Modeshift

If you’ve had the chance to visit America’s big cities, you’ve no doubt noticed that almost without exception they’re pretty terrific places to be these days. The revival of America’s big city downtowns and neighborhoods, the development that’s occurring in the inner ring suburbs, all portend something very useful to the nation’s well being in this century. The prosperity that’s occurred in American cities represents one of the great achievements in the United States in the last decade.

Today, the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program launches a multi-year initiative, the Blueprint for American Prosperity, that urges candidates in the 2008 presidential election to not only take note of how American cities secured their well-being, but also that the nation would do well to mimic those steps. Making places better involved protecting natural resources, investing in transit and other infrastructure, promoting housing, curbing sprawl, securing institutions like museums and universities, improving public safety, conserving open spaces. It also involved welcoming and providing opportunities for young entrepreneurs, and prompting civic excitement. 

“The assets that matter in today’s global and knowledge economy are innovation, infrastructure, human capital, and quality places,” according to the Blueprint’s developers. And what’s good for cities is great for the country. “The top 100 metros take up just 12 percent of our land mass but make up 74 percent of our college graduates, originate over 80 percent of all patenting, and therefore generate 75 percent of the nation’s GDP,” said Amy Liu, the deputy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program. 

The initiative’s launch marks the 10th-year of the Metropolitan Policy Program, one of the great idea laboratories in urban affairs. The director is Bruce Katz, a former Clinton Administration housing official and the winner of the Heinz Award for Public Policy.

Whether presidential candidates take note of the Blueprint is far from certain. They should.

Among the important helpings in the data feast that Mr. Katz’s crew fed to reporters today was this chart outlining how critical metropolitan health is to every state. In Michigan, for example, the Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Lansing metro regions account for 56.5 percent of the state’s population, 60 percent of all jobs in Michigan, and $247 billion in annual economic activity or 66 percent of state GDP. 

Even in Michigan, which has the highest unemployment and the largest state budget deficit, metropolitan regions are holding their own because they’ve developed and embraced a new development strategy.  Health Hill in downtown Grand Rapids, which in the 1990s grew for the first time in 40 years, is the scene of $1 billion in new medical research, training, and patient facility construction, the largest such concentration of health-related construction in the United States.

The Economist magazine last week reported on signs of revival in Flint and Saginaw. Ann Arbor, which also grew in the 1990s, is engaged in an intense civic conversation to establish a new rapid transit line that links the city with Detroit and to build new housing and offices downtown. The Traverse City region has undertaken a two-year, $1.3 million federally-financed transportation and land use study intended to draw up a multi-county plan for guiding development and building transportation infrastructure over the next generation. Several of Detroit’s inner ring suburbs – Ferndale, Royal Oak, Birmingham, to name three – have raised and invested resident taxpayer dollars in schools, central business districts, parks, housing, and transit to stabilize neighborhoods and attract new residents downtown. 

Similar far-reaching growth initiatives are occurring in nearly every other metropolitan region of the country. Last November, for instance, voters in Salt Lake County, Utah approved spending $45 million to protect open space. Residents in Salt Lake and neighboring Utah counties also raised the sales tax to add 23 miles to the 19-mile regional light rail system that opened eight years ago, and to double the length of a new commuter rail system set to open next year. When the construction is finished by 2015, the Salt Lake City region will have spent roughly $3.1 billion to build a 45-mile light rail system, and a 88-mile regional commuter rail network, the West’s second largest regional rapid transit system next to the 172-mile system that Denver is now building.

In Salt Lake City itself, equally impressive projects have occurred. The city was one of the first in the nation to require municipal buildings to achieve the highest standards of energy efficiency. It allows owners of energy efficient low-emission cars to park for free. The city enacted zoning and permitting changes to encourage much more dense downtown neighborhoods, and to discourage strip malls. Salt Lake City also constructed a public library that is a showcase of technology and architecture, and is doing everything it can to support a downtown construction boom that is adding a light rail extension, millions of square feet of new energy efficient retail and office buildings, and more than 1,300 new homes.

