This article, released by the author, was published in the magazine's number Archipelago 18-19, Winter 1994, whose theme folder was entitled: "Trains, trams and bicycles. Back to walk," and in the book "Against the car - on freedom of movement," Editorial Virus, 1996, ISBN 84-8845520-8. It relies on certain ideas contained in the report "Towards ecological conversion of transport in Spain," written by Antonio Estevan Estevan and Sanz Alfonso Alduán, published as Working Paper of the Research Center for Peace in Madrid in June 1994.
Antonio Estevan Estevan
Over the last twenty years has been imposing the evidence that transport is the real "hard core" of the ecological crisis. The transport sector is primarily responsible for the greenhouse effect, the most serious problems of air pollution, marine pollution, urbanization, soil, noise, degradation rural and urban landscape, etc. No other human activity whose influence on the present environment the combination of gravity and multitude of conditions that characterizes the transport.
Actually, it is logically so, because transportation is the arena in which the disposition of the primordial battle of mankind with nature. "Dominate" nature means, above all, to move through it with a freedom and ease growing. "Civilizing" nature means it accessible and safe for humans, cross it and open it in order to catalog their various components as "natural resources" and to transfer or manipulate until they become economic assets capable of exchange or accumulation.
Two strangers and incompatible: Transport and Nature
A sociocultural system is a building that is built on a foundation of transport. Since the dawn of time, the accumulation or the most basic barter have been, first, paths transport actions. It only makes sense to accumulate or trocar that is not easy in the short term, which is not accessible to any hand, which by its very scarcity worth transporting from somewhere. From these gestures embryonic socialization, any socio-cultural structure that occur in history has to be represented, firstly, through a political and cultural map, which is not only a territorial demarcation indicating that, within the grounds stated, are manifested with particular intensity in certain relations of trade, communication, command and other forms of connection between human beings and between and their environment, invariably resting on the horizontal transport.
In this complex network of horizontal relations that constitute human culture has its true origin of the conflict between the Transport and Nature, as Nature is mainly organized in vertical structures and next, the human species is divided into horizontal structures and distant that rely on some form of Transportation, and show a tendency to seem overwhelming to be extended to more and more distance and become more and more intense.
Indeed, in terrestrial nature, the horizontal displacement of live or materials associated with them is a relatively unique. On the mainland, biological cycles, so the majority rest on the activity of the plant kingdom, material that circulates almost exclusively vertical direction: it transports nutrients from the soil to plant tissues and drops back to the soil when the leaves or plants die.
This predominance of vertical transport in terrestrial life is no coincidence. As is known, the large amount solar energy reaching the Earth, plants are able to fix only a small part in the form of plant biomass, using reactions that are carried out at room temperature, and therefore with limited income, almost critical. The most efficient way to collect the materials needed to produce biomass (water, minerals) is the capillary pumped from the ground to the aerial parts of plants, where photosynthesis takes place, or capture them directly from the air, as with carbon. The capillary rise does not require energy input from the plant only produces an almost imperceptible cooling of the sap, which is soon balanced by heat environment. Thus, all the solar energy captured by plants can be applied to supply the photosynthetic reactions. The plants are, overwhelmingly fixed laboratories to produce biomass by optimizing to the limits its immediate availability of materials and energy.
To use the hard-energy stored by plants, animals that feed on them have to turn it into a new process that develops with relatively low yields. Much of the limited energy thus obtained is consumed in the production of muscular work, ie the movement that allows them to go to reach their food, and other functions to ensure vital, so that only a small fraction is available for biomass accumulation in animal.
This explains the huge gap existing biomass - on land - in the animal kingdom and plant kingdom: the creatures that move horizontally - animals - almost irrelevant represent a fraction of the terrestrial biomass (less a ten-thousandth), and so very strict saving energy expenditure in muscular work, generally avoiding unnecessary movements or free. Land living Nature is essentially fixed. Consists of innumerable fixed elementary units - plants - are organized together so they leave a smaller biological - in relative terms - for life within them of being endowed with ability to move.
