There are a number of things happening recently that reaffirm my
decision to move back to Morgan Hill after several decades of
corporate moving van life. I congratulate the City of Morgan Hill
for having an active environmental program headed by Tony Eulo and
the fact that it found two organizations to reward with recognition
as Green Businesses.
There are a number of things happening recently that reaffirm my decision to move back to Morgan Hill after several decades of corporate moving van life. I congratulate the City of Morgan Hill for having an active environmental program headed by Tony Eulo and the fact that it found two organizations to reward with recognition as Green Businesses.
The upcoming “community conversation” provides a pathway toward an improved future. If this is important enough to spend nearly $75,000 for a consultant, you know that it will treated seriously. According to this newspaper, the city has hired a consultant to “tell residents their side of the city’s financial story, and find out what sacrifices residents are willing to make to bring the city’s budget back in line.”
I am suggesting that, if the work is limited to this, the most likely result is a short term “quick fix” that we will pay for later. We now have an opportunity to put this community on the road to a sustainable future, one in which we can have some confidence in being able to have the core services we need without having the state jerk the rug out from under us again whenever they feel like it.
Other communities have made significant changes to ensure their future. Having been shown a way, we may want to follow. The City of Ashland, Wis., declared itself an eco-municipality. In doing so, they have committed to a set of guidelines adopted by the American Planning Association in 2000.
1) Reduce dependence upon fossil fuels, and extracted underground metals and minerals;
2) Reduce dependence on chemicals and other manufactured substances that can accumulate in nature;
3) Reduce dependence on activities that harm life-sustaining ecosystems;
4) Meet the hierarchy of present and future human needs fairly and efficiently.
That list may sound high-minded and sure to fall apart when it meets the hard reality of a growth economy and local governments that need the funding that growth promises in order to finance today’s projects. But growth does not always bring the funding that city treasurers lust for. Sound, sustainable planning might. It is possible to be able to do a lot more than we are currently doing.
If I have learned one thing from the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, it is the fact that we cannot look to government for all answers. New Orleans wasn’t able to get several hundred school buses out of the parking lots and to evacuate the poor. While the levees around New Orleans were known not to be sufficient for a major storm, the New Orleans Levee Commission built highway overpasses leading to casino boats. While Louisiana’s Coastal Commission went to Congress year after year explaining that Louisiana needed its tidal wetlands to protect the cities from just the type of disaster we saw, Congress did nothing and we lost one million acres of tidal wetlands into the Gulf of Mexico because the Mississippi River was channeled between levees to a single point of discharge. That is what reliance on government to solve problems gets you.
The people of Louisiana have learned that they need to take ownership of their own future. There are those who are already talking of rebuilding quickly. Those who really care are talking about rebuilding green, so that this will not happen again. There is even a new internet presence called “rebuild green.org.”
So, what does that have to do with us. I think it has a lot to do with Morgan Hill. We are helping as much as we can with the explicit and direct support of Katrina’s victims. That will probably fade when it is no longer the lead story on the evening news. We sometimes lurch forward, nudged by a catastrophe, but when it is over and day to day life returns, we somehow never get around to doing those things to make sure that similar things do not happen in our own community.
If Katrina exposed a weakness in our society, it is our dependence on oil, natural gas, and the infrastructure required to deliver it. I find it amazing that those who complained about rising gas prices now seem to accept the fact, given the damage that Katrina did to production facilities and refining capacity. It seems to me that the only supposedly reasonable people who don’t accept the facts behind the term “peak oil” are all in our own government. Even Chevron is basing its advertising around the fact that 50 percent of all the oil on earth has been taken from the ground and used.
We continue to utilize petroleum products at an ever increasing rate and still all that you hear from some in our government is drill, drill, drill. They seem to have decided that it makes no sense to focus on reducing demand and argue that it would cost jobs. They never seem to ask themselves how many jobs it will cost if we run out of oil before we have an alternative in place.
Dealing with the facts of peak oil and the impacts of major natural catastrophes requires some fundamental societal changes and these will not come easily or without sacrifice. We are being asked to give to the survivors of Katrina. We will be asked to fund the restoration of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Some estimate that the cost will be over $200 billion. Yet, when it comes to taking those steps necessary to protect ourselves against future disasters, will we once again decide that it is too expensive? Figuratively, will we decide that it is better to build bridges to casino boats than it is to strengthen the levee system?
The City of Morgan Hill had success with a visioning process when it was deciding what to do with the Redevelopment Agency and the funding that it could bring for City facilities. We have not yet learned to operate these facilities profitably. Maybe we should recognize that they will continue to need support from the general fund.
When those facilities were built, the City had the opportunity to make a statement about sustainability. The design of the Aquatics Center gave consideration for the inclusion of photo voltaic solar energy generation. It was deemed too expensive and no one was willing to trade off recreational facilities for long- range economic considerations. The City of Santa Cruz found it economic to use their rooftops for solar power generation and they have less sun than we do. It was considered an investment. Now, with the cost of the natural gas required to generate most of our electricity forecast to increase as much as 70 percent, we have a missed opportunity
Don’t expect anything from Sacramento, where the one major thing that Arnold got right with his million solar roof proposal, was a project that the Democrats killed playing politics. We are the ones that have to define our own future and the key word must be “sustainable.”
