ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Scientists predict in a new study that fewer than one in five of the plants and animals which currently live in the world’s rainforests will still be here in 90 years time. The culprits? Climate change and deforestation.

The study, “Correlative and mechanistic models of species distribution provide congruent forecasts under climate change”, is published in the June edition of Conservation Letters, an open-access journal. Here’s the abstract:

Good forecasts of climate change impacts on extinction risks are critical for effective conservation management responses. Species distribution models (SDMs) are central to extinction risk analyses. The reliability of predictions of SDMs has been questioned because models often lack a mechanistic underpinning and rely on assumptions that are untenable under climate change. We show how integrating predictions from fundamentally different modeling strategies produces robust forecasts of climate change impacts on habitat and population parameters. We illustrate the principle by applying mechanistic (Niche Mapper) and correlative (Maxent, Bioclim) SDMs to predict current and future distributions and fertility of an Australian gliding possum. The two approaches make congruent, accurate predictions of current distribution and similar, dire predictions about the impact of a warming scenario, supporting previous correlative-only predictions for similar species. We argue that convergent lines of independent evidence provide a robust basis for predicting and managing extinctions risks under climate change.

By 2100, climate change and deforestation could have altered two-thirds of the rainforests in Central and South America and about 70% in Africa. The Amazon Basin alone could see changes in biodiversity for 80% of the region.

A U.K. Telegraph article about the study quotes Daniel Nepstad, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, which studies climate change in Massachusetts:

This study is the strongest evidence yet that the world’s natural ecosystems will undergo profound changes including severe alterations in their species composition through the combined influence of climate change and land use. Conservation of the world’s biota, as we know it, will depend upon rapid, steep declines in greenhouse gas emissions.

Rural life is extremely energy intense, especially in terms of oil. Exurban living – people living “consumer lives with prettier views” – depends on very long supply lines. Alex Stefan at Worldchanging explains why the exurban lifestyle is not only not “green”, it is at risk in an environment where energy prices can go nowhere but up.

[W]e know that big, dense cities are greener; that the energy used in shipping food is a small portion of its overall impact, that transit is more energy efficient than driving (and indeed, that cars are the largest contributor to climate change), and that the benefits of urban living in compact, walkable, wired communities can extend far beyond living in smaller homes, served by more efficient infrastructure and not owning a car, to include a dramatic overall drop in one’s environmental impact. What’s more, we know why these things are so[.]

Unfortunately for people living in rural areas, we know a lot more about how to live a prosperous-yet-low-impact urban life than we do about how to live a rural life of equal prosperity with a small ecological footprint. Rural areas are poorer than urban areas, and offer fewer opportunities. Envisioning how people rural areas  will be able to prosper and live decent lives  in an environment bereft of cheap and abundant energy is a challenge that has yet to be faced.

A meta-analysis published recently in the Journal of the American Planning Association finds the most important single factor in minimizing driving is to develop in existing areas of high destination accessibility – like city centers. Going back in time (or back to the future), that would be villages.

Other factors like mixed-use, street and intersection design, and block size prove to be less important than destination accessibility. Still, these factors are more important than mere density. Density is less important than land-use mix and having shops, schools, and workplaces near to where people live.

Not surprisingly, driving is found to have energy and climate implications:

The transportation outcomes . . .  vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and vehicle trips (VT), are critically linked to traffic safety, air quality, energy consumption, climate change, and other social costs of automobile use.

Figuring out a way to drive less – much, much less – is key to coming to grips with peak oil and to arresting global warming before we reach a tipping point beyond which Earth’s climate will spin out of control, resulting in an Eaarth we no longer recognize and which is no longer fit for human habitation.

The free-access analysis, Travel and the Built Environment, was authored by Reid Ewingab of the University of Utah’s Urban Land Institute; and Robert Cerverocde, University of California (Berkeley) Transportation Center, Institute of Urban and Regional Development.

Here’s the abstract:

Problem: Localities and states are turning to land planning and urban design for help in reducing automobile use and related social and environmental costs. The effects of such strategies on travel demand have not been generalized in recent years from the multitude of available studies.

Purpose: We conducted a meta-analysis of the built environment-travel literature existing at the end of 2009 in order to draw generalizable conclusions for practice. We aimed to quantify effect sizes, update earlier work, include additional outcome measures, and address the methodological issue of self-selection.

