Dreaming of A Green Christmas
A piece published in the Arizona Daily Star on Dec 10th, 2019
We don’t need sheets of snow and freezing temperatures to enjoy holiday traditions here in Tucson. We get along fine pretending it’s actually cold enough to break out our thickest winter coats to see Downtown’s Parade of Lights or stroll through Winterhaven. Tucsonans can still roast chestnuts on an open fire — even though ours turn out noticeably more mesquite smoked — but most of us prefer Christmas Tamales steaming over boiling water anyway. We even get to enjoy the beauty of fallen snow…from a distance as it crawls down the Catalinas. But there is one Tucson holiday tradition that needs to become a thing of the past.
If your holidays are anything like mine, they are filled with family and friends returning home to visit from wherever their lives and careers have taken them. We chat about the Wildcats, tell them all the new foodie spots they need to try and reminisce over nostalgic favorites; and without fail someone asks the once-Tucsonan, “do you think you’d ever move back to Tucson?” With a glimmer of hope their response is always the same, “Yeah we would love to. There just aren’t enough jobs here for it to make sense.” It is time we make that response — that Tucson holiday tradition — a thing of Christmas Past.
You may say that every city has its ex-pats who make excuses to not move back to their hometown; but, Tucson is too large of a city and filled with too much untapped potential for “jobs” to be this common of a refrain. So as we approach the new year, and welcome a new mayor and City Council members, let’s continue to push our leadership to make improving Tucson’s economic health a major priority.
Now, Mayor Romero made Climate Change a major pillar of her campaign, listing it above Infrastructure, Jobs and Public Safety on her platform’s webpage. If Mayor Romero wants to fulfill her campaign promise of a more Climate-minded Tucson, she will hopefully do so by making Tucson a leader in renewable energy and sustainability industries and not just another follower; buying green products from companies in other thriving cities or recycling low-hanging Climate Change agendas.
Imagine what Tucson could accomplish if we had the foresight to capitalize on our existing engineering and high tech R&D talent pools, world class university, local passion for Climate Change and aggressively courted and incubated Green Tech companies and made it possible for them to call Tucson home. We are too talented and too caring of a city for our determination to max out at simply spending citizens’ tax dollars planting trees and switching our bus fleet to electric powered. Not only could we become a positive chapter in the renewable energy story, but we’d place Tucson in an emerging market, paving the way for our loved ones to return home to or grow into a new collection of well-paying jobs.
No amount of heritage projects or historic districting can make up for poor economic decisions that force our children — our most treasured heritage — to move away in search of a city that welcomes their potential. We can make wise infill development decisions that protect our history and environment while simultaneously encouraging economic and business-friendly initiatives that will make it possible for our loved ones to not only live in Tucson but to genuinely thrive and progress their family’s legacy here. Tucson needs to put the “Yeah we’d love to, but…” holiday tradition behind us. We can make Tucson a leader, not a follower; a place where sustainability solutions are discovered not just purchased. We just need our leadership to believe the same.
