The Jewish State / Theodore Herzl -- N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1988

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I read scores of books about the Arab-Zionist conflict.  In the course of that, I compiled a chronology of violence and other events in the history of the conflict.  The chronology grew to nearly 200 pages before other projects brought that research to a halt.  Recently, I dusted off that chronology and found it curious that I had never read the seminal Zionist work The Jewish State by Theodore Herzl.  This was because I was mainly looking to chronical the history of the conflict and not its ideological origins.  So my reading it now was long overdue.

In the 19th century, Europe underwent significant political changes due to the rise of nationalism.  It was then that Germany and Italy both became unified countries.  Other nationalist, independence movements appeared elsewhere in Europe, including Hungary, Greece, Norway, Belgium, Ireland, Romania, Serbia, and elsewhere.  It was in this context that the right of self-determination of peoples gathered international support.  What counted as "a people" was, however, a matter of debate.  It was in this context the Herzl proposed in the last decade of the 19th century that Jews should be considered "a people" with the same right to self-determination as any other people.  That they were scattered across Europe (and elsewhere) simply posed a logistical problem that could be solved by concentrating the population in a specific geographic area and creating a majority population capable of enforcing their right to self-determination.

I had no preconceived notions about Herzl's The Jewish State, but I was surprised to discover just how programmatic it is.  Herzl sought to offer a practical plan for how the Jewish people could create a viable state out of their dispersed population.  To start, a geographic gathering place would be needed.  Herzl suggested Argentina and Palestine.  Of Argentina, he wrote,

Argentina is one of the most fertile countries in the world, extends over a vast area, has a sparse population and a mild climate.  The Argentine Republic would derive considerable profit from the cession of a portion of its territory to us.  The present infiltration of Jews has certainly produced some discontent, and it would be necessary to enlighten the Republic on the intrinsic difference of our new movement.

Of Palestine, he wrote, 

Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home.  The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency.  If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey.  We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.

In both cases, Herzl recognized significant obstacles to forming a Jewish state in lands already occupied by other peoples.  To overcome these obstacles, Herzl proposed the formation of two agencies: the Society of Jews and the Jewish Company.  

The Society of Jews would be responsible for what we might now call "urban planning on an national scale."  The Society would assess the resources available to accommodate the influx of immigrants and design the national infrastructure.  It would also be responsible for establishing the political and governmental institutions of the new state. 

The Jewish Company would be responsible for helping to liquidate the assets of European Jews seeking to emigrate to the new state and to arrange for the purchase of land (developed and undeveloped) which would then be sold or provided to the immigrants.  The Jewish Company would act roughly as a real estate agent, but it would also have the responsibility of raising revenue for the development and expansion of the Jewish state.  Herzl believed that the high price of land and assets owned by Jews in Europe compared to the low prices in the new Jewish state would allow for the easy colonization of the new state.

He furthermore predicted that different classes of Jews would emigrate in different waves.  The first emigrants would be from the lower classes which suffered most from European anti-Semitism and had little to lose by emigrating to a new land.  These emigrants would be employed to build homes, schools, roads, and other infrastructure in return for passage to the new state, room, and board.  It's hard not to see them as indentured servants.  As conditions in the new state improved, middle class Jews would be drawn to emigrate and upper class Jews would find making investments in the new state attractive.

It is interesting how much Herzl's plan actually played out in the decades after he published his book.  Two agencies came into being that more or less enacted his two-agency plan: The Jewish Agency for Palestine (later Israel) did the work of the Society of Jews and the Jewish National Fund did the work of the Jewish Company.  Herzl's expectation that Jews would flee Europe as a result of anti-Semitism and the promise of protection in the new Jewish state came to pass writ large in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust.

As the 20th century wore on, the recognition of the right of the self-determination of peoples led to the end of the classical colonial era and the independence of colonies around the world.  It has, however, created significant problems for the Zionist movement and the indigenous Palestinian population.  Both make claims to their right of self-determination, while occupying the same territory.  It reveals a challenge to the right of a people for self-determination that is playing out in many places around the world.  

With the advent of international air travel, once homogenous and geographically separated peoples have become increasingly mixed, making the very notion of a people even more difficult to circumscribe.  In Europe and the United States, rightwing movements have risen to oppose immigration and to identify the native population as a people.  These movements are based on a not-so disguised ethnic identity.  

It is, however, long past the time when a people can be easily identified ethnically.  We live, instead, in self-governing societies that are ethnically diverse; so any appeal to the self-determination of a people, must find a basis other than ethnicity for that right or risk the imposition of the rule of one ethnicity over others.  The most obvious alternative to ethnicity is citizenship within a liberal democratic state in which each citizen has the same standing in relation to the law and the state.  

