As usual, the media have the wrong end of the stick. They should be featuring you and me in their stories, not to get a man-in-the-street perspective, but to berate us as the real culprits.

The blame for the unfolding tragedy, which will affect people as well as animals, economies and ecosystems, resides with all energy users. We are driven to drill in ecologically sensitive areas because people like me and you demand cheap electricity and gasoline. It is at our implicit and anoymous direction that the proximate culprits undertake known risks to the healthy functioning of productive oceans, marshes, and beaches, not to mention the danger posed to oil rig workers (like the 11 workers whose deaths are now barely mentioned by the media).

We don’t chant “drill, baby, drill,” but we might as well.

Such disasters are not “inconceivable,” as BP PLC Chairman Lamar McKay said on Sunday. They are to be expected if we continue using energy the way we have in the past. It is more than conceivable that more drilling in more dangerous places and difficult environments will lead to more accidents. Oil companies are willing to take those risks with their workers’ lives and with other people’s livelihoods. We do more than permit them to do so; we demand that they do so.

In last month’s energy atrocity in the Appalachians, there was a similar unwillingness to admit that we are all culpable, with some notable exceptions. Most attention focused on Massey Energy Company and it larger-than-life, bad-as-he-wants-to-be chief Don Blankenship. As villainous as the CEO appears, he can claim his company is, like the tobacco companies, merely delivering a legal product that people want to use. It’s true. And there were lax federal regulators to share the blame in that tragedy as well.

The side effects of coal use are underground mine disasters, and aboveground ecological disasters, and they are only about as inconceivable as lung cancer and emphysema.

We have permitted those disasters, pretended that they are accidents, and failed to recognize that we actually call them into being through our use of energy. We simply don’t holistic vision of the costly side-effects of our consumption decisions. When we use energy and demand the extraction of fossil fuels on the scale our economy requires, we cannot call these disasters and tragedies accidents.

Even more worrisome is the fatalistic reaction to the big picture. Having learned that the unavoidable costs of cheap energy are certain deaths of coal miners and oil rig workers, the certain catastrophe of mountaintop removal mining, and the certain destruction of oil spills, we too often adopt a faux courage, a resolute acceptance that these side-effects are simply inevitable. We forget that we have choices.

We can choose to develop our energy economy differently. Cleaner, renewable energies are more costly than oil and coal, but only marginally so. Events of the last few months should remind us that there are human and ecologocial costs that aren’t included in the prices of gasoline and electricity. Even nuclear energy is, on average, safer and cleaner. [There are risks, but they have to be compared with the certainties of fossil fuel extraction and use, like the 24,000 excess American deaths caused every year by coal power plant pollution, or the 1 in 6 babies born to mothers with toxic levels of mercury in their bloodstream.]

A recent report shows that the American South, depauperate in some forms of renewable energy, is actually the “Saudi Arabia of energy efficiency,” according to Dr. Marilyn Brown, who helped write the report.

Choices we make at the margin, to conserve or to consume, are incredibly important. Each increment energy we demand drives workers into riskier situations in ever more sensitive ecological areas. In contrast, each increment of energy we save or replace with renewable alternatives reduces the need for workers and creation to undergo these high risks. The payoff, even for small changes, is disproportionate to the costs.

It’s too bad our wake-up call must come in the form of disappearing mountains and expanding oil slicks.

End Dogfighting in Atlanta

In the city, I stood at a press event with a dear brother, Ralph Hawthorne of the Humane Society of the United States, and his colleagues from animal stewardship organizations, to draw attention to an Atlanta program that aims to end dogfighting by helping urban youth train and care for their pit bulls, preparing them for showing instead of fighting. Professional dog-trainer Amber Burckhalter and a team of volunteers work with kids to learn wise animal stewardship, compassion, and responsibility. Weekly classes help young people develop a relationship with their pets, and to learn about the dangers and cruelty associated with dogfighting. There’s a video about the dog-training program online and a CNN newstory about reformed dogfighter Mark Lockhart, who grew up fighting dogs, and who now helps Amber show kids how to treat dogs as friends, not fighters.

