Blog
Electrifying Our Meals
Just a month ago, I encountered a problem my wife had previously experienced in April while I had been out of town. At that time, puzzled by why our gas oven seemed not to work, she had to wait until I returned from a conference in Minneapolis and teaching a FEMA training course in Madison, Wisconsin, before suddenly finding that the oven ignition was suddenly working again. When I got error signals from trying to preheat the oven on June 3, I consulted by phone with a repair technician who said the signal was telling me the “bake ignite,” that is, the ignition for the oven, needed to be replaced. I could contact an LG technician to come out and take care of this. I chose not to take his advice. I had already been reading about the indoor...
Church to Go Solar with City of Chicago Grant
Almost all content on this blog is written by me. On rare occasions, I have hosted a guest writer when I decided it was appropriate. In this case, I am sharing an announcement from my own church, which is entering an agreement with the City of Chicago for a grant to support installing a solar energy system on its roof. I am elated to share this news and my own role as both grant writer and primary contact for an administrative team that will work with the city to implement this dynamic project. Jim Schwab Augustana Solar Project Announcement March 5, 2024 Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park Receives Major Grant for Transformational Solar Energy Project In February 2024, the City of Chicago awarded Augustana Lutheran...
The War Against Hope
“Let no joyful voice be heard! Let no man look to the sky with hope in his eyes!” says Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest as his captives slave away on his ship. “And let this day be forever cursed by we who ready to wake...the Kraken!” This well-known quote from a surreal character in a popular movie is a remarkable fit for the mood unleashed in Russia by President Vladimir Putin with the death of 47-year-old Alexei Navalny, an unparalleled advocate of Russian democracy, who suffered for his commitment with confinement in an Arctic prison after repeated attempts to end his life with poison. Putin, who has no apparent compunction about eliminating his opponents in any way possible, seems determined to become not only...
Filming on the Texas Gulf Coast
It has been a couple of months since I last posted a video of our progress in filming for Planning to Turn the Tide. That last article summarized our film efforts in Jacksonville, Florida, in September 2023, but we had another trip in the offing then, to the Texas Gulf Coast. In between, as noted in a January 1 post, I underwent prostate surgery on September 29, which required at least a month of rest and inactivity at home before venturing out again, in order to ensure successful recovery. But on November 7, I met up with videographer David Taylor at Houston Hobby Airport and we drove to Corpus Christi, where the annual conference of the Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association was getting underway. The new blog video presented...
Spiritual Depth of Martin Luther King
Holidays have a way of taming and diluting the real importance of the legacies and events they are meant to commemorate. This tendency is particularly true of today’s holiday celebrating the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These efforts reflect some discomfort with the true level of sacrifice and commitment involved in fighting for freedom. Resisting this tendency requires some real thinking and soul-searching. Sometimes, a very good author helps us regain some needed perspective on what matters. Fortunately, a few months ago, Jonathan Eig issued a new, deeply researched biography of King that helps us understand better not only what King did in his short life, but why he did it and what forces made him who he was....
Out of a Cannon
I have never been terribly enthusiastic about New Year’s Eve resolutions. This is not because I lack resolve, but because the start of a new year has usually struck me as a rather arbitrary time to gain such resolve or to turn over a new leaf. If one is committed to certain goals and principles in life, then almost any day will do for fashioning new objectives in serving those goals, depending on circumstances. Why January 1? I suspect that it is mostly a reminder for many people that they have not spent enough time thinking about or pursuing their goals. They may need to develop the habit on an ongoing basis rather than pretending that the start of a new year will make things different. Will power and commitment matter. Do you really...
APA Chapters Step Up to Host Film Project
Over the past few months, we have posted ten short blog videos detailing the progress of Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary on planning for resilience against natural disasters being produced by the American Planning Association’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. In this post, we highlight the support of APA Chapters by featuring a staff member from APA Florida, Suzie Gray, who talks about her role at the APA Florida conference we visited in Jacksonville in early September. From our first interactions with Florida Chapter representatives and staff, they have been enthusiastic about supporting the project. Not only did they supply numerous contacts, suggesting people for interviews or information, but they...
Resilience Gains Traction in Florida
How does a regional planning council plan for and demonstrate local climate resilience in a state like Florida? One answer is diligence—establishing clear goals and the means of measuring progress toward achieving them, even in the face of some political skepticism and, in some cases, opposition to effective planning tools. For those of us involved in the film project of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, Planning to Turn the Tide: Creating Resilient Communities, this brought us back to Florida one more time right after Labor Day. The occasion was the annual conference of the Florida Chapter of the American Planning Association, which took place at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville from September 5-8. But...