Throughout time, humans have occupied the biological space limited, first driving the same to other animals and then widened to the cost of altering the structure of natural ecosystems. However, traditional cultures, especially those that have evolved related to their own bases of ecological sustainability and confined in them, have been using to move only to the extent necessary to meet their needs, using it in general terms cautious and subject to the rules somehow economy's natural movement. However, in relation to the movement, as in many other aspects of modern industrial societies have been organized entirely back to the basic principles of nature. Rather than being applied to improve trade, relations and close production cycles, reducing to a minimum the movement of materials over long distances, economic systems and lifestyles prevailing in developed countries increasingly rely in the conduct of trade and horizontal displacements of large masses of people and goods over long distances, to meet any need or desire, it is trivial or irrelevant.
But since natural terrestrial ecosystems have been largely self-organization based on vertical and close cycles described above, are poorly adapted to withstand intense horizontal movements within it. The primary structures of natural ecosystems (surface soil, plant communities, ecological interfaces, etc..) Have a very fragile against massive horizontal displacement generates a mass transport system of an industrial, as that has been built in Over the last two centuries in societies under development. Consequently, the transport is that "their way" through some ecosystems natural land that is not "designed" to support it, and in its progress it divided and impoverished ecosystems, and replacing portions of the same by increasing inert spaces definitely lost for Nature and life.
But these local or regional effects of transport are far from alone in support of nature as a result of this activity. Generalization of motor transport requires the use of vast quantities of materials and energy, the extraction, processing and consumption produces large masses of solid, liquid and gaseous, so foreign to nature as is the concept of horizontal movement mass.
the global ecosystem, which is able to absorb and recycle moderate amounts of this waste is soon overwhelmed their ability to self when transportation - like many other human activities - among its members introduces massive amounts of waste in small periods of time. For example, the massive release of CO2 and various gaseous pollutants alters the composition of the atmosphere, the dispersion of oil in the sea modifies the marine biological cycles, and millions of tons of solid waste from scrap vehicles accumulate landfills or spread on the territory, poisoned and degrading. Thus, the global ecosystem is deteriorating in many different aspects in an exponential process that seems to evolve slowly at first, but after a certain threshold is rapidly approaching breakdown situations.
Nature versus freight transport
This essential contradiction between the transport and Nature does the concept of "carrying capacity" of natural ecosystems in relation to transport, which is the true starting point vision of transport from an ecological perspective. If mass transit is in itself an element foreign to the natural ecosystem, the "carrying capacity" or total amount of transport that it can assimilate without exceeding a certain threshold of damage, will necessarily be limited.
Therefore, in abstract and general terms, the unlimited growth of the transport is not compatible with the ecological balance. The introduction of technology and improvement of transport organization may raise, to some extent, the transport capacity of a given ecosystem (or global ecosystem) to a level of deterioration that is designated as socially "acceptable." But technological and organizational improvements are affected by the law of diminishing returns, as is any other physical phenomenon, from increasing relativistic speed in the realm of the very large to the expansion of knowledge or certainty in the quantum realm of the very small. In the limit of every imaginable perfection for a transportation system will always remain the mass transport object moving at a certain speed, and natural ecosystems will not be transparent material in front of that movement within it.
However, the essential incompatibility between transport and the ecological balance in this vision does not end "static" load capacity. By introducing the concept of speed, this inconsistency is accentuated, because the deterioration of natural ecosystems increases with speed to which movements are made through them. In fact, the laws of nature state that, at equal other physical conditions Quie characterize a phenomenon of movement, the energy required to move a mobile speed increases necessarily. The increased speed of transport can only be achieved with higher energy intake, and also of the various materials used in vehicle construction or infrastructure, and waste generated throughout the process. Technological development can be improved upon the physical framework in which transport occurs (friction reduction, optimization vehicles or containers, improved efficiency of energy transformations, etc.), but within each physical frame and technology, the speed increase will require higher energy and material consumption. And of course, over time technological improvements associated with increased speed will provide only diminishing returns on these inputs.