Urban ministry folks know that animals are often mistreated in cultures that tolerate cruelty and crime. Ralph Hawthorne, himself an urban minister who has in the past taken on gang violence and drug culture, now also pushes back spiritual darkness by fighting animal cruelty. He works to recruit young people and build neighborhood support and relationships, creating grassroots community while educating about the danger dogfighting poses to that community. He has traveled with former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, connecting the famous football player with young people who need to hear his story of repentance from a life of abusing animals. The stewardship mandate of Genesis surely extends to the pets under our care.

Youth Birding Competition

Immediately after leaving the End Dogfighting Atlanta press conference, I packed the car, my three kids and three of their friends, and headed out for 24 hours of birding (bird-watching and also finding birds by ear). Our team of five friends (plus Beatrice, our 2 year old) has competed for four years running, dashing from one natural area to another from 5 pm Friday to 5 pm Saturday on a day in late April, trying to rack up a long list of Georgia bird species.

The Georgia Youth Birding Competition sponsored by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources program in Non-Game Wildlife, is an amazing assemblage of kids of all ages, their mentors and parents, criss-crossing the state during the spring migration season, when North American birds that overwintered in Latin America are headed back to their nesting grounds up north. The kids spend weeks training and planning their routes and strategies (the winners tend to start on the Georgia coast spotting shorebirds and gulls, then head inland at night to pick up owls and nightjars, get a few winks, and then work their way up the state). Our team mostly stayed near Atlanta and Macon, and saw an impressive 80 species, including a few to add to their “life lists” of birds (full list here), and the winning team in our elementary-school age group saw over one hundred!

Kids, the Creation, and the Creator

Our boys know more Georgia birds, by sight and by song, than they do Pokemon characters or celebrities. (We’re hoping that that fact, combined with violin lessons, will mean we don’t have to worry about them dating until they’re in their twenties.) Their brains are designed to respond to biodiversity by learning it. Romans 1:20 means more when you pay attention to creation. It is, as the writer of the reformed Belgic confession tells us, the first means by which we know God, since the universe “is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.”

God gave humans an amazing ability to relate to animals. Dominion (not domination) and Sabbath appreciation expressed in Genesis 1, relationship (Adam seeing, naming the animals) and responsibility (tending and keeping the garden) in Genesis 2.

You see this in kids, as the image of God bubbles upward and outward. They wonder and delight in creatures, and they have the innate ability to classify and remember them, as Adam did. When kids’ brains are filled with biodiversity instead of corporate-logo-diversity, they have the chance to think God’s thoughts after him. When kids learn to love and train their pit bulldogs, they learn something about wise dominion and stewardship of the Creation. These are all signs of the life of God within them.

N.T. Wright has said that the human condition, holding the image of God, is like being an angled mirror, reflecting, from creation, glory back to the Creator, and reflecting, from God, his wise sovereignty, love, and care for creation. These programs show both those dimensions of the human experience, teaching kids in a modern, violent, and hypercommercial empire something about what it means to be truly human.

Young birders atop an Indian mound at Ocmulgee National Monument near Macon, GA

On Friday and Saturday, my boys Angus and Ewan joined their friends Meggie, Patrick, and Eric, as a team competing in the Georgia Youth Birding Competition, in which teams try to spot (or hear) as many different bird species as they can in a 24-hour period. They started at 5 pm on Friday. All the teams converge on the Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center near Mansfield, GA,to turn in their lists at 5 pm Saturday and to enjoy an awards banquet immediately afterward. There were lots of teams competing this year, in four age brackets.

Kids have to spot, identify, and record their sightings without adult help (except for driving!). Our team had 80 species, and placed third in the elementary group. The top team had just over a hundred birds!