Lasting Lessons in Resilience
In the latter half of June 2008, it was hard to imagine Cedar Rapids as the city it had been just one month earlier. A massive flood along the Cedar River clobbered the city with a classic double whammy: About the time existing flood crests that had already swamped upstream Cedar Falls hit Cedar Rapids, a severe thunderstorm reached the city to compound the impact. The river, which runs through downtown in this city of 130,000 people, reached a flood level of 31.2 feet, besting the all-time previous record of 20 feet, reached in 1851 and 1929. Flood waters covered 14 percent of the city, more than 10 square miles. About 10 percent of the city’s population was evacuated from the deluge. Highway ramps became inaccessible, and at one point,...
Striving for Flood Resilience in Iowa
In 2008, much of Iowa experienced such massive floods that 10 percent of Cedar Rapids was evacuated, books were being rescued from the basement of the University of Iowa Library, and homes were under water in Cedar Falls. Dozens of other Iowa communities faced flood waters to varying degrees, all remembering that it was only 15 years earlier that they had dealt with another massive emergency in the Midwest floods of 1993. After billions of dollars of damage and thousands of lost homes, Iowans were forced to confront the fact that so-called 100-year floods might in fact be far more frequent events of the future and that climate change was a reality for the Midwest as well as coastal states. It was in this environment of concern about how...
Who’s Gonna Watch This Movie?
The field production of Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary film project of the American Planning Association’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery (HMDR) Planning Division, has involved dozens of local volunteers and supporters in several states spread from Florida to California. In recent blog posts, I have been sharing our progress but not always featuring some of those volunteers. That is about to change. Some of those volunteers were interviewed for the film because we felt that their experience and expertise supported our educational objectives for the project. Others have helped us identify people who should be interviewed, and others have led us on tours or directed us to other resources we needed to know about. Molly...
Decade of Recovery and Resilience in Colorado
Ten years ago this month, Colorado faced a crisis. Following previous years of drought and wildfires, Rocky Mountain monsoon rains dumped a year’s worth of precipitation on the Front Range in a single day. Water poured down mountainsides that were sometimes so parched and scorched from previous high heat and fires that they could not absorb the rainfall, which then carried mud and debris downhill through the towns in its path. One of those towns was Lyons, which we visited on July 13 to interview Town Administrator Victoria Simonsen, who has remained on the job through thick and thin, helping to guide a remarkable recovery. But she also helped arrange for us to interview homeowner Priscilla Cohan, who is also a local artist, and Neil...
Labor Day Blessing
“Retire from what?” The Chicago Tribune says Jimmy Buffett asked that question once when they asked him about retirement. He died September 1, just as the Labor Day weekend began, from an aggressive skin cancer called Merkel cell cancer. In his lifetime, he succeeded first in making a name in the music world with a unique style that focused on the “play hard” part of life, but he also marketed his persona and brand with a vengeance because he also worked hard. I recall watching a segment of 60 Minutes in which he described himself as a workaholic, utterly contradicting the world of leisure his songs seemed to evoke. Work hard, play hard. Retire from what? What difference does it make if you love what you do and life has rewarded your...
Filming at the Omni
As previous installments of our blog video series have indicated, the production team for Planning to Turn the Tide spent a great deal of time in June and July first in Florida, then on a two-week road trip to Colorado and Iowa from Chicago to capture additional content. Click here to see the short video taped at the Omni Interlocken Hotel and Resort in Broomfield, Colorado. From July 9-12, we attended and filmed at the Natural Hazards Workshop, held at the Omni, completing eleven interviews with leading planners and hazards experts: Michelle Meyer, Texas A&M University Siyu Yu, Texas A&M University Andrew Rumbach, Urban Institute Anne Miller, Colorado Resiliency Office Susan Cutter, University of South Carolina Gavin Smith, North...
Heading Out on the Film Trail
The view from this week’s brief video blog is from Chicago’s 606 Trail, but David Taylor, our videographer for Planning to Turn the Tide, and I were actually headed out on a much longer trail for nearly two weeks. In a car containing his video equipment, we departed Chicago on Thursday, July 6, and drove across Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska to arrive two days later in Broomfield, Colorado, the site of the 2023 annual Natural Hazards Workshop. We returned to Chicago on Tuesday evening, July 18. Click here to view this new video blog installment in our ongoing series. Why such a long road trip for this documentary film of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division? We had long hoped that we could combine travel to...