In sum, the transport capacity of any ecosystem, for a given maximum level of deterioration, has absolute limits, which are narrowed by increasing the speed of transport. If you increase the transport burden indefinitely or the average speed thereof, or both, through a given ecosystem, it records a deterioration growing indefinitely. Technological and organizational improvements achieved only at best, slow or moderate this process, but not stop, let alone invest.
This is, in short, the vision of the transport problem which belongs to the so-called "deep ecology", which envisages the maintenance of ecological balance as a core value in itself, also putting it in first place among the human interest the long and very long term. Although the use of this form of reasoning may seem - and probably is - barely operational to meet the management of the immediate problems of transport, certainly provides a useful general framework for understanding significant global transport of environmental conflict. First, because it provides a sound basis for questioning the conventional view of transportation as an economic good whose production is desirable to increase indefinitely, ie, as an expression of wealth and social welfare.
Second, it explains very reasonably comprehensive historical process have been the relationships between transport and the environment from the beginning of the industrial revolution. Environmental degradation due to transport has not stopped growing since then, and no development technology or the invention of new modes of transport were able to stop this deterioration, but in any case accentuate, to enable the continuous increase of the transportation load and speed. The last decades of this century, which has been spreading environmental awareness and have increased technological capabilities, are precisely those that have experienced severe environmental deterioration due to shipment.
And finally, because, as applied to restricted local environments, explains the appearance of local situations of manifest breach of environmental balance largely due to transport. In the preceding pages has focused attention on limited transport capacity of natural ecosystems and the global ecosystem, in which this phenomenon is manifested with great clarity and force illustrative. But the process is played so conceptually the same, albeit on a smaller territorial scale in urban ecosystems or regional ecosystems characterized by dense human occupation.
The eternal debate of mobility and accessibility
The starting point for progress towards an "ecological society" in the field of transport is the clarification of the meaning of the concepts of "mobility" and "accessibility" generic objectives of transport activity. Long, the confusion surrounding these concepts is weighing like a millstone on the adaptability of transport activities to their own ecological environment.
In the terminology of transport, "mobility" is a quantitative parameter or variable simply measures the amount of displacement of people or goods made in a particular system or socio-economic field. Can be expressed in individual terms (for example, the average number of trips or miles traveled per person), or in the aggregate (eg, total miles traveled by residents of a country).
"Accessibility", by Rather, it is a notion or qualitative variable that indicates the ease with which members of a community can bridge the gap that separates them from the places where they can find ways to meet their needs or desires.
There are two conflicting ways of pursuing the improvement of accessibility. The first identifies accessibility with ease of movement: a place is much more "accessible" the more efficient transport system that lets you navigate to it. This approach, which is typical of the conventional view of transport, leading to continuously strengthen infrastructure, vehicles and the entire transport system, which facilitates the increased mobility power and thus, production of transport.
The second identifies accessibility, primarily with proximity: a need or desire are much more accessible - at the spatial or geographic - the smaller and more autonomous can be the displacement to be carried out to meet them. In this approach, which is the ecological vision is for the transport, mobility and the resulting "production" of transportation are no longer positive values \u200b\u200bin themselves, to become listed as a tribute to nature and society itself must face to meet the needs and desires of people. Against
vice transport virtue of proximity
naturally, this argument leads to locate the "creation of proximity or closeness" as a central objective of any transport policy greening, which aims to reduce car mobility and, therefore, the transport burden on the environment while maintaining or improving accessibility while.