Here’s our list from the 24 hour big day (birds added to the  life list of someone in the group are in ALL CAPS):

1. Canada Goose
2. Wood Duck
3. Mallard
4. Blue-winged Teal
5. Wild Turkey
6. Common Loon
7. Double-crested Cormorant
8. AMERICAN BITTERN
9. Great Blue Heron
10. Great Egret
11. Little Blue Heron
12. Cattle Egret
13. Black Vulture
14. Turkey Vulture
15. Osprey
16. Cooper’s Hawk
17. Red-shouldered Hawk
18. Red-tailed Hawk
19. Common Moorhen
20. American Coot
21. Killdeer
22. GREATER YELLOWLEGS
23. LESSER YELLOWLEGS
24. SOLITARY SANDPIPER
25. Rock Pigeon
26. Eurasian Collared Dove
27. Mourning Dove
28. Barred Owl
29. Chimney Swift
30. Ruby-throated Hummingbird
31. Red-headed Woodpecker
32. Red-bellied Woodpecker
33. Downy Woodpecker
34. Northern Flicker
35. Pileated Woodpecker
36. Eastern Phoebe
37. Eastern Kingbird
38. White-eyed Vireo
39. Red-eyed Vireo
40. Blue Jay
41. American Crow
42. Fish Crow
43. Purple Martin
44. Tree Swallow
45. Northern Rough-winged Swallow
46. Cliff Swallow
47. Barn Swallow
48. Carolina Chickadee
49. Tufted Titmouse
50. Carolina Wren
51. Marsh Wren
52. Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
53. Eastern Bluebird
54. Wood Thrush
55. American Robin
56. Gray Catbird
57. Northern Mockingbird
58. Brown Thrasher
59. European Starling
60. Cedar Waxwing
61. Yellow-rumped Warbler
62. Palm Warbler
63. Common Yellowthroat
64. Hooded Warbler
65. Eastern Towhee
66. Chipping Sparrow
67. Field Sparrow
68. Song Sparrow
69. Swamp Sparrow
70. Dark-eyed Junco
71. Northern Cardinal
72. Indigo Bunting
73. BOBOLINK
74. Red-winged Blackbird
75. Eastern Meadowlark
76. Common Grackle
77. Brown-headed Cowbird
78. House Finch
79. American Goldfinch
80. House Sparrow

My questions distill down to these four (and if anyone can find Bible references on these, let me know    ):

1. Is the climate changing in ways that (do, or will) threaten human flourishing?
2. If it is, are we causing any (substantial) part of that climate change?
3. If we are, could we do anything (substantial) about it?
4. If we could, should we do anything about it? (What would it cost to act? What would it cost to not act?)

As you might expect, a lot of furious debate occurs around Question 4, which is really about economics. Curiously, few people seem to consult economics to get answers. To listen to environmentalists (who are often but not always liberals), you get the idea that it’s just sheer stupidity and greed that has kept us from already implementing ALL their desired policy reforms and environmental regulations, and that we would live in a veritable utopia of economic and social bliss if we undertook climate action now. For many enviros, there’s NO downside to climate action.

To listen to climate action opponents (who are often but not always conservatives), ANY climate action is likely to completely destroy the economy, abolish our cherished freedoms, enshrine a one-world government, and (worst of all) take away our cars. For many of these folks, climate action is very costly with zero benefits.

As with climate science, the likely truth about climate economics is somewhere in the middle.

If you believe (a) the climate is changing, (b) we’re at least partly responsible, and (c) we could do something about it (and those are big IFs for some people), then you’ll find Paul Krugman’s essay in the New York Times Sunday magazine a helpful primer about the economics question (d): “should we do something about climate?”

Krugman provides some very clear background to the field of environmental economics, information that is useful regardless of climate issues. He also shows that climate action would NOT be costless, would NOT be catastrophic. He also reviews some pretty complicated terrain: how should we value immediate costs versus long-term costs?, if we should act, should we do it in a big-bang or ramp up over time?, what should we do if future costs of climate change are uncertain?