In Chicago, Mayor Richard M. Daley has instituted a wave of growth measures that fostered a cultural and economic revival unmatched by any city in the Midwest. The Daley administration has planted 500,000 trees, is putting up the most energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive municipal buildings in the country, has agreed to provide developers with much faster permits if they construct green buildings, and instituted a $600-million-a-year program to repair neighborhoods and city parks. The showcase of Mayor Daley’s program is Millennium Park, a 24.5-acre, $475 million expanse of lawn, wild-grass prairie, sculpture and gardens that joins the fast-growing neighborhoods along Michigan Avenue to Lake Michigan. The park is credited with prompting construction of more than 10,000 new units of downtown housing.

Chicago’s transformation has been striking. Indeed, when the results of the 2000 census were published, the magnitude of what Chicago accomplished became clear. The city’s population increased by 112,000 people, the first time that happened since the 1940′s. Chicago’s downtown neighborhoods grew by 16,000 residents during the 1990′s, according to the Metropolitan Policy Program. The city’s median income increased 12.6 percent in the 1990′s, 2 percent higher than the median incomes of the state or the six-county metropolitan region.

In the Pacific Northwest, Seattle (see pix) has developed new zoning provisions to reduce the vehicle population in an increasingly jammed downtown. Earlier this year, the city established an ordinance that requires its Transportation Department to give walking, biking and transit equal priority with cars and trucks before it improves existing streets. The directive is leading to more bike lanes, wider sidewalks and fewer car lanes, thus making room for rail lines and buses on some of Seattle’s major streets and boulevards.Seattle just completed a master plan intended to sharply increase the number of miles of bike lanes painted on city streets, or bike paths separated from traffic. A pedestrian master plan is in development. The city is also reworking its parking policies. Last year, Seattle eliminated a provision that required a minimum number of parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of new construction. It is possible now for new buildings in several downtown districts to be constructed without any parking.

And Seattle is developing alternatives for its residents and workers. A 2.6-mile, $49 million streetcar line that serves downtown opens in December 2007. A 15.6-mile, $2.3 billion light-rail line that links the city’s center with the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is scheduled to start in 2009. Today, Puget Sound residents vote on a $10.8 billion transportation bond measure, more than half of which is devoted to improving public transit. All of these initiatives have helped to make Seattle one of the most popular and prosperous cities in the world. Over the next 15 years, the city’s population is expected to grow to 680,000 by 2022, about 100,000 more than in 2004, and Seattle will generate 84,000 new jobs, 50,000 of them downtown.

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When it came to reaching large numbers of people in the 20th century, it was all about mass. Mass marketing. Mass audiences. Mass communication. Journalist David Halberstam published an important book in 1979, The Powers That Be, that documented the influence of a handful of large publishers — Time, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times — and a broadcast company – CBS — in setting the cultural, political, and social agenda in the United States. 

One of the primary trends of the 21st century Mode Shift is that mass has been replaced by groups, communities, individuals. Hastening that development, of course, is the advent of the Internet and all of the attendant global dissemination platforms, readily accessible to individuals and small groups, that the Web spawned. It’s no accident, for instance, that solving global climate change is now the first or second most important international priority.

From 1988, when James Hansen appeared before Congress to alert the nation that global warming was in progress, until 2003, when broadband became widely available, the discussion about global climate change was largely confined to the elite media, the scientific press, academia, environmental organizations, and right wing radio. Broadband made it possible for tens of thousands of new voices, many of them just as nuanced and knowledgeable, to report additional facts and draw more penetrating conclusions about the climate, often accompanied by video and motion graphics. Online audiences were huge. Al Gore used that independent communications infrastructure to help market his message and turn An Inconvenient Truth into a global phenenomen, so much so that the Nobel committee cited the online communications strategy in awarding Mr. Gore the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month.   

Mr. Gore made an appearance at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York last month. And while he warned of the awful consequences that await people and the planet if we waste more time studying and not acting, I noticed that my good friend, writer Bill McKibben, was involved in an intriguing and promising national civic action to do just that. It is called 1Sky, and it is intended to “galvanize a national movement to deliver real climate solutions and launch a sweeping transition to a clean, secure energy future.” One of 1Sky’s primary tools is the online media — mainstream and new, chatboards, forums, email, video sharing, social media, blogs, and Web sites. The idea is to ”assemble a broad cross- section of American constituencies and leaders in an unprecedented campaign to move the US federal government to deliver policies that will create 5 million new green jobs through a massive efficiency program, cut emissions 30% from today’s level by 2020, and put a moratorium all new coal plants.”