Methods: We computed elasticities for individual studies and pooled them to produce weighted averages.

Results and conclusions: Travel variables are generally inelastic with respect to change in measures of the built environment. Of the environmental variables considered here, none has a weighted average travel elasticity of absolute magnitude greater than 0.39, and most are much less. Still, the combined effect of several such variables on travel could be quite large. Consistent with prior work, we find that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is most strongly related to measures of accessibility to destinations and secondarily to street network design variables. Walking is most strongly related to measures of land use diversity, intersection density, and the number of destinations within walking distance. Bus and train use are equally related to proximity to transit and street network design variables, with land use diversity a secondary factor. Surprisingly, we find population and job densities to be only weakly associated with travel behavior once these other variables are controlled.

Takeaway for practice: The elasticities we derived in this meta-analysis may be used to adjust outputs of travel or activity models that are otherwise insensitive to variation in the built environment, or be used in sketch planning applications ranging from climate action plans to health impact assessments. However, because sample sizes are small, and very few studies control for residential preferences and attitudes, we cannot say that planners should generalize broadly from our results. While these elasticities are as accurate as currently possible, they should be understood to contain unknown error and have unknown confidence intervals. They provide a base, and as more built-environment/travel studies appear in the planning literature, these elasticities should be updated and refined.

What are the energy and emissions consequences of continuing to allow rural sprawl – the proliferation of nonfarm dwellings throughout the rural landscape? That’s one of the questions currently being addressed in Lane County by a task force looking at the county’s land use policies.

Rural development patterns enabled by cheap and abundant fossil fuels have energy and climate consequences, as almost 40% of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are associated with residences and cars. Changing development and transportation patterns can significantly impact energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Data that break down per capita CO2 emission rates along other important categories of the United States, such as by urban vs. suburban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, apartment dwellers vs. homeowners, or by ethnic/racial origin is hard to come by. But new studies are beginning to shed some light on the issue.

A 2008 report by the Brookings Institution found that the average American in a metropolitan area has a carbon footprint of 8.21 tons — 14% less than the average American living outside the city.

Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard, reached a similar conclusion in a study titled The Greenness of Cities:  Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development. Glaeser and co-author Matthew Kahn found that cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas. The city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York, which developed prior to the dominance of the automobile.

A new study titled Cities produce surprisingly low carbon emissions per capita appearing in the April issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization looked at cities in a variety of countries and, for the most part, affirms these findings. Analyzing the per capita emissions from 12 major cities in Europe, Asia, North America and South America, the study’s author, David Dodman of the International Institute for Environment and Development found that per capita emissions from cities were typically smaller, and often far smaller, than their nation’s averages.

For example, greenhouse gas emissions for New Yorkers are less than a third of those of the national average for the USA. Those of Barcelona residents are half the average for Spain.  Londoners have little more than half the greenhouse gas emissions per person of the UK average. Brazil’s two largest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have less than one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions per person of the average for Brazil.

Tokyo has considerably lower emissions per person than either Beijing or Shanghai, suggesting that prosperity need not inevitably result in greater emissions and that well designed and well governed cities can combine high living standards with much lower greenhouse gas emissions. However, the study cautions that emissions from manufacturing are currently allocated to the countries in which these greenhouse gases are produced, rather than to the locations in which the finished products are purchased and used.

The main driver of greenhouse gas emissions is unsustainable consumption, especially in the world’s more affluent countries.

Recently the media have given a lot of coverage to a supposed new scientific consensus that sea levels will rise by about one meter by 2100. For example, this is from a story in Physorg.com:

Recent studies agree that sea level will rise by roughly one meter over this century for a mid-range emission scenario. This is 3 times higher than predicted by the IPCC.

New research from several international research groups, including the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen provides independent consensus that IPCC predictions of less than a half a meter rise in sea levels is around 3 times too low. The new estimates show that the sea will rise approximately 1 meter in the next 100 years in agreement with other recent studies. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters.

But it’s not that simple, as this chart posted at Climate Feedback shows:

As you can see, the lower range of estimates of sea level rise are converging at around one meter. The upper range of the latest estimates is now hovering around two meters.  And it seems that every year, as scientists’ understanding of ice sheet dynamics grows, estimates of future sea level rise are growing as well.