Not Too Mulch to Ask
It was a simple ask. Our Chicago First Ward Alderman, Daniel La Spata, included a notice in his e-newsletter about a Saturday morning outing, organizing at his ward office on Milwaukee Avenue, for volunteers to join Openlands Chicago tree keepers to help place mulch around street trees nearby on Armitage and Milwaukee Avenues, and just, well, clean up a bit. I admit to being an easy sell on urban trees. There is a beautiful century-old American elm in our backyard. Nearly fifteen years ago, I led an American Planning Association project, funded by the U.S. Forest Service, that resulted in a report called Planning the Urban Forest. It’s not that I believe the right trees in the right places improve the livability of our neighborhoods; I...
Fort Myers and the Impact of Hurricane Ian
In last week’s post, I discussed on our video blog the interviews we had conducted for Planning to Turn the Tide in Sarasota County, Florida, during our mid-June trip through southwestern Florida. Today, we wrap up the Florida trip with a brief video blog about our visit to Fort Myers and Fort Myers Beach, which both suffered the brunt of the impact of Hurricane Ian in September 2022. Despite repeated efforts to identify and contact planning and administrative officials in Fort Myers Beach, we never succeeded, even with the help of some area volunteers. Perhaps if we had more time in our tight schedule, we could have persisted, but my time, at least, was about to expire that weekend before flying back to Chicago on Monday, June 19. The...
Addressing Hazards in Sarasota County
A bit more than a month ago, I introduced this blog audience to Planning to Turn the Tide, the film project being undertaken by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. I noted that we would be rolling out a series of updates as we completed work on new trips around the country, but the first was in Southwest Florida in late June of this year. A week later, we shared the first blog video discussing our progress, focusing on a series of interviews with planners and others at the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Commission. Today, I am sharing the second blog video, which discusses our subsequent work in Sarasota County. Click here to watch the summary video about the interviews we conducted in Sarasota County. Those...
The Earth Is Speaking to Us
Like most people, I am not worried about the wrath of ancient pagan gods, but I had to wonder. It was just a week ago, amid the horrible air quality in the Midwest, including Chicago, that I told my wife that a good rainstorm might serve to clear the air of many of the particulate pollutants from distant Canadian wildfires. Visibility had been horrible, and Chicago was for two or three days ranked among the world’s dirtiest cities. Due to numerous variables, one must qualify what I said, but generally, rain can be expected to clear the air somewhat. For healthy individuals, particularly those like myself without any serious respiratory illness, it was still easy to notice that breathing became a bit more strained during that air pollution...
Tampa Bay and the Quest for Resilience
In my last blog post, I discussed the origins of a current active film effort, Planning to Turn the Tide, which I have been leading on behalf of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. This post, which includes the first of a series of blog videos recorded during our travels, discusses what we learned during our meetings and interviews around Tampa Bay, especially during an afternoon at the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council (TBRPC) in Pinellas Park, Florida, just north of St. Petersburg. Click here to watch the summary video about the interviews at Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council. One of our interviews featured Jerry Stickney, Director of the Sunshine Line, a Hillsborough County agency that provides...
Envisioning a More Resilient Future
One reason I have long loved being an urban planner is that, ultimately, planning is about imagining a better future. Or should be, anyway. Although I was in my early thirties before I returned to school for a pair of graduate degrees in Urban and Regional Planning and Journalism (a very unusual combination, I soon learned), I was intrigued with the creative process as early as high school. At the time, I applied it mostly to writing, but I learned in college that creativity was valuable for just about any endeavor. Much later, I was enthralled when I read University of Chicago psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s path-breaking 1990 book, Flow, a study of the creative process. By then, I was already in the throes of writing my...
Catch Up and Slow Down
I was lying half awake in bed at 4 a.m., unable to return completely to sleep after using the bathroom. My mind kept rolling over various competing obligations and necessities, and the thought hit me: “You must catch up while slowing down.” Frankly, that made about as much sense to me in the moment as it probably does to you upon reading it. One’s subconscious mind can shed strange light sometimes. The whole idea is as paradoxical as it is imperative. And yet, I mention it because I strongly suspect that many people can relate to it at some level. We get caught in situations. Mine is partial explanation of why it has been weeks since I last posted on this blog, but that is a minor measure of the overall impact of a combined events and...
