by admin | Nov 18, 2023 | Climate Resilience, What's New
A perspective from Margaret Wiener
Published in CHAPELBORO, October 24, 2023
I was disheartened by the vote by the Carrboro Town Council in favor of paving beside Bolin Creek’s last remaining section not already so affected. Creekside is the worst choice for siting a greenway from the perspective of stream health, flooding, and the ecosystem. But you have to listen to actual scientists–not NEXT and TBB-to know that. Alternative paths exist, and would be much less expensive, both environmentally and fiscally—though we can only know this by pricing out all paths, not just one.
Those in favor claim that it will mean more people riding bicycles and walking and that will reduce emissions. Emissions are important. Switching to new energy and transportation systems, however, will not put an end to the extraction of oil, given the robust demand for plastics (ubiquitous, e.g., in medicine). Plastics are now everywhere on the planet, and in the bodies of all species. If solar energy (built in the right places) and wind energy are excellent paths to follow to satisfy energy needs, so are efforts to improve efficiency, including green rooftops (will there be one on the new library?). But cutting down trees, putting in more impervious roads, are poor choices for addressing climate change. In most of the country, people have been discovering the costs of heat sinks and frantically planting or re-planting trees. Since trees sequester more carbon when they are older, it is far better to leave old trees in place than to plant new ones.
And then there’s flooding. Water always wins. Recall the devastation wrought to roadways in Vermont only months ago, and that’s the future of a concrete path along the creek, given the kind of rainfall we have been having, which will only become worse. Waterways need to meander; when they overflow (increasingly the case here, with the growing intensity of storms) their banks absorb the excess–they are, in short, floodplains. In most states, floodplains are MANDATED, to help with climate resiliency. But Carrboro’s Town Council wants to destroy a floodplain. If you pave alongside the creek, it will mean water can only rush downstream to. . . Camelot Village. Nice inclusion! This is environmental injustice. Moreover, this unpaved portion of Bolin Creek is the last part with even the barely adequate EPA rating of “good fair.” Every other section, paved, is worse. The insects still barely present in the unpaved portion are the foundation of the forest ecosystem. All of the claims being touted–“but it’s already damaged as an OWASA easement”; “it’s already impervious” “it’s eroded and concrete will help”–are either misinformed or deliberately deceptive.
As for transportation: it will never be the case that everyone can ride a bicycle in a place as hilly as Carrboro and Chapel Hill—or even that those who can will choose to when it rains or snows. Electric cars and bikes have costs no one is discussing (for one, electric cars are much heavier, which means worse accidents; then there is the matter of materials for batteries.) Many who want a greenway have noted how unsafe Carrboro’s bike lanes are. They are right. That is a real problem; there is no separation between cars and bicyclists and there absolutely should be on the roads themselves. (See Franklin Street for one way to accomplish that. Or what is happening on Estes and could certainly happen if the greenway were on Sewell School Road instead.) Greenways are great. Just not in this location.
I once put a lot of faith in the Green New Deal. It increasingly looks to me like greenwashing: a way to maintain an unsustainable way of life. Development is at least equally (I would say more) responsible for the current crisis, which involves considerably more than global warming but encompasses a wide range of anthropogenic impacts on the planetary web of life. We are part of that web of life, however much we prefer to focus only on human comfort, convenience, and pleasure. Treating what we call nature as purely a resource for fulfilling human desires has gotten us into this mess. It is well beyond time for a radical change in our values and practices.
Margaret Wiener
Carrboro
by admin | Jun 27, 2023 | Climate Resilience
As I drove home from Raleigh yesterday, I looked at my car’s thermometer, it read 95 degrees. I could feel the heat island just 30 minutes earlier on my run with a friend. The hot pavement of the parking lot reflected the heat back to us as we drank our post run hydration. We huddled under one tiny lone tree, trying to stay out of the sun while we chatted about future adventures and thought about the nice cool shower that awaited us at home.
While I was thinking about our climate change here in NC, a friend called to tell me about her run. She lives in VT and while its cooler there, they are experiencing thick smoke from the fires in Canada and she felt like her hike was maybe not a good idea. Inhaling small particles from forest fire smoke can cause all sorts of health problems for folks. From all signs, VT may face heavy smoke all summer, despite none of their forests being on fire. This is climate change for Vermonters.
