We don't sit in trees any more

In Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, the hero, an adolescent 18th-century nobleman, renounces the earthbound life one evening when his sister serves him a dinner of snails. He spends the rest of his life living in the treetops, from where he falls in love, embraces radical politics, and participates in the political and cultural revolutions of the Age of Enlightenment.

Calvino's novel was written in 1957 — a novel about rebellion in a not-particularly-rebellious era. But a generation later, in April 1970, college students and politicians organized a "nationwide environmental teach-in" held mostly on college campuses. It would later become known as the first "Earth Day."

Historian Jared Farmer recounts one of the first Earth Day protests in his book Trees in Paradise, which I learned about recently on the Huntington Library's blog. A synopsis there recounts how "At Moorpark College, in Ventura County, 50 students laid their bodies down in front of bulldozers to protest the widening of a tree-lined road... By the time 10 students were arraigned in juvenile court on April 22, the first Earth Day, the trees were gone."

“What had been lost? Ancient redwoods? Historic oaks? No. They aren’t even native plants. Most of the trees in question are Australian eucalypts planted in the 19th century as ornamentals.”

With the benefit of 44 years' worth of hindsight, most Golden State environmentalists of 2014 would probably not risk arrest over some Australian eucalyptus trees. Today, they're generally considered an invasive species that sucks away scarce groundwater and fuels dangerous wildfires with their oily foliage and shedding bark.

Image: www.juliabutterfly.com

But trees — especially giant Californian trees — remained a powerful synecdoche for environmentalism. Tree protests reached a peak in the late 1990s when the charismatic Julia Butterfly Hill, with support from Humboldt County Earth First! activists, spent two years sitting in a 600 year-old redwood that she named Luna.

The immediate consequence of Hill's endurance tree-sit was the permanent protection of her tree and a 200 foot buffer zone from a logging operations.

But more generally, Hill's activism attracted national attention to the regional battles between loggers and environmentalists over the fate of the Pacific coast's old-growth forests. Thanks to stronger enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, West Coast logging was already in steep decline by the late 1990s. The activism of treesitting brought the additional accountability of publicity to logging operations.

In the years since Hill climbed down from Luna, living in trees in order to save trees has become rarer and rarer — in part because it has become less necessary. In the interest of avoiding controversy, logging businesses have committed to more sustainable forms of forestry, and conservation organizations have been able to protect most of what remains of the west's old growth trees. More ambiguously, more timber harvesting has moved overseas, away from the critical eyes of Californian idealists.

Today, treesitting feels like a bit of a 1990s anachronism. We're taught, as ecologists, to think about the complexity of global ecosystems. The idea of devoting months' or years' worth of activism to save a small grove of trees can seem like a lark in the context of the world's more pressing, global crises.

But under the apocalyptic threats of losing everything, any form of activism will feel inadequate. Before we throw up our hands, it's worth noting that Julia Butterfly Hill and her tree-sitting colleagues actually accomplished most of their goals, and leveraged influence far beyond their ambitions. It's the Butterfly effect: given enough time, repeated small actions will eventually generate big changes.

Pussy Riot's April 29 Letter to President Medvedev

This is a bit off-topic from this blog's usual fare, but very much worth reading, I assure you. A friend here in Portland has been coordinating a lot of international activism on behalf of Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist punk group whose members were jailed last fall for provoking the regime of Vladimir Putin.

The three imprisoned members are currently in the midst of a show trial, and expect to receive a sentence later this week. I'm dusting off my Russian to help compile and edit a collection of the group's translated texts, including letters from jail, manifestos, essays, and court statements, for a public reading in New York later this week.

These texts are heartbreaking, angry, and brilliant. But they also have a dark, cynical humor to them. The irony of suffering at the hands of the Russian state as they pursue their hopes for a better Russian society is not lost on them — indeed, it puts them in good company with dozens of other Russian artistic geniuses.

