How the human "network" collided with the environment.

AMERICAN FORESTS is leading the call to create a new vision for addressing the growing problem of environmental deterioration. As mankind has built webs of roads, levees, shipping lanes, and air routes to move people, goods, and information, it has ignored the impact on air, water, and wildlife. The end result is global warming, species extinction, acid rain, and desertification. Unless the problem is fixed, the global ecosystem will eventually collapse, unable to bounce back from so much abuse. What is needed is a fundamental change in how people view nature and a framework in which the human and natural "networks" can interact effectively. As the United States continues to develop, the goal is to build nature up, creating the science and conservation methods needed to restore our ecological zones. Join us. Go to www.americanforests.org and click on Learn More under the globe.

Imagine you're a sea captain or a truck driver, an airplane pilot, or a mother taking your child to preschool. You're focused on what or whom you're moving and the easiest and quickest way to get where you need to go. Your cell phone rings or your Blackberry buzzes, and you concentrate on what the caller is saying.

You don't spend time pondering how your trip--or your phone conversation--is part of a much larger network of shipping, air, road, rail, and digital lines that wrap the earth. And you may be only vaguely aware of how the network has evolved, relying on sail power, then steam, oil, and, more recently, the energy of computers, rockets, and other advanced technologies. During the last 50 years this network, which moves goods, people, and information around the globe, has grown with lightning speed--and continues to expand at an ever-accelerating rate.

Paying attention to the global network, and to the North American network within it, is quite possibly the most important thing you can do. The human network has created unprecedented wealth, allowing society to connect and evolve in new ways. Yet its growth is uncontrolled and chaotic, creating social and economic dislocation and placing relentless pressure on the world's ecosystems. The global network cuts through the last natural areas on earth, fragmenting farms, forests, and wilderness into ever-smaller shards.

This network of trade, transportation, and information is so much a part of your life that you don't notice it. Most people don't, but we all need to start.

Reconciling people and nature is now one of society's central challenges. To meet this challenge successfully, we cannot assume we already know all about the problem; we must cultivate a new point of view. As a society we focus too much on bits of the problem: this endangered species, that development proposal, that carbon credit initiative or this road project, that flood levee. We spend far too little time looking at how they all fit together. Both the environmental community and society at large have become increasingly specialized. The trick is not to lose sight of the big picture while breaking the problems down into manageable pieces.

A NEW APPROACH

We need to create a new science, a new political and business structure that will help us understand the fundamental needs of human and natural systems and allow them to coexist.

How do we start? We first need to look closely at the network humanity has built to meet its needs. As environmental advocates, we must reach out to those who build the network and help them understand, in detail, how it destroys natural systems. Then, we need to look at the big picture; stop trying to fix the environment and instead figure out how to manage the network. Then, together with those who build the network, we can begin to devise a new framework to rebuild what has been destroyed.

First, though, some background on the network.

The network that has formed across North America is denser, faster, and more complex than politicians, business leaders, or environmentalists imagine. As the 20th century began, the country had few paved roads or automobiles. By 1960 there were 1.2 million miles of roads serving 61.6 million cars. Those numbers had doubled by 2004: more than 2.5 million miles of paved roads, more than 136 million vehicles.

The network has changed with such complexity and speed--and the changes have been so profound--that it's difficult to remember how things were not so very long ago. In the late 1940s, a "superhighway" meant a four-lane road with unlimited access: no on-ramps, no off-ramps, no overpasses. In the Pacific Northwest, salmon used to run in such numbers that anglers joked it was possible to walk across rivers on their backs. Today, 40 percent of those streams have no fish at all. Air laden with mercury and other pollutants used to be the exception rather than the norm. In those days there were still places humanity didn't reach.

