The Plight of the Cities

...Poor planning and runaway technology have bequeathed us staggering problems that until recently we have hardly seemed to notice...

...It is clear, at least, that the long range effort to protect the environment must include drastic changes in transportation, in housing, and in commercial activity...

...City governments must lead, but the time is long past when solutions to complex problems could be imposed from the top...

...The aim should be rather to take advantage of the new awareness and encourage the formation of neighborhood or citizen groups which will fight for their own interests...

...Over the decades, each environmental disaster has zoomed to lead to another in an unforeseen but related area...

...The off-gases are cleaned by an electrostatic precipitator, and the heat can be used to generate about seventeen megawatts of electricity...

...The cities have been shortchanged by the states and the P'ederal Government for so long that it would be surprising indeed if the same pattern does not evolve in the current environmental crusade...

...We do not yet know where the quest for the quality of life will take us...

...Similarly, cities may consider paying a bounty on the abandoned cars which are beginning to engulf the urban scene...

...In the cities, overlapping jurisdictions and the current complex relations with suburbs, some of them in adjoining states, assure us cleaning up the environment offers no vacation from politics...

...As we go deeper into the problems and integrate the planning of all city agencies in the light of environmental problems, many new options will open up...

...But the sudden emergence of this issue may have raised some unreal expectations, the foremost being that ecology is somehow above politics, uniting Northerner and Southerner, Republican and Democrat, left and right...

...Quantitative production has become, for our mass minded contemporaries, the only imperative goal: They value quantification without qualification...

...Littering and slovenly habits that degrade urban life are viewed as simple expressions of this attitude, and the first priority is to change it with concrete reforms, however small at first, that residents can appreciate...

...Additional acreage will extend the park from 125th Street to 155th Street...

...Manufacturers of the ubiquitous beer can and the cellophane cigarette package, as well as many other packagers, may be persuaded to redesign their products...

...Ours is an age," Lewis Mumford writes in The City in History, "in which the increasingly automatic processes of production and urban expansion have displaced the human goals they are supposed to serve...

...For instance, New York City may derive electric power as well as a new off-shore island or two from a new incinerating unit now being developed in cooperation with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...

...He had been a member of the House of Representatives since 1959...

...Another example of double benefit to the environment is Riverbank, a sewage plant New York is building on the bank of the Hudson to clean our share of that river's pollution...

...The planned obsolescence of goods which we seem to have adopted as a national policy runs counter to the needs of controlling our burgeoning output of refuse...

...New technology can help us cut down on urban noise—e.g., muted jackhammers and air-conditioners, more attention to quieter aircraft and subways...

...Many studies have indicated a pervasive feeling of hopelessness about the city, a sense that our urban centers are out of control...

...All that is needed is the money and the will...

...One point is clear: Technology produced the crisis and technology can end it—if we are thoughtful in using it and willing to pay the price...

...Attitudes toward production, privacy, space, and civic responsibility—to ourselves and succeeding generations—will have to be rethought...

...Techniques are known whereby garbage can be compressed or burned, with the recycling of potentially valuable waste into chemical by-products and building materials...

...Effective sewage techniques are old and familiar...

...Despite this, the earth has been a gracious host for the few moments its most recent visitor—man—has been here...

...But it has never guaranteed this species a permanent place...

...Newly designed automobiles—smaller and electric— would save space and cut pollution...

...All we know is that the trip will be long, difficult, and expensive...

...This new unit, compact enough to be located in many neighborhoods of the city, thus reducing expensive hauling costs, shreds waste and burns it more efficiently in a fluidized bed furnace...

...Subways lines may be used for off-hour carting of refuse in special cars and many of the new lines can be planned to tie in with stores along the route so the transfer can take place beneath the streets...

...That movement will require billions of dollars over a long haul, and that money will not be available until our expensive commitment in Southeast Asia comes to an end...

...After the political exhaustion of 1968, and the heavy drain of our war in Vietnam, the nation badly needs to feel a common sense of mission and unity...

...Where there are priorities there is politics, and the movement to reclaim our environment is no exception...

...The banning of one-way bottles, for instance, may appear to be a small step, but it would eliminate much of the broken glass and daily waste in cities...

...Guests, Briefly Man is only a recent visitor to the planet earth...

...The roof of the low thirty-acre plant, built partly on the shore, partly out into the river, will be developed as a park for the nearby community...

...Our cities are crowded, land is expensive and scarce...

...Plastic garbage bags would eliminate noise, unnecessary steps for sanitation men, and avoid spillage at the truck...

...More expensive but less poisonous fuels are available, and more and more effective filters and gas traps are being developed...