Bill McKibben’s involved because he’s already tapped the online world. Last April he used the Web to  help organize 1,400 ”Step it Up” rallies across the country to pressure Washington to begin aggressively cutting carbon emissions and protect America’s right to an optimistic future.

Bill and his Step it Up organizers are planning another day of rallies on Saturday, November 3, and this time they have a novel theme. Step it Up is asking people to organize rallies at a spot in their communities that commemorates great leaders of the past. Bill writes that people have committed to climbing Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and rallying outside the Rhode Island church where John F. Kennedy was married. There will be a rally honoring Navajo elder and activist Roberta Blackgoat, who inspired the fight against coal development on tribal land.

Organizers are asked to register their rally on http://stepitup2007.org

Step it Up says it will help gather crowds and invite politicians to local rallies. And mindful of the collaboration with 1Sky, political leaders will be made familiar with the 1Sky priorities. “Basically,” writes McKibben, “we want to find out who is simply a politician and who’s ready to be a leader.”

We’ll also discover once again the power that ordinary people are acquring through adept use of online media to set global priorities.

On October 4 Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson, who also happens to be the governor of New Mexico, essentially committed a personal political drowning here in the Great Lakes region. Mr. Richardson, who is campaigning hard to win the Nevada’s presidential caucus on January 9, the nation’s second such contest, told the Las Vegas Sun the following:

“I want a national water policy,” he is quoted as telling the newspaper. ”We need a dialogue between states to deal with issues like water conservation, water reuse technology, water delivery and water production. States like Wisconsin are awash in water.”

The thirsty desert Southwest, which has suffered through a years-long drought, may be one of the fastest growing regions in the nation, and most profligate users of fresh water, but when it comes to voting numbers, especially electoral college voting numbers, it is quite literally a political drop in the bucket compared to the Great Lakes region. And the voters of the Great Lakes states aren’t about to easily turn over management of the world’s largest source of clean freshwater to either the water-wasting cities of the Southwest or to the ideological and donor-driven legislators who run the national government.

Here in the Great Lakes states we understand the value of freshwater in a world where one-third of the population does not have access to enough water to comfotably live, and where so much water is being polluted, drained, and mismanaged that two-thirds of the world’s population could suffer the same fate by 2025, according to a recent United Nations report. 

So Governor Richardson may have made some political friends, and courted some votes in Nevada and the Southwest with his remarks. But his ability to court support in the Great Lakes region, and win the White House, just ended. The evidence of that statement is told in the numbers.

A presidential candidate must marshal 270 of the 538 electoral votes to win. The total 2006 population of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado was 17.4 million, and the number of electoral votes for that region was 34. The total population of the eight Great Lakes states — Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — is 83 million, or 28 percent of all Americans.  And though it’s experienced grave difficulty making the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, five of the 10 largest states are in the Great Lakes region. That is why these eight states collectively retain 141 electoral votes, or more than half of the votes needed to win the White House. 

Wisconsin may be, as Mr. Richardson asserts, awash in water. But when he comes courting votes there and in the other Great Lakes states, he’ll find his wellspring of support bone dry. 

There’s never been a time in my life, which now spans 51 years, when the conversation in communities is so distanced from what state lawmakers choose to talk about. And the gulf only gets wider between the concerns knocking around state capitols and what Congress and the White House think is important. This isn’t a partisan problem. It’s a national disgrace.

Our state government here in Michigan, for example, is led by a two-term Democratic governor, Jennifer M. Granholm, who began her administration with a very solid and popular economic development program. It called for investing in the state’s cities, protecting natural resources, securing open spaces, fixing roads instead of building new ones, promoting public transit, improving public education, and strengthening the state’s terrific public universities. Ms. Granholm also talked about leveraging public and private funds to encourage entrepreneurism and recruit new knowledge-based companies. The idea was to overcome the state’s hierarchical economic principles, forged in the factory floor/front office clashes of the 20th century’s auto culture, and produce clean, green, prosperous cities and inner ring suburbs that could attract the highly educated young people who rule the 21st century economy.

The three most prosperous regions in Michigan — Ann Arbor, Traverse City, and Grand Rapids — actually thought highly of Ms. Granholm’s new strategy, embraced its basic principles, and have emerged late in the 21st century’s first decade as among the best places to live and do business in the country. Lesson: it worked.

