BY STEPHANIE NAKHLEH
Los Alamos
This Earth Day, a reminder: If we’re serious about protecting nature, we need to rethink how we build.
Sprawl is one of the most destructive forces in the American West. It eats up forests, paves over canyons, fragments wildlife habitat, and turns carbon-sequestering landscapes into pavement and parking lots. All to build more single-family homes miles from anywhere, because zoning laws still make it illegal to build homes near shops, services, or jobs.
In Los Alamos, we’re seeing the impact of that sprawl—just not in our own backyard. It’s happening on the southside of Santa Fe, where thousands of Lab workers, nurses, teachers, and Los Alamos County employees are forced to live and endure long, exhausting, dangerous commutes every day because they’re priced out or zoned out of Los Alamos.
I understand why people want to preserve an individual tree on a lot somewhere. I get attached to my particular views, too. But we are facing tradeoffs—and right now, we’re making the wrong ones.
When someone fights against an apartment building downtown to “preserve a tree” or “protect a view,” they may not see the downstream effects. But the truth is: that tree doesn’t stop climate change. That view doesn’t reduce emissions.
Building compact, walkable, dense neighborhoods does.
What would we rather see: single-family housing in Rendija canyon? The Department of Energy transferring contaminated land for housing? Mowing down forests for housing? Personally, I do not want those things. I’d rather see several 8-story apartment buildings downtown—where they might block my view for a minute—than have that view utterly destroyed by endless low-density sprawl. I care more about preserving wildlife habitat, and fighting climate change, than in protecting my “neighborhood character.”
I don’t want to see housing built in our canyons or forests. I don’t want to sacrifice wildlife or watersheds. And I don’t want us pretending we’re saving the environment by saying no to new neighbors while pushing the problem somewhere else.
If we want to live our environmental values, we have to stop designing our communities around the car and start building in a way that lets people live closer to where they work. That means accepting more homes, more neighbors, and more height where it makes sense—in town. (Image sources: The LAC Climate Action plan, the Congressional Budget Office, and UC Berkeley’s CoolClimate Network)