Greek Austerity: Pressure on the Environment

“While patrolling on a recent cold night, environmentalist Grigoris Gourdomichalis caught a young man illegally chopping down a tree on public land in the mountains above Athens. When confronted, the man broke down in tears, saying he was unemployed and needed the wood to warm the home he shares with his wife and four small children, because he could no longer afford heating oil. ‘It was a tough choice, but I decided just to let him go’ with the wood, said Mr. Gourdomichalis, head of the locally financed Environmental Association of Municipalities of Athens, which works to protect forests around Egaleo, a western suburb of the capital.”[1] Tens of thousands of trees had disappeared from parks and forests in Greece during the first half of the winter of 2013 alone as unemployed Greeks had to contend with the loss of the home heating-oil subsidy as part of the austerity program demanded by the state’s creditors. As impoverished residents too broke to pay for electricity or fuel turned to fireplaces and wood stoves for heat, smog was just one of the manifestations—the potential loss of forests being another. On Christmas Day, for example, pollution over Maroussi was more than two times the E.U.’s standard. Furthermore, many schools, especially in the north part of Greece, had to face hard choices for lack of money to heat classrooms.

Greek forests were succumbing  in 2012 to the Greeks' need to heat their homes as austerity hit.   source: Getty Images

Essentially, austerity was bringing many people back to pre-modern living, perhaps including a resurgence in vegetable gardens during the preceding summer. At least in respect to the wood, the problem was that the population was too big—and too concentrated in Athens—for the primitive ways to return, given the environment's capacity. 

The full essay is at "Greek Austerity and the Environment."

1. Nektaria Stamouli and Stelios Bouras, “Greeks Raid Forests in Search of Wood to Heat Homes,” The New York Times, January 11, 2013.
2. Skip Worden, God's Gold, available at Amazon. 

A Planned Chinese Supercity Hinging on Technology

A Kansas-sized supercity of 82,000 square miles and 130 million people, with Beijing at the center, is in the vanguard of economic reform, Liu Gang said from Nankai University in mid-2015.[1] Six times the size of New York City’s metropolitan area, the planned regional economy would require nothing short of a feat of urban planning. The economic synergy anticipated from the planned integration is the main benefit. The sheer scale alone presents its own challenges, however, and the complexity in coordinating the various shifts of people and services suggests that unintended excesses and shortages will demand immediate action. Even so, I contend that the application of technology will make or break the viability of the anticipated supercity.

The full essay is at "A Planned Chinese Supercity."

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[1] Ian Johnson, “Pain and Hope as China Molds Its Capital into New Supercity,” The New York Times, July 20, 2015.

Erdogan Renovating Istanbul: Turkish Prime Minister or Mayor?

Istanbul is the historical seat of three empires, the last of which being the Ottoman Empire. Following World War I, which ended that Empire, the Republic of Turkey was officially established in 1923. In terms of the previous empires, that which would be Turkey can be said to have been the host kingdom, or state, rather than an empire in itself. This distinction can add insight into the protests in 2013 against Recep Erdogen, the Prime Minister of Turkey. Before going on to accurately relate the prime minister to Istanbul, it is important to know what sparked the public unrest against him. 

                     Astonishingly, this protest in Istanbul began against the loss of a city park. In actuality, the protest was against the sitting prime minister.    Source: NYT

 According to CNN, “(t)he protests began with plans to raze Gezi Park, the last green space in central Istanbul.”[1] The Turkish government had been planning to replace the park with a replica of 19^th-century Ottoman barracks, which would include a shopping mall. The New York Times describes the park as “a place of public gathering.” The government had recently ordered the city’s oldest movie theater to be demolished so another mall could be built. Meanwhile, in ghettos across the city, the poor were being paid to give up their homes so that “contractors—many with ties to government officials—can build gated communities.”[2] The presence of cozy corruption aside, the very involvement of Turkey’s prime minister in matters that are municipal in nature was also a matter of controversy. While it would admittedly be strange to find the government of an empire occupied with municipal functions of even a major city in one of the constituent kingdoms or states, such involvement of a government of a republic on the scale of a U.S. or E.U. state is neither improper nor unusual. Conflating a kingdom, republic or state with an empire or union of such polities led to erroneous conclusions regarding the upheaval in Turkey.

 

Asli Aydintasbas, a columnist for Milliyet Newspaper, chided the Turkish prime minister for being too paternalistic in deciding “on the park, the bridge, the city and the constitution.”[3] In effect, Aydintasbas was claiming that Erdogan had been micromanaging in getting involved even on a city park and a bridge. On CNN on June 3, 2013, a commentator likened Erdogan turning the park into a mall to Obama getting involved in renovating Times Square in New York City. The commentator, an American, was conflating a union of states with a republic on the scale of one of those states.  In other words, the commentator was ignoring the vital difference in scale and operations between an empire and a kingdom or simple republic that could fit into an empire. 

Because U.S. President Obama has responsibilities spanning fifty republics, spending his time on a municipal project in a major city of one of those republics would not be an effective use of his time, given the other demands spanning fifty republics on his time. Of course, if a particular urban project has significance spanning the Union, it would not be improper for the government of that Union to get involved. The site of the World Trade Center, for instance, has such significance because the U.S. rather than merely New York had been attacked on September 11, 2001. 

The government of a simple republic or state, like Turkey and New York, can properly get involved in particular urban projects because the government is not so far removed from its cities. In the U.S., city governments are state subjurisdictions, so a state government can even take back the delegated authority, as the Michigan Government has done in the case of bankrupt Detroit. It is therefore not strange for a state legislature or executive to take interest in a particular municipal project.

  

Therefore, the prime minister of Turkey getting involved in a city park project in Istanbul is like the governor of New York getting involved in a public land project in New York City. Thus re-calibrated, Erdogan’s direct involvement on particular large projects in Istanbul is not so astonishing. This is not to say that there are no other possible valid reasons to protest against the prime minister. My sole point here is that Turkey is not a United States of Asia. Rather, the republic would be a state in such a union. To ignore this distinction simply because both empires and states are countries is extremely reductionist and apt to result in erroneous comparisons and prescriptions for policy.

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[1] Ivan Watson and Gul Tuysuz, “Turkey Protests Show No Sign of Letdown,” CNN, June 3, 2013.

[2] Tim Arango, “Protests in Turkey Reveal a Larger Fight Over Identity,” The New York Times, June 2, 2013.

[3] Ivan Watson and Gul Tuysuz, “Turkey Protests Show No Sign of Letdown,” CNN, June 3, 2013. The column itself is at: http://siyaset.milliyet.com.tr/Milliyet.aspx?aType=siyasetYazarTumYazilarV4&AuthorID=220