David Sirota: The Climate Bites Back

[marmar]

from truthdig:


The Climate Bites Back

Posted on Aug 31, 2012
By David Sirota


As a wildfire/flash flood cycle ravages the American heartland, “the climate bites back” may be the 21st century’s karmic rejoinder to the hysterical screams of “freedom!” and “property rights!” when it comes to urban sprawl.

No doubt, we’ve long understood the invisible dangers of such sprawl. For years, we’ve been warned by researchers of the direct connections between unplanned and gluttonous construction projects and human-created carbon emissions. We’ve been told specifically that suburbanization’s spread of population into ever-larger swaths of wilderness inherently results in more roads, more cars, more carbon emissions, more climate change—and thus, more chances for nature-related disasters.

But in go-go America, these scientific truisms were no match for McMansion fantasies. As coastal folk headed to the Rocky Mountain frontier with visions of big-but-inexpensive castles far away from the inner city, the term “zoning” became an even more despised epithet than it already had been in cowboy country. Rangeland and foothill frontiers subsequently became expansive low-density subdivisions, and carbon-belching SUVs chugged onto new roads being built farther and farther away from the urban core. That is, farther and farther into what the federal government calls the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) and what fire experts call the dangerous “red zone.”

The numbers are stark: According to the Denver Post, between 1990 and 2000, 40 percent of all homes built in the nation were built in the WUI—and “a Colorado State University analysis expects a 300 percent increase in WUI acreage in the next couple decades.” In the last two decades in fire-scorched Colorado alone, I-News Network reports that “a quarter million people have moved into red zones,” meaning that today “one of every four Colorado homes is in a red zone.” ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_climate_bites_back_20120831/