Letters to the Editor
murlaska
Published Letters: 2 Editor's Choice: 2
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Define "selfish"?
[Read the article: I did the right thing for the planet, but now I'm bored out of my mind]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Personally, I'm a planner and I love it. I can see how plenty wouldn't, though - any significant positive change you might make requires slogging through endless night meetings, soothing angry residents, and digging through heaps of permits for people who want to put up fences or replace their windows in the historic district, and all of it with little thanks or even acknowledgement - many plannrs consider themselves lucky if their neighbors don't know what they do; it saves on the dinnertime doorbell ringing from neighbors who want to know just what the heck you were thinking.
Making any positive change as a planner is difficult, and requires perseverence and an excellent sense of black humor. If you don't love it, then, by all means, seek something else. Seek what _you_ find to be creative and fun, and leave the planner jobs for those of us who find this field to be creative and fun. I won't mind - I count "non-planners trained in planning" to be among the things this country could use a lot more of. When local elections roll around, you're ridiculously better informed about the minutiae, and can vote in an informed fashion, and help clarify the issues for your neighbors.
As you mention, you can serve on your local planning commission, debating the merits and faults of new developments and looking forward past the next fiscal year - as local budget cuts continue to erode staff planners' ability to engage in long-range planning, taking your technical knowledge to an appointed commission seat would be an excellent way to continue contributing to your community, without the 8-5 grind that you miss.
If that's not enough, take your planning experience and your arts passion to the non-profit world, and look into arts-based community development. Help underpriveleged children envision and express the kind of world they'd like to live in. Or something like that. It doesn't matter - what does matter is that you take your passion and act on that. Call it selfish if you must, but following your dreams (with awareness of interconnectedness and your impact on others) will be more "useful" than trudging away and resenting the people you serve for trapping you in a job you don't like.
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Is climate change even needed?
[Read the article: Cry "fire" and let loose the dogs of climate change!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Climate change doesn't even have to be brought in as a causal factor for there to be plenty of fuel here (sorry) for environmentally concerned comment. Throughout the rockies and southwest, it's a pretty well-known fact: fire happens. Whether it's lodgepole pines in northern Montana or chaparral scrub in SoCal, fire happens. And, when it happens, you don't want to be in its way. Further, we can't stop it from happening - we can put out the fire now, but it only leads to a bigger fire next time.
Yet in spite of these perfectly simple facts, we're building our homes further and further into these fire-prone (or even fire-loving) ecosystems. How can we claim to be surprised when a house burns down after we've built it in a location that we know is going to burn eventually?
There's an easy environmental message here: sprawl gets your house burnt down. So don't sprawl. Live in locations and housing types appropriate to your locale. (Hint: living downtown means you're at very low risk of wildfires.) We don't need to go into whether climate change means dryer weather, which leads to fires, or whether climate change means wetter weather, which leads to fires - just stop building homes in fire-prone locations.
(This is, of course, a sneaky way to get around to climate change. As stated in the recent Urban Land Institute report, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, our land use patterns are a significantly more important part of addressing climate change than how fuel-efficient our cars are.)