Together We Can Save the World


Tom Friedman is spot-on in his column this week when he says the solvers of today's biggest problems all need to work together:

"We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems — climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet — separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors. They all need to go on safari together."

Easier said than done. But still worth doing. At least, let's let go of going on our individual crusades for the sake of our own glory, which then impedes us from partnering with groups we've decided to label as the enemy to make us feel better about ourselves. Given today's complex and inter-connected world, that sort of prideful short-sightedness does more harm than good. For the sake of our children and their children, let's do right, even and especially when it means making for strange bedfellows, rather than look good by saying we're right and everyone else is wrong, all the while blowing our chance to actually make a difference.

Comments

Eric Orozco said…
Hey, I'm willing to allow a Walmart to anchor my TOD. If you need a lot of parking by the freeway...might as well make ripe good use of a Walmart parking lot.

Just don't tell the folks over at the Overhead Wire:

http://theoverheadwire.blogspot.com/2009/08/wal-mart-is-not-tod.html

Snobs... ')
LH said…
Eric, thanks for sharing. I'm usually not on the "no Walmart here" bandwagon, but I'd have to see a pretty amazing urbanized redesign of what they're proposing @ Amity Gardens. After all, the whole value proposition of transit-proximate sites is that they are actually transit-oriented. So suburban-style grocery stories, big boxes, and others would seem to be incompatible, from both an aesthetic and functional standpoint; they'll take up space from other, more logically transit-proximate uses, and run at odds with the intent of making those sites less reliant on cars.

That being said, it was telling to me that many of the comments had an anti-Walmart slant to them. Who it seems to be more to blame is whatever jurisdiction is considering allowing such a use at such a site. They're the ones that set the rules within which businesses operate; and if they have transit they're trying to orient development to, it's on them to either exclude auto-oriented uses or set design guidelines that bend those auto-oriented uses into uses that are more appropriate to a transit-proximate site.

Walmart is a business that is trying to make as much money as possible - I say that not as a negative thing or even a neutral thing but as a good thing. If it is given permission to build at the site and does some very un-Walmart urban redesign, it is doing so out of its own self-interest to serve as many customers as possible. But if it doesn't, and the result is a transit-proximate site that is almost completely auto-centric, that's on the jurisdiction for allowing it, not on Walmart for doing it.

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