The concept of "creation of local" goes far beyond the obvious implications of the term on the location of various human activities on the territory. It is a concept too, and especially applicable to the organization of production and consumption, forms of Arabian meet needs and individual desires and, in general, the overall socioeconomic organization. A society and a sustainable economy are those that emulate the principles of nature and adapt to them instead of violent. Therefore particularly value near, used carefully everything that is available in your immediate surroundings and distant reserve movements of people and goods to meet relevant needs and desires that can not be satisfied through the use of future resources. Any contribution in these directions is an effective "creation of proximity."
proximity creation at all levels personal, social and economic strategy is the only substance capable of bringing about a process of continuous approximation to full environmental compatibility of transportation. The creation of proximity is not simply a new set of land use planning techniques, though these techniques are certainly necessary and urgent development and implementation. It is above all an organization's overall conception of human relations, and also a guiding principle of individual behavior, applicable to all areas of life. The creation of proximity has obviously important economic implications. Requires progress toward self-centered economic systems, well adapted to their ecological conditions, specializing in the efficient satisfaction of needs from local resources, refined in obtaining and making good use of the goods more massive and more dependent on transport, water, energy, food, construction materials ... It also requires other ways of using objects and to establish priorities among them, assessing and draining its durability, appreciating the proximity of the origin of things, and their degree of attachment to the culture. Also has important social implications. Revaluation behaviors and networks of mutual support and solidarity immediately. Facilitates the direct exchange of goods and services and solving multiple needs within the various circles to extending personal relationships. Involves the acceptance of multiple social and environmental responsibilities shared locally. Question the validity and even the long-term viability of large vertically centralized social structures and disjointed in the horizontal plane in its various expressions regional (metropolitan), production (large corporations) or bureaucratic.
These social and economic implications are obvious political translations. Require substantial revisions of the institutional structures of the territorial distribution of political power, grades autonomy and sovereignty attributable to each social group. Negate much if not all, of the trends prevailing reorganization of political power, systematically moving higher levels of that power to international organizations and institutional structures of territorial ranking. Refute the idea of \u200b\u200bthe inevitability of economic globalization processes and policies that are being imposed in the current historical cycle: no unsustainable in the long-term process has been or may be inevitable in history but the notion of "global economy" that currently presented as the next stage in the inexorable evolution of capitalism is a real antiparadigma ecological and therefore inherently unsustainable: it is "creating distance, continuously, in the exercise of any activity.
The pervasiveness of transport as more or less direct support of all human relationships and the Promethean nature of his conflict with nature, have the power to bring out the main physical infeasibility mode of production and Western social organization. When reasoning about the conflict is taken to its logical conclusion and compared the necessary conclusions of this speech with the realities observed in the field of transport, it becomes apparent inability to find real solutions and final borders without leaving the established system.
The proximity concept of creating an escape route provides safe and practicable to this apparent dilemma, and not without appeal if properly interpreted. Does not contain any personal or social isolation, let alone historical reversal - an impossible concept - or stagnation, decline or technical, economic or cultural. Rather, the construction company capable of full adaptation to their own physical substrate and maximum enjoyment of the near, of new forms of interconnection with the far less satisfactory and consistent, and to reconcile both systems achievements indefinitely stable and continuous improvement in material and moral commitment is a much harder and requires much more effort and human intelligence to fight in the battle of competitiveness for a place of honor in the global capitalist economy, to roll with it to the ecological abyss.
In its difficulty and its necessity is precisely its appeal, since they are not other attributes of utopia. But this is - how could it be otherwise? - A utopia quite close, with many ingredients known, some undiscovered and, of course, many invented. There were many elements to create proximity (economic, technical, social, cultural, political) in our own traditional societies, before they were swept away by that turbulent wave of development. Not a few of them are still relevant and it is still possible to recover, restore and adapt to the current time with the ability and the tranquility provided by the loss of innocence, they must have some advantage.
But there are still many more who have been spared in many societies of the kind that experts call "underdeveloped" because they have been unfolding in balance for many centuries or even millennia, before the development of the others were converted to them in "underdeveloped" and all untenable. The societies yes we applied the development will soon need those insights to the organization of the near, and many others that can only survive in a context of proximity, such as conservation of biodiversity.
