Author: Holden Corey Stein

The world is subject to change in its consumption habits over time and we are certainly in a transitional period ourselves. For one, our general consumption habits are unsustainable, and with growing populations across the world, whatever resources we have left will be further pressed. The Masdar community is looking to be the frontrunner in the transitional trend to a more sustainable society.

What Abu Dhabi is doing is highly intelligent and deserves immense credit for its foresight. The leaders and proponents of this development are aware that in the future that pressures for resources and energy will grow so large that it may cause global instability. The nation is using the resources and surplus funds that they have now in order to fund a society for the future.

Abu Dhabi is taking many great initiatives in order to promote a sustainable society in the future. For example, the nation is using MIST to enhance education and technology for the future. Furthermore, the society is looking to maintain 100% energy and water sustainability which are goals unlike those of the United States, EU, and Asian economies.

Abu Dhabi shows how the United States could use their model to promote our well-being for the future. For example, we could establish environmental sustainability by using an allotted percentage of funds from our financial and energy sectors to spur environmentally-friendly development. The American economy is by far the largest in the world – largely due to its output and consumption habits. In order to preserve our way of life and economy, we should follow the path that Masdar set in motion.

 

 

A main distinguishing factor in our contemporary civilization from others is the power to harness and extract energy. Our recent century, after the development of the light bulb and corresponding electronics, has been defined in part by the struggle for materials to satisfy our energy demands. In the effort to grow our society and technology, light pollution has emerged as a very evident consequence. Light pollution not only has significant implications and impacts on humans, but also the environment around us.

One fascinating aspect of the journal article was how a large group (100,000+) nurses were sampled in a study to analyze any health complications they have suffered from over time. What was found was that the nurses who had worked three decades and had rotated night shifts had a positive association for breast cancer. This is a chilling finding from the study. In a way, this is a grim signal that changing our “natural” habits, such as working repeatedly through the night, may have serious consequences on our individual biology.

In addition, light pollution has shown that it has negative impacts on the surrounding animals, including ourselves. The interference in the circadian rhythm is a significant impact of light pollution. For example, sleeping disorders such as insomnia may could be an inferred result of light pollution. As cities and urban areas continue to grow, so do sleeping disorders and other health complications that arise during the nighttime. From the ecological perspective, animals such as birds or other animals prevalent around urban areas could suffer from such disorders as well. It will be interesting to see over time if people or animals will adjust to the unprecedented amounts of light pollution by moving away from urban areas or learning to live with new environmental factors.

 

It is one monumental task to just simply acknowledge that there are environmental consequences for our actions. It is another task to address these consequences with full faith and effort. After reading the EPA testimony, I have effectively lost a lot of faith in our ability to respond to environmental consequences and situations. The EPA was established by the federal government in order to implement more environmental regulations and preserve what ecological integrity remains in the United States. The EPA was created with high standards and high goals. Of course no one is perfect, especially the American government, but the EPA’s performance after 9/11 was inexcusable.

Americans count on the government to protect them; this notion extends to the EPA. With two skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, it could have easily been foreseen that the air and ground around the site would have been filled with toxic chemicals and harmful debris. The EPA, in summary, executed a minimal response to the disaster by only testing a limited street area for a limited amount of known toxic substances that were prevalent in the air.

In the wake of an environmental turning point in our lifespan, we cannot afford for our government to take the easy way out of these issues. If the people are not going to change their habits, and the corporations are not going to stop over harvesting resources, then it comes down on the back of the government to preserve some form of environmental integrity. Organizations, such as the EPA, should set an example for responsibility and foresight, not an example for lackadaisical and bureaucratic behavior. This testimony presented an example that we need to observe and analyze. Oftentimes, we might think that the government does its best to protect its citizens. Ultimately, when we find out that organizations dedicated to environmental duty like the EPA let us down, it does not bide well with the citizens who are actively concerned. Those respective citizens are concerned because the response to environmental harm is not nearly as serious as it needs to be in order to foster a continuously prosperous future for our species.

I bet if we had to choose the representative municipality of the world for our time, we’d choose New York, London, or Tokyo. It may actually take us quite some time to go down the list to the capital of Azerbaijan. Baku serves as the model in the journal report “Planning of sustainable cities in view of green architecture.” While Baku may be overlooked as an influential urban area, particularly by those of whom reside in the United States, urban and environmental planners could learn a lot from the pioneer city.

