Consider the American housing sector, together with its political and activist support, which is concerned with building both market rate and affordable housing. Needless to say, it prefers to focus on a Green New Deal1 only in terms of energy saving modifications to housing itself — things like heat pumps, improved insulation and passive solar power. Once narrowed in this direction, arguments in favour of ‘green’ housing are more easily dismissed as expensive wishful thinking — great ideas, but discardable in the face of the growing international pressure to provide housing for all. Housing first, environment second, in other words.
Unfortunately, a narrow focus on the physical structure of housing ignores environmental concerns far more broad and more serious in their impact on society. An example is now being debated in the Oregon legislature, which pits new housing subdivisions against the preservation of wetlands.
Promoted in such wide-reaching documentaries such as One Planet, there is a growing awareness of the importance of entire biospheres to the survival of our planet as we know it. Those biospheres include important swaths of land such as those covered by jungles, ice cover, and — to the point of this article — wetlands.
Wetlands have always been a colossal nuisance to the spread of civilization. Bogs swallowed up so much fill in the building of a railway across Canada that in some cases, railway lines cross lakes with more stable bottoms in ribbons of steel over gravel. Anything rather than tackling seemingly bottomless bogs.
But wetlands have now been recognized as a critical part of a healthy environment, capturing and purifying as they do our planet’s precious water resources.
So which is it to be in Oregon? Wetlands filled and paved for subdivisions? Or increased density of housing on existing urban land to provide new housing while preserving wetlands?
‘Small Government’ visions of minimal interference in the affairs of society may well make it virtually certain that any cry of “Higher taxes or not, let’s have both!” (should the cry even pass enough lips) will nonetheless fall on deaf ears of those who hold the public purse strings.
Meanwhile, the fervour and narrow perspective of housing activism versus environmental activism promise many battles to come. Read more on one small corner of the coming housing vs. environment battle in street roots news: Oregon Bill Pits Housing Against The Environment
