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The
fourth week of April provided some of the most
delightful weather of 2008. On two of those days
we had reason to drive the Capital Beltway in
Virginia and Maryland. After over a week of off-and-on
rain, the April sunshine turned the trees along
the Capitol Beltway a luminous lime / chartreuse
green. Still emerging, the leaves did not
obscure the view of the understory dogwoods,
redbud and holly which added white, purple and
dark green to the forest pallet. Nor did they
mask the depth and topography of the forested
area along the Capital Beltway.
One
can learn a lot by applying Regional Metrics to
what is visible from the Beltway. Further, and
to our surprise, if you know where to look, the
Beltway takes one all the way to Easter Island
– that isolated volcanic blip in the
Southeastern Pacific where giant big-eared busts
(moai) sit on impressive platforms (ahu)
sporting fancy red headdresses.
Trip
One
On
the first trip around the Outer Loop, we were
struck by the large amount of well forested land
that exists immediately adjacent to the Capital
Beltway asphalt. In many places the second
growth Tulip Poplar and Oak are over 100 feet in
height with a varied understory. There is also
splendid tree cover in many of the interchange
clover leaves. Besides the mature forest areas,
there are also large tacks in various stages of
reforestation. In addition there are areas that
have been recently cleared of obsolete urban
uses as well as an abundance of
“underutilized” land. The land is
“underutilized” because of its prime
location and the level of urban support services
available to the site.
Our
Outer Loop trip was a delightful ride. We flew
through the multi-billion dollar Springfield
Interchange with its soaring ramps and bounced
through the Wilson Bridge construction zone with
no delays.
We
were seeing the margins of the Beltway at this
time of year for the first time in several years
and were impressed with how much treed, open and
reusable land there was visible from the Outer Loop. All this land is far inside the Clear Edge
around the Core of the National Capital
Subregion and all this land –- thousands of
acres in total -– is immediately adjacent to
one of the Subregion’s most heavily traveled
roadways.
Our
first thought was that this land resource could
– in conjunction with a new METRO line and a
Platform / Pyramid Station-Area Strategy --
provide space for Jobs / Housing / Services /
Recreation / Amenity with great Mobility and
Access. (See End
Note One.)
The
land adjacent to the Capital Beltway in
conjunction with a METRO line would support even
the most “optimistic” jobs / housing
“growth and development” projected for the
next 40 years in the National Capital Subregion
with no other land development needed.
Trip
Two, a Different View
Our
second trip around the Capital Beltway took
place four days later on the Inner Loop. There we
found just as much clearly visible forest, scrub
growth and vacant / underutilized land just
inside the Capitol Beltway as there was visible
from the Outer Loop.
The
forested and reforesting areas were just as
luminous but the trip was not as smooth. Four
lanes of traffic slowed thru interchange after
interchange and then came to a crawl when the
roadway narrowed from four lanes to three as
Inner Loop traffic approached the Woodrow Wilson
Bridge construction zone.
What
a difference between a trip using the
Autonomobile “as advertised on TV,” on
trip one, and one that reflects the reality of
the contemporary Mobility and Access Crisis,
on trip two.
More
and more Autonomobile trips, especially at peak
hour in the peak direction, are like our second
tour of the Beltway. We had planned the travel
to avoid the Beltway peaks but could not avoid
the construction crunch during daylight hours on
the Inner Loop.
Creeping
along while burning $3.79 cent a gallon gasoline
gives one a different perspective than floating
along with the flow at 75 miles per hour. What
were we thinking on that last trip? Why cut down
all these trees and build a multi-Billion dollar
METRO line?
There
is more than enough land area for all the
potential future development – if some or
all of the projected future development ever
happens – at existing METRO station-areas
if only the Platform / Ziggurat Station-Area
Strategy were applied. (Again, see End
Note One.)
There
is more than enough shared-vehicle capacity in
the existing METRO system without expansion if
an intelligent strategy is implemented to
Balance of J / H / S / R / A at every station.
At
some point citizens must abandon the tragically
flawed “AM Pump In, PM Pump Out” idea around
which the METRO system was originally designed.
Why not make the change now and avoid the need
to abandon even more dysfunctional development
in the future? (For further details see the
resources cited in End Note One.)
After
the second trip around the Beltway we returned
to our urban enclave in the Piedmont Countryside
and ran the numbers. Radial Analysis documents
that there was no reason to cut down those
luminous trees. The intensity of use in the
station-areas could be every bit as amenable at
that of the new Washington Harbor project
visible from the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge.
Citizens
just need to insist that Agencies, Enterprises
and Institutions make intelligent use of the
land already developed. We plan to include these
observations in the upcoming Backgrounder “The
Use and Management of Land.”
