While we work to be inclusive of all cultures, classes, and people and link our efforts across all three legs of the sustainability stool, events like Aurora reminds us of the power of negative social conditions to reverse all we do.
By Dave Newport
It’s impossible to adequately understand or
talk about how awful this summer has been for many unfortunate Colorado victims
of fire—and now terror. The Aurora
shootings have ended twelve young lives horribly—and derailed many others permanently. Nothing we can say or write can explain it or understand it. Or
feel it.
Reactions include anger, unspeakable grief,
survivor guilt—and an abundance of heroism. The stories of bravery and self sacrifice literally in
the face of fire continue to inspire. The rest of us are left to search our
souls. We are all asking ourselves, “why
in Colorado.” Only 13 years and a few miles from Columbine High School, kids
who grew up in that massacre’s shadow must see darkness again. Why.
Getting through the next weeks and months and
years will be difficult for many—especially those who lost family and friends.
But our communities are pulling together—and will grow stronger over time.
Give them strength.
 |
| Gainesville's remembrance of their 1990 student murder victims |
I lived in Florida during the serial murder
years of Ted
Bundy and Danny Rolling.
It was horrible. The week of terror Danny Rolling inflicted in my town of
Gainesville as he hunted down and killed five students at the University of Florida
made me feel, for the first time in my life, a palpable overlay of evil across
my community. I felt I could almost touch it. It was awful.
Gainesville got through it but not
unscarred. Having spent years working to
build a sustainable community, it was sad to watch the swarm of security lights
that went up in the wake of the student
murders. More energy consumption, more emissions. Surveillance cameras
multiplied as if through a mitosis process designed to eliminate privacy and
small town feel while making us all wary of public places and strangers. More
cops in more cars cruising the streets taught us the modern definition of
safety: heavy heat. We suffered an outbreak of gated “secure” communities ever further
from town with all the gridlock, overstressed transportation resources, and urban
flight trends they answered. We turned forests into fortresses so we could
“feel safe.”
We have not forgotten these terrible times. To this day, random Gainesville citizens keep a painted reminder of
the victims maintained in the middle of town. There is never any graffiti on
it; nobody wants to forget.
In the meantime, crime has fallen. And when
crime rates drop, people
feel safe enough to move back into denser urban neighborhoods thus creating
more sustainable cities. Things even like a robust urban tree canopy help
drive crime down, researchers
say. Broad
based, consistent sustainability efforts themselves deter crime.
Of course, what sustainability offers is
proactive crime protection—obviously, nothing helps after the fact. It’s likely
impossible to prevent the senseless acts of a few crazy people like Rolling,
Bundy, the Columbine kids, and now Aurora suspect James Holmes.
But perhaps through sustainability’s inclusive,
thoughtful approach to community development, we can minimize “normal” crime
and communities’ reactionary efforts to crimes that impede sustainability.
Turning out lights, putting up PV panels,
operating a great recycling program, whatever; all these normal sustainability efforts
are overwhelmed and seem trivial when measured against the social impacts of crime.
While we work to be inclusive of all cultures, classes, and people and link our
sustainability efforts across all three legs of the sustainability stool,
events like Aurora reminds us of the power of negative social conditions to reverse
all we do.
We talk a lot about integrating the social
leg of sustainability into our day-to-day work. Sometimes identifying those social
connections is easy, sometimes they are less clear. Unfortunately, crime makes
them vivid—and horribly tragic.
Give us strength.
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