Dead Space—First of Three Parts

Few places in this world are more sad than a derelict shopping mall. Built to face inward, its outer walls are dead space, often with no windows. Acres of empty parking lot surround it. On a windy day, old paper—flyers advertising sales in the stores, chewing gum wrappers, torn up shopping bags—whirl and flutter like the ghosts of some nightmare past. The doors are locked, usually chained, and any windows that were in the outer walls are boarded up and blank. One or two signs, sometimes with letters missing, mark the now-departed stores that were there. And all is silence.

More and more, in many places in the United States, we are seeing these dead hulks, as developers buy up green land, pave it, build a new mall, and then move on when business disappears or when the next mall down the road attracts all of the old mall's customers. The results are ugly and disheartening, and their larger implications hardly bear thinking about.

Each mall includes the inevitable parking lot, so enormous that finding one's car after shopping is often a major undertaking that wastes half an hour or more. Each parking lot, in its turn, replaced acres of grass, trees, or farmland. Even when it was successful, the mall contributed to problems with water runoff and pollution. Once it has become derelict, it still does—and it is often unclear who, if anyone, is responsible for cleaning up the mess and repairing the damage. Worse, the odds are that the mall has become derelict because another and almost certainly larger mall has superseded it. Thus to the problems created by the mall that is now derelict, we have added the problems created by the new mall that is (for the moment) successful. Both are, in ecological terms, dead space that is helping to destroy our planet.

The results of this kind of development can be dramatic. Forty years ago, Bucks County, just outside of Philadelphia, was the central character in a bucolic diary, Area Code 215: A Private Line in Bucks County, by Walter Teller. The book is a kind of modern Walden, with reflections on nature, farming, gardening, canals, and the neighbors. It is a comforting book to read. People go about their business; each day brings rain, sun, snow, clouds, and all shades of weather. There is no flooding or natural disaster in this book because in those days Bucks County was a kind and gentle environment.

The Bucks County that Teller describes has been gone for at least twenty years, victim of tract house development and mall-style retailing. Much of the farmland is gone and paved over. There are few derelict shopping malls, because Bucks County is prosperous. But there is plenty of dead space—and with it, flooding and natural disasters where before there were none. Some riverside communities now flood annually, although each year the residents hope that this flood will be the last.

It will not. There is too much paving and too little soil to absorb the rain. And in the long run, the busy malls that are the source of most of the problem may become less busy and be succeeded by bigger, gaudier ones. It is a cycle which, if we do not find a way to stop it, means nothing but trouble in the future.