In explaining that material, he delivers a not-so-subtle rebuke to the mindless optimists and the fretful pessimists.

Highly recommended.

Note: Krugman is NOT a climate skeptic, but in this piece he isn’t really arguing about climate science (except for some asides). He is describing what economists tend to agree on and disagree on about climate policy if the science were credible. That’s what makes it useful.

As cell phones become ubiquitous in the West, the dangers begin to be revealed. Environmentalists warn us of the dangers of improper disposal of cell phones (see this outstanding primer on the perils of e-waste), and of the dangers to wildlife and aesthetics (visual pollution?) from cell tower construction. Cell towers also cause nearby house prices to decline (though just by a little bit).

Cell phone radiation dangers have long been known, although the higher risk to children is becoming more apparent, and the Environmental Working Group has a great website that ranks currently-sold cell phones in terms of radiation danger. (I used the EWG database in picking out my last cell phone. I also now carry my phone in my pocket less frequently, and don’t keep it between my legs when driving, for what should be obvious reasons.)

A bigger danger than radiation is addiction—these little devices become yet another channel by which we plug into virtual worlds instead of real worlds.

A test for you: Can you take a technology Sabbath? Can you turn off cell phones, televisions, computers, video games for a whole day and find yourself connecting to God and his creation, your family and your neighbors? If we can’t do that once a week, or even once a month, we have to ask ourselves what kind of people we really are? Are we really still fully human, or are we becoming trans-human, combinations of flesh and technology? Do we want that?

Still, on the whole, I’d say cell phones help us do good things better and more efficiently. It would take a lot to make me give mine up.

Cell phones in the developing world

But in the non-Western world, cell phones are also transforming whole economies. Just this month in Scientific American, development expert Jeffrey Sachs writes about the role of mobile technology in fighting poverty. He highlights the usefulness of cell phone for community health workers with only basic training, but who can coordinate with hospitals, fight malaria, check to see if a doctor is available before transporting patients to a hospital, and determine proper courses of treatment by SMS text.

And there are environmental benefits from cell phone technology in developing countries, where mobile technology is making folks whose livelihoods depends directly on creation better off.

Farmers and fishermen are using cell phones to determine where they can get the best prices for their goods, before they transport them or land them in port. This leads to better prices for sellers AND for buyers. That makes a big difference in times of food shortage, since prices are high in famine regions, and sellers in surplus regions can make good money transporting their food to regions of scarcity. More food on the market in famine-stricken areas brings prices down—a classic market-based win-win situation facilitated by cheaper information. One study suggested cell phones already helped lessen impact of the 2005 food crisis in Niger.

Just as health information is available by text, making a database of short and long-term weather forecasts available by cell phone in the developing world will be a key strategy for climate-proofing smallholder agriculture, and helping poor farmers adapt to a changing climate system. Agricultural extension advice by SMS would be similarly helpful.

Conservation efforts are likewise being transformed by mobile technology. In Kenya, farmers are using PTT (Push-to-Talk) technology on mobile devices to alert ranchers when elephants are threatening their crops, reducing conflict making it more likely that elephants and people will be able to coexist on the landscape. In Asia, Latin America, and Africa, timber companies are hammering tags with bar codes into legally-felled trees and then uploading their GPS coordinates into a live database, to ensure that tree-felling is done in accordance with environmental laws and with respect to property rights of indigenous people.

With companies like Nokia beginning to churn out very inexpensive handsets, soon mobile technology will be in the reach of the poor, if not yet the poorest of the poor.  Nokia has got a clear mission, and it isn’t to dominate the American smartphone market. Their smartest products are hardware and software tailored to the developing world market.

As Nathan Wyeth, editor of the website nextbillion.net writes, “[Nokia’s] new “1280″ mobile sells for $30 before taxes, and if you live in energy poverty without access to electricity, it’s got apps for that: standby battery life of 22 days, an FM radio receiver, and a flashlight. Also, recognizing that handsets are frequently shared, it’s got capacity for up to five separate address books.” The company tries to keep the total cost of ownership down to get as wide a distribution as possible.