Of the pieces I've edited so far, this April letter to lame-duck president Dmitry Medvedev (whose "presidency" was merely a benchwarming interlude for Vladimir Putin, whose dictatorship at least has the modesty to make shallow gestures towards constitutional term limits) is among my favorites, for the way it relentlessly, humorously skewers the impotence of the figurehead president.

Note: this translation is mostly my own. There was a rougher English translation previously available at freepussyriot.org, but I spent an evening polishing the language and diving into the original Russian to get the tone closer to the intent of the original. If any native Russian speakers have suggestions for further edits, I'll happily take advice in the comments. Here's a link to the Russian source.

Letter to President Medvedev

Here is the response Pussy Riot gave regarding D. Medvedev’s comment that the members of the group had “achieved their goal,” in a TV interview the Russian President gave to journalists from five TV networks on April 26 2012.

This response was written after the President refused to consider the evident violation of the principles of the law in the Pussy Riot case.


“Freedom is when you forget the name of the tyrant.”
    Josef Brodsky, 1975

“Freedom is a unique feeling, which is different for each person.”
    D. Medvedev, 26.04.2012
  

Dmitry Anatolyevich!

    Exactly four years ago, in May 2008, a few days before your inauguration as a President, members of the art group Voina [translated as"War" in English — ed.] visited some police stations near Moscow to place your portrait on the wall as a newly elected president, next to the existing portrait of Putin.

    Activists of the group Voina called your inauguration day “a great achievement of the Russian people”, “a victory of freedom,” and declared the seventh of May an important holiday, even more important than the other May holidays.*

    Your portrait fixed to the prison bars of the police departments around Moscow encapsulated the hopes of millions of Russians in 2008. Your bright image was meant to penetrate into the darkest corners of the judicial, political, and incarceratory systems of the country, and was ready to confront the monstrous medieval barbarity that characterizes Russian law today.

    Four years passed.

    Atrocities and torture in your so-called police force have become increasingly systemic. Magnitsky, a lawyer, was executed in prison; his persecutors got a raise and were nominated for awards. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev got another big prison term. Taisiya Osipova has been in prison already for one and a half years without any medical help; she might hope that, after your regal attention to her case, she might embrace her daughter again a year or two before her ten-year sentence is due to end.

    It’s touching, what you said in your interview: that you see a “lot of sense” in the fact that today, “all of these cases have become public, transparent.” During the last four years it has become absolutely transparent that in every serious situation in which conflicting interests demand legal justice, the Russian court will take the side of the stronger party, who has never bothered to pay attention to the law.

    You proudly consider yourself a practicing lawyer. In reality, as you have repeatedly emphasized, a period of four years was not long enough to carry out the reforms which could bring Russia closer to a constitutional state. It was not enough time to educate a new judiciary and a new police force. Four years were not enough to wean public officials from bribes and to keep them from hating their own people. Four years were not enough to develop and implement your beloved electronic systems that were supposed to make the stuffing of ballot boxes impossible.

    Four years: also the age of the children of our group’s imprisoned members – Gera and Phillip, a daughter and a son of Nadia Tolokonnikova and Masha Aliokhina, respectively. The court which you carefully and slowly reformed during the last four years has left these children without their mothers, indefinitely.

    What is going on in the mind of our practicing lawyer, as he observes (as the head of the state, of course, he is not able to influence justice before the verdict is made, as you have already mentioned several times) how the court of our nation first refused to detain professional sadists — the policemen who tortured and killed people with bottles of champagne — and then twice extended the detention of women who, from the point of view of a religious institution, made a prayer in church with the wrong intonation?

    As a “practicing lawyer,” does it not trouble you that that Ekaterina Samutsevich, one of the members of Pussy Riot, is placed to the same cell in the Pechatniki prison where Major Evsukov [a convicted former police officer who, while drunk and in uniform, opened fire in a crowded grocery store — Ed.] awaited trial in 2009? Is it possible to still keep self-respect as a law professional, and accept the authority of the court, when someone whose crime was a prayer in church should be isolated from society in the same conditions as a police chief who shot civilians with his service weapon?

