Month: January 2018

I was presented with the following top 10 list in a local development forum recently. My area is nothing short of obsessed with top 10 lists. It’s like Christmas every day in RDU for top 10 lists. A quick Bing search (sorry I just abandoned Google) gives us lots and lots of scholarly articles on income correlations and, well, things we deem desirable. Good physical health. Good mental health. Life expectancy (assuming long is good). Educational attainment. The good ol’ cycle of poverty is a tough nut to crack in the face of these obstacles. But I had a hard time coming up with any studies on public safety and high income areas. I am sure they are out there, but they sure didn’t float to the top of the search results (I used Google too, to be sure).

So, from deep within the well, I conjured up, what might be a thesis…..the title of this post….had I been thinking about this stuff back when I was university aged. And had I not flunked out of undergraduate school at one point making graduate school all but impossible. Anyway, I’ll let my post on that development forum represent the defense of that thesis, that I never undertook.

“I had a bit of a revelation the other day driving past a gated community….it was a bit ironic that the wealthy folks living behind that gate, in many ways are responsible for creating the conditions that require them (in their minds anyway) to live behind a gate.

Absolutely nobody wants to be a victim of crime. Obvious. But a surprising few perps *want* to be committing crimes….but people get admittedly desperate just trying to survive…in my neighborhood I meet them all of the time…all of this just to say, I’d be careful bragging about how safe a community is….the big picture never goes away, and low crime areas are tethered to all the other areas in ways less flattering than anyone but a Sociology PhD will ever think about…

Put another way…shouting “we left all you other poor f&*#ers behind!” is what this list says to me. Good job Cary. ”

Cary is the white flight version. Put the rich folks in this here gated cow field with not a sidewalk or bus connection to the City proper anywhere in sight.

The gentrification approach is the other way to get yourself on such a list. Good job Alexandria. Downtown Raleigh has itself almost completed this process by attacking it in reverse. Kick the poor people out by starting with “targeted enforcement“.  The high incomes will follow.

As an aside, put top 10 lists, on my top 10 list of things I am sick of.

One of the required classes for an Environmental Engineering degree at NC State is (or was) taking an entry level solid waste class. It was taught by the well known and well regarded Dr. Morton Barlaz. At that point in our educations, the underlying student opinion of Dr. Barlaz was how could someone be so into the piles of decaying garbage he kept in the basement of Mann Hall. Looking back, I’m sure we all now know how important this dedication to science was to keeping us all safe from our wanton ways regarding waste.

On the first day of this class, Dr. Barlaz asked a simple question; “What do you all of you think is the most pressing issue is today regarding solid waste?” I was debating between nuclear waste and chemical toxic waste…along those lines anyway. Dr. Barlaz totaled up the answers among the 20 or so students and not all that surprising to me, something over half of the class said….litter. The every present emotion of intertwined sadness/anger washed over me. Litter? Really? A paper bag blowing down the highway is a bigger issue than the PCBs washing down Crabtree Creek? Alas. Dr. Barlaz saved me from public embarrassment and politely explained that litter is mostly bad manners and there are many actual pollution issues related to solid waste disposal that we’d be learning about in his class. Thank you Dr. Barlaz.

Fast forward to some mundane drive down Interstate 40. Or was it Capital Blvd? Both chew up and spit out souls with equal efficiency. Driving these roads, and having no real other option but to drive these roads to take care of some of life’s chores, makes me furious. Railing about this will be the topic of many future posts. But for the moment I want you all to consider one, often overlooked objective fact about roads. A fact that collided with the memory of that day in Barley’s class: Roads are giant strips of asphalt (concrete, gravel etc. notwithstanding). Giant strips of tar are spiderwebbed all over the world. Most of us, drive daily on the largest single piece of litter on the planet. How could this be overlooked for a paper bag?

According to the Federal Highway Administration there are 4.12 million center line miles of roads in the United States and 2.68 million of those are paved. Using a 12 foot lane width, and assuming most are only two lanes and we have about 8 million acres of asphalt. That’s a lot of unnatural crap, wantonly placed all over the ground by us people.

Roads, destroy and intersect wildlife habitat, and enable the killing many more animals than we probably care to think about….approximately a million a day in the United States alone. Roads create additional stormwater runoff that further degrades adjacent ecosystems. Roads can potentially cause species to go extinct in localized habitats. People die on roads. Over 100 per day. Roads enable access to and trampling of every corner of the world. These are all things, that even the lauded electric vehicle and driverless vehicle revolutions will not address (future post!).

So I say to you, the 50% of my solid waste class and the rest of the commuters trapped in this way of life…when you are driving down the highway, as aggravating and unsightly (and admittedly in some cases actually damaging) as roadside litter may be to you, focus on the the real trash of the road system…the road surface itself.

Asphalt IS litter.