Ms. Granholm, meanwhile, was buffeted by her conservative opponents, a state economy that faltered, the nation’s largest fiscal deficit, and abandoned the strategy almost entirely. The new core of her economic plan is expressed by a scary sounding slogan to “go anywhere and do anything” to generate new jobs.

This tendency of political leaders to govern as though they were at a buffet, picking and choosing almost indiscriminately from a myriad of interesting dishes, is emblematic of our drift as a nation. Great organizations develop core strategies and stick to them over time. Those that are most successful anticipate and adjust to new market signals, incorporate new ideas, and update their vision and goals in a careful and logical process. The same goes for successful businesses and productive lives. The idea is to write a strong narrative for yourself, your company, your state or nation that makes sense. Having a strong story, effectively and courageously executed over time, generally gets people close to what they’re after. Sharp changes in goals without consideration and anticipation is a story that has departed its narrative track and generally leads to failure in business and disappointment in governing.

I’ve had the chance to apply these lessons to the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the Republican who was born in Detroit 60 years ago, raised in a political family, and governed for one term in Massachusetts. What’s interesting is that Mr. Romney’s first gubernatorial year, 2003, was distinguished by several acts which might otherwise be called progressive. Two are of particular note. Mr. Romney hired Doug Foy, the head of the Conservation Law Foundation and arguably New England’s most important environmentalist, to head a new Office For Commonwealth Development. And second, Mr. Romney charged Mr. Foy with developing and enacting a new economic development strategy for Massachusetts based on Smart Growth principles very similar to those that Governor Granholm talked about at the start of her administration the same year in Michigan.

Though critics and supporters argue about the success of Mr. Romney’s initiative, one of its important achievements was embedding the idea that where state government decides to spend money for transportation, water, housing, offices, education, and the environment has a lot to do with where people choose to live, and where businesses choose to locate.

The Environmental League of Massachusetts counts among the achievements in the last year that it made in collaboration with the state a $30 million investment in a state brownfield redevelopment fund, a major help for developers seeking to build on land in the Commonwealth’s older industrial cities and core suburbs. The state agreed to consider carefully the consequences to communities and land use for extending new water lines. The state also raised its Historic RehabilitationTax Credit to $50 million annually from $10 million, helping developers build in existing neighborhoods rather than promote sprawl.

These and a host of other Smart Growth policies and investments helped to stabilize the state’s economy and contributed to the growing number of highly educated young people who’ve settled in Boston and Cambridge, both of which are experiencing moderate population growth, according to the Boston-based Metropolitan Area Planning Council. It’s a strong record of sound governance that produced real results. You’d think a former governor running for president might want to take note of what he’d done.

But Mr. Romney doesn’t mention a word of it in his campaigns, on his Web site, in his speeches. His campaign is a dullard’s banquet of the same old — lower taxes, oppose abortion, support the surge, defend the family. His energy policy is about more nukes, liquifying coal as a fuel, and drilling for oil in Alaska. I travel in moderate liberal and conservative circles. There isn’t anybody I know who thinks that this governing formula will make America better.

The Canadian province of Ontario, which lies across Lake Huron from Michigan, and is home to about the same number of people (10.3 million there, 10 million here), has supported one of the planet’s active conversations on the ties between a strong economy and a clean environment. Much of the dialogue centers of global climate change and the province’s coal-fired power plants, one of which, the Nanticoke plant on Lake Erie, is among the largest on the continent and each year pours thousands of tons of sulfur, mercury, nitrogen, and oxides on New York and New England.  

Four years ago, when he was running on the Liberal Party ticket for provincial Premier, Dalton McGuinty promised to shutter Ontario’s five coal-powered generating stations by 2007 in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels and comply with the Kyoto protocols. Premier McGuinty suggested replacing the power — coal burning plants accounted for 24 percent of the province’s electricity production – with a combination of hydro, wind and other renewables, and generating new commerce and jobs. Roughly 45 percent of the province’s electricity is produced from nuclear energy generated by 10 reactors housed at three enormous plants, according to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. 

Though Premier McGuinty succeeded in 2005 in closing the Lakeview coal-fired plant in Mississauga – and demolishing it with explosives on June 28, 2007 — he missed the 2007 deadline for the other four.  Last month, as another electrion approached, he announced in Toronto that wouldn’t happen again. His government just approved a regulation that requires all of the province’s coal-powered generating stations to close by 2014.  ”There is only one place in the world that is phasing out coal-fired generation and we’re doing that right here in Ontario,” he said.