    During the interview you responded quite cynically concerning Pussy Riot. You mentioned that the participants of the act accomplished what they had hoped to. Not without reason, the journalists around you presumed that you were referring to the accomplishment of getting into prison. But you, after a dramatic pause, clarified your belief that we were merely seeking popularity and celebrity.

    We would like to assure you, Dmitry Anatolyevich, that it is the monstrous reaction of the Russian authorities to the punk-prayer “Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away,” and the widespread outrage of a huge number of people, who can not understand why three women are in prison — these are the things that brought about our so-called “celebrity.”  It is not on our merit that Pussy Riot gained international attention. Even you, at the end of your reign, forcefully emphasized in the same interview that nothing has actually changed during the last 50 years in Russia, and it was you who made the candid observation that, just as it was a half a century ago, a person of culture must resist the government, even through imprisonment and prosecution.

    Naturally, many of your colleagues and subordinates – including the Ministers of Justice and Culture, and the heads of the Federation Council and the President’s Council on Civil Society Development — openly came out against the imprisonment of the members of Pussy Riot. It is evident to them that this trial will result in a public disgrace for Russian authorities. However, today the opinion of one man is held as more significant than all the power of collective intelligence and your starry-eyed abstract notions of freedom. That is why our group appealed to the Virgin Mary to banish this man out of Russian politics.

    Thus the end of your presidential term will be remembered for the victory of bondage over freedom in Russia – the opposite of your ambitions. Three girls imprisoned in Pechatniki in Moscow are unequivocally recognised as prisoners of conscience by the international community and have become a vivid warning of Russia’s path.

    And this path is due solely to a very specific idea of freedom: a freedom in which one person, acting alone, is allowed to make the important decisions in our country.

    Pussy Riot

* Ed. note: The May holidays include May Day, the celebration of workers, and Victory Day, when Russians celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany. Both holidays are obviously more significant than Medvedev’s appointment as Putin’s benchwarmer.

Occupy Heathrow

I've been meaning to write here about how the Occupy movement has brought an element of wilderness survivalism into the downtown districts of out largest cities. How corporate plazas in financial districts have transformed into undeveloped campsites.


Before I do, though, I'd like to show you how they're doing it in England. Earlier this fall, the New York Times ran an article about England's remarkable squatters' laws:

Currently, it is a crime to occupy a house where someone is living or plans to move in imminently. But squatting in an empty commercial property is a civil offense, and such squatters can be removed only by court order.

Homeowners are allowed to use “reasonable force” to get rid of squatters, though it is unclear what that means. Giles Peaker, a housing lawyer, said no one wanted to do anything that might provoke counterclaims of assault. Violence is out. No baseball bats, no pepper spray, no household weapons...

As for commercial owners, they cannot use any force, not even to break into their own property or muscle their way past the occupiers. Property owners say that the police are loath to intervene, except in the most blatant cases, without formal court orders.

Notwithstanding lurid tales told in the sensationalist British tabloids, having responsible tenants to take care of abandoned and foreclosed properties has generally been a good thing for England during these years of financial crisis. Without the squatting law, England would have more homeless, and more abandoned neighborhoods in terminal decline.

Think of it as an Occupy movement for the dross of the collapsed real estate market.

One prominent squatters' community mentioned in the Times piece is the Grow Heathrow encampment in the village of Sipson, just north of London's massive Heathrow Airport and in the path of a proposed runway expansion.


Citing British squatter laws, the community has successfully cleaned up an abandoned nursery, and turned its broken greenhouses back into functional (and beautiful) spaces for living, growing produce, and organizing activists against the airport expansion.

The proposed third runway at Heathrow has become a national issue in British politics. Ousted Labour leader Gordon Brown had been a supporter of expansion, but environmental activists - many of whom live at Grow Heathrow - have successfully delayed the proposal to the point where even airport executives acknowledge its unlikelihood.