Returning to Herzl's vision of the Jewish state, it begins to look like an ethnocratic remnant of a fading past.  If current global trends make headway in Israel/Palestine, the future of the Jewish state might not be a state living side-by-side with a Palestinian state nor a Jewish ethnocracy from "the river to the sea." Instead, there might emerge a single, liberal democratic state in which all citizens enjoy the same rights equally.  That, however, will certainly require a radical shift in the identity politics of the region.

Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide / Peter Del Tredici -- Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010

For at least a century, American botanists have raised the alarm over the invasion of non-native plant species. The immigration to North America of people from all over the world has brought with it food crops, ornamental plants, and stow-away seeds that have found a congenial new habitat in the Americas. The primary concern is that these non-native species are sometimes "invasive," meaning they exist without natural predators and therefore spread out of control. Their success crowds out many native species, thus reducing the diversity of the native ecosystem and damaging the health of the environment.

Despite the apparent threats, Peter Del Tredici, Senior Research Scientist at the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, is not so alarmed about non-native invasives. Starting from the premise that our native ecosystem has been irreparably transformed by urban development, native species are now as alien to the new urban ecosystem as non-natives. For Del Tredici, the important question in the urban setting is not whether the plant thrived in a by-gone local ecosystem, but whether the plant provides "ecosystem services" that would not otherwise be provided to the city.

In place of the native/non-native distinction, Del Tredici distinguishes plants that grow spontaneously in the urban environment versus plants that require cultivation. In the concrete jungle, Ailanthus altissima (the tree-of-heaven) is able to grow without any help from us, and according to Del Tredici, without this species, our urban tree canopy would be greatly impoverished. Replacing them with "native" species and maintaining natives would require an enormous effort for little or no increased benefit. Among the ecological benefits that spontaneous plants can provide to the city are temperature reduction, food and habitat for wildlife, erosion control, riparian stabilization, nutrient absorption, soil building, and phytoremediation or the ability to absorb and store heavy metals thereby cleaning contaminated sites.

Del Tredici's argument is persuasive, but only as long as we accept that our urban environments will be built without caring that they be hospitable to formerly native species. Careful urban planning can increase the areas that are compatible with native plants and thereby preserve the local biological heritage. Del Tredici would, however, point out that this reflects a cultural value judgement and can not be defended on the basis of biodiversity or ecological services. On the other hand, invasives are often able to spread rapidly outside of the urban environment and into relatively undisturbed ecosystems. Such escapees from the city likely pose all the threats to native species about which botanists warned us.

Del Tredici's argument in favor of spontaneous plants makes up just 23 of the book's 374 pages. The rest of the book is, as the subtitle states, a field guide in which spontaneous urban plants are cataloged and described in a manner traditional to such field guides. Each entry includes, however, information on the ecological functions and cultural significance of the plant described. This is consistent with Del Tredici's two primary goals, "to teach people how to identify the plants that are growing in urban areas, and to counter the widespread perception that these plants are ecologically harmful or useless and should be eliminated from the landscape." Each entry also includes five or six useful color photographs of the plant or its near cousins.

$20 per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasloline will Change Our Lives for the Better / Christopher Steiner - NY: Grand Central, 2009

Many oil industry analysts have concluded the world has reached its maximum annual production of conventional oil. Henceforth, our energy requirements will need to be increasingly fulfilled by other energy sources: coal, nuclear, renewables, poorer quality oil, tar sands, etc. All of these are inferior sources of energy and are much more expensive to produce. Consequently, the world will see a steady increase in the price of energy which will change our society and our way of life. Christopher Steiner's $20 Per Gallon is an attempt to understand what these chnges will be. Surprisingly, Steiner believes that on balance we will be better off by losing our addiction to cheap oil.

Steiner is a journalist and an undergraduate engineering major. He is not an economist, and this shows in his work. Nonetheless, $20 Per Gallon is a welcome attempt to begin thinking seriously about the consequences of rising oil prices. The work proceeds through ten chapters, titled with a rising price of a gallon of gas (Chapter $4, Chapter $6, Chapter $8, etc.). In these chapters Stiener describes how the incremental increas in gas will wean Americans from SUVs, drastically downsize the airline industry, stimulate the production of electric cars, rebuild our cities and destroy suburbia, restore the character of small towns, rebuild U.S. manufacturing, "deconstruct" our global food system, and stimulate the construction of high speed trains all across America.

