Modeshift

Tom Friedman, the New York Times’ great foreign affairs columnist and a former colleague of mine wrote this in a must read Sunday Magazine article yesterday: “After World War II, President Eisenhower responded to the threat of Communism and the “red menace” with massive spending on an interstate highway system to tie America together, in large part so that we could better move weapons in the event of a war with the Soviets. That highway system, though, helped to enshrine America’s car culture (atrophying our railroads) and to lock in suburban sprawl and low-density housing, which all combined to get America addicted to cheap fossil fuels, particularly oil. Many in the world followed our model.

Today, we are paying the accumulated economic, geopolitical and climate prices for that kind of America. I am not proposing that we radically alter our lifestyles. We are who we are — including a car culture. But if we want to continue to be who we are, enjoy the benefits and be able to pass them on to our children, we do need to fuel our future in a cleaner, greener way. Eisenhower rallied us with the red menace. The next president will have to rally us with a green patriotism. Hence my motto: “Green is the new red, white and blue.””

Nobody is capable of putting a smarter geopolitical frame on issues than Tom. It’s been satisfying to see how he discovered, dug in, and joined the global green movement over the last several years. When I worked in Washington with him in the 1980s and early 1990s, where I served as a national correspondent and one of the  Times’ environmental policy specialists, he sniffed at things green. The environment was interesting but not the province of writers seriously interested in advancing the world’s interests. That assessment came in spite of the persistently grim reporting in the Times and elsewhere about the consequence of global climate change, population growth, deforestation, fresh water scarcity, diminishing fisheries, desertification, and other man-made calamities enveloping planet earth. Those of us reporting on the findings of the scientists, non-profit research organizations, advocates, and communities affected knew that eventually the environment would be the story of our age. And we knew that would occur when deteriorating global conditions produced economic malfunctions that affected international relationships and trade. That’s where Tom picked up the green story a few years ago. 

In a way Tom has attained some of the same stature as Walter Cronkite during the Vietnam War. When Walter broadcast his doubts about America’s ability to win in Vietnam the nation knew it was over. When Tom Friedman calls for a “New Green Deal” in the United States, that is the can do American centrist left talking, the very same segment of the ideological spectrum that is almost certain to win the White House in 2008. And when he calls for a “green president,” that’s the cell phone vibrating in Al Gore’s pocket.    

It’s the nutty season here in the first weeks of spring. The purebred chicken scratch hill billy hound dog puppy that I picked up off the highway in southern Virginia almost 18 years ago decided she’d had enough and wandered off two days ago and vanished. It’s been snowing here in Michigan’s great white north for more than a week. Over the weekend I shoveled nine inches of snow off the deck and driveway and it’s colder than it was in January when my daughter and I, both of us wearing shorts and long tees, ran in the forests near the Betsie River. 

And now gas prices are $2.86 a gallon and rising. In northern Michigan, like almost every other rural area, we feel that price right away. Wages are stagnant here. The cost of living is rising. Thousands of people drive long distances to work, sacrificing their time in exchange for living in a home they can afford. Our public transit agency is doing a better job, and soon we’ll have an express bus from my home in Benzonia to Traverse City. But most people drive to their jobs, often 50 to 80 miles round trip. When you’re making $80 a day after taxes – a pretty typical wage here — and fuel costs $10 a day, the price of gas is an issue.

When gas gets this high it gets a lot easier to make the case that we need to think more clearly about community design and the much different energy era we’ve entered. Kurt Vonnegut, the writer and humorist who died yesterday at age 84, once summed the problem us this way.  “We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.”

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Those of you in other states who’d like a short primer in the cruel consequences of failing to face up to the future need only look at Michigan. Its budget is $1 billion in the red and getting worse. Only Mississippi had a higher unemployment rate in February. Mortage foreclosures top the nation. The Republican legislature last year eliminated a $2 billion business tax and are now intent on draining more money from public education and the state’s universities. The Democratic governor, despite one of the largest election margins ever for a Democrat in a statewide race, seems helpless in pushing for a new direction. The auto-dependent economy, land gobbling patterns of development, and way of life here in the Motor State are  obsolete. Yet one of the clearest messages out of Lansing is offered by the road lobby, which argues that the best way out of the mess is more of the same: Raising gas taxes to build new roads. This in a state that has a public transportation system so poor that it takes 10 hours to get from Ann Arbor to Traverse City — a 250-mile, four-hour car ride. Michigan ranks 49th out of 50 in its ability to retain educated young people, and is among the slowest growing states.  