It’s important to note that as coal is phased out as a fuel source in Ontario, the province’s economy is surging because of a new green, clean, land-conserving, transit-focused economic strategy. The provincial government announced last month a $17.5 billion program to expand Toronto’s commuter and light rail rapid transit system by nearly 600 miles. The provincial unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been in more than 30 years. More than 1 million acres of open space are being conserved and set aside in the Toronto suburbs to slow sprawl and improve the quality of life.

Now let’s turn to Michigan, which is representative of the economic conditions in all of the Great Lakes states and is slipping to the back of the American economic pack according to most economic and quality of life measures. Let’s talk just about coal-fired generating stations. Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin have the highest concentration of coal-fired power plants in the nation and produce one-fifth of the carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Department of Energy. These states also have among them the highest rates of unemployment, lowest rates of job growth, highest rates of outward migration by young people, and Michigan has the largest state budget deficit in the nation.

Is there a relationship between a region’s decline and the fact that it generates most of its power from a dirty 19th century boiler technology and an 18th century fuel source?  It’s not just the practice of making power from coal, it’s the moribund thinking. Michigan spends $18 billion on energy every year, most of it importing fuel — coal, oil, natural gas, uranium — from outside the state.

Shane Lopez, an energy researcher and senior at the University of Michigan who’s working with us this summer at the Michigan Land Use Institue, prepared a grounding memorandum that found the state’s 15 coal-powered plants larger than 100 megawatts, and five that produce under 100 megawatts, provide 65 percent of Michigan’s energy. According to a 2006 national energy efficiency scorecard, Michigan ranks 33rd among states. Vermont, Connecticut, and California were national leaders, and not surprisingly their economies are much stronger. Shane also found compelling documentation, including a 2001 study by the Regional Economics Application Laboratory at  the University of Illinois, that a concerted state project to boost energy efficiency and renewable energy would produce 38,000 new jobs in Michigan and increase the gross state product by $3.4 billion annually by 2020.

Michigan, though, is having none of this. At the moment state officials are poised to begin reviewing applications to build two and perhaps three new coal-generating power plants — Rogers City on Lake Huron, and Midland are sites that have been publicly announced. Governor Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, has said little to date about the projects though her aides have privately said the governor is committed to “going anywhere and doing anything”  to generate new jobs. Governor Granholm proposed the 21st Century Energy Plan for Michigan in January.  It recommends spending $68 million a year for energy efficiency improvements. The administration and the Legislature blame the state budget deficit for preventing them from investing in the program.

The 21st Century Energy Plan also calls for generating Michigan’s electricity from coal. Late last month, the state Department of Environmental Quality issued a statement that said it would require new plants to meet tougher emissions and operating standards. 

Ruy Teixeira, a journalist who does a very good job keeping track of public opinion at the Center For American Progress in Washington, published this analysis of where citizens think the energy bill being debated in Congress ought to go. The verdict: Towards green, efficient, conservation measures and not to new production. 

The money quote: “The public is also quite clear on its priorities when it comes to promoting energy conservation versus increasing the supply of oil, coal, and natural gas. When asked which of these should be the higher priority, the public chooses energy conservation by a very wide 68 percent-to-21 percent margin.”

Democrat Bill  Richardson, a member of President Bill Clinton’s cabinet and the current governor of New Mexico, this week became the first 2008 presidential candidate to formally introduce a Mode Shift idea into the national race. Richardson was in West Hollywood on Monday, and according to the Associated Press promised “to create a partnership to build a light rail network and help untangle the Los Angeles region’s notorious traffic. With gas prices rising and roadways jammed, Richardson said it was time to rethink a federal transportation policy that pumps billions of dollars into new roads each year. Mass transit, he said, will be the best, cleanest way to move metropolitan residents in the future.”

If elected, Richardson said he would “make it a major effort to refocus transportation construction of roads into light rail and more energy efficient transportation,” the New Mexico governor told reporters at a news conference. I would make light rail at least an equal partner” with highways, he said. With more rail and clean-running buses, “it’s going to improve the quality of life in this country.”