Sachs is hopeful that expert systems, running on inexpensive mobile networks, will “revolutionize rural farm yields, disease control, business networks, rural finance, education systems, and much more. Soon farmers will be able to enter local data for advice on specific soil needs, timing on the planting season, drought and rainfall forecasts, market prices, and logistics.”

Nokia, for example, is already beginning to expand a set of services called Life Tools, that provides Nokia cell phone users in India, and now in Indonesia, access to information about agriculture, including up-to-the-minute prices information and news about 275 different crops.

Wyeth figures the impact of cell phone technology, combined with inexpensive handsets, may be bigger than any other global development strategies currently in place.

And for poor people directly dependent on creation for their survival, that’s a good thing.

I’ve met Pat Chastain and Pat Hudson several times now (and look forward to meeting Dawn Coppock). I wish that every environmental advocate could take lessons from their gracious demeanor and their sacrificial determination to see justice done for the people Appalachia. Learn from them. Pray for them. Support them!

Mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia (John Paget | PagetFilms.com).

In what is regarded by many as a sea change for the most reckless and destructive form of coal mining, mountaintop removal, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Friday issued a proposal to veto a large-scale mining permit already approved by the US Army Corps of Engineers (Washington Post; New York Times)

Arch Coal Inc.’s Spruce No. 1 mine would degrade surrounding water quality, fill more than 7 miles of headwater streams and affect more than 2,000 acres of forest, EPA said.

That would be really bad for the people who get their drinking water from those mountains. Never mind the violence done to some of the oldest and most beautiful mountains in America.

The Clean Water Act grants EPA authority to veto Corps-issued permits for surface mines on environmental grounds, but it has only used that authority 12 times since 1972. Never before has the agency vetoed an already-issued permit.

An EPA willing to flex its muscles on behalf of poor mountaineers whose livelihoods are being destroyed by mountaintop removal mining is a significant change from recent policy. “The EPA is showing signs of backbone on this issue,” says Rob Perks of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The agency has already acknowledged the science confirming that this extreme form of strip mining is incompatible with environmental protection.”

Peter Illyn, of the Christian environmental group Restoring Eden, says, “It’s about time. There’s no moral, ecological, or economic justification for the damage that mountaintop removal  does to the people, to the water, and to the ecosystems of Appalachia.” Illyn’s group works with local partners in Appalachia to bring Christian leaders and college students to the region. “I’ve seen some of the most broken places on the globe, but I’ve never seen such egregious damage done in the name of cheap energy.”

Other signs also suggest that Big Coal’s days raping and pillaging the Appalachian Mountains may be numbered.

Fewer and fewer people are actually employed in mining coal in the Appalachians, as Big Coal has moved from underground mining to blasting the tops off mountains. The new hyper-violent strategy is cheaper, and employs a lot fewer people (some coal companies have laid off 90% of their workers). Coal’s constituency is being reduced to the barons who use profits to buy influence but don’t create jobs. More and more former miners are realizing the loss of their natural heritage. “The descendants of coal miners who live in the hollows and valleys believe that Appalachia can be saved,” says Allen Johnson of the West Virginia based advocacy group Christians for the Mountains.

A recent study from West Virginia University indicates that for every dollar of benefit coal mining produces, there are five dollars of health care costs borne by innocent bystanders. If coal companies weren’t able to offload their costs on third parties, mountaintop removal mining wouldn’t exist.

And David Roberts from Grist comments that even long-time coal defender Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) has shown little desire to defend the practice of obliterating his home state. (West Virginia’s junior senator, Jay Rockefeller, and much of their Congressional delegation, don’t seem to be similarly enlightened.)