You’d think people who live along the coast would be beginning to get a little concerned, wouldn’t you?  Think again.

From Florida, Mark Schrope reports that coastal development continues virtually unabated in Miami in spite of its vulnerability:

Right now Florida is showing almost no leadership on responding sensibly to storms and to rising sea level,” says Robert Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Orrin Pilkey of Duke University in North Carolina, a well-known proponent of greater constraints on coastal development, is even more forthright. “I call it an outlaw state,” he says. “Florida has been particularly irresponsible and it’s going to pay the price very soon.

As Climate Feedback points out, worse than just ignoring the threat of sea level rise, the state of Florida has taken drastic action to ensure that waterside properties damaged in storms can be rebuilt in the same locations time and time again.

Here in Oregon, plans by the City of Newport to redefine areas prone to landslides and erosion and to impose new rules governing how construction can occur in them are raising the outrage of property owners. Oregonlive reports:

Property owners here are furious over city plans to redefine areas prone to landslides and erosion — and how construction can occur in them.

Proposed building code changes for new construction in areas known as geologic hazard zones will cost property owners billions of dollars, they say, and are bound to trigger lawsuits.

Talk about the changes began circulating town this month. Angry locals swamped a Planning Commission meeting and quickly formed the Central Coast Home and Business Owners Association to fight the changes, which they accuse Newport officials of trying to sneak in.

At the heart of the battle is the city’s plan to adopt maps made by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries in 2004. The maps show landslide and erosion zones, coding them in red, orange and yellow according to the degree of risk. Red is the highest. . . .

Opponents say the changes are naive and wrongheaded — and will cost everyone. They fear that under the changes, existing buildings in red zones would become “nonconforming” uses, making them nearly impossible to refinance, sell or insure.

The city has backed off some of the most controversial proposals, and “further revisions are likely.”
Better an inevitable “natural” disaster than what development interests call an “economic disaster.” In Oregon, as elsewhere, it seems our approach to an unpalatable situation is to bury our heads in the sand. Until we drown.

An analysis by the Urban Land Institute finds that the typical household in the study area spends upwards of $22,000 annually on housing, which represents roughly 35% of the median household income ($68,036). With transportation costs for the typical household reaching nearly $12,000 annually, the combined costs of housing and transportation account for roughly 54% of the typical household’s income.

Similar studies conducted for the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington, D.C., region have found average housing and transportation cost burdens of 59% and 47%, respectively.

“Drive until you qualify” make no sense when the transportation costs offset the lower house prices.

When gasoline prices rose to over $4 per gallon in 2008, the high prices hit exurban areas hard and magnified the housing bust in areas such as Riverside County, CA.

A news story in the Minneapolis -St. Paul Star Tribune now reports a reversal in the migration to suburbs and exurbs in Minnesota:

New estimates suggest that the movement into suburban and exurban counties within commuting distance of Minneapolis and St. Paul has stopped cold for the first time in recent memory.

For many years, the combination of robust growth, a multitude of freeways and plenty of open space helped ignite an explosion in exurban living. People were commuting for hours from towns such as Mora, Glencoe and Owatonna. National experts classed the Twin Cities as having the nation’s third-largest exurban flight from 2000 to 2005, ahead of even sprawling Atlanta.

But the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest estimates — the first to reflect the impact of 2008’s $4-a-gallon gas — suggest that:

• With people abandoning foreclosed and unsellable homes, the two-state ring of exurban counties is hardly growing. For these counties as a group, 2009 marked the first time more people left than moved in.
• In the five big suburban counties closest to the center (Dakota, Scott, Carver, Anoka and Washington), new arrivals have slowed to a standstill. With a wave of baby boomers sitting on empty nests in older suburbs such as Eagan, and new construction all but extinguished in once-booming counties such as Scott, growth is half what it was a decade ago.
• The two big core counties of Hennepin and Ramsey, losing tens of thousands of people a year as recently as five years ago, are on the rebound. Growth is gaining by the year.

When gas is cheap, moving farther out as a way to get more space for less money can make sense. But there’s a trade0ff. Time spent commuting is time not spent with a spouse, a child, a dog. Distance can be a drag. When gas prices rise and housing prices collapse, being upside down on a mortgage can make it difficult or impossible to escape.