When Every Vote Matters
As a general rule, I am not about to tell people that the fate of the world depends on someone’s election to city council, even in a large city. On the other hand, some people climb the ladder to higher office after winning at local levels. But if candidates have commitment and staying power, one loss is unlikely to deter them in the long run. Barack Obama famously lost a Democratic primary election for Congress to U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush in Illinois’s First District in 2000, only to win a U.S. Senate seat by a landslide in 2004 and the presidency by a decisive margin against Sen. John McCain in 2008. People often learn vital campaign lessons from losing once or twice. Meanwhile, aside from the question of who is positioned to run for higher...
New Year’s Thought about Legacy
I am a tree lover, but not a tree hugger. I think there is a difference, although I do not wish to demean tree huggers in any way. I am simply coming from a different place, viewing matters through a different lens. I can understand the emotional response that trees elicit from huggers. I appreciate the beauty that nature provides and feel moved upon seeing a forest or even the single American elm that towers over our backyard. I had already assumed that this tree, which we protected when we built our home in 1994 by adjusting the location of the garage and shortening its apron into the alley behind us, was at least a century oldwhen an arborist from Davey Tree, which prunes it periodically, confirmed my guess. At its ripe but healthy old...
Moving Against Gun Violence
On Friday, December 16, our grandson Angel was attending a biology lab class at Malcolm X College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago, where he is currently aiming to lay the foundation for a health care career. In his first quarter in college, he has not yet established the exact contours of that career. His world is still full of possibilities. While he was in class, someone else’s life possibilities came to an abrupt close. The 36-year-old driver of a car moving down West Jackson Boulevard, right in front of the Malcolm X campus, slammed into a tree after being shot in what police say was a gang-related shooting. His 29-year-old female passenger was taken to a nearby hospital in critical condition, having also been shot. She later...
Going Viral
Now I know what it feels like, or may have felt like. Kind of. Sort of. I will never experience, in all likelihood, the very worst the COVID-19 virus can inflict on human beings. I was lucky in many ways. First, the virus just never found me as a target until early October of this year. Second, I am very physically fit for my age, and I don’t suffer from any chronic conditions that often expose people to more severe reactions to the virus. Third, by the time COVID-19 found me, I had the two initial shots of the Pfizer vaccine, and later a Moderna booster. My only failing was not having obtained the more recently released Omicron booster, but there is no question that vaccines made my path far easier than was the case for those who...
Chasm
It was a thrill standing on the ledge until I surveyed the pavement hundreds of feet below. Then I voted against the deniers. Jim Schwab
Recovering Humanity Amid Terror
When I first moved to Chicago, in November 1985, I came alone from Omaha. My wife, who grew up in Nebraska, chose to stay there until the fall semester was over. She was teaching across the river in the Council Bluffs, Iowa, public schools. I needed to settle in with my new job and find an apartment, after which we would move our belongings from Omaha. That happened in December. Jean house-sat for a carpenter friend in Omaha who vacationed in the winter until she too moved to Chicago in late January of 1986. During those initial weeks, I stayed in a home owned by a widow in the Hyde Park neighborhood near the University of Chicago. She had a spare room to rent. We talked on a few nights as I got used to my new setting, and I learned she...
Hidden Treasures in Plain Sight
My mother was definitely a neatnik. Everything in its place, but don’t keep too many things in the first place. If something did not have an obvious use, get rid of it. A sentimentalist, she was not. She lived her life in the suburbs of Cleveland, which is where I grew up. At the age of 29, however, I effectively “flew the coop,” a phrase I’ve hyperlinked for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with its usage. I moved to Iowa, took the helm of a public interest group, later transitioned to graduate school at the University of Iowa, and after completing my degrees, ended up in Chicago. The rest is history, both personal and professional. That meant that, on occasion, my parents visited our home in Chicago, though I far more frequently visited...
Honoring Victims of Violence
At first, the music was minimal or even silent. Voices from the twelve-member Adrian Dunn Singers, spread across the back and sides of the sanctuary of Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, simply announced a date in 2021, beginning on January 1, followed by the names of specific homicide victims of that day, mostly of gun violence. Steadily, they moved through the calendar year, each ten seconds in the score representing one day. Being the type of person who cranks numbers quickly in his head, I could not resist doing the calculation and determining that the pace stated in the program would consume just over an hour. A good length, I thought. The weeks and months rolled by with the haunting music steadily asserting itself, but it was...
Do We Need a Gun Victims Memorial Day?
