently now, not because I’m uninterested in keeping track of influential views from across the ideological spectrum, but because he’s so irritating, particularly when he talks about the environment. Rush deliberately misleads, misinforms, denies the facts, and legitimizes the specious. In Rush’s world global warming is a farce made up by Al Gore and his ilk. Environmentalists are wacko tofu-eating elitists. ”Sound science” is whatever the White House says it is.  

The danger, of course, is that Rush’s credibility with millions of Americans is still too high. He’s an enabler for delaying action on global climate change, energy independence, and environmental stewardship.  And while the tide of history is inexorably pushing the United States to a new, greener, cleaner, more energy-efficient era, Rush and his alliance of radio wing nuts and the political leaders they support are holding back intellectual and technological transformations that will make this nation a much better place.

James Wolcott covers some of this same ground in a new piece in the green issue of Vanity Fair this month. The money section:

“For us non-dittoheads (that is, the unconverted), a more fitting memorial to Mount Rushbo might be a diorama of the environmental destruction that he did so much to enable in his multi-decade reign of denigration. Global warming’s most popular denialist, talk radio’s most imitated showman, conservatism’s minister of disinformation, he has injected millions of semi-vacant American skulls with a cream filling of complacency that has helped thrust this country into the forefront of backward leadership. He has given Republican lawmakers the rhetorical cover fire to do nothing but snicker as the crisis emerged and impressed itself on the rest of the world. He conscripted concern for nature as just another weapon in the Culture Wars. May the grasses of his favorite golf courses go forever yellow and dust storms whip from the sand traps.”

Rush, though, is in trouble. Radio was the communications platform that fostered the radical right’s agenda across America. The Internet is the platform that is gradually weakening that agenda’s foundation. Media Matters for America, which closely tracks the tone, civility, and accuracy of political conversation on television and radio, has built much of its reputation on documenting Rush Limbaugh’s factual inaccuracies. The Web site has revealed Rush, who prides himself on his ability to conduct intelligent conversation across a wide spectrum of issues, to be nothing more than a fabricator on matters of science and the environment. For a radio host whose reputation is built on ideology and expertise, such persistent reporting is enormously damaging.

[youtube]1YyjrhvmDM8&mode=related&search=[/youtube]

As a communications strategist, I often tell policy groups that they’re making a difference when their opponents start to whine, call them names, and otherwise divert from their core message.  Rush’s audience is diminishing, according to broadcast audience tracking companies. And Rush is responding with unprovide attacks on his critics in way that illustrates weakness not strength. Media Matters reported the latest outburst yesterday.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen how broadcast words have consequences for those they’re aimed at, and for those who did the aiming. The heap of shattered conservative pundit careers is growing. Ann Coulter last summer said the widows of men killed on 9/11  were “reveling in their status as celebrities,” and early last month called presidential candidate John Edwards a “faggot.” Both comments were recorded on video tape, rocketed across various Web sites, were rebroadcast on national television. Ann Coulter is done as a credible voice. She’s become a sideshow.

 Don Imus’ racist and sexist remark about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team was seen as out of bounds. He’s gone. 

Rush is cagier, but he’s slipping. 

A final thought: One of the intriguing elements in the narrative of all of these people is how some of my liberal media friends say ‘free speech’ is diminished when ideologues suffer for their remarks. Frankly, that’s nonsense. Nobody denied Coulter or Imus or Rush or any other broadcast personality the right to speak. The public just insisted that facts and authenticity and some measure of truth underly what they said. The public also expressed its right to say, “Enough.”

Jim Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere and wielder of one of the sharper editorial knives in the country, takes slices out of Tom Friedman’s Sunday New York Times Magazine article on the global green movement in an essay that published on his site at kunstler.com and picked up by Alternet.org. 

The money passage:

“Friedman goes on to tout Wal-Mart’s mendacious campaign to “green” up its operations by, among other things, improving the mileage of its truck fleet from 6-mpg to 12-mpg. He writes:

 Take Wal-Mart. The world’s biggest retailer woke up several years ago, its CEO Lee Scott told me, and realized with regard to the environment its customers “had higher expectations for us than we had for ourselves.” So Scott hired a sustainability expert, Jib Ellison, to tutor his company. The first lesson Ellison preached was that going green was a whole new way for Wal-Mart to cut costs and drive its profits.

  ”I’ve been to dozens of permitting battles over Wal-Mart in the planning boards of America, writing on suburban sprawl, and I can assure you that the the pro Wal-Mart factions in these fights uniformly couldn’t give a f… about anything except saving five bucks on a plastic salad shooter (“we want bargain shopping!!!”). Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are precisely the members of the American public who sold their own local economies down the river, who led their towns into destitution, and who believe with all their hearts that it is possible to get something for nothing (which is why this large cohort of citizens spends so much of its meager income on lottery tickets, trips to Las Vegas, and gets suckered into ruinous “miracle” mortgages).