And probably many more ways of creating closeness will have to be laboriously invented to solve problems and difficulties are the product of the development application, and whose solution, if it exists, nobody knows yet. The reorganization of economies and the developed world to cut the unsustainable process of globalization have unleashed themselves, and to establish instead the systematic creation proximity and closeness, is almost about to start a debate that promises to be one of the liveliest and most complex of many that has attracted the environmentalism.
Antonio Estevan Estevan
Over the last twenty years has been imposing the evidence that transport is the real "hard core" of the ecological crisis. The transport sector is primarily responsible for the greenhouse effect, the most serious problems of air pollution, marine pollution, urbanization, soil, noise, degradation rural and urban landscape, etc. No other human activity whose influence on the present environment the combination of gravity and multitude of conditions that characterizes the transport.
Actually, it is logically so, because transportation is the arena in which the disposition of the primordial battle of mankind with nature. "Dominate" nature means, above all, to move through it with a freedom and ease growing. "Civilizing" nature means it accessible and safe for humans, cross it and open it in order to catalog their various components as "natural resources" and to transfer or manipulate until they become economic assets capable of exchange or accumulation.
Two strangers and incompatible: Transport and Nature
A sociocultural system is a building that is built on a foundation of transport. Since the dawn of time, the accumulation or the most basic barter have been, first, paths transport actions. It only makes sense to accumulate or trocar that is not easy in the short term, which is not accessible to any hand, which by its very scarcity worth transporting from somewhere. From these gestures embryonic socialization, any socio-cultural structure that occur in history has to be represented, firstly, through a political and cultural map, which is not only a territorial demarcation indicating that, within the grounds stated, are manifested with particular intensity in certain relations of trade, communication, command and other forms of connection between human beings and between and their environment, invariably resting on the horizontal transport.
In this complex network of horizontal relations that constitute human culture has its true origin of the conflict between the Transport and Nature, as Nature is mainly organized in vertical structures and next, the human species is divided into horizontal structures and distant that rely on some form of Transportation, and show a tendency to seem overwhelming to be extended to more and more distance and become more and more intense.
Indeed, in terrestrial nature, the horizontal displacement of live or materials associated with them is a relatively unique. On the mainland, biological cycles, so the majority rest on the activity of the plant kingdom, material that circulates almost exclusively vertical direction: it transports nutrients from the soil to plant tissues and drops back to the soil when the leaves or plants die.
This predominance of vertical transport in terrestrial life is no coincidence. As is known, the large amount solar energy reaching the Earth, plants are able to fix only a small part in the form of plant biomass, using reactions that are carried out at room temperature, and therefore with limited income, almost critical. The most efficient way to collect the materials needed to produce biomass (water, minerals) is the capillary pumped from the ground to the aerial parts of plants, where photosynthesis takes place, or capture them directly from the air, as with carbon. The capillary rise does not require energy input from the plant only produces an almost imperceptible cooling of the sap, which is soon balanced by heat environment. Thus, all the solar energy captured by plants can be applied to supply the photosynthetic reactions. The plants are, overwhelmingly fixed laboratories to produce biomass by optimizing to the limits its immediate availability of materials and energy.
To use the hard-energy stored by plants, animals that feed on them have to turn it into a new process that develops with relatively low yields. Much of the limited energy thus obtained is consumed in the production of muscular work, ie the movement that allows them to go to reach their food, and other functions to ensure vital, so that only a small fraction is available for biomass accumulation in animal.
This explains the huge gap existing biomass - on land - in the animal kingdom and plant kingdom: the creatures that move horizontally - animals - almost irrelevant represent a fraction of the terrestrial biomass (less a ten-thousandth), and so very strict saving energy expenditure in muscular work, generally avoiding unnecessary movements or free. Land living Nature is essentially fixed. Consists of innumerable fixed elementary units - plants - are organized together so they leave a smaller biological - in relative terms - for life within them of being endowed with ability to move.