I am going to keep this short and simple for two reasons. One, I am writing on the morning of Memorial Day, and I want to celebrate the holiday and spend time with my family. Our grandson Angel, who is graduating from high school on June 6, and from a Chicago Police and Fire Training Academy program on June 1, is coming with his father to earn $20 from me for assembling the brand-new outdoor grill I bought Saturday at Menard’s, and we will plan his graduation party. So, there is all that. Two, the coverage of the mass murder of school children at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has received nearly wall-to-wall coverage in the news media, so it’s not clear I need to add to all that, other than to note that the tragedy of gun...
Modern Links to Lincoln
It was spring break in the Chicago Public Schools this past week (April 11-15). Despite busy lives, I thought my wife and I should do something special with Alex, our 13-year-old grandson, so I proposed a visit to Springfield, the Illinois capital, to visit the Abraham Lincoln Museum, which we had never seen. The museum is part of a complex, opened in 2005, that includes the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, an invaluable resource for students and scholars on about Lincoln, the Civil War, and related historical topics, and the Illinois State Historical Library, founded in 1889. Across the street sits Springfield Union Station, which now contains an exhibit about the 2012 Steven Spielberg movie titled Lincoln. The library and museum...
No Time for Cowards
This past Sunday, I attended a rally for Ukraine at Chicago’s downtown Daley Plaza. I am no expert at crowd counts, but it was clear that hundreds attended, filling most of the plaza. The point was painfully obvious: People were hugely upset with the unwarranted Russian invasion of Ukraine that began two weeks ago. It is hard not to notice such things in Chicago, particularly on the near North Side. We live about one mile from a neighborhood known as Ukrainian Village. Chicago hosts the second-largest Ukrainian population in the U.S., estimated at 54,000. Many of us know or work with Ukrainian-American friends and colleagues. One of our daughters has a long-time friend from her junior college years. She talked to her recently and reported...
The Struggle for Climate Sanity
It is Sunday evening as I start this blog post. Whether I finish it tonight is less important than simply getting it done. I had intended to get it done earlier, but other matters intervened, including a death in the family, so I am doing it now. Part of my motivation is that I feel a small sense of empowerment from a successful start to a two-month series of Adult Forum discussions of climate change at my own church. I became the volunteer coordinator of the Adult Forum, which is the adult discussion group that meets during the Sunday school hour, in 2017, just in time for the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation. That is no small thing at a Lutheran church. Last week, introducing the moral and ethical questions...
FOBOTS
Over the past weekend, two legendary quarterbacks who may be outlasting their time in the spotlight went down to defeat with their teams. Neither Aaron Rodgers, of the Green Bay Packers, nor Tom Brady, recently with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, will be headed to the Super Bowl. At their current salary level and respective ages, there is also the question of whether they can find a National Football League team that wants to spend what is necessary to keep them on the field. If not, retirement may be involuntary for either or both. Rodgers earned some well-deserved opprobrium when he dishonestly claimed to have been vaccinated, even though he was not, putting his team and others at risk because of his own arrogance. The NFL probably...
Truth and Consequences and January 6
Like most people, I learned of the insurrection that resulted in five deaths and considerably more than 100 injuries to Capitol police from television news. Don’t ask me which channel; it was probably either CNN or MSNBC, but honestly, I don’t remember. I only remember what I saw—the searing image of American citizens attacking the seat of their own government on behalf of a President who lied to them because his twisted psyche did not allow him to admit that he had lost an election, fair and square. If he believes that the election was stolen, it is not because he has ever had any evidence to that effect. It is because he has repeated the lie to himself so often that he has internalized it completely. Such men are very dangerous. There...
My Ode to Negativity
I am proud to announce that I started the New Year on a negative note. Having had a very mild fever Thursday evening and a very mild nagging cough, I thought the better part of wisdom these days was a COVID test, even though I would have bet serious money that it was something else, like a mere cold. But it did make me slightly uncomfortable. The fever was gone yesterday. So, at just after 8 a.m. today, I walked to a nearby National COVID Center, which offers free tests without appointment and was open today from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. I strongly suspected there would be no line, that few other people had roused themselves out of bed, let alone showered and dressed and gone outside, so early this holiday morning. I was right. I got there, a...
Fighting Lunacy with Lunacy
Thanks to the New York Times, I learned over the weekend that birds are not real. Oh, the information has been out there, and I don’t know how I missed it. Perhaps I am just not tuned into the metaverse, being over thirty[1] and all . . . . but I just did not catch on. Now I know. I understand. You see, the birds have long since been replaced with drones that are surveilling our every movement. It is important that all right-thinking Americans be aware of their real purpose. Join the Birds Aren’t Real movement and find out. I personally intend to alter my disguise daily when I go outside so that the bird-drones can never identify me as the same person twice. Tweet the warning. Tweet it wide. Okay. Let me keep this blog post shorter than...