One reason Brown and other political leaders had been pressing for a third runway is because the expansion had been seen as a necessity to preserving London's status as a global financial center.



In this light, Grow Heathrow and other opponents of airport expansion are not just fighting against airplane pollution. They're making a vital contribution to the Occupy movement, by inconveniencing Britain's bankers and hedge fund managers in their pursuit of global commercial domination.

All photos courtesy of Transition Heathrow's Flickr.

Occupy Heathrow

I've been meaning to write here about how the Occupy movement has brought an element of wilderness survivalism into the downtown districts of out largest cities. How corporate plazas in financial districts have transformed into undeveloped campsites.


Before I do, though, I'd like to show you how they're doing it in England. Earlier this fall, the New York Times ran an article about England's remarkable squatters' laws:

Currently, it is a crime to occupy a house where someone is living or plans to move in imminently. But squatting in an empty commercial property is a civil offense, and such squatters can be removed only by court order.

Homeowners are allowed to use “reasonable force” to get rid of squatters, though it is unclear what that means. Giles Peaker, a housing lawyer, said no one wanted to do anything that might provoke counterclaims of assault. Violence is out. No baseball bats, no pepper spray, no household weapons...

As for commercial owners, they cannot use any force, not even to break into their own property or muscle their way past the occupiers. Property owners say that the police are loath to intervene, except in the most blatant cases, without formal court orders.

Notwithstanding lurid tales told in the sensationalist British tabloids, having responsible tenants to take care of abandoned and foreclosed properties has generally been a good thing for England during these years of financial crisis. Without the squatting law, England would have more homeless, and more abandoned neighborhoods in terminal decline.

Think of it as an Occupy movement for the dross of the collapsed real estate market.

One prominent squatters' community mentioned in the Times piece is the Grow Heathrow encampment in the village of Sipson, just north of London's massive Heathrow Airport and in the path of a proposed runway expansion.


Citing British squatter laws, the community has successfully cleaned up an abandoned nursery, and turned its broken greenhouses back into functional (and beautiful) spaces for living, growing produce, and organizing activists against the airport expansion.

The proposed third runway at Heathrow has become a national issue in British politics. Ousted Labour leader Gordon Brown had been a supporter of expansion, but environmental activists - many of whom live at Grow Heathrow - have successfully delayed the proposal to the point where even airport executives acknowledge its unlikelihood.

One reason Brown and other political leaders had been pressing for a third runway is because the expansion had been seen as a necessity to preserving London's status as a global financial center.



In this light, Grow Heathrow and other opponents of airport expansion are not just fighting against airplane pollution. They're making a vital contribution to the Occupy movement, by inconveniencing Britain's bankers and hedge fund managers in their pursuit of global commercial domination.

All photos courtesy of Transition Heathrow's Flickr.

The New Coastline: Floods Near the Harbor, Fourth Graders Take the High Ground

Brooklyn's new coastline, near Jamaica Bay. From the New York Times

Using NASA data and flood maps, an artist is tracing the high water line of future floods along the coast of Brooklyn.

The line traces a contour line about 10 feet above sea level. Currently, New York experiences floods along this line at a frequency of once every 100 years: a 1% chance of flooding in any given year. In 2020, the odds of flooding are expected to have doubled to 2.3%, and by 2080, floods could be reaching this line once every four years.

Here in Portland, we traced a portion of our own high water line in this spring's New Coast Parade. Portions of our parade route on Commercial Street, which is also about 10 feet above typical high tides, actually did flood a week after the parade during the Patriot's Day Storm.

If you think that's bad news, you can at least count your blessings that you're not among the increasingly desperate ranks of global warming skeptics, who brought their ebbing tide of climate change "debate" down to childish levels over the weekend.

Following the publication of a global warming opinion piece by kids at the East End Community School, the nation's right-wing conspiracy theorists followed a link from the Drudge Report to focus their righteous rage on Portland's fourth graders.

Student Jacob Austin (aged 9) impetuously responded to the criticism by replying, "I thought they should do a little research, and then they can tell me we did a bad job."