Ominously, gas prices are now rising again.

Over the last 60 years, anti-urban policies have resulted in an energy-sucking, emissions-spewing U.S. Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, points to subsidization of highways and home ownership as deliberate policy choices that have bled cities and encouraged a suburban and exurban infrastructure – one that is dependent on high levels of energy inputs (resulting in emissions outputs) both for transportation and to power buildings.

Glaeser cites studies that find each new federally-funded highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18%. Cities don’t benefit much from that highway infrastructure because dense areas already have good means of getting around – like walking.

Subsidizing home ownership is also anti-urban. Glaeser gives Boston as an example: 62% of Boston homes are rented; 78 percent of suburban Wellesley homes are owner-occupied. Cities are dominated by apartments, and more than 85% of homes in multi-unit structures are rented. Suburbs are dominated by single-family detached houses, and more than 85% of such homes are owner-occupied. Multi-unit structures are generally both smaller and more energy-efficient than detached single-family dwellings considering both embedded and operating energy and emissions – at least up to a point.

Subsidizing home ownership, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the home mortgage interest deduction, lures people out of apartments and cities, increasing their energy and emissions footprints.

The U.S. isn’t alone in promoting sprawl. Canadian government at all levels spends more than four times as much on highways as on transit, thus opening up suburbs for development. As in the U.S, Canadian cities and suburbs artificially limit density through single-use zoning that also imposes density limitations and minimum parking requirements.  Low density limits the number of people who can walk to jobs, shops or transit stops, thus making development more car-oriented. But overall, the Canadian government promotes sprawl less aggressively than the United States – and gets less of it as a result.

One consequence of “less bad” anti-urban policies, Canadian cities are healthier and more vibrant than American cities. Among the ten cities that were America’s most populous in 1950, eight have lost population- often by huge margins.  The most extreme example is St. Louis, which lost 59 percent of its population between 1950 and 2000.  By contrast, every single one of Canada’s 1950 “Top Ten” cities has gained population.

So how to reduce energy consumption and emissions? A good start would be to eliminate highway subsidies, to stop subsidizing home ownership, and to give more respect and provide greater rewards to renters.

Energy Information Agency data shows U.S. liquid fuels consumption declined by 810,000 bbl/d (4.2 percent) to 18.7 million bbl/d in 2009, the fourth consecutive annual decline. That’s 10% off the peak in consumption of 20.8 million bbl/d in 2005.

As energy analyst Jeff Rubin points out, the U.S. will never regain pre-recession peak levels of oil consumption – and ditto for oil consumption in Canada, Western Europe, Japan, or anywhere else in the OECD economies.

But don’t expect oil prices to go down. Rubin says:

Back in the 1990s, that kind of demand contraction in the OECD would have foretold a big decline in oil prices, since those countries accounted for almost three quarters of global oil demand. Today, they account for barely half, and tomorrow they will account for even less.

In a world where oil supplies have most likely peaked, global oil consumption has become a zero-sum game:

As China moves from consuming 8 million barrels a day to 10 million barrels, and OPEC ramps up its own daily consumption from 10.5 million to 12 million barrels, somehow, somewhere else in the world, there must be a corresponding decline in oil consumption. That somewhere else just happens to be the U.S. market and the oil markets of the other OECD economies.

Automobile sales in the U.S. have also peaked, never to regain former levels. Calculated Risk reports estimated car sales for February 2010 at 10.4 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate).

The current level of sales are very low – far below the 17 million that were sold each year between 1999 and 2007 – and are still below the lowest point for the ‘90/’91 recession (even with a larger population).

All of our land use and transportation planning assumes that vehicle travel will continue to grow at historic rates. Based on those assumptions, reducing the historic rate of increase would require heroic efforts; reducing per capita vehicle miles traveled (VTM), even more.  Reducing overall VTM significantly enough to achieve even the modest emissions reductions goals that are currently on the table would be a Sisyphean task, especiallyif population were to continue to increase as projected.

Given the new reality of dwindling fuel supplies and collapsing vehicle sales, it may be wiser to devote our planning efforts to figuring out how people can live and get around in communities with far less fuel and far fewer vehicles. The new reality is, the era of car-dominated communities is drawing to a close.

