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Napalm Dreams Sprawl's unintended consequences include allergies ... and death. By Susan Zakin AROUND THIS TIME OF YEAR, I always think of the great Robert Duvall line from Apocalypse Now. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," said Duvall, playing a military commander strutting on the beach in Vietnam. "It smells like victory." This line occurs to me as I watch the little white parachutes bearing desert broom seeds flying ubiquitously through the air. Like the rituals of harvest and planting in pastoral societies, the desert broom tufts are a sign. They say: Call Walgreen's. Now. Your sinuses are about to explode. All roads lead to suburban sprawl in Tucson, as I've said before in this column. Even the road to hypoallergenic Kleenex is paved with thoughtless growth, but not quite the way you'd think. As a raft of scientists have now informed me, the Rousseauian romantic view of allergies is way off. They're not only caused by foreign species planted by homesick Midwesterners. Desert broom is a species native to Arizona, New Mexico, northern Mexico and Baja. But it used to grow only in washes. Now it grows on roadsides. How many of those do we have? "Too many, and they're too fast and too big," is the only sane answer. That fact was brought home in the harshest possible way last week when psychiatrist Bruce Hedges was killed while riding his bicycle on North First Avenue. A pickup truck hit the 40-year-old Hedges on the afternoon of January 1. This was the second serious crash involving a bicyclist in less than a week. Great way to start the New Year. I hadn't put all this together--the desert broom, the bike accidents and sprawl--until a friend told me that his wife had been one of Hedges' patients. My friend thought that Hedges was an incredibly nice guy. This conversation reminded me of the most remarkable thing about Tucson. Tucson is still a small town, even as we push the 1 million population mark. This quality is maddening sometimes. It's also one of the reasons I live here. When my friend told me that he knew Hedges, an impersonal news story became real, human. Tragic. How can we live in a place where the climate begs you to be outside, a perfect place for riding a bicycle instead of a pollution-spewing SUV, yet organize our city in a way that makes it virtually impossible to be anything but a dull, overweight suburbanite? The buzz around county politics lately is that transportation department head Brooks Keenan might become the scapegoat for Pima County's brilliant faux pas, when officials destroyed critical habitat for the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl as part of a road-widening project in the messy sprawl that is the northwest side. By doing so, they may have violated the Endangered Species Act, which they are supposedly putting into practice with the much-vaunted Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. Keenan may not be the reincarnation of John Muir, but the problem goes beyond any individual. Adam Rome, author of a forthcoming, and quite possibly definitive, book on urban sprawl called The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge University Press), put the whole thing in perspective for me in a conversation we had recently. Rome shocked me by flouting the conventional political rhetoric of environmentalists. Building poor-quality, energy-inefficient, bulldozer-driven subdivisions quite simply results in cheaper home prices, he said. Think about it. We're talking relatively cheap mega-acres of land and the use of mass-production techniques. In short, industrial homebuilding. Economies of scale are real. I don't know why anyone would want to live in a badly constructed frame-stucco house that looks like just their neighbors' house, and is usually painted a revolting color like the crayon marked Flesh in your old Crayola box. That is the great mystery of 20th-century life in the United States. Some questions can never be answered. What can be determined is that these houses do cost. The true costs of sprawl are passed on to the environment and the taxpayer-at-large. It's a perfect system, if you're a developer. For everyone else, including American society, it's "the biggest environmental disaster since the Dust Bowl," writes Rome. But the politics haven't jelled on the issue of sprawl, either nationally or locally. We may have a green-tinged supervisor or two. But every career bureaucrat in Tucson knows that his or her job is on the line if they buck the real estate developers and their cronies who run this town. This is another way that Tucson remains not just a small town, but small-time. Unsophisticated but powerful men like Jim Click, the ur dealmaker Don Diamond and their friends call the shots here. Make no mistake about it. As long as that remains the status quo, there will be uncontrolled sprawl in Tucson. There will be collateral damage. Some of it will be serious. Sprawl kills, as it turns out, and not just pygmy owls. I feel like a weenie now for complaining about the desert broom. Anyway, Mary-Kay O'Rourke, a research associate in respiratory sciences at the University of Arizona, tells me that's probably not it at all. The noxious plant bloomed months ago and there's not much evidence that the little seed parachutes now painting the air white can make you sick. Janice Bowers, the botanist and author, tells me that I might be allergic to mold. O'Rourke suggested juniper. She made me feel better by suggesting that allergies may be a sign of the strength of one's immune system. For some reason, people who get allergies aren't as susceptible to parasites. Before there was a Walgreen's on every corner, if a parasite infestation occurred people like me made it while non-sneezers died. "Of course, this is pure conjecture," she said. "But your misery might have something to do with natural selection." Too bad Dr. Hedges wasn't so lucky.
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