Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Louv, Richard [best free novels txt] 📗

Numerous studies have shown the economic benefits of green space; for example, some show how adjacent housing benefits from small neighborhood parks. If the green space is well designed, the public gains a higher return on their property tax, adding value to the neighborhood and increasing the net return to the tax rolls. These economic incentives should encourage us to move away from the flat, green parks (which are underused by children, who prefer the rough edges to the flat green) toward a more natural pocket-park design. Indeed, such better-designed areas must be part of a reinvention of the way we live—part of the physical creation of zoopolis.

A good example of zoopolis is Oregon’s famous trail system, known as the Loop, which encircles the Portland metro area. A century ago, when the system was conceived, the plan was for a 40-mile series of trails. Today, the system is 140 miles long and still growing. The Loop connects parks, open spaces, and neighborhoods. From it, other trails radiate out and connect to county, state, and federal recreation areas.

Green architecture slowly is gaining popularity in the United States. In San Bruno, California, the new Gap office has a greenroof of native grasses and wildflowers, “which undulates like the surrounding green hills,” according to Architecture Week. The roof reduces sound transmission by up to fifty decibels and provides an acoustic barrier to nearby air traffic. In Utah, the new twenty-thousand-seat Conference Center for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is capped by a greenroof. In Michigan, designers of a Herman Miller furniture factory constructed a wetlands system for collecting and treating storm-water runoff. According to Beatley, the most ambitious green building at this time may be the new Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, at Oberlin College in Ohio. The building was designed to be off the power grid. It treats its own wastewater and generates power through a combination of southern orientation, rooftop photovoltaics, geothermal pumps, and energy conservation. Carpet tiles, when replaced in future decades at the end of their useful life, will be recycled. As one designer put it, the Oberlin building “comes closest to achieving the metaphor of a structure functioning like a tree.”

The Robert Redford building, a retrofitted structure built in 1917 that houses the Natural Resources Defense Council’s office in Santa Monica, California, is another good example. The building uses about 60 percent less water than most other buildings because its roof captures rainwater; its floors are made of bamboo, a fast-growing substitute for traditional hardwoods. The carpets are hemp. Toilets flush with rainwater and urinals use no water, because of a special filter that extracts waste.

Surprisingly, one of the best examples of what the future could hold is the city of Chicago. Under the leadership of Mayor Richard Daley, the city is reclaiming its 165-year-old motto, “City in a Garden,” by launching an impressive campaign not just to preserve open space, but also to re-create wildlife habitat, greenways, stream corridors, and other natural land, thereby adding to its existing seventy-three hundred acres of parklands. Daley’s goal: make Chicago the greenest city in the nation. Inspired by rooftop gardens in Germany, Daley insisted that the new, thirty-thousand-square-foot roof of City Hall be designed as a rooftop garden to help insulate the building, absorb excess storm water, help prevent sewer flooding, and act as a giant air purifier.

“The garden has already yielded some promising results. During an August heat wave, surface temperatures in areas of the garden were between 86 and 125 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 to 70 degrees less than the temperatures of the black-tar roof of the adjoining Cook County building,” reports Nancy Seegar, in Planning, the publication of the American Planning Association. This roof cost about twice as much as a conventional roof, but is expected to last twice as long. As with other roofs of this type, energy savings pay for the maintenance cost. More than twenty thousand plants representing 150 different species grow in the garden, and it even claims two beehives and four thousand non-aggressive honeybees; the beekeepers harvested 150 pounds of honey during the first year. Future harvests will be packaged and sold at the city’s Cultural Center. The bees are expected to forage for nectar in nearby Grant Park.

Among the city’s other accomplishments: some three hundred thousand trees planted since 1989. The municipality has also restored twenty-eight miles of boulevard gardens, and turned twenty-one acres of underused city land and abandoned gas stations into pocket parks and seventy-two community gardens. In time, there may be two hundred such gardens. One of those once-blighted lots is now the “El Coqui” garden, named after a tree frog native to Puerto Rico; the garden serves as a classroom for a nearby elementary school. On Chicago’s Southeast Side, the city has established the Calumet Open Space Reserve, with four thousand acres, including wetlands, forests, and prairies. In Kane County, in the far western Chicago region, a Farmland Protection Program will buy farmland or development rights to farmland.

At the same time, Chicago has developed one of the best renewable-energy rebate programs in the nation. A growing network of bike paths connects neighborhoods, parks, and business districts. An excellent mass-transit system means owning a car in metropolitan Chicago is no longer a necessity. Chicago has also developed a five-year plan to generate 20 percent of its electrical power from renewable energy sources and to retrofit existing public buildings. This is no Lone Ranger adventure, but a collaboration of 140 public and private organizations working under the banner of the Chicago Wilderness coalition. Commercial outlets are following Chicago’s public lead. For example, a new Target store, located on a redeveloped site, will have its own rooftop garden.

The greening of Chicago has even received praise from conservative columnist George Will, who quotes Daley extolling the virtues of flowers. “Flowers calm people down,” says the son of the first Mayor Daley, who was beloved by many locals, but