What Makes Us Grateful
People often lean toward traditional expectations of traditional holidays. We expect them to unfold in predictable ways. It’s not just, for instance, that we know we should be thankful on Thanksgiving, but also that we have family traditions of a feast with certain preparations and foods and activities that are all part of what we anticipate. We relax with pleasure when we are able to follow the script. Last year, seven months into a pandemic the likes of which our society had not experienced in an entire century, our expectations were tempered by the need for limited crowds and our awareness of those who had succumbed to COVID-19 who could no longer share a meal with us. This year, many of us reverted to accepting somewhat larger...
Rising from the Ashes
Back on August 11, during a family vacation that involved circumnavigating the shores of Lake Michigan, my wife and I and two grandsons visited the small town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and spent an afternoon at the Peshtigo Fire Museum. It is housed in a former church that the museum acquired in 1963. While there, I decided to purchase some items from the small gift shop near the front; the museum sells a handful of books and mementoes. One was a reprint of a special edition of a local newspaper that commemorated the 1871 fire that destroyed the town. The other was a small book by the Rev. Peter Pernin, a Roman Catholic priest who wrote about surviving the fire. I may have acquired another item or two, but if I did, I have no proof....
Buridan’s Blogger
In the fourteenth century, French philosopher-priest Jean Buridan, a student of William of Ockham, posited the hypothetical story of a donkey that starved to death while situated equidistant from two delicious bales of hay. The fictional donkey was supposedly a victim of indecision and thus the object of intense navel gazing among those who want to debate the existence of free will. No one ever asked, to my knowledge anyway, whether the donkey was mentally ill or simply traumatized and thus incapable of acting on his own behalf. Mental health, after all, was not well understood in the Middle Ages. That’s one of many reasons why the term “medieval” has derogatory connotations. I mention this because it has nothing to do with why I have...
Consider Your Victims
We are probably all born with a certain focus on our own needs. The first job of a baby is to survive, but ideally, we learn from parents, especially, but also from others around us that somebody else cares and takes care of us when we most need the help. With any luck, we learn to extend that same concern from ourselves to others, and as we grow, we learn how we can support and cooperate with our fellow human beings. Empathy must be taught, and not everyone learns, or learns well. I would like to believe that this article will reach someone and cause them to think about any potential victims of their actions. Maybe it will, but I also doubt that the most violent among us are reading my blog. I have good reason to suspect that my content...
Like Water Flowing Downhill
The Major League Baseball team long known as the Cleveland Indians will rename itself at the end of this season as the Cleveland Guardians. The change will surely draw criticism from traditionalists, but it is long overdue. The logo is outrageously racist and derogatory. The name could conceivably be neutral in intent if it honored Native Americans, but the logo has always belied any supposed good intentions. Conservative fans in Ohio long defended the name and the logo, but time is up, and it is just as well. The image has worn out its welcome. In my college days at Cleveland State University, I recall the American Indian Movement challenging reenactments of Cleveland founder Moses Cleaveland landing on the shores of the Cuyahoga River...
Private Costs of Disaster Prevention
The recent collapse of the Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, has cast a spotlight on numerous issues concerning building maintenance, private and public decision-making processes, potential (but highly uncertain) corrosive impacts of sea level rise, and even the continuing exposure of rescue workers to COVID-19, in addition to environmental and occupational hazards. That is all in addition to the governance questions surrounding condominium boards, given the news of past debates about deferred but expensive maintenance once consultants revealed structural deterioration in the 12-story complex. I wish to be clear about my purpose in writing this post. As an urban planner and researcher, I have doggedly sought to focus on known facts...
Softly Persuasive Planning Pioneer
I first met Ken Topping at the American Planning Association (APA) office in Chicago on a cold day in January 1994. Chicago was suffering one of its classic Arctic blasts at something like -20°F. Ken, a tall, very polite, and articulate gentleman, had his heavy winter coat for the ride back to O’Hare International Airport toward the end of the day. On January 17, just a day or so before he arrived in Chicago, the Northridge Earthquake struck Los Angeles, an area where he had worked for many years. Ken, who was already developing a significant history of advancing what was then the nascent role of urban planning in responding to disasters, became immediately involved. Exactly one year later, on January 17, 1995, the Great Hanshin...