Throughout time, humans have occupied the biological space limited, first driving the same to other animals and then widened to the cost of altering the structure of natural ecosystems. However, traditional cultures, especially those that have evolved related to their own bases of ecological sustainability and confined in them, have been using to move only to the extent necessary to meet their needs, using it in general terms cautious and subject to the rules somehow economy's natural movement. However, in relation to the movement, as in many other aspects of modern industrial societies have been organized entirely back to the basic principles of nature. Rather than being applied to improve trade, relations and close production cycles, reducing to a minimum the movement of materials over long distances, economic systems and lifestyles prevailing in developed countries increasingly rely in the conduct of trade and horizontal displacements of large masses of people and goods over long distances, to meet any need or desire, it is trivial or irrelevant.
But since natural terrestrial ecosystems have been largely self-organization based on vertical and close cycles described above, are poorly adapted to withstand intense horizontal movements within it. The primary structures of natural ecosystems (surface soil, plant communities, ecological interfaces, etc..) Have a very fragile against massive horizontal displacement generates a mass transport system of an industrial, as that has been built in Over the last two centuries in societies under development. Consequently, the transport is that "their way" through some ecosystems natural land that is not "designed" to support it, and in its progress it divided and impoverished ecosystems, and replacing portions of the same by increasing inert spaces definitely lost for Nature and life.
But these local or regional effects of transport are far from alone in support of nature as a result of this activity. Generalization of motor transport requires the use of vast quantities of materials and energy, the extraction, processing and consumption produces large masses of solid, liquid and gaseous, so foreign to nature as is the concept of horizontal movement mass.
the global ecosystem, which is able to absorb and recycle moderate amounts of this waste is soon overwhelmed their ability to self when transportation - like many other human activities - among its members introduces massive amounts of waste in small periods of time. For example, the massive release of CO2 and various gaseous pollutants alters the composition of the atmosphere, the dispersion of oil in the sea modifies the marine biological cycles, and millions of tons of solid waste from scrap vehicles accumulate landfills or spread on the territory, poisoned and degrading. Thus, the global ecosystem is deteriorating in many different aspects in an exponential process that seems to evolve slowly at first, but after a certain threshold is rapidly approaching breakdown situations.
Nature versus freight transport
This essential contradiction between the transport and Nature does the concept of "carrying capacity" of natural ecosystems in relation to transport, which is the true starting point vision of transport from an ecological perspective. If mass transit is in itself an element foreign to the natural ecosystem, the "carrying capacity" or total amount of transport that it can assimilate without exceeding a certain threshold of damage, will necessarily be limited.
Therefore, in abstract and general terms, the unlimited growth of the transport is not compatible with the ecological balance. The introduction of technology and improvement of transport organization may raise, to some extent, the transport capacity of a given ecosystem (or global ecosystem) to a level of deterioration that is designated as socially "acceptable." But technological and organizational improvements are affected by the law of diminishing returns, as is any other physical phenomenon, from increasing relativistic speed in the realm of the very large to the expansion of knowledge or certainty in the quantum realm of the very small. In the limit of every imaginable perfection for a transportation system will always remain the mass transport object moving at a certain speed, and natural ecosystems will not be transparent material in front of that movement within it.
However, the essential incompatibility between transport and the ecological balance in this vision does not end "static" load capacity. By introducing the concept of speed, this inconsistency is accentuated, because the deterioration of natural ecosystems increases with speed to which movements are made through them. In fact, the laws of nature state that, at equal other physical conditions Quie characterize a phenomenon of movement, the energy required to move a mobile speed increases necessarily. The increased speed of transport can only be achieved with higher energy intake, and also of the various materials used in vehicle construction or infrastructure, and waste generated throughout the process. Technological development can be improved upon the physical framework in which transport occurs (friction reduction, optimization vehicles or containers, improved efficiency of energy transformations, etc.), but within each physical frame and technology, the speed increase will require higher energy and material consumption. And of course, over time technological improvements associated with increased speed will provide only diminishing returns on these inputs.
