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Only the Hardiest Trees Can Survive Today’s Urban Inferno

May 29, 2024

Only the Hardiest Trees Can Survive Today’s Urban Inferno

In a rapidly warming world, cities need more tree cover to stay cool—but only certain species can handle soaring temperatures, and often they aren’t native species.
Image may contain Brick City Road Street Urban Architecture Building Wall Plant Tree Path and Sidewalk
PHOTOGRAPH: VICENTE MÉNDEZ

Last fall, I invited a stranger into my yard.

Manzanita, with its peeling red bark and delicate pitcher-shaped blossoms, thrives on the dry, rocky ridges of Northern California. The small evergreen tree or shrub is famously drought-tolerant, with some varieties capable of enduring more than 200 days between waterings. And yet here I was, gently lowering an 18-inch variety named for botanist Howard McMinn into the damp soil of Tacoma, a city in Washington known for its towering Douglas firs, big-leaf maples, and an average of 152 rainy days per year.

It’s not that I’m a thoughtless gardener. Some studies suggest that the Seattle area’s climate will more closely resemble Northern California’s by 2050, so I’m planting that region’s trees, too.

Climate change is scrambling the seasons, wreaking havoc on trees. Some temperate and high-altitude regions will grow more humid, which can lead to lethal rot. In other temperate zones, drier springs and hotter summers are disrupting annual cycles of growth, damaging root systems, and rendering any survivors more vulnerable to pests.

Image may contain Land Nature Outdoors Plant Tree Vegetation Woodland and Aerial View
Dead larch trees, a result of bark beetle infestation, stand amidst a city forest in Hagen, Germany. In addition to pests, high temperatures and drought have created stress for the native forest.PHOTOGRAPH: JONAS GÜTTLER/GETTY IMAGES
Image may contain Ground Plant Vegetation Wood Land Nature Outdoors Tree and Woodland
Dead Joshua trees in the eastern Mojave Desert as seen in 2022. Scientists say that climate change will likely kill virtually all of California’s iconic Joshua trees by the end of the century.PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID MCNEW/GETTY IMAGES

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We Are Witnessing a Last Minute Mass Exodus Before the Final Collapse of Our Major Cities

June 7, 2022

Warning – Migrate from Urban Cities to the Suburbs

November 17, 2021

Warning – Migrate from Urban Cities to the Suburbs


I have warned that they were considering lockdowns for climate change. India has been the first to impose a lockdown in New Delhi all for air pollution. I strongly recommend that if you can, get out of the major urban cities before you find yourself locked in home imprisonment denied all human rights on the basis of climate. This is the New World Order and the end goal is to even eliminate office buildings and commuting.

Another Nail In The Coffin Of Big Cities

January 9, 2021

Another Nail In The Coffin Of Big Cities

The riots, political turmoil, and other banana republic embarrassments seem to be ending – for now. So let’s get back to examining the real problems of this hyper-leveraged, dangerously-complex world. Like how big cities might soon be obsolete:

Pretend it’s 2019 and you’re living in a major US city. You, your spouse and two kids have a fairly nice (though admittedly very expensive) apartment in a relatively safe neighborhood, and life is pretty good. There’s a park nearby, dozens of great restaurants within walking distance, and plenty of interesting friends. And of course your high-paying jobs are right there.

Then comes 2020. A pandemic causes your mayor to panic and lock down the city. There go the park, friends, and restaurants. And before the horror of this new normal has a chance to sink in, civil unrest explodes and turns your once-iconic neighborhood into a Mad Maxian war zone of burned-out cars and boarded up storefronts.

If it was just you, you might stick it out. But with a family, this life is now untenable. So you look into moving, preferably to somewhere semi-rural where neither a lockdown nor riots will ever be a problem and the kids can actually play outside. Maybe it’s time to indulge your fantasy of working remotely from a homestead in a gorgeous place.

But you immediately hit a technological speed bump: Broadband Internet, which up to this point had seemed both ubiquitous and a basic human right, isn’t available on the homesteads you now covet. The only option out there is low-tech, unreliable, molasses-slow satellite Internet that, if the reviews are to be believed, is worse than nothing at all.

