New York is an environmental Armageddon – The New Statesman


New Times,
New Thinking.
On all sides the urban machine is operating at full tilt, churning out volcanic volumes of steam and fumes.
By Simon Armitage
I was in New York a few weeks ago. It was cold, and not just temperature-wise. I lived there in 2019, pre-Covid, since when it has become more New York than ever, especially financially. One theory says the city is clawing back the income it lost during lockdown, and my debit card was doing everything it could to assist.
When I was younger, America was the home of cheap clothes. Travellers to the US took half-empty suitcases with them to stock up on jeans and jumpers for the next few years. Not any more, so much so that today’s visitor would be better advised to stuff their luggage full of cash before flying out. Sure, the exchange rate hasn’t helped, but it feels like an attitude as much as anything, as if the place is revelling in its exorbitance, or as if expensiveness were a reliable indicator of credibility and status.
And if the prices don’t kill you, the gratuities will. Go to a shop to buy a small packet of mints and before the transaction can be concluded the card machine demands to know how much extra you’d like to fork out, 18 per cent being the minimum option and usually drawing a nonplussed look from the retailer. To be fair, there is a “no tip” button, hiding near the bottom of the screen, but presumably that triggers an alarm or opens a trapdoor into the dungeon of shame. Cough up or f**k off, appears to be the message. Then there’s the state tax, the federal tax, the kitchen tax, the seating tax, the breathing tax…
New York, or Manhattan more specifically, is an environmental Armageddon. Central Park, sometimes referred to as the lungs of the city, is an iron lung at best, or a lung suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Or maybe it’s an oxygen tent. The High Line, the disused train track converted into an elevated walkway, is certainly a respite from the snarling traffic at ground level. But a few planters and the odd clump of bamboo every 50 yards aren’t going to purify the atmosphere any time soon.
On all sides the urban machine is operating at full tilt, every building churning out volcanic volumes of steam and fumes, because it’s super chilly and the heating needs cranking up so those people well-off enough to own properties there can sit around in vests and sliders. Below ground, the Subway has become an unsupervised asylum or unstaffed hospital, a chthonic refuge for all those lost souls priced out of any kind of treatment or care. The mentally ill, the infirm, the injured and the homeless riding the circles of hell day and night because it’s too costly to set foot on the pavement. At Penn Station I watched rats below the platform not even bothering to scuttle any more, just lolloping along or waiting for the next discarded pizza crust or fallen hot dog. Is this nature?
Across the other side of the continent, Los Angeles was on fire, and I found it impossible to drag myself away from the televised news reports. Among the victims of the fires were some of the wealthiest people in the world, their lives utterly disconnected from the laws of thermodynamics and the basic principles of meteorology; many of them movie-industry folk often tasked with replicating real life, standing around in the smouldering ruins of La La Land asking how this could happen. The truth is that we all know how to join the dots, but very few will.
I left the US before inauguration day, imagining the new president on top of his golden tower block, floodwater lapping around his ankles or flames licking his heels, still doing his soft-shoe-shuffle routine and singing, “Drill, baby, drill.”
Forgive the bitterness. It’s nothing personal; for New York or Los Angeles I could have substituted almost any city or conurbation in the world, and when I sat down at my desk an hour ago I intended to write about the brilliance of snow.
[See also: The cost of net zero in the town that steel built
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