Outthink Wildfire—a Podcast Conversation
It is evident with each increasingly serious and increasingly long wildfire season in the West and South that American still has serious public policy work to do in confronting this hazard. Recently, the National Fire Protection Association unveiled its new policy initiative, Outthink Wildfire, aimed at highlighting the need to move beyond current reactive strategies to widespread adoption and enforcement of building codes, adoption of wiser land-use regulations, and building substantial public pressure to make changes happen quickly. The American Planning Association has released a new episode in the Resilience Roundtable series of podcasts, sponsored by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, in which I...
In Harm’s Way or Dodging Disaster?
President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill aims to fix much that is ailing in America, and its sheer size is drawing predictable—and short-sighted—fire from Republicans in Congress. The nation has a great deal of aging infrastructure, which will eventually pose a massive challenge to economic development. But the American Jobs Plan also takes aim at a growing, urgent, and critical need for infrastructure to cope with the impacts of climate change. These affect many kinds of infrastructure, including transportation, water, wastewater, and energy and communications systems. There is nothing patriotic, it seems to me, in being so oppositional as to allow our nation to deteriorate, Texas-style, in the face of changing climate...
Acting in Good Faith
How does one portray the life of a man whose ultimate fate was a hanging at the hands of the Gestapo, with just four weeks left until the German surrender in World War II? Even an experienced professional actor might find that role daunting. I played that role last Friday evening in what amounted to my amateur acting debut, complicated by a Zoom platform in what we all hope are the latter stages of a pandemic. I’m certainly accustomed to being on a stage in front of an audience as a public speaker, but in those situations, I am speaking for myself. Portraying a historical figure of the magnitude of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a very different matter. The collective performance of volunteers mostly from Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park in...
Podcast on Hawaii Volcano Recovery
Volcanoes pose a unique challenge for hazard mitigation and post-disaster recovery in the parts of the world where they occur. In the United States, these regions are along the Pacific Rim and in the middle of the ocean itself—in other words, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Hawaii. In Hawaii, an archipelago that grew from volcanic eruptions over millions of years, all active volcanoes are located on the island of Hawai’i, also known as the Big Island because, as Hawai’i County planner Douglas Le notes, the land area of all the other major islands could be fit into this one land mass. As I have done with previous installments of the American Planning Association’s Resilience Roundtable podcast series, for which I have been host for the...
Climate Solutions, Off the Shelf
About six weeks ago, as the Biden administration was first asserting its priorities regarding climate change and the environment, I reviewed a book about the positive actions already being taken by cities around the world in addressing the climate crisis. The important takeaway was that, while climate policy languished or moved backwards under the Trump administration, cities and their mayors had not waited for national governments to act. They had instead taken the initiative. But city governments are not alone. Architects, planners, engineers, and even developers have innovated in their own ways. In late 2019, Chicago architect Douglas Farr provided me with a copy of his book, Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future,...
Our Collective COVID Cabin Fever
I am not a doubter when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccines. All I want to do is sign up and let them put a sharp needle in my arm and inoculate me. Do it twice if the vaccine demands it. Even my experience in early February with the shingles vaccine cannot deter me. On a Tuesday afternoon, a pharmacist at the local Walgreen’s provided a shot that I requested at my doctor’s suggestion. It has been two decades since I experienced my second episode of shingles, but I vividly recollected the piercing pains in my shoulders and arms that made it nearly impossible to exercise my fingers on a keyboard, one of the most basic things I have long done to earn a living. I told the pharmacist that I “noticed it but did not feel it.” He put a bandage...
When Narcissism Trumps All
Within the last week, I finished reading a nearly 800-page biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, which may raise the question of why I took the trouble. I started only after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election but refused to concede and persisted in disseminating the fiction that the election had somehow been stolen. It struck me that there might be some noteworthy parallels in personality traits, or psychology, with one of the great monsters of European history. There are. Not that I am a psychologist or even play one on television. But as voters, we all judge presidential character to one degree or another. It is often a significant factor in the public debate in election years. In his detailed but highly readable 1998 biography, Napoleon...
Practical Approaches to Climate Change
One of the more remarkable facets of the political debate over climate change is the almost knee-jerk rejection among conservative skeptics of the science is that they abandon the same can-do spirit of capitalism that they would otherwise adopt when defending the ability of the private sector to solve other problems. Confronted with the necessity of worldwide action to reduce the global disturbances that are driving increased weather volatility and more powerful disasters, they suddenly are filled with doubt about the ability of either public or private sectors, or both together, to successfully shift our energy consumption to less carbon-intensive solutions. They become, in short, the “cannot-do” crowd. Suddenly, there are massive...