THE AMERICAN NETWORK BEGINS

This way of thinking--improve the environment by improving the network--may be new, but the human network is not. It's been evolving since humans first set foot on the continent. The first tendrils of the network were formed as tribes blazed footpaths through the wilderness. As colonial settlements took form, the French, Spanish, and English widened those footpaths into dirt roads, established shipping routes and ports on the coasts and along rivers. For more than two centuries dirt roads and rivers formed the North American network, and waterways remained the most convenient "highways" through the new nation.

The pace picked up with the development of the steam engine in the late 18th century. Less than 50 years later, steamships were crossing the oceans and plying the rivers. Railroads crossed the landscape, linking cities and pushing inland. In 1869 the entire rail system in the U.S. comprised 52,922 miles; within 30 years there were more than 163,000 miles of track crisscrossed the country. Telegraph lines followed rail lines, initiating the first communications revolution. These corridors of transportation and communications spread rapidly as booming cities reached farther and farther into the wilderness for raw materials.

Steam engines and telegraphs began an ever-accelerating process of massive environmental impact that continues today. As railroads fragmented the landscape, the depletion of natural resources accelerated. Forests were treated as supplies of endless virgin timber. Pollution increased and factories needed more energy to fuel steam engines. With the growth in population and incomes, the demand for food and new homes eroded the landscape. Ladies' fashions doomed the carrier pigeon and reduced the number of flamingos; sportsmen took trains to the prairies and slaughtered buffalo by the millions.

This cycle of environmental destruction repeated itself throughout the 20th century as the network added new "layers" and developed new capacities: Railroads led to roads led to airplanes. Telegraphs led to telephones and computers and satellite communication. Each development increased the efficiency and the reach of the human network.

As the network has developed, its layers have become more specialized. Autos and air took over passenger travel; railroads and steamships increasingly hauled only freight. Increased specialization has linked the network even more tightly and made it more interactive.

Yet if we go beyond our own communities and try to see our nation as an integrated whole, it becomes obvious that cities and metropolitan areas are the smaller and larger networks that have grown at the interstices of a continental network. At key access points that link the United States to the larger global network--New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Chicago--large urban areas have grown up like spiderwebs between the branches of a great economic tree.

INTERSTATE TRANSFORMATION

Look at the area from Washington, DC, to Boston, the nation's oldest urbanized region. In 1960, this region had already been labeled a "megalopolis," a seemingly borderless urban region that reached beyond traditional city boundaries. Since then, the eastern seaboard has urbanized more quickly and in a much different pattern than predicted. Instead of a linear corridor, the region has morphed into an urban latticework of centers and corridors extending west.

When World War II ended in 1945, cities from Washington to Boston retained the dense, clustered appearance they'd always had. A series of parkways and turnpikes had begun connecting the eastern seaboard's cities, but these were single-purpose segments--the Pennsylvania turnpike, for instance, was built to link Philadelphia to the Midwest, not to intersect with the New Jersey Turnpike or its thruways. The end result was the roads did not form a large-scale grid. New Jersey, in the center of the 11 states that make up the region, remained an agricultural area, and its nickname, "The Garden State," was not yet the stuff of comedians' jokes.

The Interstate Highway Act changed all that. The legislation, which passed in 1956, created an interstate grid that connected the six large metropolitan areas between Washington and Boston. Planners focused on creating a passage, now known as the Northeast corridor, to link the six, reduce inter-city travel time, and increase economic synergy.

Their strategy worked, but the interstates' initial phase also had an unintended effect. It created a platform for suburbs to spread, gobbling up wildlife habitat and resources and extending the fragmentation, depletion, pollution, erosion, and extinction of natural systems. Work began on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1950 and later merged with the construction of I-95 to complete the Northeast corridor by 1960. Between 1950 and 2000, New Jersey's population doubled. As the 21st century began, only 2 million of the state's 6 million acres remained undeveloped.