Lane County is convening a stakeholders group with the objective of revising the county’s comprehensive plan and development code to address the burning issues of the 21st century: how to best ensure cleaner, healthier, safer, and more prosperous communities in a world increasingly threatened by energy shortfalls and a warming climate.

Here’s the text of an email sent out by Planning Director Kent Howe:

All,

As part of the citizen involvement process for Lane County’s Long Range Planning Program, you have volunteered to participate in the Lane County Stakeholder Group that will be reviewing potential revisions to land use policies and regulations.

The Lane County Board of Commissioners has directed Land Management Division staff to facilitate this group process.

The first meeting of the Stakeholder’s Group is Thursday, February 25th, 6:00pm, Harris Hall, 125 E. 8th Ave, Eugene.

At the Feb 17, 2010, meeting the Board specified the Stakeholder Group review the first 6 policy issues in the Goal One Code Amendment Proposal, attached. These correspond to lines 1-24 on the Preliminary List of Code Amendments spread sheet, also attached.

We look forward to working with you. If you have any questions, please give me a call.

Thanks,

Kent Howe
Planning Director
Lane County
541-682-3734

The text of the amendments proposed by Goal One Coalition and LandWatch Lane County is available here.

So all of you Lane County folks who are concerned about figuring out a way to strong local economies that will be resilient enough to grapple with the challenges we are already beginning to face, here’s your chance to take on the developers who normally have their way.

See you Thursday!

Solastalgia:  the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault; a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’; symptoms include anxiety, despair, numbness, a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless, grief.

Solastalgia is a neologism coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003. It describes a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change. Solastalgia is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment

Wikipedia explains:

As opposed to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home – “solastalgia” is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment. A paper published by Albrecht and collaborators focused on two contexts where collaborative research teams found solastalgia to be evident: the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales (NSW) and the impact of large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative affect that is exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.

An article in the New York Times quotes Albrecht:

There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease.’ People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.

Albrecht has found that this “place pathology” isn’t limited to natives or to the displaced. People can be despairing and depressed without being forced from their homeland. The land changing around them can bring about the same sense of mournful disorientation.

The researchers could have found evidence of solastagia by looking at me in Sacramento, California in the ’70s, as the paradise I was born and grew up in was devastated by rampant and uncontrolled “development.”  It got so bad I fled in a desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of sanity. The Seattle area in Washington proved little better. When at last I found a real home again here in Oregon, that traumatic experience provided the impetus to do everything in my power to prevent a repeat of the California and Washington experience.

In California, things have gone from bad to worse; it is now what Sasha Abramsky in an article in The Nation calls the “west coast wasteland.” California’s population has exploded from a little over 10 million in 1950 to about 37 million today. But as many have warned (including Eben Fodor in his landmark 1998 study “The Cost of Growth in Oregon“), growth costs a lot and doesn’t pay for itself. After 60 years of growth, the bills have come due.

As Abramsky observes, what was a gorgeous state with a terrific infrastructure built up over the past century now has no money or political will to keep the place running properly. Paradise is broken and in a perennial state of fiscal crisis as California threatens to become a failed state. And California is not alone.

My heart still aches for what once was and is now irretrievably lost. I still can’t bear to cross the border. Unfortunately, as the symptom of climate change shows, the disease of growth doesn’t respect borders. Growth now threatens to devastate the entirety of the globe.

Earth is the only home we have, there’s nowhere left to flee. As it succumbs to the ravishes of growth, are we not destined to see solastalgia spread and become a global contagion?

In overwhelmingly approving the report of its Peak Oil Task Force, the Bloomington (Indiana) City Council,  has endorsed a truly revolutionary idea:

Recognize the need for, and the inevitability of, a steady state economy – one that is not predicated on ever-greater amounts of energy and materials throughput, but recognizes the limits of the biosphere.

The Task Force report – Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience - calls for a reduction in community oil consumption by 5% per year in an effort to realize a 50 percent decrease in consumption in just 14 years. The targeted rate of decrease in oil consumption is along the lines laid out by the oil depletion protocol.