The first noteworthy environmental improvement taken upon by Baku was the incorporation of more green and recreational space within the city. The chart with the breakdowns of what the recreational space is used for shows how in just six years the city managed to increase its green space area by 20%. To be fair, when looking at this comparison we have to look at the feasibility of redeveloping space in Baku compared to New York. Baku’s population stands at about 2 million people, but is completely dwarfed by New York’s 8.5 million strong. Just by comparing populations, the challenges of incorporating more green space, let alone 20% more, are not negligible. One way of going about immense green space rezoning is to redevelop certain areas, especially those affected by Hurricane Sandy, into natural buffers or parks. By doing this, the city can minimize property loss and casualties while reaping the benefits of having a more ecologically balanced city.

The other noteworthy point made in the article was how Baku is engaged in reclaiming some of the industrial neighborhoods and how it approaches industrial development. This initiative is very similar to how New York has been approaching it’s long-time abandoned and neglected neighbors. By following this example, New York shows how in at least some ways that it has the potential to be more environmentally balanced going forward. In addition, the city’s approach to rezoning is crucial in making land usage more efficient and balanced.

Due to my experience with NYC 311 and studying various pollution factors in New York City, I feel that this article has especial relevance to me. While working for 311, I personally handled hundreds of noise complaint calls that had a myriad of origins. According to the New Yorker article, noise complaints from the city could come from frequent nuisances such as loud parties or off-hours construction, but could also originate from loud ice cream trucks or barking dogs. The variety of sources of sound pollution in New York City makes this type of pollution and negative social factor even tougher to remedy.

New York City plays as a host to many different types of people; all who register on some form of spectrum or another. Unfortunately, for people who care about their sleep, one of the many spectra range from quiet to loud. For this reason, I feel that a panacea for noise pollution will have to come from technological and infrastructural developments. For example, buildings may have to be restructured on the outside to contain more noise from traffic and construction. Furthermore, the interiors of buildings can be designed to keep more of the noise inside the room if people are talking loudly or partying through the night.

Implementing new urban design methods and technologies into our structures should not be a challenging task. As we covered already in our seminar, Sweden has already started incorporating more of an ecological balance in its cities by planting more trees and creating more green spaces. In turn, Sweden’s average decibel level has decreased across its urban areas. We could learn from other nations and their efforts to reduce noise, but we have other solutions as well. New developments in technology and incorporating them into existing and new structures can reduce noise levels and 311 noise complaints around the city.

 

The Hudson Valley and its shifting over time have provided a great symbol of our goal to achieve environmental balance. Initially, the ecosystem was in relative environmental harmony as the American Indian populations were not so drastically high that they depleted many local and temporary resources. Biodiversity was as high as it could be, and technological impacts were kept to a minimum due to a lack of human intervention and higher education.

Fast forward to the Colonial Era and the first half of our young country’s history and the Hudson Valley is an epicenter for industrial development. The Hudson River proved crucial for trade to the west and local industry that spurred the local economy. Fisheries, factories and harbors all hurt the sea life directly, as population increases surrounding the industrial centers and towns depleted animal species and local resources. As mentioned earlier in City at the Water’s Edge, the Hudson Valley was subjected to intense deforestation at the expense of the lumber industry and domestic wood demand. It was particularly interesting to know that the overwhelming majority of trees that now exist up and through New York are nowhere near 150 years old.

Today, the Hudson Valley is in a different stage. Our society acknowledges the impacts it can have on the environment. Humans have developed suburbs, built factories, and tore down trees twice or three times over. Through the Hudson River Estuary Action Agenda, it could be seen there is evidence that the current stage is different from how it was before.

Many advancements have been made to correct for our past environmental neglect. There are now safeguards and regulations in place to track pollution, acidity levels, and temperatures in the region to make sure that the local wildlife is at least sustained and able to survive in the environment. There is also an established commitment to maintaining the Valley’s greenery and land integrity and suburbanization and the negative externalities continue to threaten the landscape. What makes this era different from the last is that we, as a society, now recognize the imbalance and are now implementing methods and means of correcting this imbalance as effectively as possible.

Our society, for the sake of sustaining and promoting billions of lives, has to face the facts that we consume our environment and contribute to immense amounts of waste. For centuries, economists, designers, architects, and politicians have been concerned with how to efficiently create and build cities to minimize waste and inefficiencies.

