Four decades after Joni Mitchell wrote and sang the lines “They paved paradise.  And put up a parking lot”, we still haven’t learned.  So now, we’ve got shopping malls everywhere.

Earth-balling explained

We talked about it in the previous post, and how it was inherently difficult to make them eco-friendly as possible.  We thought that was the end of the discussion, but we were wrong.  We forgot one important thing.

The trees.

Don’t get us wrong: we adore malls.  Whether we like it or not, our whole lives have come to revolve around the convenience and comfort and wide array of choices in products and services offered by malls.  Simply put, our society cannot imagine a life without malls.

But for every wide, sprawling mall that gets built, trees no doubt have had to give up their lives, as well as the thriving ecosystem of plants, birds, small animals, and insects living there.  It seems silly, but that’s the reality.  Trees had to be cut down in order to make way for supposedly green buildings—the very reason why eco-friendly shopping malls continue to be an oxymoron and a challenge to green builders.

Keeping and Moving Trees

Builders have an elegant—yet depressing—solution to this problem of trees.  Cut what needs to be cut but keep and save a few ones for show purposes.  The result is that a few (two or three) trees are left intact, which the builder has decided were too lovely and grand to be cut down.  Landscaping takes care of the area around the now-alone tree—some graceful ferns and low-lying bushes and shrubs that beautifully frame and soften the area.

When finally unveiled to the public, the shopping malls comes out looking fresh and green, as if it has rightly done its part for the environment.  And the public in turn conveniently adopts an amnesiac attitude—they immediately forget there were ever trees standing there in the first place, before the mall took over.  Over time, the amnesia becomes permanent, as the mind gets distracted by all that merchandise and shiny new things.  We forget the land used to be a forest, or a rice field, or a marshland; to our minds, it simply was a mall ever since.

Nor is earth-balling a better solution.  Earth-balling is a process where the soil around the tree are scooped out in a ball shape so as to preserve the tree’s root system for transplanting later.  It’s not always 100{e3829ec1db02d54faaf9fa2de0d48db26af01d7a7944a63c3b26976124791cab} effective as different trees have different root systems.  It only puts stress on trees from the shock of transplant.  Still, any effort to transplant trees is better than none.  The industry is still coming up with ways on safer transplanting process that doesn’t harm trees as much, but inarguably any solution would be inevitably invasive.

So What Can Be Done for Our Shopping Malls?

So this is why malls can never be inherently eco-friendly.  A lot of resources had to be poured into the venture, a lot of sacrifices had to be done.  The least we can do is to make them as energy- and water efficient as possible.  Also, we have to plan the transportation and walking route for easy access to everyone.  And to make daily operations and maintenance as low-impact as possible.

Our society has learned to turn a blind eye to all those trees unnecessarily giving up their lives just so one more shopping mall can be built.  It’s true that making cities more compact than ever is more sustainable than urban sprawl, but if we can spare that last remaining patch of forest land in our city, where’s the harm in that?