Suggested strategies for achieving the reduced fuel consumption goals include:

• Explore new energy sources, greater efficiencies and conservation opportunities for the following energy-intensive municipal services: water and wastewater treatment; law enforcement and fire protection; heating and cooling municipal buildings; and trash removal and recycling. Immediate attention should be given to off-grid water production to meet minimum community needs.
• Promote economic relocalization. Our community’s reliance on a steady supply of inexpensive goods from as far as halfway around the world makes us vulnerable to a decline in inexpensive oil and/or shortages. Producing and processing more goods within the community fosters greater security in a post-peak world while strengthening the local economy.
• Intensify the City’s emerging focus on form-based development, so that residents can easily live within walking distance of daily needs, such as grocery stores, schools and pharmacies.
• Increase home energy conservation and aim to retrofit 5 percent of housing per year.
• Establish community cooperative rideshare programs.
• Advocate for greater local, state and federal funding for public transit.
• Accelerate local food production by training more urban farmers and removing legal, institutional and cultural barriers to farming within the city.
• Plant edible landscapes throughout the city.

The Task Force’s vision is for a city where “most residents live within walking distance of daily needs; most of the food required to feed residents is grown within Monroe County; residents can easily and conveniently get where they need to go on bike, foot or public transit; most of the community’s housing stock is retrofit for energy efficiency; and local government provides high-quality services to its residents while using less fossil fuel energy.”

That actually sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? A post-peak world need not be dismal.

Lane County will at long last be reviewing and approving property line adjustments.

That’s the effect of amendments to Lane Code Chapter 13 – amendments which have long been pushed for by LandWatch Lane County and Goal One Coalition.

The Lane County Board of Commissioners approved the revisions by a unanimous 5-0 vote at its afternoon meeting on Wednesday, December 9.

Lane County’s historic “hands off” approach to property line adjustments has long allowed for developers to find tiny “lots”, often created when road construction sliced through properties, leaving new “lots” on each side. Speculators buy up the land; reconfigure the property lines by simply recording deeds; obtain “legal lot verifications” for the reconfigured properties; and then sell off the developable parcels at a hefty profit. All this happened without public notice, any opportunity for public comment or participation, adequate county review, or any way to challenge the result.

A Court of Appeals decision (Phillips v. Polk County) and the passage of two bills in the 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions ( HB 2723, dealing with retroactive unit of land validations; and HB 3629, dealing with property line adjustments) made it obvious to everyone – including the development community – that Lane County’s practices failed to comply with state law, putting Lane County property owners in an untenable position.

In the spring of 2009, the Board of Commissioners directed the Land Management Division (LMD) to initiate the post-acknowledgment plan amendment (PAPA) process to adopt the code changes drafted by LandWatch and Goal One Coalition. Following a joint public hearing before the Board and Planning Commission, the Board directed LMD to call together a work group composed of land use advocates, surveyors, and the development community to see if a consensus proposal could be achieved. The Planning Commission recommended approval of the draft resulting from that effort, and with formal Board approval the new provisions will now become the law of the land.

This morning (December 9, 2009) the Linn County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to overturn the Planning Commission’s denial and approve the application of its Parks Department to establish a park on 175 acres of farmland at the I-5/Highway 34 interchange.

An RV park is the key and most controversial element of the proposed park. Owners of several existing local, private RV parks complained vociferously that competition from a publicly operated RV park would put them out of business. While the original proposal envisioned as many as 196 RV hookups, the Board imposed a condition of approval limiting that number to a maximum of 100.

The local farm community also voiced strong opposition, arguing that farm land is irreplaceable and that farming, Linn County’s biggest industry, deserves and needs the county’s support and protection.

The Board of Commissioners has three elected members: Roger Nyquist, Will Tucker, and John Lindsey. Lindsey’s seat is up for election next November.

It should be obvious to everyone – even our county commissioners – that investing public funds in an RV park when we are facing climate change, peak oil, a financial crisis, and the need to ensure our food security is as foolhardy as can be. Come November, the voters will have a chance to voice their opinion.

Pete Boucot, a declared candidate for Lindsey’s seat, is leading the opposition to the Board’s plans. The county borrowed over $1.25 million from its road fund to purchase the property. Boucot objects this in an inappropriate use of the county’s road funds. Boucot also points out the commissioners have been silent on how or when the road fund is to be paid back or where the funds to develop the park are to come from.

From Tuesday’s Eugene Register-Guard:

Springfield growth inventory delivers a surprise

City councilors were prepared to adopt the results of a buildable residential land inventory, which concluded the city was short by more than 300 acres in what it would need to meet 20-year growth projections.

