Music credit in this video to Jeremy Robert Harris: jeremyrobertharris.com
We just keep paving. Urbanization and suburban sprawl means tarmac and concrete, convenient for drivers and cyclists, but it doesn’t absorb the rain. We lose an acre of farmland every minute, according to the American Farmland Trust, much of it to car-centric urban development. Looking across a landscape laid bare by bulldozers it’s hard not to cringe, especially when the over-paving creates the conditions for flash floods, urban heat island effect, and loss of habitat for native creatures.
Like many of our other destructive patterns, this paving trend may seem too big to shift, despite being wasteful and banal. Not so! Brad Lancaster shows us how to increase the life potential where we ourselves live, and intervene in the system to plant shade trees, edible fruits trees, and native plants for wildlife habitat. In this episode Brad shows us how suburbs can be modified. He’s one politically savvy redeemer, and has created a city-wide change starting from one illegal act and a powerful demonstration of what is possible.
MORE RESOURCES
- Rainwater Harvesting.
- Smart Growth
- Center for Liveable Communities
- Working together
- Harvesting the Desert
- Food Not Lawns
Literature and speculative fiction about post- suburban possibilities
- A world made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler
- Madadam Trilogy, Margaret Atwood
- Looking Backwards, Edward Bellamy
- News from Nowhere, William Morris
Greenhorns Radio segments related to this episode:
- Molly Nakarara
- Eric Herm
- Anastasia Rabin
- Tina Bartsch – Walking J Farm
- Adam Valdivia – Sleeping Frog Farms
- Waste with Tristram Stuart
- Sean Dembrosky – Edible Acres
- Owen Hablutzel
- Neil Bertrando