We could get rid of mountaintop removal mining with a negligible effect on energy prices, since only 5% of the nation’s electricity comes from such intemperate practices. The temptation will be to try to tinker at the margins of current technologies. Such an attempt will be misguided, according to Perks of the NRDC. “What EPA needs to do now is finally recognize that when it comes to this practice, there’s no way to mitigate the damage by tweaking the regulations.  You can’t mend mountaintop removal, you have to end it.”

Further resources:

Restoring Eden | Mountaintop Removal Campaign

Christians for the Mountains

NRDC “No More Mountaintop Removal Mining”

LEAF (Tennessee-based Christian advocates against MTR)

I don’t know that much about emerging theology. Names like Brian McLaren, Troy Bronsink, and Will Samson float around in my head, pretty untethered to a rigorous classification, all lumped into the categories of surprising, interesting and delightful people from whom I can learn a great deal. But I do know that they are more interested in communities than in the “free market”, and that all communities are constituted by constraint. Kruse does a good job of explaining this. They are interested in what kinds of order, what kinds of organization, bubble up from the bottom when they aren’t imposed from above.

But I think Kruse oversimplifies things when he looks to economists like Hayek or his modern libertarian followers for examples of “emergence” theory. (In fact, I believe Hayek’s views were much richer than most modern libertarians.)

Libertarians have a very narrow view and special view of the concept of emergence as an economic phenomenon. The truth is, decentralized, individual actors give rise to many kinds of complex behavior, including institutions other than the “free market.” Most libertarian ideas amount to an attempt to flatten interactions, to reduce the richness of social institutions, to remove the emergent complexity of social interactions. They would design systems which artificially prevent the normal evolution of social norms, morals, rules, traditions, relationships of reciprocity, and other emergent forms of order. People are moral creatures, and that morality is not purely a private phenomenon. It finds expression in persuasion, social pressure, democratic government, courts, and even in corporations and bureaucracies.

The insights of Hayek and his followers are very important, and neglected at our peril. Highly decentralized, anonymous interactions do give rise to spontaneous order, as reflected in stable price signals, markets clearing, cost minimization, gains from trade, welfare enhancement (if not exactly maximization), etc. But no human would be happy with a libertarian or economic approach to managing the number of abortions, whether they are pro-life or pro-choice (I have done many classroom exercises exploring just such a topic. Everyone wants society to use institutions other than the market to answer questions about abortion. But libertarian economics, like authoritarian government, clears away mid-level institutions that constrain human freedom.)

Institutional economics is the place to look for emergence theory. Libertarian economics only has a very shallow (but nonetheless important) concept of emergence. Check out classic writers like Herb Simon, Robert Axelrod, Elinor Ostrom, or economists at the Santa Fe Institute like Brian Arthur, for richer views on emergence in economic and social systems.

As such, I think emergence as a concept fits the emerging crowd better than the libertarian crowd.

Further on, the front porch reaches its pinnacle of development in 1920s and 30s Craftsman bungalows. Then a diminishment sets in, as porch sizes are reduced, and they migrate to the sides of houses, while the front element is reduced to a mere stoop, sometimes with awning, sometimes without. Eventually there is no porch, no stoop–the only thing facing the street is the automatically-controlled door to a 2, 3, or 4 car garage. Life happens on the back deck. There is no loitering, and walkers may be looked on with suspicion.

Kendra Juskus writes this month, on the Flourish weblog, about front porch culture and African history , in honor of Black History Month. It’s a fascinating piece, in which she explores why front porches act as bridges between public and private spaces, and how that builds community. My family’s own experience in urban Atlanta was to discover how in an older African American neighborhood, life still happens on the street side of the house. People tend to sit out front, to barbecue out front, and to live life in closer proximity to neighbors than in the housing districts that emphasize private spaces.

In related pieces this month, we explore how churches can begin to re-inhabit their neighborhoods and communities by allowing the “front porch mentality” to influence their architecture, landscaping, event planning. Churches have in many cases allowed their facilities to become semi-private spaces that are more like private clubs than public buildings, and how we might overcome that, through thoughtful changes to the built environment, in the way we welcome walkers, bicyclists, and in the way gardening accomplishes community-building.

