Sustainable cities

[stinkweed]

According to this philly edges out the burg but neither are in the top ten.

[PghUSA]

This is a pretty interesting link thanks SW!

I would have thought that both Philly and Pittsburgh would have ranked above many of these sunbelt cities. It is a ranking and like polls you can make them say anything, but I think there are some legit points to take out of this one. Thanks again.

[TheGerbil]

Not sure I entirely buy this study. I am always skeptical of rankings, of course.

I'd like to know what they mean by knowledgebase. If they are talking about number of educated people in the city, then they got us all wrong. I have heard time and time again that we have an above average number of college educated people here.

I don't really trust the air quality and water quality ratings either. At the very least, they should take into account how much these things have improved in the last couple of decades. We started out much dirtier than most cities, and have come a long way.

Glad to see we did well in some areas, though. We're getting credit for our green buildings, which is great.

[blueblackcat]

I remember seeing these SustainLane rankings in this forum before. On top of what you mentioned, Gerbil, I'm questioning the subjectivity of some consultant's definition of "sustainability." Right now it's the big meaningless corporate buzzword of the moment, peppered throughout annual reports of every industry no matter how unsustainable by any rational standard.

Overwhelmingly it seems to me that most of the buzzword-worthy assertions of sustainability come from weird straight-line predictions of the future that focus on the sustainability of "growth" in the sense of simply having more of everything that we have now by fitting it into what's left that we didn't destroy yet. Meanwhile, ecology, infastructure, and demographics only come into the equation after considering how much of a damper either one would cause for this "growth." Convenient for corporate managers to create "long term strategies" to sell to stockholders but unrealistic in every way for the rest of us. To put it another way, residents of a city think of sustainability as the ability to live healthy productive lives, but corporations think of sustainability as the ability to further exploit whatever's still left for a future profits and trick everyone into thinking that it's a good thing.

In the end we have this view of sustainability that's distorted by corporate interests and the results are, I think: Yuppy sustainability. When I look at the SustainLane website, that's ALL I see. Ways Yuppies can do more by buying organically grown cotton diapers, because the organic tomato just isn't yuppy-edge anymore, and by only going to travel agencies that recycle their soda cans when planning their "low impact" ecological vacation to Tibet (as opposed to a high-impact one to Las Vegas from AAA?). OH and good news!!! Hybrid SUV's are being planned for 2006. Well color me a soccer-mom and send me to the dry-cleaners, haleluja!

Thanks, but no thanks, Sustainlane

[PghUSA]

I'm a big fan of the "off the grid" movement, grow most of your own food, dry your clothes outside, even generate your own electricity (solar or hyrdolisis or treadmill etc.) and drive bio diesel or bike.

With all the green buildings around Pittsburgh, plus as Gerbil mentioned the faulty (I linked this before on this forum) EPA readings since 2 of the 3 monitoring stations are right down wind from out of state coal plants (one in WVA one near E. Liverpool OH) so first it's Ohio and WVA pollution NOT Pittsburgh's and even though it blows some our way it is not a fair reading, it would be similar to saying its 126 degrees in Phoenix while I take the reading in the middle of a freshly tarred parking lot at 1pm in direct sunlight, of course the AVERAGE temp in Phoenix right then is NOT 126 degrees, but afterall it is a "reading" just like the "readings" they get a mile downwind from an OHIO coal plant!?! Not fair if you ask me.

[TheGerbil]

.... the faulty (I linked this before on this forum) EPA readings since 2 of the 3 monitoring stations are right down wind from out of state coal plants (one in WVA one near E. Liverpool OH) so first it's Ohio and WVA pollution NOT Pittsburgh's and even though it blows some our way it is not a fair reading,

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I am so tired of hearing how supposedly bad our air quality is, thanks to those faulty readings. What a bad impression it makes. And it's totally untrue.

I go outside every day and the air is clear. I only see any kind of smog when it's really hot outside. I trust my own eyes and lungs over some readings the gov't took.