With new roads came new means of moving people and goods. Population density increased; suburbs more than doubled the urban areas surrounding Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. High-capacity interstates created a new kind of transportation corridor that provided business with greater accessibility and visibility. These new corridors attracted commercial development and economic activity. These evolved into strips of restaurants, hotels, office buildings, industrial parks, movie theaters, and shopping centers. New urban centers, which before had formed around geographic features like ports or rivers, instead formed around key points and intersections in the interstates. Tyson's Corner, outside Washington, DC, and the Meadowlands, in New Jersey, are two examples.

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Two years after the first interstates opened, the first commercial jets changed the pattern of long distance travel. The grand era of train travel ended as people flocked to the airports for quick connections to distant locales. This was a great advantage for larger cities with well-developed airports and a terrible disadvantage for small cities with limited air service. This inland cities often went into decline.

THE CITY GETS A BELT

Those who envisioned the interstates saw them as a strategic tool to connect cities, not only moving goods but also tanks and other military supplies in case of war. Yet the roads themselves became linear cities as more homes and businesses clustered around them. Rapid development turned these once high-speed corridors into endless traffic jams. Planners built beltways to ease congestion, but new roads expanded the urban edge, opening thousands of square miles of green space to development. It's an example of how, in the course of modernization, urban sprawl and environmental degradation just happened.

Look at Boston. A first ring around the city (Route 128) was built 10 miles out. Then a second, (1-495), about 25 miles out. Then a third (combining 1-95 and 1-90), about 40 miles from downtown. Boston's city center population declined with the advent of these beltways--down from 800,000 to 500,000 since 1970--while its metro area population increased fivefold to 4 million. The amount of space Bostonians now occupy has increased to 10 times the area of the original city. And it's a pattern that has repeated throughout the Northeast, causing the natural landscape to disappear faster than at any time in history.

As the human network developed and became more complex, the engineers and policy makers who planned it became more specialized. While the designers of the interstate system looked at the continent as a system, the planners who followed them defined the success of this burgeoning network by capacity rather than by how each segment fit into the larger picture. Little attention was given to the patterns of urban growth, economic activity, or quality of life. The result: transportation planning became reactive, responding to congestion and safety issues, rather than proactive, planning for a stronger economy and healthier environment--and therefore a more efficient network. The same is true of other growth and development issues such as zoning and water management.

A LATTICE OVER THE LANDSCAPE

We have become more narrowly focused while our reach has become almost impossibly wide. Since 1990, this network has morphed into a massive urban lattice linked by a series of centers and corridors like a gigantic child's building toy, the spokes held together by pegs in holes. The breakup of Conrail and the introduction of e-commerce redefined the pattern of distribution, transportation, and logistics across the Northeast. Older urban centers gained new life as inland hubs. The Internet and global positioning systems made "just-in-time" delivery and e-commerce the norm. Retailers no longer shipped goods to one place and hoped they would sell. If an item was moving sluggishly at one outlet, it could be moved to where shoppers demanded it. Or, through e-commerce, the item could be shipped directly to consumers, fueling a boom in the freight industry.

"Rust belt" towns became important inland trucking and rail hubs, acting as fulfillment centers that received good from inland locations, West Coast ports, the Southeast, and Mexico, and distributed them, air to rail to road, up and down the Eastern seaboard. These smaller metro areas added housing, retail, and industry and therefore their own networks of roads, water mains, and power systems.

East Coast development no longer centers on the Northeast corridor, but extends westward to cities like Scranton, Pennsylvania, and north to cities like Newburgh, New York. The system of interstates that now extends west from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston--together with the interstates that extend north and south between 1-81 and 1-95--now form a gigantic lattice. That in turn provides a new framework for growth that extends inland to the Lehigh Valley, north up the Hudson Valley and south into northern Virginia. The individual metropolitan markets of the mid-20th century have become a huge consolidated urban market serving the 52 million people who now live in the Northeast.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

In the space of just a few decades, the landscape of the Northeastern corridor has changed dramatically. What was once a region with dense cities separated by farms and natural areas has become a nearly continuous urban region that extends inland to smaller hub cities. As North America's continental grid connectd with the larger global network, the global economy churned into overdrive, growing at the fastest rate in human history, according to World Bank figures.