Fortunately, all states aren’t as inept. The good Mormons of Utah, for instance, embraced sound land use planning and efficient community design long before they landed on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in the mid-19th century. The 21st century metropolis at the foot of the Wasatch Front that they are now developing is being stitched together by energy-efficient, cost-effective, gas-saving light rail and heavy commuter rail lines. Last November voters approved a measure to raise their sales taxes to accelerate construction of four new lines, a total of 26 miles, to add to the existing 19-mile light rail system. Next spring, the Utah Transit Authority opens a nine-station, 44-mile heavy commuter line running north from Salt Lake City. And 44 more miles running south could open as soon as 2014.

 The land around the existing 23 transit stations, and the coming nine new ones, are becoming magnets for new housing, business and retail developments that are reachable by train, car, bike, and on foot. The new residents of the planned development at the Farmington station, for instance, won’t be nearly as worried about the price of gas regardless of how high it rises. They can use the train to get to work in Salt Lake City 13 miles away, and operate a single vehicle instead of a fleet, the way we need to do in northern Michigan. 

Many families here, including mine, spend more on vehicles, fuel, insurance, and maintenance than they do on any other monthly expense, exceeding the cost of housing. 

It’s not going to get easier. The sharp rise in gas prices over the last two weeks comes amid news that oil production in the  Cantarell field in Mexico, the world’s second largest by output, is falling dramatically. According to Supply Chain Digest, one of the Internet sites I pay attention to on this issue, the Cantarell field has seen its daily production rates drop by 20 percent over the last year, what Supply Chain says is “an incredibly rapid decline. It is now producing about 1.6 million barrels per day, down from two million a year ago.”

“Pemex, Mexico’s national oil company, is applying some new technology to the field, and hopes to stem the slide in barrels per day as a result. Even so, production from Cantarell will decline to 600,000 barrels per day by 2013,” said Supply Chain.

The Wall Street Journal also reported last week that: “Two decades ago, about a dozen fields produced more than a million barrels a day. Now there are only four, one of which is Cantarell. The future of two others, discovered more than 50 years ago, remains in question.”

Michigan is desperately far behind in the work to prepare for the era of $4 a gallon and $5 a gallon gas, which is imminent. Look at California, where Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Sacramento all boast good rapid transit systems that were built over the last generation. The state’s cities are growing more dense and more compact, even Los Angeles, which by various measures is the most densely developed city in the country. The state, by the way, achieved new patterns of development and a healthy economy.

A last thought. Residents and state officials in car-happy California recognize that there is waning civic energy for more damaging highways. Neither California nor any other state can afford to build its way out of congestion. There aren’t a whole lot of people left who think more highways, more parking lots, more cars, more sprawl is a good thing to do. There is much more popular support for repairing existing roads and building more compact, environmentally-sensitive, walkable places to live. And people want to build rail transportation that is fast, convenient, affordable, and much cheaper than driving. 

Last November California voters overwhelmingly approved more than $30 billion in new state spending to achieve that vision. The Rebuild California plan calls for $12.25 billion to repair and modernize highways, not build new ones, and $4 billion for light rail, commuter rail, and bus improvements. Talk about investing in the future.

In Michigan, we’re cutting school spending, freezing state grants, laying off state troopers, and thinking about more highway construction. We’re also sliding fast into backwater status.  

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In May 2004 when writer David Brock launched Media Matters For America, the Web site that specializes in documenting the lies and other distasteful discourse that permeates talk radio and TV, I paid immediate attention. 

Mediamatters.org went up near the top of my favorites list for a couple of reasons. The reporting was entirely new and airtight — the Web site made very good use of on-air clips and transcripts. The frame was values driven and righteous. Brock and his staff served to answer the question a lot of us had been asking of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and the boneheads at CNN talk shows for years. Did you hear that? Can he really say that?

Just as significantly, MediaMatters represented the blossoming of the new Internet-based media that was asking different questions, reporting angles never considered by the mainstream media, and doing it on a new global medium accessible to thousands of readers. Rush Limbaugh’s career has been slipping ever since MediaMatters began keeping a daily log of his hateful, error-filled enabling of the radical right.  And with the development of broadband and video file sharing sites, Media Matters has become the central watchdog of the cable news and television talk show discourse, too. 

