One Shining Light

Evening skyline along the Grand Central

This deal has been criticized in light of the economic crisis of 2008-2009 and the $45 billion of taxpayer funds allocated to Citigroup by the US Government in two separate rescue packages, prompting New York City Council members Vincent Ignizio and James Oddo to suggest that the new ballpark be called "Citi/Taxpayer Field."

--Wikipedia

“Today we’re introducing the greener, greater buildings plan, a far-reaching package of new local laws that will dramatically improve New York’s energy efficiency and reduce energy costs by some three-quarters of a billion dollars a year,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “This will significantly improve our economic competitiveness, put thousands of New Yorkers to work in green jobs, and do more to shrink our own direct impact on global warming than any other actions imaginable.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announcing the “MAJOR PACKAGE OF LEGISLATION TO CREATE GREENER, GREATER BUILDINGS PLAN FOR NEW YORK CITY” on April 22, 2009.

Name: Citi Field

Site: Next to old stadium in Queens

Cost: $800 million. Mets are investing about $600 million, including $528 million in tax-exempt bonds. The city is spending about $165 million in infrastructure improvements around the stadium. Citigroup will pay $20 million per year for naming rights.

--SunSentinel.com

I don’t usually spend much time thinking about sports, and when it comes to building arenas and stadiums, I just kind of assume the politicians and the monied owners of sports teams are in bed with one another, and will do what they have always done, namely, concoct sweetheart contracts that make the taxpayers—sports fans or no—pay for the bread and circuses while they rake in profits from ticket sales, cable contracts and food concessionaires. But the arrival on the city’s real estate of both a new Yankee Stadium and a new Shea (excuse me, Citi Field or Citi Bank Field) Stadium couldn’t have had worse timing. With all that this city needs, the obscenity of spending a single taxpayer dollar to subsidize arenas in which wildly overpaid (not as much as corporate types, but still) hulks on steroids vie with one another in the sun is difficult to swallow.

The owners of the old Shea Stadium had the decency to reduce it to rubble before the new stadium opened. In the case of Yankee Stadium, however, if you hurry, a ride along the Harlem River Drive will reward you with a view of the old stadium and the new, side by side, cheek to jowl, looking almost indistinguishable from one another. The construction of both new stadiums was completely unnecessary, and in light of the global events surrounding their opening, both edifices will probably forever stand as monuments to an irrational financial exuberance (to coin a phrase) we are not likely ever to see again. In the bad old days, robber barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller built museums and libraries; the acolytes of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan gave me and my fellow Queens residents this to remember them by:

My first real recognition of the pure insanity of this venture came at night, driving down Grand Central Parkway on my way to Flushing. As I approached the area around LaGuardia Airport, I became aware of a halo of garish light on the distant horizon. “My God, what is that?” I uttered aloud. Squinting through the glare on my windshield, I made out the new light display that will (unless some follower of Ayn Rand is available) forever blemish the night sky of Queens. Two thoughts came to mind immediately. First was the Mayor’s exhortation to his followers that they take out all of those wasteful incandescent light bulbs in their homes and replace them with those curlicue jobs that give off such a terrible light. I wearied at the prospect of attempting to calculate how many 40 Watt bulbs it would take to equal the blazing white light of Citi Field’s horrific signage and field lights. Certainly, our Mayor should be informed of the electric changes taking place across the East River in Queens. Certainly, he will want to do something about this:

The halo of light that emanates from Citifield can be seen from far off, and this prompted my second thought—I’ve seen this before, and I can vividly recall when and where. There was a time I was making frequent trips to South Jersey. I would get on the Garden State Parkway and cruise for an hour or so through the pastoral bliss of starry skies, pinelands, grazing deer, busy woodchucks, and then make the turn onto the Atlantic City Expressway whereupon my eyes had to make an immediate adjustment to the OZ-like glare coming from the row of casinos that adorn the shoreline at that location. One turn—from pastoral bliss to whorehouse capitalism.

It was at this point that I had a sinking feeling, a hunch verging on a conviction, that it would only be a matter of time before this first manifestation of the Willets Point “renaissance” would be followed by a proposal to build casinos in Flushing. I promised myself that I would return with a camera and attempt to document this brave new world. My first series of photographs would be taken in daylight, and I would later retrace my path on Grand Central Parkway at night. For the daylight shots, I decided to take the 7 train to the new field, and and begin to tour the new facility. It wasn’t long before I was rewarded with yet another harbinger of a possible incursion by the gambling industry that seemed to affirm my hunch, a large Caesars Atlantic City billboard:

A daytime tour of the grounds soon makes it evident that, with the exception of its main entrance, oddly reminiscent of both the old Ebbets Field and the Coliseum in Rome, the other vistas that the new stadium presents are unrelentingly devoted to the crassest commercialism. Where once the old Shea delicately adorned its circumference with delicate neon line-drawings of players in motion, we now have an explosion of billboard advertising. Across 126th Street, opposite the stadium's Bullpen Gate, are still located the many chop shops and auto parts stores slated for removal as part of the Willets Point renaissance. Protest signs adorn several of the cyclone fences in the area, and indeed this complex--the owners of which have viewed with dark humor the complaints of a city that has redlined the district of all essential city services for years--doesn't look like it is going anywhere soon.

Enemies of the People

When the good Dr. Stockman in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People tries to warn the people of his town that their river is dangerously polluted, he becomes, of course, the eponymous enemy of the very people he is trying to protect. Ibsen, like many other early observers of the devastation brought about by industrialization and the exploitation of the natural environment for profit, understood that an inevitable adjunct of this planet-wide revolution was a “silent majority”. The phrase, (in spite of its having been co-opted by a Nixon administration under siege in the 1970s), is invaluable for its insight into the most profound psychological underpinning of the profit system—denial.

What, after all, do all of the plagues of our time have in common? The automobile, indoor and outdoor air pollution, water pollution, famine, epidemic disease, deforestation, over-fishing of the oceans and rivers, the rapid extinction of species, skyscrapers, jet travel, casual waste of natural resources, even electric light all pose a threat to our very existence on the planet. While on the one hand, we are “treated” to endless jeremiads about where we are headed, there seems to be no plausible solution to the insidious trend. Windmills, nuclear power plants, recycling old newspapers, electric cars and zoos for near-extinct species all seem laughably (or tragically) incapable of making a significant difference. Those who study and understand the full scope of the problems we now face will confess that it is probably already too late to avoid some cataclysmic event that will forever alter our lives on Earth.

Yet, in spite of the gravity of what we are all now facing, there is a conspiracy of silence on its root cause. What is almost never mentioned in the midst of the constant hand-wringing and hair-pulling exhortations in the media and the scholarly journals is the underlying problem—there are just too many people on the planet.[1]

The subject of population growth has a long political as well as scientific history. There was a time when Malthusians, that is, adherents of Thomas Malthus’ ideas about population, were looked upon as reactionary. Left wingers of just about every shade were distinguished by their faith in scientific solutions to all of mankind’s problems. Technology would save us. Population grows geometrically Malthus pointed out, while resources grow mathematically. The technocrats made claim to having defied Malthus’ gloomy forecasts when they devised methods to not only feed existing populations but, as a result of the new regimens they put in place, allow global population to grow by a third. In the process, the ammonium nitrates so liberally applied to the soil have created a huge additional hazard to life on the planet. All indications are that we have not yet seen the end of population growth, that by 2050, we will have three billion more human beings to feed.

What should now be obvious is that Earth simply cannot accommodate such large numbers. Where once—in spite of the usual opposition from the Catholic Church and other institutions that thrive on teeming surpluses of poor people—population control and family planning were corollaries to any program aimed at improving the lot of our species, the subject has become taboo. In fact, declining population is now seen as an economic threat in many advanced nations faced with the prospect of fewer workers to fund social programs for aging citizens. In a global context, the notable exception of China’s so-called one birth policy can be seen as an anomaly. Moreover, the country’s recent surge of affluence has rendered the policy somewhat irrelevant since, as has long been obvious, one effective cure for excess population is affluence. Rich peoples (barring some perceived threat to their group’s existence) don’t have time for babies.

The era in which we were treated to programs for poor nations which included everything from condoms to IUDs to voluntary sterilization ended for a variety of reasons. Reagan era opposition to essentially all family planning regimens led the way, and most of what was then done to remove governmental support from family planning efforts is still in place. The so-called right to life faction, ostensibly opposed to abortion, turned out, not surprisingly, to be disingenuously opposed to all forms of birth control as well. Family planning was portrayed as an insidious cover for advocacy of abortion. In some minority communities here in the United States but in other areas of the world as well family planning was portrayed as a veiled form of genocide for the poor. Population control groups not only lost government funding, they were deemed out of touch with technological changes such as improved fertilizers and genetically modified organisms that would supposedly allow for almost unlimited population growth. In their institutional literature and mission statements, great care is now taken by organizations like the United Nations and other groups with global outreach to emphasize free choice. It has become politically incorrect, even misogynistic, to present a public face that would openly advocate for anything resembling a rigorous program of population control.

The doomsayers of the 1960s who predicted world-wide famine within just a few decades were obviously proven wrong; the population time-bomb never exploded; Malthus was proven wrong once again. Fertilizers and scientifically modified seed could and did feed larger and larger populations. Not included in the calculation, however, was the environmental cost of the new agricultural regimen. It is a cost not measured alone in direct harm to land and water. The parallel phenomena of extinction and chemically induced mutations of still extant species offer a clear warning that, like other species that have been artificially induced to rapidly expand their populations, humans are in danger of becoming dangerous pests, the most dangerous the planet has ever seen.

[1] There are no doubt some on both the right and the left who will argue that we must acknowledge an even deeper underlying problem such as the inequities of capitalism or a lack of spiritual enlightenment. I would argue here that unless the problem of overpopulation is addressed soon, its devastating impact on the health of the planet will render political and religious concerns moot.