On the Outer Banks, for example in Rodanthe, $30 million in restoration has been occurring to keep the tides from swallowing up homes. Stll $30 million cannot protect homes from climate change, as they lose up to 12 ft of coastline a year, and recently 4 homes.
https://www.13newsnow.com/article/news/local/north-carolina/outer-banks/4-rodanthe-homes-condemned-amid-impact-high-surf-erosion/291-66f02c42-af30-4061-b480-ebf04f389c80#:~:text=The%20condemnation%20comes%20a%20day,Rodanthe%20collapsed%20into%20the%20ocean.&text=RODANTHE%2C%20N.C.%20%E2%80%94%20Four%20oceanfront%20homes,Noah%20Gillam%20told%2013News%20Now.
I drove into Carrboro, my car’s thermometer registered a temperature of 88, much cooler than Raleigh’s urban heat island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
I thought to myself, thank goodness Carrboro is cooler, for now. Currently our dense forested areas like Carolina North, the Greene tract and fewer paved surfaces keep us cooler than Cary, Durham or Raleigh, but that is changing, and fast.
While places like VT or CA are facing smoke from fires, our current climate crisis is cutting trees, and paving surfaces leading to higher heat islands and faster, more powerful flooding events with each rainstorm. Trees and pervious surfaces, like dirt or forest floors, natural grasslands and vegetation slow storm water and filter it before it hits our streams and rivers. As our small town keeps voting for more dense neighborhoods, cutting trees and paving more wooded areas we expedite our climate crisis with each new development, each new section of forest cut.
No place remains unchanged, but our small town can be smarter about what types of construction we allow, what types of homes we build and how we mitigate stormwater erosion. We can never build enough homes, it’s in the same vein of building more and more highway lanes. Studies have shown that every time you build a new highway lane, more people just come and fill it up. Our current housing dilemma is in parallel. One small town cannot solve these larger problems, throwing dense housing at the problem will only create bigger problems in the near future. Building dense housing without smart, deliberate thought is not the right response to climate change as we are currently struggling with stormwater issues; nearly every neighborhood in town has at least one home that regularly floods or is dealing with mold from a constantly wet crawl space.
While asking people to bike more is helpful it’s like putting chewing gum in a crack in a dam. It doesn’t account for people who live in the county that work at UNC or the hospital, they will still need to drive to work and park. It doesn’t account for the parents that take their kids to soccer practice, while dropping another at music lessons and trying to zip to the store to grab food for dinner. It does not account for people who cannot ride for physical reasons, or who work multiple jobs and don’t have an extra hour to bike-commute. It also doesn’t take climate change into account and biking when the heat index is over 90 can be serious for people who are not accustomed to strenuous work in hot environments. As an extreme athlete I have seen firsthand that heat stroke is serious and can happen in circumstances that you don’t expect.
Expecting everyone to bike and not drive also puts a strain on our local small businesses that rely on events like parents week, Mother’s Day, sports events and summer to encourage tourists and out of town folks to patronize their businesses. People come into town to visit their kids at school, or just to see the town and they won’t be biking as many live out of state. Without ample parking for the business our cute local downtown will not continue to thrive.
In many ways it is also elitist and leads to gentrification, which makes affording to live in Carrboro even more out of reach for people.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1920490117
The Carrboro Town Council has heard about this from the local Black community in several Tuesday night meetings.
Instead, the biggest pro-climate thing we can do in this town is keep pushing for the closing of the UNC coal plant. From digging coal out of the mountains in West Virginia, to burning coal 2 miles from our homes, to disposing of the coal ash; it’s the antithesis of climate forward thinking.
A 2019 report indicated the plant releases four to six times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide gas allowed by the Clean Air Act, which is one of several reasons why groups like the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and the Town of Carrboro are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over their permit for the plant.
https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2022/09/opinion-get-rid-of-chapel-hill-coal-plant
https://indyweek.com/news/orange/unc-chapel-hill-cogeneration-plant-lawsuit-permit/
With the closing of the plant, there have been plans to turn the railway into a rails to trail bike path. This would essentially connect UNC, through Carrboro and its business district, through many of the apartments, in town, up to Smith Middle School and Chapel Hill High School, north by Chapel Hill transit, where there are many park and ride lots, past New Hope Market all the way to Brumley Preserve and only a few short miles to the MST by the Eno. It would also connect with Chapel Hill’s future Estes extension bike route, then connecting into Chapel Hill.
It makes arguing over 2 miles of a floodplain seem not even worthwhile. Instead of connecting Carrboro’s wealthiest neighborhoods, the rails to trail would actually be a real transportation corridor. We could keep our carbon capture/cooler air/natural forest for birds, owls, salamanders, frogs and other woodland creatures and create a real transportation corridor that would be for everyone.
By Fair Oaks Resident