The new urban superstructure, an ever-growing lattice of development, presents new and massive threats to the environment. More and more roads slice across ecosystems and migration routes. More and more people demand more resources and create more pollutants. More and more species find they just can't survive within this human network.

And the story is the same across the continent. Chicago's metro area extends across five states. Metro areas like Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and Atlanta keep expanding with no end in sight. The same is true of smaller cities like Lexington, Virginia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Memphis, Tennessee.

As these metropolitan spiderwebs grow larger, the continental grid grows stronger. And the land between them grows more fragmented, depleted, polluted, and eroded. More species become extinct.

Even more damaging, the densest human developments often grow up in areas of great biodiversity, such as coastal regions and river valleys where cities were originally located to have access to water. In desert cities like Phoenix or Tucson, the network's growth has led to a desire to recreate green cities of the Midwest and East, altering the natural landscape and upsetting the fragile ecological balance.

WHAT TO DO

What can be done? Our current institutions are inadequate to meet this challenge. While Portland, Oregon, tries to curb its growth, it has no control over the growth across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington or in other Oregon cities. How can we integrate the development of smaller urban hubs?

Seeing the network is the first step toward recognizing that we must better manage it. While planners laid out the interstates with an eye toward a continental system, they never applied the same kind of big picture thinking to metropolitan areas. Our increasing specialization has eliminated the generalist from environmental, economic, and planning discussions. With everyone focused on his or her "piece" of the network, there is no one to look at the overall picture at a time when that insight is most crucial. The human network's reach and complexity have nearly exceeded our ability to understand what we are creating--and how it affects us.

Most of us don't even see the network that has come to dominate our society, our economy, and our environment. Although many of us are unaware of it, the network dominates our way of life. We live by transit schedules, digital clocks, and cell phones rather than the ebb and flow of natural systems. We fail to see that global warming and all our other environmental problems stem from the human network in which we all live.

So far, we have reacted to environmental damage in two ways: by adapting to it or by trying to mitigate it. AMERICAN FORESTS now promotes a third solution: strategic environmental development. If we begin to see the network and how it affects our cities, regions, and continents, we can figure out how to better design and build it, weaving human and natural systems together. We can begin to build links between business communities and environmental groups. And we can develop a new science to guide these efforts, building up the environment as we build the human network. We can begin to be part of a big picture solution.

Architect and city planner Michael Gallis is principal of Michael Gallis & Associates, Charlotte, North Carolina; Gary Moll is a VP at AMERICAN FORESTS; Heather Millar is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. This is an edited version of this story; a longer version is on our website.

RELATED ARTICLE: Q & A: BRUCE GORDON, PILOT FOR THE EARTH-FRIENDLY SKIES

Bruce Gordon has climbed into a cockpit to document environmental change for more than 20 years. He started with Light Hawk, a coalition of volunteer pilots that provides free flights over threatened regions in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Central America. In 2002 Gordon founded EcoFlight, based in Aspen, Colorado. Gordon's organization enlists professional pilots to advocate for the protection of remaining Rocky Mountain wilderness and to provide flights to educate the media, politicians, and public about critical environmental issues.

Q: AMERICAN FORESTS: Why do you do what you do?

A: Gordon: We have the ability to give the land a voice. Our images stimulate debate. Our hope is to educate the public--media and concerned citizens, but also young adults--so that they will call for positive changes in environmental policy.

Q: AMERICAN FORESTS: How have things changed since you started conservation flying?