Public spaces are endangered in modern American landscapes, and our politics and community-mindedness suffer as a result. When you have to buy a ticket or a coffee or a beer to encounter other people in neutral spaces, you lose some folks. How do we encourage spiritual loitering in a rat-race world?

Do you have ideas about how to retrofit our landscapes and lives to foster a front-porch culture? Write us (rusty@flourishonline.org). We’re happy to receive feedback and would love to share your ideas with others.

Why do Americans have so many car crashes? It's the amount of time we spend in cars

An estimated 19 people have died in crashes related to unexpected acceleration in Toyota-made vehicles over the last decade. This has led to a national uproar, dominating the news cycle and flooding dealers with recalled autos to repair.

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to put the problem in perspective. In a year, Toyota drivers, if they are like other drivers, put about 11,400 miles on their vehicle.
Ten years of driving (114,000 miles, give or take), times
the number of vehicles involved in the recall (8 million), equals
the total miles driven by recalled vehicles over 10 years (912 billion miles; that’s 9.12 x 10^11 for you exponentially-minded people).

So dividing the number of deaths (19) by the total miles driven gives an estimated risk of death from sudden acceleration:
2 deaths per 100 bn vehicle miles traveled

To put that in perspective, in 2008, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration calculates your risk of dying from an automobile accident at 1270 deaths per 100 bn vehicle miles traveled.

Hmmm. That means that you are over 600 times more likely to die in an automobile fatality in ANY make of car than you are to die from Toyota’s flawed acceleration system. Statistically speaking, stuck accelerators and faulty floor mats just don’t matter.

Getting in a car is inherently dangerous.

But it is worse than that. By building our cities the way we have since World War II, we in the United States are virtually forcing our citizens to make very dangerous choices, if they want to work, go to school, go to the doctor, or shop. Relatively few Americans live in neighborhoods where they can choose not to have a car, largely because we’ve built our cities on the cheap, failing to provide public transportation alternatives, outlawing mixed-use developments through perverse zoning policies, and subsidizing development on the margins of our cities with public money. In the case of land-use and transportation, we get exactly the system our policies promote.

Getting in a car is dangerous, and it’s hard to avoid getting in a car. It’s even dangerous for people who aren’t in the cars.

While we’ve abandoned the American landscape to the automobile, the death rate from traffic fatalities in the US, for passengers, drivers, and pedestrians, has leapfrogged past every other cause of death for children over the age of one, and it remains the leading cause of death even for young adults.

Citizens in the U.S. are twice as likely to die from automobiles as citizens in the United Kingdom, to take another developed world example; and we have the highest risk of any developed country, not because our roads are more dangerous, or our cars more deadly. Our death rate is sky-high because we expect people to drive everywhere, and therefore we spend much more time in cars than folks in other countries. We’ve built a landscape in which no one is seriously expected to walk or bike to any destination. This has an effect on our obesity rate, and on all the diseases driven by being overweight (diabetes, heart disease, stroke, stress, cancer). But the main health effect is on the number of Americans who die in the traffic epidemic.

But we take this deadly epidemic (and the corresponding injury rates) without blinking, having become convinced that it is somehow natural to have 35,000 Americans die each year on the road.

There are alternatives: it is possible to design healthy places that are not only safe but which cultivate community, flourishing economies, and happy families. For ideas, check out the Healthy Places section of the CDC website, or these other resources on healthy places for community developers at Flourish’s website.

Related resources:
How your church can do a walkability audit
“Walking to Justice (Walkability, Justice, and Healthy Cities)” by Rusty Pritchard, from current PRISM magazine (Jan/Feb 2010)
Flourish resource list on Walkability, Liveability, and Justice (for the CCDA conference)
Congress for New Urbanism
CDC Healthy Places