Instead, they learned the city actually has a slight surplus of buildable residential property.

The change brought a howling protest from one developer and muted concern from two others who spoke at a public hearing Monday night.

Springfield’s early estimates suggested it might be short by as much as 1,000 acres of land for homes. But by August, with the help of local consultant ECONorthwest, the city concluded it was short by only 344 acres of the land it would need for housing by 2030.

But Monday night, Springfield planning supervisor Linda Pauly explained that that total was based on a mistaken assumption that housing could only be constructed on land that had no more than a 15 percent slope.

When a community member concerned about the survey results asked to see the data, city staff and ECONorthwest discovered they’d used the wrong slope constraint, Pauly said.

Housing can go on hillsides with a 25 percent slope, according to state law. It’s commercial buildings that require the 15 percent slope limitation.

The mistake was only discovered last week, Pauly said.

The revision concludes the city has a small surplus: 59 acres more than they’ll need to meet expected residential growth between now and 2030.

The “community member” mentioned in the article was LandWatch Lane County member Mia Nelson. Through dogged persistence and determination, she overcame stonewalling by the City of Springfield and EcoNorthwest, who didn’t want to make available the data which supposedly supported the earlier conclusion that 300+ more acres of land would be needed to support projected growth. When Nelson finally got her hands on the raw data, she brought to light the flawed assumption.

City officials aren’t yet ready to give up their precious expansion plans:

Mayor Leiken called the latest review a hiccup in an otherwise useful process. . .

While some councilors worried that the new numbers may be as flawed as the old ones, they voted unanimously to adopt the Residential Lands Study.

Al Johnson, a consulting attorney for the city, assured the councilors that their vote would not be considered the last word on the subject, and that their conclusions about how much land they’ll need won’t be considered final until the city formally adopts its Springfield 2030 Plan, a process it will undertake with Lane County.

Can you visualize the day our political leaders will let go of the idea of growth?

The urban structure of our cities, towns and suburbs is one of the largest drivers of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Cities that are compact, walkable, and transit-served, with a good distribution of daily services, use a fraction of the energy and generate a fraction of the greenhouse gases as U.S. cities.

There is an enormous difference in energy use between compact cities and sprawling cities, as American ones tend to be – with no corresponding difference in quality of life. This chart shows gasoline use.

Vehicle Miles Traveled (VTM) is just part of the story. Other sources of emissions from urban form in the five key categories of infrastructure, and its embodied and operating energy; other advantages of “location efficiency,” including additional benefits of walking; optimized size, orientation and urban shaping of buildings; lost ecosystem services; and behavioral factors and “induced demand” may add up to twice as much as emissions from personal transportation and VMTs alone.

Michael Mehaffy explores each of these factors in depth in an article at Planetizen. Bottom line: increasing urban energy efficiency and cutting urban emissions is about a lot more than increasing density, reducing VMT, and improving fuel mileage. The way we design the places we live can make it improbable or even impossible to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. But if done right, the places we live can make it possible an elegant, satisfying, low-carbon way of life.

Ron Eber and Ed Sullivan have just made available their new article Long and Winding Road: Farmland Protection in Oregon 1963 – 2009.

Ron Eber, now retired, was the long-time farm and forest specialist at the Department of Land Conservation and Development. Ed Sullivan is the dean of Oregon land use attorneys at Garvey Shubert Barer. The article was published in the San Joaquin Agricultural Law Review.

I haven’t had a chance to read much of it yet. The article ends with “a few modest suggestions for further improvements” to Oregon’s planning program. We’ll be giving particular attention to these recommendations, especially as they relate to the challenges of peak oil and climate change.

Lane County has reaffirmed the public’s right to participate in the land use decision making process by lowering the fee imposed for an appeal to the Board of Commissioners from $3,700 to $250.

The adoption of the Chapter 14 amendments was the culmination of years of work by LandWatch Lane County and Goal One Coalition.