Collateral Damage
For those who have noticed, it has been more than five weeks since I last posted to this blog. It has been a rough stretch, but it could have been much rougher. At least to my knowledge, I never have contracted COVID-19. Not that people weren’t asking, especially relatives. There were the holidays, of course, and who wouldn’t take it easy for at least a few days? Then came the call on Christmas Eve, around 8 p.m. CST. It was my younger sister, choked up, reporting that our mother had died about an hour earlier at 8 p.m. EST. It was not entirely unexpected. She was living in a small nursing facility near Cleveland. My younger sister and brother live nearby. At 103, our mother had lived a very long life, overcoming more obstacles and health...
Digital Coast Act Becomes Real
Last Wednesday, December 2, the U.S. Senate passed the Digital Coast Act in a final vote that sent the legislation to President Trump for his signature. If that happens, it may provide a very useful gift to thousands of coastal communities wrestling with a wide variety of coastal zone management challenges. For more than a decade, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has sponsored through its Office of Coastal Management a program that has racked up stellar achievements while awaiting congressional blessing of its existence. Digital Coast began as an effort, in collaboration with five nongovernmental partners, to share federal geospatial data and tools with communities in ways that did not require a Ph.D. scientist...
Charting a Path to Sustainability
A presidential transition has always been a time to look forward in American history, anticipating change, contemplating new directions. Sometimes we like the new direction, sometimes we don’t; sometimes we think it just doesn’t go far enough to remedy the problems we face. But never have we faced the narcissistic spectacle of a president unwilling to release his grip on power. Every president before Donald Trump has been enough of a patriot to cooperate with a new president of the opposite party, and losing candidates who never ascended to the White House have been willing to concede. It is extremely unfortunate that some Americans are trying to deny others the right to focus on defining a more positive future. But they are only trying...
2020 Vision
In two days, those who have not yet voted by mail or in person at an early voting site will have their last chance to express their views on America’s future. It is by far the starkest choice in my lifetime, and I will add that Harry Truman was in the White House when I was born. I have participated in presidential and other elections since 1972. The Twenty-sixth Amendment, which prohibited age discrimination in voting for those 18 and older, was ratified in 1971, while I was a junior in college. I have never taken that right for granted In five decades since then. But I find it a curious coincidence that we face this choice in a year that can be pronounced Twenty-Twenty, the optometric formula for perfect vision. I first experienced the...
Disaster Mitigation Act at Twenty
When a law makes a powerful impact over time, it is sometimes hard to remember what life was like before it was enacted. In U.S. history, for example, both Social Security and, later, Medicare, created a new reality for the elderly that makes it almost impossible for most people to imagine what old age meant before they took effect. They are so much a part of the fabric of American life that some people even forget (or never learn) the social and political debates that produced them. That sort of obtuse amnesia was in evidence as Tea Party protests materialized in response to the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, in which some carried signs that read, “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare.” Ponder that conundrum for a while. Few...
The Eyes Have It
I might have thought by now you would have found the exit from the hall of mirrors. But no. You are mesmerized by its dreamy distortions, imprisoned by its illusions. Perception arises from wave lengths and shadows, reflections against a shifting surface. Tall becomes short, wide becomes narrow. Eyes bulge, then shrink into shocked sockets. You must linger to feed the hunger. Within the funhouse walls, where the insecure, the paranoid, the narcissistic control the asylum, the Great Sphincter, sustained by his Ras Putin coterie, emits his daily surprises to the surprise of no one but the angry, the gleeful gullible, the sheep led to COVID slaughter while wildfires consume the hallways. Is the funhouse aflame? Now that changes the climate...
Truly Hard Wind
What in the U.S. Midwest would spur comparisons to a hurricane? What could spread damage over an equally wide area? It is a good bet that most people are unfamiliar with the word “derecho,” which comes from Spanish, meaning “straight,” but such a storm made itself felt just three weeks ago in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, as well as parts of Nebraska and Wisconsin. The Spanish word with an adopted meaning in English refers to such a storm’s powerful straight-line winds, as opposed to another adapted Spanish word, “tornado,” literally meaning “turned,” which, of course, refers to a cyclonic, or spinning, meteorological phenomenon. The Event On August 10, a derecho took shape in eastern Nebraska and the southeastern corner of South Dakota...