In sum, the transport capacity of any ecosystem, for a given maximum level of deterioration, has absolute limits, which are narrowed by increasing the speed of transport. If you increase the transport burden indefinitely or the average speed thereof, or both, through a given ecosystem, it records a deterioration growing indefinitely. Technological and organizational improvements achieved only at best, slow or moderate this process, but not stop, let alone invest.
This is, in short, the vision of the transport problem which belongs to the so-called "deep ecology", which envisages the maintenance of ecological balance as a core value in itself, also putting it in first place among the human interest the long and very long term. Although the use of this form of reasoning may seem - and probably is - barely operational to meet the management of the immediate problems of transport, certainly provides a useful general framework for understanding significant global transport of environmental conflict. First, because it provides a sound basis for questioning the conventional view of transportation as an economic good whose production is desirable to increase indefinitely, ie, as an expression of wealth and social welfare.
Second, it explains very reasonably comprehensive historical process have been the relationships between transport and the environment from the beginning of the industrial revolution. Environmental degradation due to transport has not stopped growing since then, and no development technology or the invention of new modes of transport were able to stop this deterioration, but in any case accentuate, to enable the continuous increase of the transportation load and speed. The last decades of this century, which has been spreading environmental awareness and have increased technological capabilities, are precisely those that have experienced severe environmental deterioration due to shipment.
And finally, because, as applied to restricted local environments, explains the appearance of local situations of manifest breach of environmental balance largely due to transport. In the preceding pages has focused attention on limited transport capacity of natural ecosystems and the global ecosystem, in which this phenomenon is manifested with great clarity and force illustrative. But the process is played so conceptually the same, albeit on a smaller territorial scale in urban ecosystems or regional ecosystems characterized by dense human occupation.
The eternal debate of mobility and accessibility
The starting point for progress towards an "ecological society" in the field of transport is the clarification of the meaning of the concepts of "mobility" and "accessibility" generic objectives of transport activity. Long, the confusion surrounding these concepts is weighing like a millstone on the adaptability of transport activities to their own ecological environment.
In the terminology of transport, "mobility" is a quantitative parameter or variable simply measures the amount of displacement of people or goods made in a particular system or socio-economic field. Can be expressed in individual terms (for example, the average number of trips or miles traveled per person), or in the aggregate (eg, total miles traveled by residents of a country).
"Accessibility", by Rather, it is a notion or qualitative variable that indicates the ease with which members of a community can bridge the gap that separates them from the places where they can find ways to meet their needs or desires.
There are two conflicting ways of pursuing the improvement of accessibility. The first identifies accessibility with ease of movement: a place is much more "accessible" the more efficient transport system that lets you navigate to it. This approach, which is typical of the conventional view of transport, leading to continuously strengthen infrastructure, vehicles and the entire transport system, which facilitates the increased mobility power and thus, production of transport.
The second identifies accessibility, primarily with proximity: a need or desire are much more accessible - at the spatial or geographic - the smaller and more autonomous can be the displacement to be carried out to meet them. In this approach, which is the ecological vision is for the transport, mobility and the resulting "production" of transportation are no longer positive values \u200b\u200bin themselves, to become listed as a tribute to nature and society itself must face to meet the needs and desires of people. Against
vice transport virtue of proximity
naturally, this argument leads to locate the "creation of proximity or closeness" as a central objective of any transport policy greening, which aims to reduce car mobility and, therefore, the transport burden on the environment while maintaining or improving accessibility while.
The concept of "creation of local" goes far beyond the obvious implications of the term on the location of various human activities on the territory. It is a concept too, and especially applicable to the organization of production and consumption, forms of Arabian meet needs and individual desires and, in general, the overall socioeconomic organization. A society and a sustainable economy are those that emulate the principles of nature and adapt to them instead of violent. Therefore particularly value near, used carefully everything that is available in your immediate surroundings and distant reserve movements of people and goods to meet relevant needs and desires that can not be satisfied through the use of future resources. Any contribution in these directions is an effective "creation of proximity."