The Board of Commissioners at its meeting on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 4  unanimously approved amendments to Lane Code Chapter 14 to streamline and expedite the way the county processes applications for permits and zone changes. Most importantly, the revised Chapter 14 dramatically lowers the cost of getting through the local process to a final decision. The new procedures provide two tracks for appealing a hearings official decision to the Board of Commissioners. For $3700 – the amount currently charged – a party can ask that the Board hold a public hearing and make the final county decision on an application. But for only $250, a party can ask that the Board not hold a public hearing, but rather simply ratify the hearing official’s decision as the final county decision. On either track, the decision to hear or not hear the appeal rests with the Board.

Goal One first introduced a bill to cap local appeal fees during the 2003 legislative session. That proposal withered on the vine due to vociferous opposition from lobbyists for the League of Oregon Cities and Association of Oregon Counties, who complained that it would impose “unfunded mandates” on local governments.

Seeking to sidestep opposition from local governments while addressing their concerns, we then crafted an approach that would offer local governments two options. The default option would be for permit and zone changes to be processed with only a single public hearing – the decision resulting from that hearing would be the final local decision, obviating the need for a local appeal and avoiding all the related costs and expenses. If the local governing body insisted on retaining final approval authority, the fee for an appeal hearing to the local governing body would be capped at an affordable amount. Goal One Coalition attempted to generate interest in this new concept leading up to the 2007 legislative session, but got nowhere.

Our attention then shifted to local initiatives: if we could get the concept implemented in just one jurisdiction, that could serve as an example and real-life test case for the rest of the state. Building on the strong partnership between Goal One Coalition and LandWatch Lane County and LandWatch’s extraordinary effectiveness, Lane County offered an excellent opportunity. And Lane County desperately needed a fix:  exorbitant appeal fees made it effectively impossible to challenge any decision beyond the hearings official level.

Because Lane County’s appeal fee was so high, and because Land Management Division (LMD) attempts to fund all of its operations from user fees, we believed any proposal to dramatically lower and then cap the fee for an appeal to the Board would be a non-starter. Our approach, therefore, was to eliminate the appeal to the Board and make the hearings official decision the final county decision.

We presented our proposal to the Board of Commissioners in 2008. In March 2009, the reconfigured Board of Commissioners directed LMD to initiate the process to adopt the joint Goal One/LandWatch proposal.

At a joint public hearing before the Lane County Planning Commission and Board of Commissioners in July, the Board directed Land Management Division to conduct stakeholder meetings to try to reach a consensus among advocacy groups and developer representatives. Out of those meetings came the proposal to keep the option for an appeal to the Board of Commissioners while providing a way to get through that appeals process for only $250. What was really surprising is that the $250 cap was proposed by the developer group – they figured that was the price that needed to be paid to get what they wanted, a process which they believe protects their interests from arbitrary interference from the current progressive majority on the Board of Commissioners.

The text of the Chapter 14 amendments adopted by the Board is available here.

The Nasca people, best known for giant geoglyphs etched into the surface of a vast desert plain, once flourished in the valleys of south coastal Peru. About 500 AD their civilization collapsed into a bloody resource war and then vanished.

Photograph: Kevin Schafer/Corbis, published in the UK Guardian

What happened? Archaeologists from Cambridge University say the Nasca brought about their own demise by ruining the fragile ecosystem that supported them. Their study was published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

Over the course of many generations, the Nasca cleared areas of forest for agriculture. The huarango tree, which once blanketed what is now desert, was gradually replaced by crops such as cotton and maize.

But the short-term agricultural gain came at a high price because the trees were the critical component of the ecosystem. Dr. Beresford-Jones explains what happened:

The huarango is a remarkable nitrogen-fixing tree and it was an important source of food, forage, timber and fuel for the local people. Furthermore, it is the ecological ‘keystone’ species in this desert zone, enhancing soil fertility and moisture, ameliorating desert extremes in the microclimate beneath its canopy and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known.

In time, gradual woodland clearance crossed an ecological threshold – sharply defined in such desert environments – exposing the landscape to the region’s extraordinary desert winds and the effects of El Niño floods.

In the absence of huarango cover, when El Niño did strike, the river down-cut into its floodplain, Nasca irrigation systems were damaged and the area became unworkable for agriculture. Infant mortality rose, while average adult life expectancy fell. The crops that had been cultivated by the Nasca for generations disappeared, and the area fell victim to a severe drought.

There are now no undisturbed ecosystems in the region, and what remains of the old-growth huarango forests is being destroyed in illegal charcoal-burning operations.