A: Gordon: Twenty years ago, if you flew from one state to another, you wouldn't see a lot of industrialization of the land. Flying over southern Utah, the sky was bluer and cleaner. The change is absolutely dramatic. Now it's rare to see roadless areas. You can't fly more than 20 or 30 minutes without seeing oil and gas drilling or mining or gravel pits occurring on our land. In the middle of nowhere, near Grand Junction, there are these 4,000-man camps set up to look for oil shale. The enormity of the projects makes me think of the "Mad Max" movies. You see this all up and down the Rocky Mountains, from southern New Mexico up to the Canadian border. Then, if you look at urban development, you see the homes spreading like a cancer, linking Denver to Colorado Springs to Pueblo, even up to Cheyenne, Wyoming, forming a megalopolis. You see the roads going in and you know what's next.

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Q: AMERICAN FORESTS: How has EcoFlight helped to bring about change?

A: Gordon: We don't get out ahead of the curve. Our politicians don't get out in front of this thing. So one of EcoFlight's focuses is to get politicians out there seeing this, seeing the continuousness and contiguousness of the land. The reactions vary. We have taken up some politicians who have fallen asleep. We took the leaders of Grand Junction, Colorado, up so they could see how oil and gas companies were leasing their watersheds. After we landed, they passed ordinances to get the energy companies to stop.

Q: AMERICAN FORESTS: What do you think the solution might be?

A: Gordon: We have to have a new paradigm. It's going to take some big changes, a united effort. People have to realize that it's not the old Wild West, where there were infinite resources and infinite space. People have to see what's going on.

--Heather Millar

RELATED ARTICLE: Q & A: JOHN AMOS, ECO-GEOGRAPHER

During the 15 years John Amos worked as a geologist for the private sector, he became increasingly disturbed by the satellite images he used. He began to think images of habitat loss and the spread of human influence could be important, not only as scientific data but as a powerful way to communicate the scale of environmental change to the public. In 2001, he left his job. In 2002, he founded Sky Truth, a West Virginia-based nonprofit that uses satellite imagery and computer processing to document landscape impacts of human activity such as oil and gas drilling, strip mining, and commercial fishing near protected marine areas.

Q: AMERICAN FORESTS: Why do people need to see Sky Truth's satellite images?

A: Amos: People are most intensely focused on what's happening in their surroundings and in the time they're living in. We're hard-wired to be that way. But as a result, we miss these incredibly significant changes happening right under our noses. With the view from space, we can expose people to much larger distances, scopes, and landscapes than they would experience from their little experience on the ground. Overall, I'm amazed at the increasing evidence of change to the planet. Cumulatively, there are fewer and fewer places you can look and not see evidence of human activity.

Q: AMERICAN FORESTS: What can satellite and computer images do that regular pictures can't?

A: Amos: There is public data from NASA's Landsat satellite and that goes back to 1972. Using those images we can take people back in time. We can show them what the landscape looked like 10, 20, 30 years ago. Then we can time travel into the future and use imagery to show people what the future holds for landscapes if we don't change the way we're doing things.

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Q: AMERICAN FORESTS: How can satellite pictures change people's thinking?

A: Amos: We can change people's scale of perception from a local to a regional view. We can reset people's base of what the environment should be like. Time and again, visuals impact people's opinions in a way that no amount of verbiage can.

Q: AMERICAN FORESTS: Give us some examples.

A: Amos: A perfect example is our Bureau of Land Management. When it approves or reject a proposal to drill for oil and gas, or to mine minerals, it looks at one project at a time, in isolation from all the dozens of resource extraction projects that are already approved or underway. There's not a holistic approach to the cumulative impacts of these extractive projects. Our images show the death of the landscape by a thousand cuts. Or take Las Vegas--that city's human footprint on the planet has exploded. From space, you can see that the whole eastern half of China is covered in this bluish-gray haze. You can see it blow across the north Pacific to us in North America. They have measured pollutants in the U.S. that can be traced back to coal burning in China.

Q: AMERICAN FORESTS: What impact do you hope your work will have?

A: Amos: The stuff that's eye-popping now are images that show the global reach of human activity. We hopeby what we're doing, we make people think long and hard about how they conduct business.

--Heather Millar