This week MediaMatters displayed, more emphatically than ever before, just how significant a force it and the Internet media have become. And conversely, why the mainstream media’s role is gradually waning as a source of original reporting and taking on the role as amalgamator and synthesizer.

MediaMatters, which attracts about 120,000 visitors a day, was the first to report Don Imus’ racist attack on the Rutgers women’s basketball team, which reached and lost the national championship game last week. Had there been no MediaMatters it’s almost certain Imus’ act of career suicide — he called the team of mostly African American players “nappy headed hos” – would have gone unaddressed. Imus’ many friends include a host of white bigfoot magazine, newspaper, radio, and television journalists and broadcasters who regularly appear on his nationally broadcast show. They  didn’t think the attack was a big deal. Some of them — Howard Fineman, Tom Oliphant, Mike Lupica  – raced to Imus’ defense in the days after MediaMatters’ reporting began to generate the national storm that is ending his career. Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, displaying more evidence that he’s lost his political pitch, said Imus deserved a second chance. 

After all, several of the major figures in the story had issues of their own. Brock himself was once a media hitman for the radical right, writing vile pieces for the American Spectator about Anita Hill and Bill Clinton before recanting and veering left. Al Sharpton, who called for Imus’ removal, once championed a young black girl, Tawana Brawley, who made up from whole cloth a story of how she’d been attacked by whites and smeared with feces. Jesse Jackson, who’s been calling for more civil discourse on rap records and the like, referred to New York during his 1984 presidential campaign as “Hymietown.”

The authenticity of MediaMatters’ reporting on the Imus remark and its aftermath kept the story in a firm path. MediaMatters compiled the clips, transcripts, video files, and commentary — all available with a mouse click — that gave the running story new content, pace and context. That made it much simpler for readers to draw conclusions, bloggers to make assessment, and for mainstream journalists to stay abreast of events. Rarely has a single news desk so completely owned a major national political and cultural news event.

The real value of what MediaMatters did, of course, is open new ground in the ongoing epic of race, class, and equity in America. The saga had a main character — a media humpty — who made a hateful remark that is causing him to publicly break into a dozen pieces. Last night MSNBC removed him permanently from its airwave. CBS Radio, which broadcasts the radio show, is sure to follow. Imus’ brand is so grievously injured that the car, soap, food, media, and travel companies that supported his show aren’t going to threaten their brands.    

This blog, Mode Shift, is intently interested because race touches everything, particularly where we choose to live. Anything that can lead to understanding helps. In Michigan, the most segregated state in the country, we are especially mindful. The sprawling patterns of development that emptied Michigan’s cities and prompted suburbs to consume land at a pace four to eight times faster than population growth, were largely caused and are still the result of racial distrust. 

The inability of southeast Michigan to develop a regional rapid transit system is defined by public officials as solely a matter of money. But those of us who’ve worked hard to dig out the facts and talk about the problem know that at the very core, the lack of a rapid transit system is because of discomfort – I use the word carefully — the mostly white suburbs and the mostly black cities have about linking to each other. 

Michigan residents last year approved a measure making affirmative action illegal. For decades our legislature has systematically skewed its public investments for roads, sewers and other infrastructure toward the suburbs, and away from the cities. Michigan’s many barriers to achieving a more competitive economy and ending its obsolete political and business operating systems is tied to the state’s commitment to division instead of collaboration and cooperation.

MediaMatters played a role in the Imus affair that not nearly enough mainstream media are pursuing.  It broke a big cultural and economic story, served as a forum for discussion, fed the conversation with new facts, context, and Internet links. By the strength of its original reporting, MediaMatters also pushed the conversation about race a few steps forward and served the public interest. Nice job. 

KNOXVILLE – From his office on the fifth floor of the Knoxville City County building, Dave Hill looks across the Tennessee River to 350 acres and more than two miles of riverfront. None of it is enchanting. Yet all of it essential to this mid-size southern city’s plan to be a green, clean, energy efficient, and lovely statement about America’s capacity to build the century’s new world class urban centers.

