Environment

Elections are over now, and the community expression of support for the creation of the Bolin Creek Park and Preserve was overwhelming.

Thanks in no small part to Carrboro Mayor, Mike Nelson, we're on our way to making this park and preserve a reality. The 27 acre Adam's Tract is now in preservation, and last month the Carrboro BOA voted to accept a Conservation Map of the Bolin Creek Watershed.

But where do we go from here?

The planned Claremont development just west of Bolin Creek on the north side of Homestead Rd. is rapidly moving forward. UNC is in the concept stage of Carolina Commons, a development of 140 affordably priced homes for UNC faculty and staff just north of Winmore and east of Lake Hogan Farm. Much of the land targeted for preservation is developable and remains elusive. Clearly, if we are serious about making this park and preserve a reality, we must press on quickly.

Chapel Hill Herald, Saturday October 22, 2005

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was a brief moment in which the long-neglected problem of environmental racism received some attention. Katrina exposed the racism in state and national efforts to aid victims, in who lives near Superfund sites, in who lives in the most vulnerable areas and in who has the means to evacuate.

It also laid bare the difficulty in disentangling questions of race and class particularly in a city like New Orleans. In the flooded Lower Ninth Ward, more than 98 percent of residents are black and more than a third live in poverty.

Katrina made manifest the nature of American poverty. Suddenly, we could see, as Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal put it, that the poor are "already dying a slow death, brought on by a concentration of financial limits, inferior housing, dilapidated educational structures, violence, environmental decay and systematic state neglect."

Chapel Hill Herald, Saturday October 15, 2005

One of the most compelling comments of election season so far came from Carrboro Alderman Jacquelyn Gist at the Sierra Club candidates forum. "Grass makes you stupid" Gist said in reference to Carrboro's many acres of lawn. "Grass is one of the biggest problems facing our community."

Knowing Gist, I did not take her words to be a New Urbanist rebuke of suburban living. They seemed more an indictment of the manner in which modern society relates to nature, and how an alien landscape -- in this case, the lawn -- interferes with our ability to understand the ecosystem that is our home.

I'd been thinking along similar lines this summer, each time I stepped out my front door and walked over to the nearby forest by Bolin Creek. Along the sidewalks and street it was awfully hot, the pavement throwing the sun's heat back at me. But as soon as I stepped under the canopy of trees, it felt 10 degrees cooler. Clearly, the way we live, the way we build, the way we develop -- none is well attuned to our natural environs.