A little over a year ago, "Jurassic Park" author Michael Crichton delivered a speech to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club on the similarity between environmentalism and religion.
"Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists," said Crichton. "There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions, there's a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is called sustainability."
His words replayed in my mind during the media coverage of New York's two most famous raptors – the red-tailed hawks Pale Male and Lola, after their unceremonious eviction from a 12th floor perch at 927 Fifth Avenue.
Biologists often lump predatory birds into the category known as "charismatic macrofauna" -- animal organisms big enough to impress or awe human observers. In their decade of residence alongside Central Park, Pale Male, Lola and their offspring have been the inspiration for a documentary movie, multiple television specials and magazine articles, not to mention a book, "Red-Tails in Love."
That may explain why the removal of their nest inspired a week’s worth of rallies, with nearly a hundred people gathered across the street chanting “ No nest, no peace.”
"Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets," read one sign.
"Honk-4-Hawks," read another.
"People want to see the nest brought back," E. J. Adams of the New York City Audubon Society politely explained to the press.
The co-op board reversed itself; Pale Male and Lola will return – demonstrating the benefits of ...not a religion... but what could be called emotional environmentalism. Before we elevate them to sacred status, however, it's important to realize that not all species have the benefit of a Manhattan address, celebrity neighbors, and a noble visage. Many, like the endangered Torrey's Mountain Mint and the American chestnut tree, do their living and dying invisibly in overlooked spaces such as Charleston Woods on Staten Island.
The history of Staten Island and the history of Staten Island real estate development are often one and the same. Since the days of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Staten Island economy has been built on one fundamental precept: Inside every cramped city apartment is a future Staten Island homeowner yearning to breathe free.
Forty years after the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, however, many local groups are starting to question the wisdom of that notion. A hot real estate market coupled with a loophole-riddled building code have led to hasty, ill-conceived developments on an island already known for its crazy-quilt approach to neighborhood planning. But resistance has been piecemeal as well: "There's so many things going on on Staten Island that everybody is so busy taking care of their own little piece of turf," says Dennis Conwell, a Dongan Hills activist.
Lately, however, island environmental groups have been finding places to dig in. For the last 12 weeks, Kryscherville, a neighborhood just north of the Outerbridge Crossing, has been the scene of candlelight vigils as local environmental groups protest the potential construction of the island's third Home Depot store on 130 acres of city-owned woodland known as Charleston Woods. Event co-organizer David Burg of WildMetro says the protest was the only recourse after a failed legal attempt to block the sale to the Blumenfeld Development Group, a Syosset-based company that a 1999 New York Public Interest Research Group report ranked as the top-spending lobbyist in New York City.
Burg admits that turnout for the Sunday vigils has been slight -- most attract fewer than 12 participants -- and the media coverage negligible. Still, in giving activists a place to gather and vent their feelings, the group has managed to turn a local defeat into a victory of sorts. On November 17, delegates from 15 island groups convened for an island-wide "summit" on open space issues. Attendees pledged mutual support on everything from low-level single-lot disputes to large-scale projects such as the recently proposed Nascar racetrack in the wetlands region just below the Goethals Bridge. To sum up the "join or die" spirit of the gathering, delegates ambitiously titled their alliance the Coalition to Save Staten Island.
"The feeling is that there's just too much for existing groups to take on individually," Burg says. "It's now or never."
Most official remedies to the threat of overdevelopment involved changing “the width of streets or the number of curbs,” said Shirlee Marraccini, a resident of Great Kills and president of Turnaround Friends, a non-profit dedicated to converting abandoned or underutilized properties into community parkland. Such remedies do little to prevent the subdivision of existing city-owned or privately-owned lots currently regarded by most Staten Islanders as open space.
If recent behavior is any indication, island politicians are already sensing a shift in community sentiment, and responding accordingly; area representatives, for example, oppose development of the Charleston Woods site.
"Before we use the Charleston site for stores, we should put it to public use," writes Councilmember Andrew Lanza on Gotham Gazette. "The infrastructure of Staten Island has lagged behind development. We have overcrowded schools, we do not have enough parkland, and we do not have a single recreational ballfield on the South Shore."