Mainstream
Media's Spin
On
Tuesday 29 April WaPo published a story
by Eric Weiss “Toll Road Project Will Bulldoze
Hundreds of Trees.” It turns out the reported
activity would be alarming only for the
uninformed. However, the reality of tree
clearing would be much more alarming if the
reporter grasped the larger context of the plans
for “widening” the Capital Beltway.
The
29 April story notes that the “hundreds of
trees” are in two staging areas that are
outside the “foot print” of the existing
Beltway and these two areas are planned to be
turned into Open Space uses when the Toll Road /
HOT lane construction is completed.
But
that is only part of the
“deforestation-for-the-HOT- lanes” story --
the rest was not reported in WaPo. What
is termed “the existing footprint” is the
current Capital Beltway right-of-way and the
out-of-right-of-way grading easements. Some of
the right-of-way was never cleared, some has
reforested in the 40-plus years since the
Beltway was built or since more recent widenings
and interchange reconfigurations took place.
There
are tree buffers on the margins of the
right-of-way. The area inside of many clover
leaves were not cleared.
In other words there
are a lot of trees in the “existing
footprint.” That is especially true in
existing interchanges which will all be
extensively expanded and rebuilt to accommodate
the HOT lanes.
When
you look out from the Tower Club the largest
forested areas one sees are in the Beltway-VA
Route 7 Interchange.
The
Bigger Picture
But
there is a far more important story that also is not
covered:
In
the long run citizens do not need to increase
the capacity of the Capitol Beltway, they need
to find way to be happy and safe with less
consumption of imported energy. That means
less travel and more shared vehicle travel,
not more cars. (See THE
PROBLEM WITH CARS.)
The
HOT lanes / Toll Road Project assumes that
facilities need to be added to accommodate more
Autonomobiles. (Yes, “assumes” makes an
“ass” out of “u” and “me.”)
As noted
above there is no “need” for a fancy new
Purple Line with a Platform / Ziggurat Station
Area Strategy, there is no “need” to cut
down any trees to provide for future “growth
and development,” there is no “need” to
widen the Capital Beltway.
What
is needed are rational and sustainable human
settlement patterns and a balance between the
vehicle trip demand of the
settlement patterns and the capacity of the
transport system.
Why
cannot MainStream Media connect the dots, even
between the dots in the stories they run? Is it
not clear that the end of Autonomobiles --
Large, Private Vehicles as we have known them --
is near?
Cannot anyone who reads the week long WaPo
coverage of the world food crisis understand
what is happening? Here are just a few
highlights:
We
do not even need to get to Global Climate
Change, the balance of payments, and... Is it
not clear that humans must shrink their
ecological footprint?
The
best and fastest ways to shrink the ecological
footprint are:
-
Better
use the land – functional human settlement
patterns, regional food production,
reduction of vehicle trips, etc.
-
On
the land no longer needed, let nature take
its course – reforestation, especially in
areas where “normal” rainfall creates
verdant second and third generation forests
like those along the Capital Beltway.
The
View of Easter Island
But
there is even more. We have included a brief
summary of contextual issues so it is clear what
we mean when we say one can see Easter Island
from the Capital Beltway.
The view from the
Capital Beltway provides a compelling way to
come to grips with the Collapse of functional
society on Easter Island and thus the future of
the National Capital Subregion if there is not
Fundamental Change in human settlement patterns
and Fundamental Change in governance structure.
What
is this “Easter Island” reference? Jared
Diamond in the best-seller "Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed"
provides a detailed profile of Easter Island. (For
a review of Diamond’s book see “Collapse,”
An Appreciation,” 8 August 2005. For those
who have not yet read "Collapse," we
provide below a brief summary of the sections of
the book that make the Capitol Beltway / Easter
Island connection clear.)
Diamond
explores the question summarized in the subtitle,
“how societies choose to fail or succeed,”
with the same intensity he employed in his
landmark book "Guns, Germs and Steel."
He devotes Part One of the book to a survey of
present day Montana. We know something about
Montana and concur with Diamond’s observations
and conclusions about past, current and future
settlement pattern and resource conservation
dysfunction in Montana and the rest of the
Northern Rocky Mountain Urban Support Region. (See
End Note Two.)
Diamond
opens Part Two with an extensive discussion of
Easter Island. We have never been to Easter
Island but Diamond supplies the data and
references needed to understand what happened
between 900 A.D. when the Easter Island was
settled by Polynesians and the early Eighteenth
Century (1722) when Easter Island was
“discovered” by a Dutch expedition. (See End
Note Three.)
For
Diamond the bottom line on the Collapse of any
society is:
-
Failure
to make intelligent long term plans, and
-
Failure
to reconsider traditional practices when
conditions change.
