Sustainability Survey: Atlanta #20 of 25
(Via Food Fight who were understandably pleased that Portland, OR, came in at #2.)
SustainLane has ranked 25 cities across the U.S. according to their sustainability, using 12 criteria. Atlanta, at #20, is quite a bit down the page here.
Honestly, I’m kind of surprised that we did so well. It’s obvious that our air quality sucks, urban sprawl is rampant, and though there are quite a few bicyclists in my part of town* most of the suburbs seem actually hostile toward pedestrians and are largely sidewalkless. It also was reassuring, in a depressing sort of way, to find that we scored so low on locally grown food; I’ve been trying to buy more locally grown stuff, even when it isn’t organic, but haven’t been very successful. (It’s times like this I really wish I had a garden, but I don’t even have a balcony where I could grow tomatoes and peppers or anything. I don’t think I get enough light to keep herbs alive — Percy the Parsley turned yellow and died a couple weeks back.)
On the other hand, we’re ranked #5 in LEED-certified and -registered buildings. If the refurbishment plans at work go through, that ranking might slightly improve.
One thing the survey didn’t appear to take into account, as far as I can tell, is greenspace. Granted, deepest Midtown and many of the outlying suburbs are not exactly lush with vegetation, and there is certainly a lot of room for improvement (per Trees Atlanta, the goal for sustainability should be 40% tree cover, and we’re at 27%), but one of the joys of living in town is, for me, the number of trees, even outside the parks. (Ponce de Leon between the Highlands and Decatur is one of my favorite stretches.) Maybe it’s just the fact that I moved back here from Illinois, which is known more for extremely flat and naked horizons than for trees, but my subjective and highly unscientific impression is that we’ve got a good start on greenspace — and, with any luck at all, the Beltline project will increase the greenspace, as well as provide a better in-town mass transit option than our current unwieldy, clunky MARTA. That, of course, assumes that the Beltline is implemented well; how likely that is, of course, remains open to question.
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*I shall soon be among them. Now that I’ve retrieved my bicycle from my parents’ house, I plan to get back into practice, with the aim of trying to commute to work via bike as soon as the weather cools to the point where I won’t either be drenched with sweat when I arrive (wouldn’t bother me too much, but might offend the coworkers) or die of heat stroke going up a hill. My goal is to be biking to work at least half the time before the end of September.