For Conwell of Dongan Hills, political support is crucial but not as crucial as a coalition. Development is a many-headed opponent, he believes; without cross-island coordination, each local victory is outweighed by multiple losses.
"It's so hard to see information in the city," Conwell said. "Between tracking the auctions, trying to keep track of what the building is department doing, what the [Department of Environmental Protection] is doing, you also have to throw in the dimension of what our friends in Albany and Washington D.C. are doing. Everybody's got a little slice of responsibility, which adds to the confusion. Most of the time I've just seen things by watching the Internet."
Burg says even the limited pressure over the Home Depot development has scored results. Earlier this month, he says, attorneys from the Blumenfeld Development Group contacted WildMetro to set up a discussion on how to mitigate the project's environmental impact. Representatives from the company did not return calls requesting comment, but the company has a similar Home Depot/Costco project in East Harlem facing even more community pressure. The group is also talking with the city about preserving a 30-acre remainder of the Staten Island site as open woodland space.
While not exactly victories, such talks have done much to slow the fait accompli nature of local developmental politics. When coalition members gather in January, Marraccini hopes the group can come up with a few more places worthy of collective action.
"I sincerely believe that the Kryscher Hill-Charleston Wood project was the beginning of something," she says. "With all the natural areas going away, we really need to have one united voice. Hopefully, we will have some impact not just on one project but on all of them." The result won't restore us to Eden, but the members of the coalition hope that Staten Island, at least, will be saved.
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This is a good time for City Hall, and the city as a whole, to focus on using energy more efficiently.
There are many reasons to do so. For one, energy costs have been skyrocketing, and promise to rise even more steeply. The price of oil is already way up, and Con Edison is trying to get a rate increase of 6.7 percent.
Pollution also looms as a large threat. This summer, New York City joined eight states in announcing a lawsuit against five major polluters, whom they charge with contributing to global warming. These companies alone -- American Electric Power Company; the Southern Company; Tennessee Valley Authority; Xcel Energy Inc.; and Cinergy Corporation -- are responsible for ten percent of the nation's total carbon dioxide emissions.
"There is no dispute that global warming is upon us and that these defendants' carbon dioxide pollution is a major contributor," says Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
At the same time, the demand for energy is increasing. In recent years, the number of electrical appliances in homes and offices (especially computers) has increased significantly. In August 2003, the high demand for energy led to a major blackout. While New York’s energy systems are some of the most modern, the state’s reserve of energy is 40 percent lower than regulators say it should be. That is one reason why power companies are proposing the construction of up to 15 more power plants in New York City.
Thus, reducing energy use would save money, prevent blackouts, reduce the need to build new power plants, and could also improve local air quality.
And one way to reduce energy use is to increase energy efficiency. There are some computers – and air conditioners and lights and household appliances and industrial motors – that run more efficiently than others. Most newer computers have software that can automatically save power when the computer has not been used for a certain amount of time. Experts also advocate for greater use of such cleaner and more efficient energy sources as solar power and wind power, as well as fuel cells. Frank Morris of the Sierra Club believes that better management of the demand for energy could reduce the city’s energy use by 35 percent.
Currently, there is a bill pending in the New York City Council that would create a new energy policy office. The law would require the city to develop a comprehensive energy policy, assess the efficiency of energy use in city facilities, set goals for the reduction of energy use, encourage energy conservation and the use of fossil fuel alternatives by both the public and private sector, and promote public awareness of the efficient use of energy.
One could reasonably question how effective this office would be, however, in light of the difficulties over another bill being considered by the City Council, which encourages City Hall to get its own house in order.
The bill focuses specifically on the use of city-owned computers. The city owns some 100,000 personal computers and office equipment, which could be made more efficient – and save some $1.4 million on energy costs – through the use of power-saving software.
But the city agency in charge of the computers, the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), opposes the legislation.
Why?
The city’s vast information technology infrastructure “makes the implementation of the proposed initiative difficult to deploy and enforce,” testified Ron Bergmann, a deputy commissioner at DoITT. “Agencies largely administer their own computer operations and have a diverse array of equipment, operating systems and applications.”