Richardson, who’s not done nearly as well as he needed to in early national television interviews, is nevertheless no slouch on energy or transportation policy. Last July New Mexico opened the first stations and 15 miles of the Rail Runner Express, a new north-south heavy commuter rail line that is now a nine-station, 55-mile system that will extend next year to 117 miles and reach Santa Fe. The system is carrying 2,000 passengers a day now, and is expected to cost $393 million, according to the Albuquerque Tribune. 

We’ll see more such Mode Shift ideas from presidential candidates. Static incomes. High energy prices. Falling home sales and rising rate of foreclosure. Global climate change. Traffic congestion and declining quality of life in American suburbs. Issues too close to home for candidates to ignore. 

If you travel to Las Vegas, Knoxville, Chicago, and Salt Lake City one of the surprising trends you’ll see is the abrupt shift in housing markets. Downtowns in these and other cities are outpacing the suburbs in new home construction and existing home sales. Two of the critical reasons for both are the shrinking size of American households — not a new trend — and the fact that transportation costs exceed housing expenses in household budgets. Though builders are intent on constructing the 3,000 square foot McMansion in the distant suburb, the fact is that there are far fewer households than there once were capable of both filling them up and  being able to afford to get there in the first place. 

Let’s tease out both trends. The US Census Bureau noted earlier this year that the conventional American nuclear family — husband, wife, and kids under one roof — now composes less than a quarter of all households. The Census Bureau also reported that single people now make up the majority of US households. Long story short: the market for those cul-de-sac McMansions is shrinking. The downward slide in new suburban home sales is further exacerbated by reckless lending practices, static or shrinking family incomes, traffic congestion, and the growing popularity of downtown living shared by young people and retirees alike. 

The other major influence in the soaring interest in American downtowns and shrinking housing markets at metropolitan edges is the cost of transportation, now the number one expense in the majority of American households, according to a study by the Center For Housing Policy in Washngton, D.C.  Researchers evaluated households that earned from $20,000 to $50,000 — the majority of households, by the way — in 28 metropolitan regions. They found that on average households spent 30 percent of their monthly income on transportation and 28 percent on housing. Such supposedly low cost cities like Atlanta were actually very high cost places to live. Atlantans spent 32 percent of their income on transportation, more than supposedly high cost cities like New York (24 percent), and Washington, D.C. (28 percent). In fact, when transportation and housing costs were combined Atlanta — one of the most sprawled out, drive through places in the world — was the second most expensive metropolitan region in the nation, next to San Francisco.  Detroit, by the way, had among the highest transportation costs (31 percent) but also near the lowest housing costs (24 percent of household income), the researchers found.

What does it mean for patterns of American development? The old rules of the housing/income/time/distance game have changed.  Working people sacrificed their time in order to find decent housing distant from their jobs. Their commutes in relatively inexpensive vehicles with cheap fuel made it work economically. No more. Vehicles are expensive to buy and maintain and insure. Fuel prices are rising fast. For every dollar people spend each month on housing in the distant suburbs, they’re spending as much or more on transportation. Living far away just doesn’t cash flow like it once did. And that reality is translating into depressed suburban housing markets, downtown redevelopment, and Mode Shift projects occurring all over the nation to finance and build new forms of work force housing and rapid transit systems. Very soon researchers may find that the footprint of major American metropolitan regions has begun to stabilize and then shrink.

On the day late last month that Rachel Carson would have turned 100 years old I posted a piece on Mode Shift that focused on the surprising failure of the nation’s major environmental organizations to defend the mother of modern environmentalism. The free market right has set out on a deliberate path to diminish Carson, and by extension the American environmental community, as credible in responding to the consequences of industrial technology. The attack on Carson is an important facet of the free market right’s campaign to diminish the reach of local, state, and federal safeguards. And it’s been remarkably effective and destructive. The federal government, for instance, has no strategy for responding to global climate change because of its sympathy to free market assertions that the science of climate change is deeply flawed.  

In any case on Tuesday this week John Tierney, an influential free market science writer and columnist at the New York Times, leveled a broadside at Carson in the pages of Science Times. Calling Silent Spring a “hodgepodge of science and junk science,” Tierney accused Carson of using “dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass ‘biocide.’”

