Eco City : Trees and High-Tech Industry Coexist in Palo Alto, Where Coffee Costs Less if You Bring a Mug
On a tree-shaded street of $500,000 homes, neatly tied stacks of newspapers and burlap sacks bulging with empty cans lie waiting for the weekly recycling truck in front of environmentally landscaped yards.
Recycling has been going strong here for almost 20 years, but xeriscaping--using drought-tolerant plants so yards need less watering--is all the rage these dry days.
In Palo Alto, birthplace of the Silicon Valley’s computer industry and home of Earth Day headquarters, the fascination with high-tech is matched by a commitment to a high quality of life and devotion to the environment.
Businessmen and women pedal to work on a 30-mile network of bike lanes, cruising past houses topped by solar energy panels.
Snowy egrets and great blue herons soar above marshes, and ducks splash in a pond in the city’s cherished baylands.
Hundreds of deer graze the hillside meadows of the city’s 1,500-acre Foothills Park. Mountain lions, bobcats and 11 species of snakes roam freely in the hills, and 150 kinds of birds delight hikers and picnickers.
Frank Zinn takes a break every day around noon to feed bread to ground squirrels in the baylands. The normally skittish creatures, who live in 8-foot deep burrows, let Zinn pet them.
“They’re kind of like my family,” Zinn said. “I was a still photographer in Hollywood and when I came back to this area I was worried that this whole place would be condominiums. I sure am glad they preserved all this.”
While 75% of the wetlands around San Francisco Bay have been filled in over the years, Palo Altans have worked to preserve their edge of the bay since the 1920s and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain its natural beauty.
“Wetlands are one of the most productive land forms in terms of wildlife,” said Emily Renzel, a City Council member who has led protection efforts. “Many animal species depend on them. To the extent that we are crowding out major segments of the animal population, we’re just setting ourselves up for disaster someday.
“Slowly but surely we’re creating a world in which we may be the only ones existing, and it may not be a very pretty world. I don’t think we want to be in a world without birds singing.”
Palo Alto is not without problems, of course. High-tech companies sometimes leak toxic chemicals, and older buildings waste too much energy.
But it is a small city with a big reputation, a pioneer in recycling since 1971, a center for solar energy research and a model of environmental responsibility for cities of any size.
It has won national awards for its bicycling and recycling programs, waste-water treatment and hazardous-waste disposal.
Halfway between the gray fog of San Francisco and the brown smog of San Jose, Palo Alto is seen in aerial photographs as a patch of green. A thick canopy of trees enriches the air with oxygen.
The redwood El Palo Alto--”the tall tree” used as a landmark by Spanish explorers in 1769--still stands nobly, though thin on top and slightly stooped.
The city of 56,000 that grew up around that tree and bucolic Stanford University has developed a passion for trees, especially after watching apricot and cherry orchards give way to aerospace, communications and electronic companies in the 1940s and ‘50s.
According to the city’s computerized tree inventory, 32,089 city-owned trees--the most popular are magnolias with big white blossoms--line the streets. Perhaps 10 to 15 times as many are privately owned, including birches, eucalyptuses and orange, lemon, plum, pear and almond trees that flourish in the Mediterranean climate of mild, moist winters and warm, dry summers.
In the Magic Forest, a small stand of redwoods in one of the city’s more than 50 parks, the air is as cool and refreshing as in the wilds of Yosemite.
For many Palo Altans, though, their view of the environment extends beyond the beauty of the land and the quality of the air and water, said Denis Hayes, Earth Day founder and a resident of Palo Alto, off and on, for more than 20 years.
“When a bunch of us were involved in trying to build a new environmental movement in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s,” he said, “the search was really for an all-encompassing set of values, a new ideology relevant to the 20th Century.”
A top priority, he said, was a desire to stop deterioration of the planet and encourage peace, justice and education.
In that broad context, he said, “Palo Alto is in many ways an idyllic kind of community. It aspires to become a new Athens. It really does promote that vision in the sense of having large democratic involvements in (national and international) statecraft and doing what it can to encourage art and athletics.”
No environmental danger escapes notice and no waste is tolerated in this city, where more than 70% of residents and 24 of the 30 leading generators of commercial waste participate regularly in recycling.
Newspapers, glass, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, corrugated cardboard, used motor oil, scrap metal, high-grade paper, mattresses, yard debris and used car batteries are collected either curbside or at drop-off centers.
This month, the City Council is expected to pass the nation’s first toxic gas ordinance--drafted by the Santa Clara County fire departments with help from Silicon Valley computer chip companies, environmentalists and lawmakers.
It is designed to control releases of poisonous gases and add enough safeguards to prevent a “Bhopal, India, type of disaster,” said Fire Marshal Phil Constantino. The model ordinance, under study by dozens of other cities, is a follow-up to a hazardous materials storage law, also the first in the nation, adopted by Palo Alto and neighboring cities in 1982.
Last year, the council prohibited all places that serve food from using containers made with ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. Downtown coffee shops offer coffee at 20 cents off for patrons who bring their own mugs instead of using Styrofoam cups.
Another ordinance, banning all non-recyclable, disposable polystyrene and rigid plastic food service items, is to go into effect July 1.
By the same date, auto service shops will be required to have equipment to capture the CFC-laden Freon that escapes during air conditioning repairs.
On Jan. 1, retail stores were required to offer a choice of paper or plastic bags.
Houses are expensive in Palo Alto--three-bedroom houses range from $300,000 to $1 million--but gas and electricity rates are generally at least 30% lower than the rest of the Bay Area, thanks to a city-owned utilities system.
Palo Alto Utilities, the only municipal agency in the state that provides gas, electricity and water, offers customers free analyses of energy and water use, as well as low-interest loans to install solar systems.
According to the 1980 Census, 14% of Palo Altans working there rode bicycles to their jobs. The current Census is expected to show a big increase.
“The more bicyclists you have, the fewer cars you have,” said Ellen Fletcher, a former council member and longtime bicycling advocate. “That reduces the pollutants in the air, the traffic and the need for more parking lots.”
Fletcher helped push through laws requiring companies with more than 50 employees to provide showers and bicycle parking spaces. She is urging the city to create a network of bicycle boulevards to make it easier to ride around town.
“It’s still a tough competition with the automobile,” she said. “The ultimate goal should be to make it as convenient to bicycle as it is to drive, and we haven’t quite gotten to that stage.”
One progressive Palo Alto drug research company, Alza Corp., pays employees up to $60 a month for using public transportation or $1 a day if they bike, jog, walk or ride in car pools to work.
“Our primary concern as a company is an environmental one,” said Alza executive Peter Carpenter. “Paying people not to drive and providing them with bike lockers and showers is also cheaper than building more parking spaces for cars.
“Instead of subsidizing cars, we’re subsidizing alternatives. It’s the free market approach. We’re giving people an incentive to leave their cars home.”
Yet Carpenter admits, somewhat sheepishly, “I still drive 90% of the time myself, which is horrible. . . . That’s the acid test, when you can get people like me to stop talking about getting out of their cars and start doing it.”