While the broad outlines of Steiner's vision of the future are probably correct, he fails to provide the details necessary for a clear picture of the future. The optimistic tone of the work often relies on technological solutions to the problems raised by expensive energy. Hydrocarbon fertilizers will be replaced with electrolosis created amonia, the burden that electric cars will place on our electric grid will be solved by smart grid technologies, and petro-plastics will be replaced by bio-plastics. Between the lack of detailed economic analyses and the faith in technological solutions, the hopeful picture of the futre seems more hopeful than justified.

Perhaps the strongest chapters in the book outline the development of urban neighborhoods, public transportation, and high speed interstate rail lines. These developments rely mainly on proven technologies and a will to implemented cost effective plans. It is very easy to see how the rise in energy prices will stimulate retrofitting our housing and building stock to avoid heating and cooling waste and how our transportation needs will require the development of cost effective ways of moving our workforce to and from their houses and workplaces.

It is less clear that we will be able to feed our huge population without the cheap energy that made such a population possible. Steiner would have done better to investigate the carrying capacity of land in and around our major cities to see just what land and water resources would be needed to feed them and how much it would cost to bring enough food to the market. If our current conurbations are not viable, our future will be different in ways that Steiner does not explore.

Nonetheless, one is left with less anxiety about the future having read $20 Per Gallon. For anyone contemplating the most dire scenarios spun out by "peak oil" theorists, that may be a good thing. One should not underestimate the resourcefulness of people and our ability to create meaningful and enjoyable lives without the goods and services of our hydrocarbon economy. Still, Steiner's vision is certainly too rosy. He consistently glosses over the real sacrifices that people will need to make with the loss of cheap energy or during the transition to a new energy economy.

Many of these sacrifices are likely unanticipate today, but it precisely because they are unanticipated that Steiner's book is so valuable. It is the first attempt I have seen to seriously imagine the consequences of rising energy prices. If only a good economist would bring her or his attention to the issue as Steiner has.

Anacostia: The Death and Life of an American River / John R. Wennersten -- Baltimore: Chesapeake Book Co., 2008.

When people think of rivers and Washington D.C., they naturally think of the Potomac. However, when the city was first planned, its primary waterfront was to be on the Anacostia River, or what was once called the "East Branch." Unfortunately for the Anacostia, the wealthier and established citizens of Georgetown persuaded developers to direct the face of the city toward the Potomac, thus starting a long history of neglect and degradation of the Anacostia.

John Wennersten's Anacostia is both a natural and political history of the Anacostia River. It's natural history made its headwaters an ocean-going port until silt clogged the port at Bladensburg in 1850 and with the growth of Washington D.C. during. After the Civil War, poor water management resulted in extreme contamination and epidemics of small pox, cholera, and malaria which killed thousands. By 1873, it (and Rock Creek) had become little more than open sewers which it remained until the Clean Water Act was passed one hundred years later in 1972.

While the Clean Water Act brought some progress toward cleaning the river, one can still not safely swim or fish in the Anacostia (goals set by the Act.) It was not until 1988 that genuine progress began when the Anacostia Watershed Society was formed. The Society was (and is) a non-profit organization dedicated to restoring the watershed. Along with other environmental partners, the Society has forced the EPA to address the dreadful state of the river. While much remains to be done, the last third of Anacostia is an inspiring testament to the determination of environmentalists to take back our natural birthright from the self-interested developers and despoilers of the land.

Among the most interesting aspects of Anacostia is how Wennersten connects the lives of the people of Washington D.C. to the Anacostia. Time and again, the rich and powerful (wittingly or not) displaced the poor and vulnerable from prime real estate and forced them to move to what is known as "Anacostia" or the east side of the Anacostia River inside D.C. Wennersten's sympathetic account of the mistreatment of people would not be news to many people in D.C., but deserves much wider currency.

Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change / Reid Ewing, et al. -- Washington, D.C.: ULI, 2008.

As the subtitle suggests, Growing Cooler provides statistical evidence to support the claim that compact development is a necessary element of a U.S. effort to stabilize the climate. The book notes the transportation sector’s sizeable contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and the inability of technological changes to meet the necessary reduction targets. It argues for the need to significantly reduce vehicle miles traveled, and the importance of compact development in accomplishing this. Compact development’s significance is compounded by the long time horizons of the built environment relative to policy measures.

As someone already fairly convinced of the benefits of smart growth, I found the information very clearly presented but not revelational. What I found most valuable in Growing Cooler was its definitions of the sometimes nebulous elements of sprawl and of compact development. The book is optimistic that increased compact development will occur given rising gas prices, changing demographics, and an emerging paradigm shift related to climate change.