proximity creation at all levels personal, social and economic strategy is the only substance capable of bringing about a process of continuous approximation to full environmental compatibility of transportation. The creation of proximity is not simply a new set of land use planning techniques, though these techniques are certainly necessary and urgent development and implementation. It is above all an organization's overall conception of human relations, and also a guiding principle of individual behavior, applicable to all areas of life. The creation of proximity has obviously important economic implications. Requires progress toward self-centered economic systems, well adapted to their ecological conditions, specializing in the efficient satisfaction of needs from local resources, refined in obtaining and making good use of the goods more massive and more dependent on transport, water, energy, food, construction materials ... It also requires other ways of using objects and to establish priorities among them, assessing and draining its durability, appreciating the proximity of the origin of things, and their degree of attachment to the culture. Also has important social implications. Revaluation behaviors and networks of mutual support and solidarity immediately. Facilitates the direct exchange of goods and services and solving multiple needs within the various circles to extending personal relationships. Involves the acceptance of multiple social and environmental responsibilities shared locally. Question the validity and even the long-term viability of large vertically centralized social structures and disjointed in the horizontal plane in its various expressions regional (metropolitan), production (large corporations) or bureaucratic.
These social and economic implications are obvious political translations. Require substantial revisions of the institutional structures of the territorial distribution of political power, grades autonomy and sovereignty attributable to each social group. Negate much if not all, of the trends prevailing reorganization of political power, systematically moving higher levels of that power to international organizations and institutional structures of territorial ranking. Refute the idea of \u200b\u200bthe inevitability of economic globalization processes and policies that are being imposed in the current historical cycle: no unsustainable in the long-term process has been or may be inevitable in history but the notion of "global economy" that currently presented as the next stage in the inexorable evolution of capitalism is a real antiparadigma ecological and therefore inherently unsustainable: it is "creating distance, continuously, in the exercise of any activity.
The pervasiveness of transport as more or less direct support of all human relationships and the Promethean nature of his conflict with nature, have the power to bring out the main physical infeasibility mode of production and Western social organization. When reasoning about the conflict is taken to its logical conclusion and compared the necessary conclusions of this speech with the realities observed in the field of transport, it becomes apparent inability to find real solutions and final borders without leaving the established system.
The proximity concept of creating an escape route provides safe and practicable to this apparent dilemma, and not without appeal if properly interpreted. Does not contain any personal or social isolation, let alone historical reversal - an impossible concept - or stagnation, decline or technical, economic or cultural. Rather, the construction company capable of full adaptation to their own physical substrate and maximum enjoyment of the near, of new forms of interconnection with the far less satisfactory and consistent, and to reconcile both systems achievements indefinitely stable and continuous improvement in material and moral commitment is a much harder and requires much more effort and human intelligence to fight in the battle of competitiveness for a place of honor in the global capitalist economy, to roll with it to the ecological abyss.
In its difficulty and its necessity is precisely its appeal, since they are not other attributes of utopia. But this is - how could it be otherwise? - A utopia quite close, with many ingredients known, some undiscovered and, of course, many invented. There were many elements to create proximity (economic, technical, social, cultural, political) in our own traditional societies, before they were swept away by that turbulent wave of development. Not a few of them are still relevant and it is still possible to recover, restore and adapt to the current time with the ability and the tranquility provided by the loss of innocence, they must have some advantage.
But there are still many more who have been spared in many societies of the kind that experts call "underdeveloped" because they have been unfolding in balance for many centuries or even millennia, before the development of the others were converted to them in "underdeveloped" and all untenable. The societies yes we applied the development will soon need those insights to the organization of the near, and many others that can only survive in a context of proximity, such as conservation of biodiversity.
And probably many more ways of creating closeness will have to be laboriously invented to solve problems and difficulties are the product of the development application, and whose solution, if it exists, nobody knows yet. The reorganization of economies and the developed world to cut the unsustainable process of globalization have unleashed themselves, and to establish instead the systematic creation proximity and closeness, is almost about to start a debate that promises to be one of the liveliest and most complex of many that has attracted the environmentalism.
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