As my Manhattan mother might say: “Knoxville? Where’s  Knoxville?”

But that’s just the point. It’s the Knoxvilles of America that are as crucial to determining the design of the nation’s urban form as are the Chicagos and New Yorks and Seattles. And this city, the home to the University of Tennessee, the center of a five-country metropolitan region of 670,000 people, and growing 13 percent a decade, has some very ambitious, even outsize plans. It wants to transform the “south waterfront” along the river into a new district of homes, businesses, parks, walkways, and a new UT satellite campus connected to the main campus across a handsome foot bridge. 

Knoxville, though, is far from the only mid-American regional city thinking about transformative investments of real magnitude. And in each of these cities the focus is on walkability, energy efficiency, access, environmental quality, healthy living, parks and open space; the ecological, cultural, and economic assets that serve as the feedstock for urban vitality. 

Twenty acres at the center of Salt Lake City are being torn out and rebuilt as the City Creek Center by the Church of the Latter Day Saints. The new development will promote downtown living, shopping, access to recreation and modern office buildings, all of it bissected by the city’s TRAX light rail line.  

Boston is building the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway above the buried highways of the Big Dig, and in the process is transforming a very old New England city into an even more modern metropolis that people are rushing to invest in for housing and businesses.

Tulsa is proposing The Channels, a high rise district (see pix) perched along the existing city and in the flow of the Arkansas River. The new district, proposed by a local foundation last September, is “designed to propel the region past its competitors’, by promoting healthy lifestyles. I first read about it on a fine blog, Brand Avenue.

Think about it. In my lifetime, the central premise of making American cities better has completely changed. As a kid I watched our city leaders, emboldened by federal dollars, tear down the oldest, most historic, most walkable, most urban parts of White Plains, New York. For much of my childhood, the leveled area remained a lifeless plain of empty lots. It’s since been replaced by a windowless mall where shoppers have been grievously injured in senseless crimes, and block after block of completely ordinary square office buildings so distanced from each other that walking is impractical.

The plans that Knoxville, Tulsa, Boston, and Salt Lake City are busy executing speak to different values and a modern operating system that thinks about what really makes people comfortable. And that includes building clean and green, but in a way that cultivates architectural excitement and spatial intimacy. These cities are putting the civic equipment so essential to great cities — especially homes and offices and shops — closer together, not farther apart as they did 40 years ago.  

Historically, the south waterfront in Knoxville was where the city put heavy industry, oil depots, and working folks who lived in neighborhoods tucked in between what are now acres of land cleared of their old warehouses and factories. Knoxville’s no-nonsense Republican mayor Bill Haslam saw the area differently and asked Hill, a planner and public administrator to head up the south waterfront planning project. Several years later, with the help of Portland scenario planner John Fregonese, the Knoxville South Waterfront is envisioned as a place of Vancouver quality urbanity, complete with narrower streets, compact neighborhoods, pocket parks, space for business and retail that is reachable on walkable paths including one that hugs the shoreline, much like Portland’s walkways along the Williamette River. 

So far several condomimiums have been built and the city is negotiating to move some of the industrial businesses, including propane and oil depots. There’s one more value that Knoxville and the other cities have embraced. Patience.  Hill says that completing the South Waterfront will take at least 10 years and perhaps a generation. That’s good, he told me. Cities take time to build right. 

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The work to make the nation’s metropolitan regions greener, cleaner, and more energy efficient is too often impeded by the overly earnest language of the movement. Sustainlane.com is trying to break through the wall of techno-legal-political speak with its Unsustainables, an animated series broadcast on the Internet. 

According to the Sustainlane.com’s editors, the Unsustainables “depicts the lives of a blended family in a modern urban environment. Each segment centers around our characters who, like many of us, stumble towards the future in an attempt to live green. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they don’t.”

The programming is a useful new venture, especially in visually explaining to kids what’s up with the choices they face. 

If you’re interested in what happens beyond the borders of the United States, then you also know that an awful lot of what’s reported as foreign news is distilled through the filter of government to government action, diplomat to diplomat negotiation. 

A different kind of communication is now available on the Internet, which fills that huge space between the conversation among international elites and the conversation occurring at the grassroots. Few Web sites are doing that as well as GlobalVoices online.org, which has secured an international network of young bloggers to report on ground level events. Some of the bloggers are so good that national governments have imprisoned them.

