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Passing the Torch The culture war goes deeper than an environmental dispute. By Susan Zakin Have I really just written a series on endangered species that's as long as War and Peace? Have you really read it? I hope so. For those of you who would rather that I keep writing about Julia Roberts' Oscar dress, I can promise more of that in the future. I love writing that stuff. But four years ago, when the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl was added to the endangered species list, none of the newspapers explained what the whole thing was about. It almost seemed as if they were afraid to tackle the subject. In a region where real estate development (along with its predecessor, cattle grazing) is the state religion, there is an enormous amount of pressure to downplay anything that might threaten the established order. We got lots of perfunctory articles that sounded like box scores: The homebuilders win a lawsuit, the environmentalists cry foul. I believe that it is our social and civic responsibility to look at extinction as thoroughly as we possibly can. I've tried to do that. I won't kid you. I don't think saving the environment is a "he said, she said" issue. We should do it. This wasn't really in dispute until industry revved up a multi-billion dollar public relations campaign in the 1980s and 1990s and succeeded in marginalizing the issue. But that didn't change the facts. How can you be against nature? It's what we depend on to stay alive. The question of how to protect the environment is more complicated. Virtually all of our systems are geared to making a profit at the expense of nature. How do we humanely and intelligently retool? In Arizona, we haven't even agreed on the goal yet. The Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan is a chance to do that. We can start by dispensing with cartoon stereotypes. Developers should stop accusing environmentalists of motives other than saving the environment. Environmentalists are just as flawed as other people. But most of them don't care about money and really do care about the environment. Give us a rest from the rhetoric that suggests otherwise. It would also be great if I never heard another developer tell me that the only thing he cares about is providing reasonably priced housing for decent, hard-working Americans. Anyone in business cares about making a profit. Think up a better soundbite. Environmentalists should stop being patronizing to developers, too. No, these guys didn't major in biology. They don't care about the same things you do. You probably don't like the clothes they wear. But if they're so stupid, how come they kick your ass all the time? Developers can be intelligent, perspicacious and far-sighted. A canny observer of Tucson's growth battles noted that real estate developers have created enormous markets for their wares. They dominate the way Americans live. In Arizona, they are accustomed to being pillars of the community. They seem shocked that a whole new generation of committed, well-educated and decent people believe they are essentially guilty of genocide because of their single-minded, intransigent determination to destroy the desert that is essential to the survival of plants and animals. To an environmentally conscious Gen-Xer, a real estate billionaire's $1 million donation to the United Way seems like a transparently hypocritical tax dodge. One man's hero is another's villain. We are living through a fundamental generational shift. When I get into conversations with real estate honchos here in Tucson, I'm blown away that they always seem to mention World War II. "The war," they call it. And they don't mean Vietnam. The culture of Tucson's powerful real estate community harks back to the values of my father's generation. These men, many of them veterans themselves, provided housing for the World War II soldiers who came home to start families. They cut their teeth on the patriotic rhetoric of Levittown. These men have their place in history. They acted as agents of the post-war era's democratization of privilege. Only 41 percent of non-farming Americans owned their own homes before 1920. By 1990, the rate was almost 65 percent. But we paid a price. The application of Henry Ford's industrial mass production techniques to homebuilding was an environmental disaster on the order of Chernobyl. The suburbanization of America vastly increased pollution and wiped out huge swaths of wildlife habitat. Urbanized land area in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1954, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. From 1992 to 1997, the national rate of development more than doubled, to 3 million acres a year. In most large metropolitan areas, urban land area rose more than twice as fast as population between 1950 and 1990. Urban sprawl wasn't great for architecture, either. Americans used to live in towns where they could walk to a store. Houses had front porches where people gathered on summer nights to sip iced tea with their neighbors. Many Americans want this again. But cultural inertia, racism and government subsidies still point to a 1950s model, especially in the Sunbelt, where the aging warhorses have not loosened their grip. What happened to the Baby Boomers here? An anthropologist says that Tucson is more like Mexico than the United States. This is true in many ways. Many Mexican Baby Boomers have refused to participate in civic life because of rampant corruption. I think the same thing has happened here. The disenchantment and disenfranchisement of progressive Baby Boomers in Arizona has impoverished us intellectually, culturally and politically. Now we have another chance. The torch has skipped a generation. But it's ready to catch fire.
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