I know Tierney and worked with him at the Times in the early 1990s, when he joined the paper. He’s smart, thorough, and delights in being a contrarian on environmental issues. He wrote a famous piece questioning the value of recycling, essentially saying that recycling wastes more energy and materials than it saves. In another piece for the Times Magazine, Tierney singlehandedly changed the public’s view of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich when he reported on a bet that Ehrlich made with Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland. In 1968 Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which predicted a runaway global population boom (he was right on that) and mass starvation globally and food riots in the United States in the 1980s (he was wrong about that).  Ehrlich bet that the prices of five key metals would rise as a result of population increases and scarcity of natural resources. Simon bet that innovation would drive prices down. In 1990, Ehrlich conceded defeat and sent Simon a check for $576.07, the amount that represented the decline in the metals’ prices after accounting for inflation, he reported.

Now Tierney is after Rachel Carson, using as the basis of his critique a 1962 review of Silent Spring in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin’s review was the subject of debate as intense at the time as Carson’s ground-breaking journalism. Her assessment of the toxic trail left by pesticides in plants and animals was defended and confirmed then by independent scientists, some of them working at the behest of President John F. Kennedy. And they’ve been reconfirmed time and again in the real world since.

Pesticide use has resulted in mass killings of songbirds and wildlife, and the poisoning of farm and industrial workers. I personally reported on the consequences to production workers in Lathrop, California in the 1980s who were left sterile because of their exposure to the pesticide DBCP during its manufacture. I reported on the incidence of young children who’d been born deaf in a California community where the drinking water supply had been contamined by DBCP and other toxic farm chemicals. 

I tracked through the forests of western North Carolina in the early 1980s, identifying uncommon rates of death and illness in communities exposed to the defoliants 2,4-D and picloram, which were used to kill broad-leafed trees. The mix of 2,4-D and picloram, by the way, was sprayed in Vietnam, was known as Agent White, and was used to clear forests where Agent Orange didn’t work. A military study of the effects of Agent White, which I found in the library of Auburn University in Alabama, said that Hmong tribes exposed to the defoliant displayed levels of cancer and birth defects far in excess of neighboring communities that weren’t exposed. 

So you can’t tell me that Rachel Carson’s reporting inspired “chemophobia” as Tierney charges, or is exaggerated or untrue. What he does is focus the knife edge of an eloquent rhetorical attack on the outer membrane of Carson’s reporting, such as the predictions she made that haven’t come to pass — a big loss of robins, for instance. He doesn’t note that such a prediction might well have come to pass, and fortunately hasn’t, because several of the most toxic compounds she critiqued, especially DDT, have been banned for agricultural use. 

I appeal again to the major national organizations to get involved in setting the record straight about the value of Carson’s journalism and scholarship. Their credibility and the salience of the environmental movement’s science is at stake.

Late on the Friday night before the Memorial Day weekend, Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Michigan reached agreement with Democratic Governor Jennifer M. Granholm on a very temporary fix to close an $800 million state budget deficit. The deficit, for those who might be unfamiliar, is what happens when what the state earns in tax revenue doesn’t keep up with what it spends on programs. Next fall the crisis worsens when lawmakers look down the raw throat of a $1.8 billion deficit.

“Some people might say that the agreement makes things worse,” said Governor Granholm in an interview last week with Michigan Public Radio. “They’re right.”

There are reasons to sympathize with our governor. Ever since she took office in 2003, Granholm has faced the nation’s largest state budget deficits. Their cause is two-fold. During the 1990s Michigan’s Republican Governor John Engler, and the Republican-led House and Senate engaged in a program of tax cutting that steadily diminished the percentage of personal and business income that Michigan paid in taxes. Then came the acceleration of energy, land, and living costs, globalization, and declining incomes across the country. The state’s manufacturing sector, which has lost over 300,000 jobs since 2000, went into free fall, further reducing income and sales tax revenue. The result is that over $4 billion in revenue has drained from state coffers since Granholm was sworn in. As recently as the 2004/2005 fiscal year, Michigan earned $9 billion in general fund revenues. In fiscal 2007/2008, it is expected to raise $7 billion in general fund revenue. Michigan now has 52,299 state employees, fewer than at any time since 1973, when the state’s population was 9.1 million or 11 percent less than the 10.1 million people that live here today. 