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How Removing Asphalt Is Softening Our Cities

May 19, 2019

How Removing Asphalt Is Softening Our Cities

Greening alleys reclaims public space, reconnects urban dwellers to one another, and invites nature deep into cities.

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Rachel Schutz hated watching the kids play outside, and not because she was a curmudgeon. As director of an after-school program in a Latino neighborhood near ­Portland, Oregon, she likes the outdoors, the piney tang that hangs in the damp air.

But the kids’ shoes would thump on the asphalt, the pounding echoing against metal dumpsters along the alley. That was their play space. When a neighbor’s pine tree shed its needles, she watched the kids sweep them together and build them into a nest or fort. Otherwise, they were limited to games with chalk or a ball hoop.

The kids wanted something different for the Inukai Family Boys and Girls Club’s 5,000 square feet of alleyside space. They talked about a soccer field or a traditional playground—but surprised Schutz by choosing a nature park. They imagined dirt, logs, and boulders to climb on, raised beds to grow flowers and veggies, and hundreds of trees and plants throughout.

Schutz just had to figure out how to remove the pavement.

Doing so introduced her to a soften-our-cities movement in which cities such as Nashville, Tennessee, Montreal, and Detroit are rethinking all that cement. Alleys and alleysides in particular are being effectively reimagined as people-friendly pathways, parks, and lushly planted urban habitat.

Schutz and the kids she serves understand why the idea has been spreading. The day before they strong-armed the asphalt up, one girl asked her, “Miss Rachel, does this mean we get real grass we can touch?”

Some things about alleys

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To feed growing cities we need to stop urban sprawl eating up our food supply

October 27, 2015

New season asparagus from farmland on Melbourne’s city fringe. Matthew Carey

If you’ve eaten any of the new season’s asparagus recently, it probably came from Koo Wee Rup, a small town 60 kilometres to the south east of Melbourne. Koo Wee Rup produces over 90% of Australia’s asparagus. The region has perfect conditions for asparagus growing, and its ancient peaty soils have a reputation for producing some of the best asparagus in the world.

Koo Wee Rup is just one of many food growing areas on the urban fringe of Australia’s state capitals that make an important contribution to the nation’s fresh food supply. The foodbowls on the fringe of cities like Sydney and Melbourne are some of the most highly productive agricultural regions in Australia.

But as these cities expand to accommodate rapidly growing populations, fertile farmland on the city fringe is at risk due to urban sprawl.

Melbourne Foodbowl at 7 million infographicFoodprint Melbourne project

Melbourne’s foodprint

Early findings from a new study of food production on Melbourne’s city fringe highlight the impact that continued urban sprawl could have on the supply of fresh, local foods in Australia’s cities. The Foodprint Melbourne project is investigating the capacity of Melbourne’s city fringe foodbowl to feed the population of Greater Melbourne.

The research explores the capacity of Melbourne’s foodbowl to feed the current population of 4.4 million and the predicted future population of around 7 million in 2050. The project also investigates the city’s “foodprint” – the amount of land, water and energy required to feed the city, as well as associated greenhouse gas emissions.

Early project findings indicate that Melbourne’s foodbowl currently has the capacity to supply a significant proportion of Greater Melbourne’s food needs across a wide variety of foods, including poultry, eggs, red meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables. The city’s foodbowl can supply just over 40% of the food needed to feed Greater Melbourne, including over 80% of the fresh vegetables consumed and around 13% of fruit.

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Cities Are Finally Treating Water as a Resource, Not a Nuisance

September 6, 2015

Cities Are Finally Treating Water as a Resource, Not a Nuisance

From Houston to Melbourne, the surprising ways urban areas are dealing with water woes

Memorial Day barbecues and parades were thwarted this year in Houston when a massive storm dumped more than 10 inches of rain in two days, creating a Waterworld of flooded freeways, cars, houses and businesses, leaving several people dead and hundreds in need of rescue.

