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The greatest challenge of the coming century will be the consequences of an imbalanced atmosphere. Currently, projections of global heating due to an increasingly imbalanced atmosphere are dire, but they underestimate the near-term heating impacts of the growing concentrations of methane. Industrially mediated carbon capture and storage sometimes gets raised as a promising solution on the CO2 front, but it is presently commercially inviable. Despite these facts, we nonetheless need to act globally to reduce the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, although our increasingly separate information ecosystems make finding a way to express the reality of the atmospheric imbalance crisis to a wide audience daunting. One approach to presenting the atmospheric imbalances leading to global heating is to strip the discussion down initially to its bare bones with a sharp focus on the variables of the logistic growth equation. Although virtually anything can be politicized, the logistic growth equation’s variables are at least apolitical in their origin. After examining those variables, we can proceed to focus on density-dependent mortality factors (DDMFs) and their relationship to visible climatic changes driven by atmospheric imbalances. Both the Global North and the Global South need to do all that we do to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas accumulation, reducing DDMFs, while paying careful attention to Indigenous rights and to the need for global gender equity, so that our efforts to control DDMFs do not produce a new expression of colonialism.

This article describes two contesting paradigms of urban planning employed successively in Portland, Oregon; (1) urban planning typical of the US in the first half of the 20th Century that was focused on traffic and infrastructure, and (2) progressive urban planning focused on neighborhood livability and connections. It gives a history of their implementation in Portland, focusing on issues of racial and socioeconomic justice in the Albina neighborhood. Recent knowledge about air pollution’s impacts on human health, and infant and childhood development, are integrated into the discussion of urban planning. It describes racially and socioeconomically disproportionate access to urban green spaces, with the corresponding health implications. It also describes attempts to mitigate such health implications, sometimes resulting in “green gentrification” and displacement. The article asks if the results of the two paradigms of urban planning were objectively different from one another in terms of impacts on minority and disadvantaged communities. Future urban planning, and the need for human health concerns becoming central, are discussed.