The
long and short of Diamonds’s thesis is that
the Easter Island society Collapsed because of
unsustainable agricultural and political /
social / religious practices.
The
original Polynesian settlers found Easter Island
tree-covered with abundant terrestrial and
marine resource in ecological Balance. Just as
other Polynesian societies did (and these
societies did not Collapse from internal
causes), Easter Islanders cut down trees to
clear land for agriculture and fuel. They also
cut down trees for cremations and other
ceremonies.
An
additional a major use of timber was scaffolding
for carving the 887 big-eared bust / statues (moai)
and for rollers to move the mori and the large
stones used to build over 300 platforms (ahu)
upon which the moai were set. The stones
weighing from 10 to over 80 tons were moved from
quarries in the interior of the island to
seaside locations. Scaffolding and lifting
apparatus made of of timber were also needed to build the
platforms and erect the moai and to place the
separate red headdress on big-eared moai.
The
moai carving and ahu building took place
primarily between 1000 AD and 1600 AD. The
society had collapsed by the time there is a
record of Easter Island’s “discovery.”
There may have been pre-“discovery” visits
from Europeans that resulted in Small Pox or
other epidemics but ecological devastation of
Easter Island had already resulted in the island
being unable to support anything like the peak
population of up to 20,000 humans prior to the
Collapse.
What
happened? The Easter Islanders over-harvested
their natural capital (trees) to construct
political / social / religious infrastructure.
Unlike other islands settled by Polynesians,
Easter Island has little rainfall and a more
“Mediterranean” climate. Vegetation does not
grow as fast on Easter as it does on other South
Pacific Islands. Lack of rainfall and low
humidity resulted in less vigorous root growth
which preserved and made accessible the easy-to-carve
volcanic stone that was used to create the
political / social / religious artifacts.
Overpopulation, pandering political / zealous
religious traditions resulted in burning through
Easter Islands most important natural capital,
the forest.
How
does this relate to the Capital Beltway? Even if
all the trees within a mile of the Capital
Beltway were taken down, it would have little
impact on the overall Washington-Baltimore New
Urban Regions environment. The lesson is,
however, still
clear:
Over consumption of resources -– in
this case petroleum for fuel and asphalt and to
create cement -– in the context of the global
trends noted above put the future of society in
jeopardy and raise the prospect of a Collapse
not unlike Easter Island.
What
about the multi-Billion Dollar Springfield
Interchange and the multi-Billion Dollar Wilson
bridge widening? They are the big-eared moai.
The Capital Beltway Toll Road and HOT lane
widening is presumed to be needed to connect and
use the capacity of these two new facilities.
A
sustainable future is more complex in 2008 than
creating a sustainable island culture on Easter
Island in 1400 but you can see Easter Island
from the Beltway if you know which you are
looking at. Think about it -- perhaps on a walk,
though, not another ride on on the Capital
Beltway.
--
May 5, 2008
End
Notes
(1).
The Platform Strategy for a “Purple Line”
around the Beltway is outlined in the
Backgrounder “It
is Time to Fundamentally Rethink METRO and
Mobility in the National Capital Subregion,”
18 October 2004. The use of “Platform
Station-Areas” is further articulated in “All
Aboard,” 16 April 2007. The later column
introduces and illustrates a “Pyramid
Station-Area Strategy.” Recently it has come
to our attentions that the ‘Pyramid
Station-Area Strategy’ might be better called
the "Ziggurat Station-Area Strategy.” The
ziggurat urban form is championed by
“Ecocities” advocates based on
archaeological precedents from across the Globe.
The ecological benefits of the stepped pyramid
configuration for Cluster- and
Neighborhood-scale components of urban places
are impressive.
We
were surprised to find that the idea for the
METRO Purple Line with over-the-Beltway
Platforms was first published in the mid-'80s.
This strategy was articulated in the early
renditions of the documents that became “It is
Time to Fundamentally Rethink METRO and Mobility
in the National Capital Subregion” most
recently up dated in 2004.
(2).
We grew up in Montana, went to high school
there, worked five summers for the National Park
Service to support undergraduate education and
graduated from the University of Montana. Our
uncle Gordon Thomas farmed in the Bitterroot
Valley upon which Diamond focuses considerable
attention in Part One. Since moving to Hawaii in
1960 we have returned to Montana often. When we
were there in 2006, we paid special attention to
the points Diamond raises in Collapse and
believe he is on target. (See “Big
(Gray, Brown) Sky Country,” 23 October
2006.)
(3).
While some are uncomfortable with some of
Diamond’s sweeping conclusions in his two most
popular books, few question his field
observations and his even handed reporting of
the science-based work of others.
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