The Green Guard at the New Year

Tomorrow is our great obligatory day off, but millions of us will be working. And thinking about the sectors whose employees will miss Christmas helps us think more adroitly about the kinds of jobs we can professionalize to create a green economy. Airport workers, office-building security guards, bus drivers and UPS carriers, if you look at them right, have invested their futures on the idea that the climate stays livable.

The service economy that gorges itself from “black Friday” to “hangover Saturday” relies on stable transportation and stable cities.  Now remember that climate change will bring instability- not steady warming to turn Manhattan into Miami one palm tree per year, but a bombardment of storms and floods and freak weather events that will shut our schools and roads and communications networks in messy ways throughout the year. Blizzards like the one visiting the Midwest as I type have everything to do with climate change, because they reflect a more volatile weather pattern.

Now. We can safeguard our cities and our economy from the dumbbell ends of disaster by building more redundant telecom networks, which are backups to backups, and by building our trains and buses out of sturdier stuff. But we can only slow down changes in the atmosphere if we reduce the waste of fuel that trails our daily lives. We need to share more buildings, transportation, public space and services. If we do, we’ll spread the cost of new technology and spread the pain of remediation. If we don’t, we’ll lose control even of the power to track how much we’re wasting.

So the ambassadors to cities- the people at the airport, the bus terminal, the UPS dropoff and the food court- exact a potent spell, less vital than teachers and cops and mayors but no less resonant. If people make cities warm and genuine, if they encourage cooperation and good humor, they will induce other people to spend more time at the margin in cities.

Can working-class people shoulder this burden, to steer each other toward high-density living in a time of high confusion?

Track your moments on your journeys this holiday season and let me know. Then think about what a little more real investment in education and public life would mean for the cities, white or green or black, of our future.