Bah! You can keep your precious research, Jacob! But who really occupies the moral and intellectual high ground - environmentally-concerned fourth graders, or the crackpot adults who spend their weekends hurling insults against them?

Updates from the Rogue Blogger

Exciting news! While helping out at the farmer's market over the weekend, I heard from two separate sources that Chris Busby, editor of The Bollard, Portland's electronic news source, has been disparaging yours truly as "a rogue blogger." Yarr!

This building deserves more respect (photo: Portland Press Herald).

Busby's apparently upset about this article from last week's Forecaster, which broke the news of a newly-formed group that is organizing to oppose the Portland Public Library's move to a smaller and more expensive building away from Monument Square.

This very loose organization evolved from informal discussions between Jed Rathband, a local political consultant, and me. Basically, we griped about what seemed to be an impulsive decision that affects a very important public space, and we decided to do something about it. Hence, the PEEPs: Portlanders for Economic and Educational Priorities (Jed came up with the name a few minutes before the Forecaster's press deadline).

Now, even though we didn't really have a name, we did have several supportive individuals encouraging us from the get-go. Like us, they don't have a lot of time or resources to dedicate to the cause, but they do agree it's worth more discussion. We the PEEPs exist to vocalize these opposing views, which, we're finding, are more widespread than the conventional wisdom would have it.

But Chris Busby is definitely not down with the PEEPs. After hearing about our group's humble origins from Jed over a beer at the local watering hole for 30-somethings, the erstwhile amiable Busby reportedly went home and wrote an nasty letter to the editor of the Forecaster. He called for the original article's retraction, criticized reporter Kate Bucklin for writing it, and dismissed the PEEPs as the work of only two people: Jed and "a rogue blogger." Who is me.

Mr. Busby's criticism misses the mark, though. We'd heard from others who oppose the library's move before we had the idea for PEEPs, and following the publication last Friday of this op-ed column of the subject (take a moment to admire the solidity of its arguments and the well-formed prose), we've been hearing from more and more people who agree that the Library shouldn't spend a million dollars to move into a smaller space.

Chris Busby has been working hard to establish The Bollard as a legitimate alternative to other local news sources. This is someone who usually champions free speech and alternative media - so why doesn't he use his own forum to discuss the issue, instead of trying to meddle with the editorial decisions of another newspaper? It strikes me as being a little bit petty, and my esteem for The Bollard's been bruised a bit.

Besides, Busby doesn't know me well enough to realize that he's only encouraging me by labeling me a "rogue blogger." He might as well have called me Captain Awesome. So, lock up the women and children and stay tuned to this blog for more about the PEEPs, why the library should stay where it is, and other rascally roguery.

The New Coast Parade

The new coastline: Boothby Square

Thanks to everyone who turned out this morning in the Old Port to march along Portland's New Coastline to demand comprehensive cuts in greenhouse gas pollution. Thanks especially to Sara, Harry, and Valerie, who pulled most of the weight to organize this event.

I counted about 200 people who passed me while I was parade marshalling at Middle and Market Streets. We also had a number of our state congressional delegation there, and today's event should make a strong case for making the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (currently under consideration in the Legislature) a high priority for them.

I was a little bit giddy from having so many people show up (I'd been needlessly fretting that no one would come), but I got the impression that a lot of other people had a good time, too. Even the people who were waiting in traffic for our parade to pass by were smiling.

The new coastline: Commercial Street

You can see photos from the other 1500 events around the nation at www.stepitup2007.org.

UPDATE: I nearly forgot: the old media were at this event in full force, and it looks like some of tonight's 6 o'clock news shows will boil down the crucial arguments for greenhouse gas legislation into a 2-second sound bite from yours truly. Here's the report from the WCSH 6 TV station:

Activists are urging the federal government to cut carbon dioxide emissions 80% by the year 2050.

"It's not too late, [it's] totally achievable," said activist Christian McNeil.