Laura Forlano is a doctoral student studying communication technology policy at Columbia University.Â
Ask anyone who has jogged, biked, skated or strolled along the Hudson River lately what their least favorite stretch is and you might be surprised at the response. It is not in the Meat Market area, where lamb and cow carcasses get unceremoniously dumped into refuse bins early each afternoon. It is not Gansevoort peninsula, where dozens of garbage trucks idle and queue at the beginning and end of their route. It is not the West 130s in Harlem where the North River Sewage Treatment Plant sits on the shore. No, the smelliest, most offensive stretch of the Hudson River Greenway is in Chelsea, right beside what is being called the Hudson Yards.
At West 30th Street sits the heliport. Helicopters – like most fossil fuel burning engines – do not run at peak efficiency at lower speeds. While landing or idling on the waterfront tarmac the smell of hot, unburnt fuel is overwhelming. The hundreds of takeoffs and landings here each day may seem to constitute a dense arrival and departure pattern for tourists and high rolling commuters, but the stifling reality is that the air quality along this stretch of the Hudson River Greenway is possibly the most unhealthy and certainly the most offensive one can find the length of the waterfront along the entire Manhattan shoreline of the Hudson.
Slightly more than four blocks north is Pier 76, home to the city’s tow pound.
This stretch of the Hudson River, then, is home to two unfortunate waterfront uses, neither of which makes use of the water in any way.
Sadder still, the city and the state do not have any plans to change this. At the same time that both city and state are pulling out all the stops to redevelop the West Side, attract the 2012 Olympics, and expand the convention center, it is unfathomable to think that more than a billion dollars in public money is to be spent to redevelop 11 blocks along the Hudson River with no real plan to improve the waterfront.
The greatest sea-change in urban living in New York City in the last 30 years is the transformation of urban waterfronts and waterways into exciting new public spaces. From the Gowanus Canal to the Bronx River, these once-derided waterways are now synonymous with grassroots success. And there is no revival to rival the rescue of the Hudson River along the west side of Manhattan, where the collapse of the Miller Highwayover thirty years ago opened the door for the removal of the detritus of commerce, parked and towed cars, crumbling pier sheds, and miles of chain link fence separating the hundreds of thousands of workers and residents in the adjacent communities from the most famous river in the United States.
But this is not happening in the area alongside what is being called, ironically, the Hudson Yards. The only thing the city is doing for the Hudson River in its plans for the Hudson Yards is stealing the river’s name. This stretch of Hudson River waterfront will not be the beneficiary of either the city’s investment of $600 million in the Hudson Yards, nor the state’s plan to expand the Javits Center. In fact, these two plans together in their present state will simply perpetuate the non-planning that has plagued so much of the city’s waterfront development in the last thirty years.
The neglect of the Hudson River in the Hudson Yards plan is the most short-sighted aspect of what is being promoted as a visionary, long-range plan. The city’s own map for the Hudson Yards area makes clear that the study deliberately left out the waterfront. As the Environmental Impact Statement for the project makes clear, the western terminus of the project area is not the river, but 12th Avenue. Despite the fact that images used to promote the Sports and Convention Center illustrate glorious river views and an active waterfront dotted with sailboats, ferries, and water taxis, the plan for the stadium itself includes merely building an elevated walkway over the West Side Highway to connect to Hudson River Park.
If this is visionary planning then I would rather take the proposed $600 million in city funding for the Hudson Yards and trade it in. For this awesome amount of money, one could complete Hudson River Park ($225 million), Brooklyn Bridge Park ($150 million), Sunset Park Waterfront Park ($25 million), Harlem River Park ($50 million) the South Bronx Greenway ($50 million) combined. With the extra $100 million we could create a few hundred street-end parks around the city in any of the places where few such large-scale waterfront opportunities still exist. The beneficiaries of all these investments may not be season ticket holders, of course, but we all must remember that the beauty of this city is not that not everyone can afford a skybox – it is that most of us don't want to be in one.
Carter Craft, an urban planner, is director of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance.