Forget the Phoenix and Butterfly, I've Got a New Metaphor

Last night, I had a conversation with a really wise old woman named Carol. The discussion eventually turned to the economy. Carol told me a story of how she used to teach young children. The little boys in her class would inevitably end up at the back of the room playing with the building blocks. They'd build elaborate structures (or not, depending on the creative faculties of the child), and then knock them down in a loud clatter. Sometimes a flying block would hit a child in the face, maybe even hurting him, and he'd cry for a bit, but ultimately, the hurt would stop. More importantly though, they needed to knock down their creations in order to build something new and better and keep learning. Carol made the analogy that that's what's happening in our economy right now. I hope she's right.


On the way home, I got to thinking that maybe this same principle is at work with regard to our struggling ecosystem and our cities. Maybe we're knocking our blocks down so that we can rebuild them again. Granted, it's pretty hard to scrub carbon from the sky and unmelt the icecaps, and impossible to bring back extinct species and hurricane victim fatalities, but I'm trying to have a hopeful moment here.

Greensburg, Kansas serves as an example of what I mean. The town was obliterated by an F5 tornado in 2007, one of the worst years on record for tornado activity (along with 2004 and 2008, notice a pattern there?). Many scientists theorize that climate change influenced the doubling of the frequency of tornadoes in the Midwest over the past 40 years, possibly even as a contributing cause of the Greensburg tornado. Of course, the official line is that this is all unproven conjecture, but I'm not sure the families of the rising number of people killed annually by tornadoes would agree. But that's not the point. Greensburg is rebuilding itself as a LEED Platinum City, which means extra green, extra efficient, extra sustainable, extra New Urbanist. If other cities follow suit, we may just have a chance at curbing climate change after all. Knock it down, rebuild it again, but better.

I've heard that in Chinese, the symbol for crisis is the same as the symbol for opportunity. That might sound cliché, but it's also a pretty cool metaphor for our time.