But if you’re getting ready for me to take a swipe at those tax-cutting Republicans, forget it. The governor and her Democratic allies, who are pressing for tax increases to balance the budget, have just as much responsibility for producing Michigan’s budget mess. Both sides are tangled in the heavy ropes of partisan and ideological conflict. 

There’s a way out — collaboration around new ideas — that is proving successful in the prosperous regions of the country and ought to be just as useful here. There’s nothing new about this approach, other than how well it works at the state level in California, Maine, and North Carolina, and in metropolitan regions like Denver, San Diego, Albuquerque, St. Louis, and Chicago. Those of us who’ve engaged in intense public disagreements over highways or new Wal-Marts, farmland conservation, windmills, natural rivers, and downtown development also know that the resolution often accompanies proposing a better idea. An alternative to the status quo. A vision that makes sense for its time and can generate common ground.

The problem with Michigan’s budget standoff, now in its fifth year, is that neither side has agreed on such a vision. Republicans want to keep cutting programs they don’t much like, including environmental protection, health care, and the union-dominated public school systems. Democrats want to spend in those same programs. But if you look at most state-financed programs, you see very quickly that, with few exceptions, they are meant to ensure the continuation of ideas that fit the 20th century, not the 21st. Put another way: As long as Michigan’s state government defends its authority to spend on the programs it’s financed over the last 35 years, it really won’t make much difference for ensuring prosperity for the next 35.  

Transportation’s $3.4 billion budget is heavily weighted to building and maintaining roads. Under 10 percent of the budget is devoted to public transit and not one penny is focused on regional rapid transit, which has proved so successful in igniting economic development in Washington, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Portland and nearly 30 more cities since the late 1980s.

The state’s $113 million agriculture budget includes $3 million to promote Michigan farm products for global markets, and next to nothing to promote local food networks, which have far more capacity to generate higher incomes for food producers and processors, not to mention the ability to help preserve the state’s farmland and rural beauty, both important ingredients to prosperity in the 21st century.

A year ago the Michigan Land Use Institute, Michigan State, and the Upjohn Institute collaborated on an economic study that found that if Michigan growers increased the amount of fruits and vegetables they sold in local markets the shift could increase net farm income by $164 million, or nearly 16 percent. As farm families spend this new income, the study shows they could generate up to 1,889 new jobs across the state and $187 million in new personal income from those jobs. In other words if Michigan spent a little — a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year for technical support and capacity building — it could gain as much new income and as many jobs as it now tries vainly to do by spending tens of millions unsuccessfully in trying to attract new manufacturers. 

The Department of Labor and Economic Growth, the principal economic development agency, spends 48 percent of its $1.3 billion budget on job training, and 9 percent on commissions, boards, and its own staff. But there isn’t any money devoted to the proposed Airport City that lies between Detroit Metropolitan Airport and Willow Run. The proposed new urban region of 450,000 residents and 350,000 new jobs takes advantage of the global reliance on air transport, the advanced manufacturing base, and the $1.3 billion a year in research grants earned by the three big universities in southeast Michigan — Wayne State, Michigan State, and the University of Michigan. The budget agreement reached on May 25, in fact, cuts $166 million in state support for higher education in 2007.

As Larry the Cable Guy would say, “I could do this all day.” The point is that as long as lawmakers are defending turf and ideology, Michigan loses. The vast pool of financial capital managed by our state lawmakers is being used to operate obsolete programs and support old ideas about growth and prosperity. The Michigan Land Use Institute published a report in 2005, “Follow The Money,” that identified $10 billion a year in state economic development funds used for schools, highways, universities, research, and other programs. 

Michigan doesn’t have a shortage of money, as Democrats argue. The state’s budget is $43 billion annually. Michigan has a shortage of ideas, vision, and willingness to collaborate. So long as the state’s budget is devoted to building more roads not regional rapid transit, promoting farm products in the farm-killing global commodity markets, subsidizing sprawl in rural areas, selling state forests and other assets at bargain prices, and cutting funding to higher education in the knowledge economy, we all lose. Unless Granholm and state legislators develop a prosperity plan and the programs to carry it out that fit the 21st century — programs that promote fresh local foods, rapid transit, energy efficiency, environmental protection, housing and urban neighborhoods, and access to great schools — it doesn’t matter how much money the state spends or doesn’t spend. The existing programs neither buttress the present nor prepare for the future. They do, however, ensure that Michigan’s standing in the world will continue to diminish.