I note the existence of GlobalVoicesonline because the American Mode Shift is predicated on this country’s capacity to be much better at getting along with our global neighbors. This is a century in which we’re gradually learning how to do more with much less, and in the process also realizing we can lead richer lives that give us more time, more freedom, more rights, more opportunities. Much of the improvement will come with redesigning cities to be more ecologically sensitive, energy efficient, architecturally welcoming places to live.

But we won’t be able to achieve that more worthwhile future as long as the United States continues to give much the world the back of its hand. In the 2oth century we lived so profligately that we had to reach into every corner of the globe to grab the natural resources what George Bush I famously defined before the first Gulf War as our “American way of life.” The world is pushing back, outcompeting us in labor markets, innovation, and sustainability.

Europeans, for instance, enjoy more vacation, more time with their families, a higher standard of living, and use half as much energy as Americans do. The French just unleashed a new intercity train (see pix)that can go 3oo miles per hour, is quicker city to city than a jet, and uses much less energy. Indian computer and software engineers are returning to their home country because entrepreneurial opportunities are greater there than here. 

GlobalVoicesonline’s network of citizen journalists is dedicated to broadening cultural understanding and improving global journalism. It was developed by Ethan Zuckerman, an activist and researcher focused on information technology and information development, who is based at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His online project, which he founded with a Berkman Center colleague, Rebecca MacKinnon, features stories from over 100 nations and is visited by 200,000 readers a month. Zuckerman also is a contributor and board member of Worldchanging.com, a Seattle-based global news portal. In 2002, Technology Review Magazine awarded Zuckerman the Technology in the Service of Humanity Award. In 2003, Fortune Magazine named him as one of the top 10 innovators under the age of 40. The World Economic Forum named him a Global Leader for Tomorrow in 2003 and a Young Global Leader in 2005.

 It was only a matter of time before global warming would become an organizing principle in the United States. Even for the conservative U.S. Supreme Court. It’s all come in a rush.

This week, in a 5-4 decision, the High Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority and duty to regulate climate change gases produced by automobiles. The suit, brought in June 2003 by Massachusetts and 12 other states, asked the nine justices to tell the EPA that it has jurisdiction over emissions of carbon dioxide from vehicles. The court decision is a critical step in the states’ ultimate goal: compelling the agency to require reductions of vehicular emissions.  Michigan’s Democratic Governor, Jennifer M. Granholm, studiously avoided taking sides in the case, which should profoundly affect the state’s automakers, their employees and suppliers, and the communities where they are located. Roughly 27 percent of the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions come from vehicles, according to the federal government’s Energy Information Center, and more than 60 percent of those vehicles are made by Michigan-based manufacturers.

The Supreme Court, though, was not alone among elite organizations expressing its concern for the earth’s warming climate. Governors are establishing special commissions to probe the consequences for their states. The United Nations announced today that the Security Council would convene a panel to study how global climate change would affect the poorest nations. Presidential candidates are talking about climate change, though several of the most prominent — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain — also express support for “clean” coal technology.

Also comes word today from Capitol Hill that John Kerry and Newt Gingrich will debate climate change next week in New York. Says The Hill, the weekly Congressional newspaper, quoting Gingrich: ”America should focus its energy policy in four areas,” Gingrich writes on his website. “Basic research for a new energy system, incentives for conservation, more renewable resources, and environmentally sound development of fossil fuels. The lengthy process of environmental planning must be made more efficient and cost effective.” Imagine, global climate change as the foundation of political theater. Remarkable.  

Climate change is the product of industrialization gone awry. It represents obsolescence in every facet of modern life, including that we designed our spread out cities to use more fossil fuels to reach our over heated and air conditioned outsize homes and office buildings. Solving climate change means updating all of the features of our existence. The technology and practices to reduce emissions of global warming gases will produce communities that rely on energy-efficient transit, promote more compact neighborhoods, build parks and conserve natural resources, construct eco-sensitive office building with heat absorbing green roofs, plant trees instead of rip them up, and make it possible to live with one car instead of a fleet. Though our friends at the Reason Foundation couldn’t fathom it, this will make our lives better.

And here in Michigan, forcing car makers to manufacture cleaner, much more energy efficient vehicles will do more to push the American auto industry into the modern era than anything done over the last two decades in the front offices of the Big 3.