Note how the word "totally" constitutes 1/6 of my sound bite. Way to be articulate, dude.

What you can do about it.

Global warming can get you down with all of its talk of famine and mass extinction. Luckily, the situation is less hopeless than it might seem.

We could avoid the worst effects of warming if we committed to an 80% reduction in carbon emissions within the next 30 years. That might sound like a big, impossible initiative, but actually, it would just bring the world back down to the levels of carbon emissions we had in 1950. I wasn't around, but from what I've heard, 1950 wasn't so terrible. Some people even refer to those times as "the good old days."

We can start towards that goal as individuals, by conserving energy, driving less, and buying green power. But we also need our government to step in and force our markets to recognize and take responsibility for the very real costs of greenhouse gas emissions.

The new coastline (from Flood Maps, a previous post)

Towards that end, we in Portland are staging a protest this weekend, on Saturday, April 14. Our "New Coast Parade" will march along Fore Street, the new waterfront of Portland under a 6 meter sea level change. Following the parade, there will be speakers, music, and educational exhibits in Monument Square.

This will be one of over 1300 protests, rallies, and gatherings being held all over the nation to make Congress regulate an 80% emissions reduction. If you live in or near Portland, please join us, and if you live somewhere else, you can probably find an event near you.

Meet us between 10:30 and 11 AM in Post Office Park for the parade, or stop by sometime early in the afternoon for the rally in the Square (click here for event details).

Miscellany

Here are some things I've been meaning to put up for a while. Watch out for the bullets:

• My analog reading material these days consists of economist Matthew Kahn's new book Green Cities, which seeks to evaluate global cities according to various measures of environmental health. It's got some good insights and with only a few equations it ought to be fairly accessbile to non-economists. Before you go to the library you can sample Kahn's writing and thoughts at his weblog: http://greeneconomics.blogspot.com.
  
  
• This sentence from Kahn's book caught my eye: "[One] hypothesis suggests that a nation is more likely to enact environmental regulation when its economy is growing and income inequality is falling." Which reminded me of themes discussed in the Brookings Institution's Action Plan for Promoting Sustainable Prosperity and Quality Places, another bit of reading I've recently finished. The Brookings report makes note of big demographic and economic dichotomies in our state: north and south, working-class and college-educated, the young workforce and older retirees, wealthy newcomers and struggling old-timers. Income inequality is growing here as it is all over America, and politics have become more divisive and less productive. The Brookings report recommends harnessing the productivity and wealth of richer residents to grow the state's economy and extend opportunity to its working classes. If Maine is to protect its civic integrity, it must preserve its egalitarian spirit.
  
  
• Thanks to May Shrink Or Fade and The Adventures of a Geo-Geek for adding me to their prestigious lists of links, and thanks also to their readers who may have found their way here.
  
  
• Finally, The Bollard has published an essay of mine that started as a draft blog post and quickly outgrew this format. If all these whizzing bullets haven't yet shot your attention span to hell, check it out here.

Correcting Thoreau.

A new essay from urban naturalist Jenny Price is on Grist:
In Cities is the Preservation of the World.

Price criticizes "the popular American delusion, which nature writers have encouraged, that nature is where cities are not." Millions of Americans have followed Thoreau into the Waldens of the world, and the result has more often been sprawl and pollution than the preservation of anything.

This blog attempts for Portland what Price advocates for all of our cities: to bring nature writing out of the quasi-mystical frontiers where people aren't and into the cities and suburbs where we actually live.

If we accomplish that, we'll literally bring environmentalism closer to millions of people.

New York still stands, and thinks to look ahead

Twenty-five years ago, New York was almost bankrupt. Robert Caro had written a book subtitled "The Fall of New York" and won a Pulitzer Prize for it. And the new movie "Escape from New York" was premised on the idea that by 1997, Manhattan would be abandoned and adaptively reused as a maximum-security prison.