Resource Management as a Key Factor… has been a great change of pace reading because it demonstrates how over time our leaders have been concerned with our development and space utilization. I agree with the overarching journal theme that we need to focus on resources management. RM is imperative because now that we have reached a mature global economy and heavily developed population, it is crucial to emphasize that resource management will now dictate the rest of our future and economics going forward. Our modern way of economics concerns the combination of two concepts: Supply and Demand. In order to progress past traditional development and resource utilization, we have to acknowledge that our Capitalist practices do not exist in a vacuum, nor will resources be so easy to come by.

In one essence, our energy demands are a great foreshadowing factor in how the world will develop over the coming centuries. As the article points out, various methods of energy have to be explored to sustain our demands. The beginning of the 21st century marked an era when we faced the fact that our oil and coal resources will not last much longer. The article suggests that over time we have adapted our resource usage to match our developing needs. For example, in the 20th century emerged Nuclear, Natural Gas, and other alternative energies such as Wind, Solar, and Hydro. This shift in energy consumption and development is a good forecast for how our society will use resources management to usher in a future of redevelopment and more environmental balance.

 

http://www.nycedc.com/system/files/files/resource/SolarThermalUpdateOp.pdf

After reading a series of pessimistic opinions and analysis through the first half of the semester, I actually enjoyed reading this piece due to it’s legitimate findings and arguments for optimism. Something I found noteworthy was that we had so many different chemical emissions and high levels of pollution prior to this sudden change. New York in the 20th century has been plagued with environmental issues emerging from a rapidly growing population, increased automobile usage, and the prominence of industry, especially before the 1980s. Even after the Clean Air and Clean Water act have been issued by the Federal Government decades ago, New York still had a long ways to improve in the 21st century.

With our heightened awareness and our growing ability to observe tangible environmental changes, we as a city and society can move in a positive direction. The graphs presented in the report, including the Sulfur Dioxide graph on page 8, demonstrate just how rapidly people can bring upon change in their habits and consumption. I traditionally believe that humans can alter their environment much more quickly than they can repair it. On the contrary, I can see that with our technological capabilities, heightened environmental awareness, public and private support, and viable alternatives, that we may be able to dramatically reverse our affects on the environment – or at minimum our air pollution.

Another interesting point to be drawn from the article is that most people cannot even see or recognize negative changes in their environment. Before reading this report, I was not even aware of these types of emissions into our atmosphere, let alone the other dozens that may harm us in addition to the common culprits – Carbon Dioxide and Methane. People can read about climate reports or changing patterns but since we don’t actually see progressive change and that it doesn’t affect our direct lifestyles, we do not feel the urgency to change our habits. This is why reports like this are imperative and show that there is room for change. Our scientists and municipalities have shown through this example that we all don’t necessarily have to see the negative changes, we just have to be willing and able to help participate in positive change as it is warranted.

A lynchpin of modern thought is that we operate in equilibrium. We like to think that our economies and political rationale operate in equilibrium, but we tend to neglect our effects on nature. The world has a fragile environmental balance that has been made evident by many recent weather shifts and rapidly developing animal extinctions. We have to observe that our actions are creating an imbalance in our environmental equilibrium and that our planet will account for those shifts in attempt to balance our global ecosystem.

In order to adjust to the human impacts on the world, our environment will change dramatically to account for the sheer amount of human interference. As McCully suggested in Chapter 10, sea levels are rising and are making efforts to develop and preserve lands immensely difficult or impossible. What we have to realize as a species is that we have had success in altering our environment to suit our lifestyles and population, but that success may be qualified and short-lived. We can build homes and preserve beaches, but we cannot systematically preserve below sea-level cities from global sea surges in the long-term, let alone over the approaching decades.

One day, even if it takes hundreds of years from now , we will obtain an equilibrium between our species’ progress and the environment we inhabit. We already acknowledge that our current population, without accounting for continuous growth, is unsustainable. With resources being reaped around the world, whether they be oil fields, aquifers, rainforests, or mines, we are running out of time and space to keep our societal structure operating. Increasing scarcity and decreasing amounts of unused lands are already putting pressure on our sustainability and global stability.

Modern history has been written in accord with wars and treaties and has been dotted with remarkable events of human conflict. As we move toward the era of globalization and international collaboration, humankind as a whole is facing a new kind of conflict that has been proving more ominous and consequential by the day. Climate change is a dire problem that will have imminent and pronounced effects on our way of life. Only time will determine how we react to the impending changes and crisis. It is important to realize that we are not immune to pronounced changes in our environment when it factors into our survival as a species.