For as long as I’ve been involved in understanding the dimensions of urban disinvestment, as well as the solutions, one more civic concern has always lurked in the shadows. That’s gentrification, the process by which wealthier people interested in moving back into a city use buying power and sway to push the poor out of their homes.

As a journalist, public policy specialist, and citizen of America I’ve personally experienced almost every side of this issue. I was raised in a New York City suburb during New York’s worst post-war period, the decades of the 1970s and 1980s when disinvestment, decline, crime, and deterioration chased the middle class and their employers to the suburbs and to other states. In 1980, New York City was home to 7.1 million people, 810,000 less than in 1970. That, of course, left room for the less fortunate, including some of my artistic friends, to find affordable housing in Manhattan.

A generation later, after massive investment in New York’s police and infrastructure — roads, bridges, rail, parks, water, schools — Manhattan and New York’s other borough became hot places to live again. It helped that Wall Street also boomed in the 1990s. The wealthy and middle class moved back in, increasing competition for housing. New York responded by building more places to live, which made it possible for the rich and the less rich to live in the city. New York City’s population, 8.14 million in 2005, grew 14 percent in a generation.

For a time in the mid-1980s I lived in Manhattan. I’ve also lived in Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Sacramento, and Charleston, S.C. Frankly, the fact that cities are becoming great places to live is a singular achievement made possible by effective business and governing strategies that improved basic civic equipment and services. States that have big exciting cities are prospering. States that don’t, like Michigan, end up sending their best young people to the states that do. In the contest between slums and decent housing, I’ll take the good housing and safe neighborhoods any time.

In the last 15 years the Smart Growth and New Urbanist movements have been at the head of the pack in developing even more refined steps to make American cities more environmentally sensitive, energy efficient, and architecturally beautiful. You’d expect their work to be hailed as evidence of the nation’s ability to find solutions to real problems. Yet even as cities improve, a persistent chorus of critics find in Smart Growth and New Urbanism seeds of inequity. They blame the two movements for promoting economic development that favors the wealthy over the poor, and displaces people from their urban homes.

A good exploration of this critique is Holly Pearson’s new piece on gentrification for WorldChanging.com, which was just voted by Planetizen.com as one of the 10 best Web sites for land use planning and design. “Even if new development patterns bring about positive physical changes to an urban landscape, like better access to public transportation and greater energy efficiency, if factors like ethnic diversity and affordability are sacrificed, then has sustainability really been achieved?” asks Pearson.

San Francisco, it turns out, is solving the issue with some adept public policy designed to leverage the economic gains provided by the wealthy to encourage more investment in affordable housing. Very schmart. It’s one approach to making sure that cities of the future are capable of welcoming all kinds of people. And if they do, it’s possible to slow the ever outward movement of America’s built environment, which is how this nation will conserve land, fuel, resources, and the sense of neighborhood security that will keep this nation a decent place to be.

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If you’ve followed what’s going on here in Michigan you know that we continue to lead the nation in too many categories that aren’t welcome — joblessness, rates of obesity and heart disease, income gap between wealthy and poor, racial segregation, home foreclosures. And we are at the bottom of the heap in categories that define well-being – income growth, business starts, educational achievement, the quality of our big cities, state fiscal health.

There are many reasons why Michigan has slid so far from its stature as an economic powerhouse capable of generating the good life for so many people for decades. The short answer is that our autocentric manufacturing economy, and hierarchical way of making decisions, is obsolete. Moreover, our comfort with Michigan’s divisions – political, racial, religious, class, and geographic — is preventing our ability to decide what to do in a century defined by collaboration.

But as I’ve discovered in so many other places, when you toss aside all the pretense and posturing, break down all the bluster and nonsense that keep us apart, you find that people do share values and principles. That common ground is, in fact, the very ground that lies beneath their feet, the ground that supports their neighborhoods, their schools, their businesses, their children, and themselves. The land, and the communities and culture that have grown up around our places, is what unites people. 

Last week I was in Knoxville, speaking at a large Quality Growth conference attended by 700 people. The people I met said they were very concerned that record levels of business, housing, and infrastructure investment produced by a new wave of population growth will ruin what is known as the East Tennessee experience. It’s a mix of mountain geography and culture, the hard woods and green pastures, the poverty and independence that fostered a way of life firmly based in family, freedom, hard work, and forbearance.

In February I was in Salt Lake City, which also is growing fast. There people have gathered around the idea that record rates of population growth threatens a high desert religious way of life that treated mountain vistas and great expanses of rangeland as precious gifts of God. The residents of the Wasatch Front, some of the most conservative and independent people in America — it’s Utah after all – nevertheless have reached agreement on an extraordinarily progressive course of action. They are taxing themselves to build light and heavy commuter rail lines, protect farmland and open space, promote energy efficiency, and build new communities around transit stations and stops. They also have convinced the very same Republican government they sent to Washington to quit toying with protections for the gorgeous and job-producing federal wilderness that lies at their doorstep.  

Here in Michigan, people also come together around our shared natural heritage. This state pioneered many of the environmental protection measures that became national policy. We were the first to outlaw DDT, the first state to establish protections for wetlands and natural rivers, fresh water dunes and inland lakes and streams. Michigan has the largest state-owned public domain east of the Mississippi, more than 4 million acres. And Michigan brokered a deal with the energy industry in 1980 that allowed for drilling on state lands in exchange for investing royalties in a state-managed account, the Natural Resources Trust Fund. The Trust Fund has paid for permanently preserving tens of thousands of acres of wild land and open space in Michigan, including more than 6,000 acres of coastal Lake Michigan dunes and forest in Benzie County, where I live.

Michigan’s geography has always been its economy. Only today it’s not about chopping down 17 million acres of old growth, as Michigan did 110 years ago. It’s about conservation and intelligent investment in resource-based industries. Michigan’s development strategy, still heavily dependent on jobs we can’t keep in a global economy, needs to be based much more firmly in its natural heritage. One state agency, Travel Michigan, seems to truly recognize that fact. Last year, Travel Michigan worked with McCann Erickson, the big Birmingham advertising agency, to produce a series of video spots, narrated by Tim Allen, that every Michigan resident ought to see. 

Melinda Remer, the agency’s marketing director who helped to conceive the project, told me today that the first three videos, which focus on Michigan’s natural and cultural assets, were released in May 2006 and cost $36,000 to produce, and were part of a $7.5 million multi-year marketing campaign. Over the summer they helped to attract more than 1 million visitors a month to Travel Michigan’s Web site. Two more videos, one of which will explore Michigan’s cities, are due to be released next month.   

Check all three out. They just make you want to tap every Lansing lawmaker on the shoulder. See. Quit your political gamesmanship. Stop spending money on what doesn’t work. The land, the water, our forests, Michigan’s great institutions, our towns, our schools, our neighbors. That’s what matters. That’s why we love Michigan.  

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Metrophile is an interesting offering on Wired’s blog network. It covers trends and fashion and art, the urban snackage that makes living in the metropolitan space a more inviting existence for growing numbers of Americans, young and retired. 

The International Herald Tribune launched its Business of Green blog last month, and it’s alreadys one of the savviest forums for global business and environmental trends on the Internet. The New York Times carries the blog on the page it’s hidden deep in the bowels of NYTimes.com that feature some of the best reporting on the site.  

Metropolis Magazine, a national monthly published in New York, has consistently been one of the most perceptive places to read about metropolitan design trends.  Metropolis editors have always been interested in the relationship between urban culture, politics, governing, and design. The book’s reporting covers architecture, interior design, product design, graphic design, crafts, planning, and preservation. I visited late last year with Martin Pedersen, the executive editor, in the magazine’s crowded hive of a fourth floor office on w. 23rd Street and found him personable, approachable, and very sharp.

I’ll be writing a piece for Metropolis later this year out of St. Louis that describes how four convening organizations shaped the landscape, economy, and quality of life there.  The region’s light rail system, historic neighborhood development, park expansion and repair, and recreational trail network became realities in large part because of the role convening organizations played in encouraging unlikely allies to work together.

Another place to follow urban design and social trends is Dwell Magazine. The magazine’s Web site has gotten much more accessible in recent months, as has its archive. Robert Sullivan, a regular Dwell contributor, visited us in Michigan last year to report on progress we’re making to help the state’s cities be  better places to live.  A link to the article is under Articles and Appearances on the right sidebar to this page.