Old or New?

After reviewing the supplied readings for this week, I decided to write about the two that most caught my eye: "The Dark Side of the American Dream", Sierra Club, and The Green Issue, "A Cautionary Tale." The first web article reviews the results of a report on sprawl, while the second argues the effects of green building as opposed to the preservation of old buildings. While these may seem like two disconnected topics, I found a common thread throughout both of them: preservation is more energy efficient than anything new, no matter how "responsibly" or "sustainably" built or planned.

When I was growing up, I remember getting magazines from the Sierra Club all the time. When I asked my mother what they were, she told me that she got them in the mail for free because she donated money to the Sierra Club. When I asked her what the Sierra Club was, she said something vague about nature and the environment, something that didn't really register with me. What did register, though, was the fact that my mother had donated, multiple times, to anything. I was raised for a lot of my life by a single mother who was raising five children on her own, no college degree, and no child support. My mother could barely afford food and heat for us, much less could she afford to donate to anyone or anything else. So the Sierra Club must have been vitally, crucially, important. And I now know that it is.

This report provides information on sprawl, the effects of urban flight to rural areas not set up to properly maintain heavy usage and population. These rural areas are affected by urban flight in many ways, including air pollution, water pollution, traffic congestion, and loss of not only natural resources such as land, but also the loss of indigenous plants, animals, and organisms that live on the land due to over development. This report also shared ways in which any cities in America are working to fight sprawl. Some cities are proposing, or have already put into effect, taxes that will go towards setting aside farmland and natural environments in the face of development. Many places have also established something called Urban Growth Boundaries. "An urban growth boundary is an official line that separates an urban area from its surrounding greenbelt of open lands, including farms, watersheds and parks. These boundaries protect the wide diversity of natural resources that wrap around population centers while funneling growth to areas with existing infrastructure" (1998). Still other cities across the U.S. have funneled money and energy into revitalizing existing towns and infrastructures, and approving places set aside as Open Space Revenues. Sprawl is a major problem in the United States, as urban flight puts pressure on the resources of areas not set up to accommodate larger populations.

The Green Issue: "A Cautionary Tale," provides that while building "green" is nice, preserving old buildings is better. Arguments made in the past that it was not as energy efficient to renovate or preserve old buildings in favor of building better, newer, even "green" ones, is just not true. Statistics now show that old buildings are green - they had to be. Buildings and homes used to be built according to the weather and resources available in a place, not just thrown up in any style that was trending at the moment. A great quote that was shared in this article that embodies the message is: "The greenest building is one that is already built" (Curtis). It costs more money and energy to tear down an existing structure and replace it with a new one, no matter how "green" the new one may be. Not only that, but think of all the waste created from the loss of the existing structure. Just makes no sense. A phrase that best describes this school of thought is Embodied Energy. This phrases maintains that old buildings already have stored energy, they are like fossil fuel repositories, places where we have already saved energy. This argues the waste involved in the energy usage it takes to build a new structure.

What I think ties these two articles together is the fact that they both argue the preservation of what is already here, available to us, rather than the development of the new. Whether the argument is for structures, roads, utility systems, or whole towns, the arguments to work with what we have is now stronger and more valid than it has ever been before, and will not be ignored.

Citations:

Curtis, Wayne. "A Cautionary Tale." Preservation Nation Homepage - National Trust for Historic Preservation. Preservation, Jan. 2008. Web. 06 Nov. 2011. .

"1998 Sprawl Report- Sprawl - Sierra Club." Sierra Club Home Page: Explore, Enjoy and Protect the Planet. Sierra Club, 1998. Web. 06 Nov. 2011. .