In hindsight, New York didn't fall. In fact, the city is worth trillions of dollars and is basically ruling the planet. And so, flush with cash and ambition, the city is looking to the future with an optimism it hasn't had in decades.

The Bloomberg administration articulated that optimism last week with PLANYC 2030. The Plan anticipates that "our city will be getting bigger, our infrastructure older, and our environment more unpredictable" (the last is a reference to global warming, which could soon turn downtown New York into a Venice of the New World). These three broad issues are broken down into ten goals sorted under one-word headlines, which, for the sake of print design, all end in the letter "N" (for NYC, get it?).

Under the "OPENYC" initiative, the goals are to build housing for one million new residents, add transit capacity to serve them and improve travel times, and to insure than every New Yorker lives within a 10-minute walk from a park. Goals of the MAINTAINYC initiative deal with upgrading the city's water, transportation, and electicity infrastructure. And the four goals of GREENYC are to reduce climate-change pollutants by 30%, to have the cleanest air of any large American city, to clean all of New York's contaminated brownfields, and to open 90% of city waterways to recreation with natural area restoration and water quality improvements.

In spite of the references to "opening" and "maintaining" the city, every one of the ten goals involves making New York, and by extension, America, more sustainable. The plan claims that "New York is one of the most environmentally-efficient cities in the world." The world can disagree, but certainly NYC is the most efficient place to live in the United States. Imagine how much worse off we would be if New York's 8.5 million people - almost 3% of the nation's population - lived the same SUV-driving, McMansion-living lifestyle that the rest of America practices, instead of riding subways and living on an average of two-hundredths of an acre? If a million more people can live there instead of Peoria, the world will be in comparatively better shape.

Adding transit capacity and accessibility to parks have obvious environmental benefits. Upgrading water infrastructure will likely involve additional investments in protecting the city's upstream watersheds, and offers the possibility that New Yorkers might abandon the stunningly inefficient practice of importing water in plastic bottles from places like Fiji and Poland, Maine. The committment to transportation infrastructure might be a chance for the city to spread the gospel of congestion charging. And electrical infrastructure improvements will look toward cleaner power with better distribution, including buildings that generate their own electricity.

Even though the plan doesn't mince words about the problems that might face the city (flooding, blackouts, all-day rush hours), the overall tone is strikingly optimistic. These goals might be prerequisites for New York's continued dominance, but they also give good reason for the world to keep following New York's lead.

PLANYC2030 website

The Economist: The new New York

Streetsblog: Futurama 2030

Plum Creek

Map of the Plum Creek proposal (thanks Paul)

Perhaps you've heard about what Plum Creek, the stockholder-owned real estate and timber company, has planned in Northern Maine. In a landscape that today stands as a largely undeveloped working forest, with pristine lakes and a remarkable wealth of renewable forest resources, Plum Creek has proposed building 975 houses and two large resorts.

By way of comparison, North Conway, New Hampshire has 1,602 housing units in all (2000 Census), and Bar Harbor has 1,558 (2000 Census).

Plum Creek has also tried to sweeten the deal by including a proposed "conservation framework" that would put 368,000 acres under easements or conservation ownership. The possibility for conservation is indeed impressive: the framework would connect a million acres of conserved lands stretching from Baxter State Park to the Canadian border. The only hitch is that the company demands approval of their development plans, then expects state taxpayers and conservation nonprofits to pony up millions of dollars for the framework to take effect.

I'll be writing about this business in greater depth in the weeks to come, until and during the time when the state conducts public hearings on the plan. In the meantime, a few links:

-Natural Resources Council of Maine (who are shaping up as the main opposition group)

-Plum Creek Moosehead Plan site

And this is the big plan: Plum Creek's own documents (these are huge files):

Vol. 1: Petition for rezoning (PDF, 90 mb)

Vol. 2: Plan description (PDF, 165 mb)

Vols. 3 and 4: Appendices (PDF, 110 mb)

The Maine Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC) has a whole web page devoted to the concept plan and its path through the regulatory process here, as well as a calendar of updates and upcoming events.