But it was a predictable disaster. That’s because, thanks to a pro-development bent, the magnitude of stormwater runoff has increased dramatically as Houston has sprawled across 600 or so square miles of mud plain veined with rivers, sealing under asphalt the floodplains and adjoining prairies that once absorbed seasonal torrential rains and planting development in harm’s way. Land subsidence from groundwater pumping and oil and gas development and, now, sea level rise and more frequent and severe storms are applying additional pressure from Galveston Bay, which sits just east of the city of 2.2 million.

The good news? Houston had already begun shifting gears, hoping to reduce the severity of future floods by reclaiming 183 miles of natural waterways that snake through the city and 4,000 acres of adjacent green space from industrial areas through a project known as the Bayou Greenways. The goal is to absorb rain where it falls, reducing the volume rushing into stormwater detention facilities, and to encourage biking and walking as “active transit” in the parks that make up the Bayou Greenways.

With these measures, Houston is beginning to embrace a worldwide trend in urban retrofitting — layering new infrastructure on top of old to help cities weather climate change. In many places, that includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions: shifting to cleaner energy, making buildings more efficient and improving public transit. For cities facing increased threats from floods and droughts, it also means adapting to a changing world by finding new ways to manage water.

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Resilient Urban Systems: Where We Stand Now and Where We Need to Go

April 25, 2015

Resilient Urban Systems: Where We Stand Now and Where We Need to Go

By the year 2050, close to seven billion people will be living in urbanized areas worldwide, which is almost double the number of urban inhabitants of today. Provision of adequate infrastructure service to this massive urban population in order to ensure their health, wealth, and comfort is going to be a daunting challenge for engineers, planners, and socioeconomic decision makers in the coming decades. However, the challenges faced by the developing and developed worlds are dissimilar in nature. While the developed world is coping with aging infrastructure, the developing world faces the challenge of keeping up with the brisk pace of urbanization and the consequential rise in infrastructure demand. In 2013, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) awarded the US infrastructure an overall grade of D+ and estimated that USD $3.6 trillion needs to be invested by 2020.1

When considering how to reshape, redesign, or create urban areas to be more sustainable, it is imperative to include urban infrastructure systems (UIS) in the decision-making process. UIS are durable features of the urban form and exhibit a strong form of path dependence. UIS have a pronounced effect on the general topology of the urban system and how the urban area continues to grow spatially over time. UIS, with a typical design life of 50 to 100 years, continue to dominate the urban form and mediate the citizens, goods, services, energy, and resource flows into, within, and out of the urban areas for decades after the design decision has been made. For example, transportation planning often has a prescriptive effect on the growth pattern of an urban region. Empirical estimates suggest that one new highway built through a central city reduces its central-city population by about 18 percent.2

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The Role of Cities in Moving Toward a Sustainable Economy « Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

December 6, 2014

The Role of Cities in Moving Toward a Sustainable Economy « Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

I encounter many young adults who are discouraged by America’s failure to respond to big issues affecting the future of Planet Earth and human civilization. They do not see much opportunity to make major changes, especially at the governmental level. But empowering examples can illustrate how significant changes can be made in governance at many levels. Cities can and have provided some model changes, but we will never get to a sustainable, steady state, true-cost economy when major energy and land-use decisions continue to take us in the opposite direction.

Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Portland (Oregon), and Chicago have led the way with enlightened environmental and economic policies. In Washington, DC, I served on Mayor Gray’s “green ribbon” panel to help fashion a comprehensive green plan for the nation’s capital.

This post focuses, however, on a lesser known city, Austin, Texas, that made big economic decisions that changed the dynamics in energy, transportation, land-use, and self-reliance.

The post is about what a hippy flower-child was able to do in Austin by getting elected to the city council. Max Nofziger left his family’s farm in northwest Ohio over 40 years ago and went to live in Austin. He was a hippy and initially made his living selling flowers on street corners, but managed to get elected to the city council and his persistence and rationality helped lead the way for some significant changes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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