Dana Blankenhorn

The Apartment Crisis

I wrote about the housing crisis” last year. My focus was on the tax law. It needs to discourage private equity from buying up houses, and encourage home ownership.

But there’s a second element at work. It’s demographic. Millennials, like my kids, aren’t marrying. If they’re marrying, they’re not having kids. They want small apartments near where they work. Most of them work in cities, where it’s very expensive to build.

Developers, united with young renters, are trying to increase density by block-busting urban homeowners. That’s what a lot of the current “affordable housing” debate is about. I saw it in the 1960s, when it was a racial divide. It’s ugly and leads to crime.

The good news is that apartment construction is already increasing. It is now near the level it was in 1972, just before the first oil crisis. If interest rates moderate even a little, the industry will blow past that number. 

I’m no NIMBY. Planned density can work. But rather than giving developers open season to wreck home values in the name of “15 minute neighborhoods," destroying the tree canopy, start with “30-minute cities," so that the infrastructure keeps up with the demand.

Wild America Stores

There is no difference between the wild environment and the built environment.

Cities and suburbs are as much a part of the ecosystem as any national park or wetland.

In the last few years my Atlanta backyard, a few hundred feet from a MARTA rail station, has been visited by deer, rabbits, and while turkey vultures, as well as a host of predatory and preying birds and other animals.

If you want to know where the environmental war is being fought, it’s around your house. Millions of people are fighting it. They’re putting up bird feeders, planting trees, running beehives, and letting their plants grow wild.

They’re doing it without retail support. That needs to change.

You will find seed and wild animal chows in hardware stores, pet shops, and even some specialty bird stores. What I’ve yet to see is anyone offering a full set of products and services targeting homeowners who want to create a more natural ecosystem where they live.

There are products for such a store, from feeders to water gardens, from birdbaths to salt licks. Such a store could also sell services. It could send out people to inspect yards and certify habitats. It could provide environmental education and learning products to young people.

Until now, environmentalism has mainly been pursued through non-profit channels, and politics. This is one reason why the environment is losing. The market’s will is all on the other side.

Drop me a line and let’s launch this puppy.

Arborists on Offense

In cities built in forests, like Atlanta, it’s time for city arborists to go on offense.

For too long, they’ve been playing defense. That is, a developer (or homeowner) would decide to cut down some trees, and there would be a process the arborist could object to. That’s defense.

Offense is something else.

It starts with a much bigger budget. Use the money to hire summer workers who will comb the city on foot and by bike, with cameras, identifying lots without tree canopy. Fine those suckers, preferably through a property tax surtax from which they can’t escape. Those same summer workers can identify lots with a full tree canopy. These property owners can apply for a bonus, again in the form of a property tax abatement. The bonus would be smaller than the penalty, providing money for the arborist’s budget. The workers are also more likely to grow up as supporters of trees.

The arborist should also work with independent groups, like Trees Atlanta in Atlanta, to offer property owners advice on what trees they should plant where. Trees Atlanta can use existing programs to pay for those trees where people can’t afford them. And before poor people start futzing about huge trees falling on their houses, there are plenty of smaller trees to choose from.

We can argue about what defines canopy. Is it just the unbuilt areas of the property, or does it include roofs? Trees over a roof can cut cooling bills. But solar panels on a roof can do the same thing.

The arborist should also work with property owners and non-government agencies to get trees on roofs. Every flat roof can be a garden. Every small roof can have a canopy.

A city that wants to grow, expanding the amount of land that’s built-up, has a responsibility to let arborists go on offense. Otherwise, it’s part of the global warming problem. You don’t want that to be your political obituary. Or the actual one for your children.

The Common Good

Without an overwhelming victory for democracy on November 3, I’ll be glad to die.

Trump is the ultimate expression of a basic misperception, that private goods matter more than the public goods, that national well-being matters more than global well-being, that fences and borders can isolate and separate us.

This is especially true when it comes to the environment.

My children face a bleak future unless current climate trends are reversed. But the U.S. can’t change it alone. Every country must do its part.

The ice caps’ disappearance means many cities around the world are doomed. New Orleans is doomed. Miami is doomed. New York City is doomed. So are Calcutta, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur. Sea level rise means these places will soon be underwater.

Meanwhile, the methane of the Siberian tundra is bubbling to the surface. Fires in the Amazon and West mean the Earth can no longer breathe. The “habitable” part of the U.S. will be cut by two-thirds within 50 years. The oceans are warming so that, along with overfishing, all that’s left will be jellyfish.

In past bouts of global warming, when the ice caps disappeared, nature adjusted. Cooling trends returned and nature came back. With man-made global warming, there’s no natural reversal. It takes 80 grams of energy to melt a gram of ice. Once the ice is melted, 80 grams of energy take its temperature to 112.