...Marshall McLuhan writes: "If the temperature of the bathwater rises only one degree each half-hour, how will the bather know when to scream...

...If this becomes a pattern, the apparent functional belief in the inevitability of dirty cities may be reversed...

...After all, no one is pro-pollution...

...We are currently studying the possibility of using it to build an island in the upper bay that might shield the lower Staten Island beaches from the polluted discharge of the Hudson and hasten the reopening of these beaches for swimming...

...We owe a large debt to those individuals and groups, on campuses and around the country, whose missionary interest in ecology has now burst upon the national consciousness with the fervor of a crusade...

...Air and water are the most discussed environmental problems in the city, and in New York we believe we have made important strides in cutting down pollution...

...Already in Brooklyn, neighborhood groups are organizing to boycott merchants who consistently befoul the sidewalk and streets...

...But ecology can hardly make our differences disappear...

...In the cities, the first problem is one of morale...

...colman McCarthy The Washington Post February 18, 1970 John V. Lindsay was first elected mayor of New York City in 1965...

...But the broadening of the environmental movement in the cities, and the involvement of those who live in them, will depend on new ideas and small programs...

...The Plight of the Cities by JOHN V. LINDSAY The degradation of the environment is by now a familiar story: polluted air and water, a decaying physical plant, massive sanitation problems, sharp rises in congestion and noise that bring tension, lost efficiency, and incivility...

...The plans, drawn up in consultation with community representatives, include an amphitheater, pools, community center, public dock and fishing pier, restaurant and shops, as well as playing fields for several sports...

...It would be as shortsighted to save the countryside at the expense of the city as it would be to allow ecology to grow into a middle-class whites-only movement...

...As the emphasis shifts from the quantity of goods to the quality of life, every aspect of the city's life will have to be looked at in a new light...

...Large Sunday newspapers, much of their poundage unread, could be sold in sections, easing the Monday clean-up and saving untold numbers of trees that are now cut down to provide unread pages...

...Ecology cannot be thought of as a department of government or the job of a few, but as a web of values that permeates all urban thinking...

...and because man is doing what no other species has ever done —quarreling with Nature—it appears that his presence on earth will be nothing more than a brief guest appearance...

...I do not mean that solutions will come quickly or easily, if only because of the enduring political habits of this nation...

...But this interdependence works for the good as well...

...The city is the environment for a growing majority of our citizens...

...With the aid of the Reynolds metal company, New York City is developing a program in which community organizations will return beverage cans for a half-cent per can bounty—a program which we expect to expand over the next five years to the point where twenty-five to fifty per cent of aluminum cans in the city will be reclaimed...

...It also produces an ash that is ideal fill material...

...No area of city government or industry can act any longer without regard for ecological consequences...

...Already many are using the term "ecology" in its narrowest sense, as if the need to protect our resources is a kind of conservation that stops at city borders...

...We do not yet know whether a major shift in the economy and consumer habits will be necessary to make the cities what they can and should be...

...Multiple use of environmental protection facilities is likely to be necessary if the quality of life in our cities is to be improved...

...We are suffering from the mistakes of decades...

...While we are waiting, a smaller, slower, low-compression taxicab would be a feasible advance...

...Lead poisoning, rats, the filth of the slums are just as much environmental problems as saving the redwoods and healing the scars of strip mining...

...We know how to package consumer goods in materials that save space and decay rapidly...

...The philosopher Alfred Whitehead saw the earth as "a second-rate planet revolving around a second-rate sun...

...Even then, extensive politicking will be necessary to sort out priorities of reclamation and to sustain the political pressure necessary for reform...

...He is the author of a new book, The City, just published by W. W. Norton...

...If, for instance, the left is given to believe that it must mute its peace activities for the sake of reclaiming the environment, if ecology is made to seem a cover for our differences rather than a coalition to solve one of them, then the movement is doomed to disillusion...

...Compared to the billions of years that the primordial forces worked in silence in the vast canyons of cosmic space, he has been here only an infinitesimal moment...

...The need now is to think in terms of total environment...

...In New York, for instance, it may well be that forty miles of efficient new subways will do more for our atmosphere than tinkering with the internal combustion engine...

...Urban pollution has accumulated just as imperceptibly for years, and only now is the scream being heard...

...We now know that our cities have developed their own perverse ecology, each problem feeding another, often attracting "solutions" which merely shift the crisis from one area to another...

...The prospect that he will pollute his species back to oblivion is a huge tragedy, but perhaps it is only part of a cycle, a ripple in the contour of evolution, part of the pilgrimage of living things that began with cells and plants and only lately has included man...

...Honking of auto horns and the playing of radios and tape recorders in public can be prohibited...