Death by a million trucks

The movie “Rob Roy,” starring Liam Neeson and Tim Roth, features an epic battle scene in 18^th Century Scotland. Roth’s character chooses a light sword to go up against the much larger man with a broadsword. A broadsword wasn’t necessarily heavy but when it connected with your neck or head would immediately shatter bones into pulp, or if it connected with your upper arm there would be nothing humerus about it.

So the broadsword misses Roth’s head and he lunges in with the light sword—flick flick flick. It isn’t long before the larger opponent is covered in blood and bleeding profusely—and suffers what we call death by a thousand cuts.

One cigarette butt on the beach is the same, with these things being the single-most littered item in the U.S.—releasing benzene and arsenic and the same polyaromatic hydrocarbons that are in diesel exhaust into our drinking water, some 120 billion every year—death by a billion butts, as it were.

In the Town of Riverhead, we are now faced with more than 10 million square feet of warehousing and e-commerce distribution centers. Nobody seems to know or nobody is telling us exactly how many diesel burning trucks are going to be required for their operations.

I’m free to assume for the moment that 3,000 trucks a day will be added to our local roads, flicking at our already frazzled nerves.

That’s some 90,000 truck trips every month which equals one million truck trips every year, pouring out not just carbon dioxide but the waste of burned heavy diesel fuel — nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, small soot particles that cross the membrane of our lungs and enter our blood stream — and asbestos from brake dust, all emitted into the air that we are required to breathe. We have no choice.

Every day, 240,000 cars leave Long Island carrying a single occupant to work. Ten hours later, those same 240,000 cars return home—every weekday, 250 days a year for the last 50 years. The cumulative effects of this pollution has caused the DEC to stop testing our air quality three times a day, opting instead to test just once a day because the air is never below the safe threshold. Suffolk County is known for having the worst air quality in New York State.

Asthma in our children, COPD in our elderly—and not so elderly—and Stage 4 lung cancer in Long Islanders who never smoked cigarettes.

Death by a million trucks.

We have an option before us. A moratorium is the most sensible one. Like listening to a song playing on a music player, we can simply hit the pause button. We can pick up where we left off if we choose, or we might realize that it’s not fitting our mood once it’s stopped.

Declaring a pause on some 14 million square feet of development is not admitting defeat in any way—it’s just a way of thinking about the cumulative impacts these projects will have on our population, our people. To take the time to consider how every decision we make impacts the shared vision of our community stretching out, not just for the next 20 years, but the next 100, because these buildings may still be standing a century from now. To take the time to ask ourselves and our businesses if we are going to do the bare minimum as it affects our people or if we’re going to go an extra mile to make our health and welfare the more important consideration?

Can we build into our comprehensive plan the concepts of creating businesses that support us not just financially but socially and environmentally as well? Can we find architects and designers and builders who build not just for the least they can do in the cheapest, fastest ways possible, but to award ourselves buildings that create more energy than they consume? Can we incentivize people to do their best with everyone in mind?

These are not simple decisions but they are commonsense choices which will only present themselves to us if we create them.

Let us pause.  Let us think.  Together.

Because that’s how a democracy works best.

Mark Haubner is president of the North Fork Environmental Council. He also serves as co-chairperson of the Riverhead Town Environmental Advisory Committee and is a member of the town’s Central Advisory Committee for the comprehensive plan update. He lives in Aquebogue.