The last chapter prior to the conclusion presents policy recommendations for federal, state, regional, and local governments, many of which will be familiar to those who follow or are involved in smart growth advocacy. I recommend this book to those who are new to the idea of smart growth or are looking for hard evidence to site to skeptics.

Design with Nature / Ian McHarg -- NY: Wiley, 1969, 1994.

My introduction to Landscape Architecture, Design with Nature gives me a sense of the field as being where geology meets the built environment. McHarg’s “ecological planning method” identifies geological features such as slope, drainage, bedrock foundation, et al., for a given region and uses these factors to determine what type of development is appropriate for what land. Although the emphasis is on ecological factors, McHarg also recognizes historic value and leaves room for other social values to be considered in the process.

I found myself frustrated that the process does not address certain planning questions such as how to build communities that promote transit and non-motorized transportation. McHarg allayed these frustrations by repeatedly noting that the ecological method does not generate a plan, it simply lays the environmental basework; other goals can be addressed when the plan is made. Indeed, the method seems a far more sophisticated base than either sprawl or geometric concepts such as greenbelts, wedges, or even spider-web networks.

The book moves back and forth between chapters presenting broad ideas and concepts and chapters presenting case studies. Many of the case studies are set in the mid-Atlantic, with much information on Washington, DC, which I enjoyed. There is a lot of information in this book, and I found the broad chapters a bit heavy on ranting and the case studies sometimes too detailed. Nevertheless, between the rants and the geological inventories, this book is a real nugget of insight on how to think about the world we live in and our relationship to it.

The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry / Robert Cervero -- Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998.

The Transit Metropolis offers good analysis and rich data on the transit systems of select cities from multiple continents. Presenting twelve case studies from Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and Canada, Cervero covers not only the form and technology used in the transit system, but also supportive policies and relevant political and institutional arrangements. A ‘transit metropolis’ is “one where enough travelers opt for transit riding, by virtue of a workable transit-land use nexus, to put the region on a sustainable course.” This broad net captures cities that use their transit systems to guide urban growth (adaptive cities), others that create a transit system to serve their more spread out land use pattern (adaptive transit), cities whose downtowns are transit havens (strong-core cities), and cities who use a mix of adaptive-transit and adaptive-city methods (hybrids).

Rather than laying out hard and fast rules for transportation planning, the book offers a wide and impressive array of methods. The only absolute offered is that transit should support land use policies and not vice versa. Although repeated pointing out that quality services attract more riders, Cervero does not couch this as a universal recommendation, noting that pricing transit affordably may mean lower quality vehicles in poorer cities.

From the case studies, it seems clear that cities with good transit are primarily wealthy cities outside the United States. For those primarily interested in the United States, comparison with U.S. cities is provided in many of the case studies, and the final chapter provides shorter examples of U.S. cities recently improving their transit systems. My own interest is primarily with developing cities, and I was disappointed not to have any examples from Africa or from poorer Asian cities (Singapore and Tokyo were the Asian examples). Nonetheless, the case studies clearly presented ways of designing transit systems that suit local conditions and aims.

Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision / Kirkpatrick Sale

Kirkpatrick Sale's Dwellers in the Land presents a brisk argument in favor of geographical determinism, particularly the importance of bioregions in shaping our identities. He goes on to argue that this is a very good thing -- that our nationalized and globalized economy and culture is the root of many of our problems. Sales argues that by reconnecting with our local bioregion, we can restore our environment and resolve significant social and economic problems. Occasionally, he waxes on about the Earth as a single organism, i.e., the "Gaea" (or Gaia) Thesis. While this sometimes amounts a kind of religious faith, embracing the vision has the practical consequence of underscoring the value of the planet and humbling our place in it.

The Rise of the Creative Class and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life / Richard Florida

I would not have finished this book but that my book club will be discussing it. The most interesting theses are trivial at best. Most of the work is a description of the the life preferences of "the Creative Class," a flattering term for what one would otherwise call the bourgeoisie, particularly the high tech bourgeoisie. Florida's quantitative support for his theses goes no deeper than the comparison of various "indexes" that mostly are mere rank-order lists of cities. He provides no data on the strength of the correlations that he asserts and often the relata are not independent. He generally disregards the contributions of the working class by, for example, generally attributing the value of high tech products to the work done by software engineers. He advocates city planning that intentionally caters to the wants of the wealthy and privileged. All of this in the pursuit of the sacred goal of "economic growth" regardless of disparities of wealth and the ecological limits of the planet. It's nothing more than euphemistic boosterism for some of the worst tendencies of the global economy.