The Fight in My Front Yard

I’m leaving next week for Europe.

Perhaps the most important day on my trip will be September 28, when I’m due to see my daughter in Vienna.

It’s not just important because I love her. It’s important that I check in with her regarding the most important issue facing mankind, climate change.

My daughter has been studying most of her life to be on the front lines of the battle. But what I’m finding is that the key to this battle may be right back here, in what was her front yard. If you want to know whether the climate crisis can be overcome or not, that’s where to start.

My daughter’s focus has been on urban animal policy. It sounds arcane, but it’s not. Whether or not we admit it, our cities and suburbs are part of nature, just as our forests and beaches are. They are ecosystems, where plants and animals live or die depending on our actions.

In Atlanta, that battle is being lost.

Nature in the City

One of my big gripes with the present time, with freedom and democracy on the line, is that it delays consideration of other important issues.

Like that of nature in the city.

We like to pretend that nature has been tamed in the city, that it has no place save what we carve out for it. This is false.

During this century, as exurbs have extended their tentacles to the deepest woods and the tallest mountains, we have seen an unprecedented, seldom remarked-upon, rush of animals to American cities. When I was raising chickens 20 years ago I only had to worry about opossums and raccoons. Now we have coyotes, hawks and falcons. We also have bunny rabbits, deer, armadillo and feral hogs roaming the local landscape.

What Comes Next

Reporters on all beats are so obsessed with the here-and-now they ignore what is going on beneath, the trends that will make up tomorrow.

This has always been my indictment of the business I have called home for nearly 40 years. It’s why I didn’t make more of my news career than I did. I was constantly looking around corners, seeking the future, rather than looking closely at what was in front of me.

That’s OK. I’ve had a good life. No, make that a great life. A wonderful life partner, two great kids, a home we have built together, comfort in our old age, and memories of good times.

But I’m still looking around corners, still trying to figure out what’s next. Ask any old person. Inside them you’ll always find a 20-year old going “what the fuck?”

For a decade now, ever since I began seeing that technology was going to achieve political power, and sustain that power, meaning all that’s happening now is a play I foresaw, I have been thinking about what comes next.

The Internet of Things? Renewable energy? Artificial Intelligence? All these of the now. They’re what is happening. I foresaw IoT nearly 15 years ago now, and reported on it here to you, as “The World of Always On.” I began covering renewable energy just as that area began to boom, and predicted we would achieve crossover with fossil fuels by 2016. As we did. Artificial intelligence? I’d settle for some of the real kind, frankly.

When You Kill All the Predators the Prey May Kill You

by Robin Blankenhorn

Imagine this. You are driving north on I-75 in Atlanta, heading toward the I-285 Perimeter, when you see two white tailed deer along the side of the road, less than 20 from the southbound lanes.

This really did happen, to me, last weekend.

My dad and I were heading to the Silver Comet Trail for a bike ride when I saw those two deer, near Mt. Paran Road, in the Buckhead neighborhood. While many would be very happy to see that, my thought was more on how many people they might kill.

It goes without saying that people fear predators. They can kill us and would gladly use us for their next meal if given the chance. Look at that we have done to wolf, bear, and shark populations because of that fear. (The picture is from a Boston lawyer's blog post about a deer attack on a jogger.)

You would be surprised at how few humans these predators kill in a year. This number pales in comparison to what herbivores kill, and especially deer, because we have killed all the predators that might otherwise keep their numbers in check. 

Making Peace With Urban Wildlife

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 22 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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Temple Grandin said, “Nature is cruel. We don't have to be.”

She should have added, “But nature has to be.” Because it's true. And it's a truth people ignore all the time. It may be the most important truth in America today.

The cat chases the mouse and our sympathy goes to the mouse. The dog fights the cat and we call the cat a hero when it wins. We support the cute, and fear the powerful.

Which is why evolution has been going in reverse, and that reverse has been accelerating since Darwin's first description of it.

In Defense of Zoos Killing Off Their Charges

by Robin Blankenhorn

This is one of a series of articles written by Robin Blankenhorn, a range and wildlife graduate of Texas A&M in Kingsville, Texas, concerning urban wildlife issues. Enjoy. 

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I am sure by now that you have heard about the Copenhagen Zoo. How they put down a healthy 2-year old male giraffe named Marius even when there were other options available. 

Many people are now outraged. There have been death threats sent to to the zoo and even the director of the zoo. People say it was wrong to decide to end his life. They are insulted that he was then fed to lions and tigers.

I wonder if you understand the whole story. I want to defend the zoo.