Some of us in the urban creeks restoration movement were treated to the first signs of the last throes of an automobile/land use fad as big as the country it transformed. Yesterday (November 6,2006) members of the community activist group in Berkeley, California called Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza met with one of the representatives of the car culture that rocketed to prominence after the Second World War and is now approaching a sputtering turn around.
The local story is that our group wants to bring back a block of Strawberry Creek to the city’s downtown, while the University of California has recruited a hotel developer to build a project that would place a building right up to the present street line, rather than setting the building back in various places to make room for a creek and plaza.
Yesterday, our guest at a luncheon meeting and a local businessman, and in addition a recent student of the computer graphics application called SketchUp, showed us simplified renderings of a possible creek “water feature” heading down Center Street with a lane of traffic along its edge. He repeated more than five times that hundreds of pedestrian malls in city centers were disasters – he’d traveled the country widely and did some research on the Internet to confirm that. When many of us present pointed out that there were many successes as well as failures and added that there are many pedestrian streets that are extremely successful and well loved in Europe and other parts of the world, he explicitly said models from outside the country were irrelevant since Americans love their cars.
He referred to the effect if the creek were not very shallow as a “revine,” and so, presented an almost straight line channel to carry some fraction of the creek water in a trench one to five feet deep symbolically through the city center, while out of hand rejecting any discussion of shifting the building footprint.
Well, that’s exactly what the group is all about: defining the building footprint so that there could be a creek and pedestrian plaza to grace the city center. He did do a good job re-convincing us that trying to create anything that looked remotely like a creek within the present street edge would look terrible. I said I’d rather have no creek at all than a trench with water that would give a bad reputation to creek daylighting in the future (daylighting meaning bring up buried creeks into the light of day).
But more importantly, there is the larger historical perspective that the discussion brings up.
While writing the following in a note to my fellow creek activists it dawned on me that expositions like our guest’s show a massive historic trend, powered by oil and the absurd build out of suburbia to the strained limits of both, both oil and suburbia, that is now turning around before our very eyes. Here’s what I said in my note to Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza:

Our guest reiterated many times that there are hundreds of mall failures in the US and precious few successes. I think he exaggerates on the negative and also that precedent, though often helpful, is not strictly required. Berkeley can be creative and can actually take the lead here, as it has in a number of other instances – first creek “daylighting” in the US, first Ecology Center, first to disinvest in Apartheid South Africa, first Styrofoam ban, first dog park, first police car radios! and many other firsts. Berkeley could do something that isn’t precisely modeled in the past, like our Strawberry Creek Plaza which we propose would be a combination creek opening, pedestrian street part of the way and a plaza set into the environment. Do we really need an exact precedent here? Partial precedents – and leadership again for the city – are good enough.

But perhaps why so many malls failed should be mentioned and our guest’s observation of that is at least partially true, if incomplete in omitting the many successes. The failures generally cited happened to be at a particular time in recent history and people have been generalizing every since without pointing out the time frame. The really large spate of failures was because of a disinvestment in the downtowns and new investment in car-dependent sprawl that occurred between the Second World War and about the beginning of the 21st century. Many other disinvestments contributed to killing whole town centers along with their pedestrianized streets, too. In fact I would say it was heroic for people to even try city center malls in the circumstances. They were conscientious people doing everything they could to save something very valuable.
I know a brilliant planner and author named Ken Schneider who is known only to people who have been searching for creative answers to urban problems and people who have followed the history and theory of cities for a long time. His books were published in the 1970s and 1980s. He was one of the heroic planners in the 1960s of the Fresno Mall, a project stuck in the middle of the worst time in history to be working for the pedestrian. I tell his story in my book, Ecocities. The Fresno Mall is frequently cited as a disaster – and it was, but not for the short-sighted reasons generally stated. The real reason was that at the same time planners there were struggling to attract people to the center, the city made decisions to close a large downtown hospital and a large hotel and move them way out of the downtown area. The IRS also set up its center three miles from downtown. Thus thousands of employees were decamped to the suburbs as well as placing the people far from the center in new low-density, car-dependent development. And by now we are all familiar with the big box destruction of city centers in towns everywhere epitomized by Wal-Mart.

One can say – “Hey! People love their cars so that’s just the way it is.” But no such phenomenon as the Fresno Mall failure is happening in communities today. Except for on the distant fringes of megalopolis sprawl and around smaller towns, there just isn’t much room left and commutes of more than two hours a day are just too ridiculous. Cities are now surrounded by such vast areas of sprawl you can’t just build new sprawl three miles in every direction – it’s already there. You can’t even build ten or fifteen miles in every direction because there are Bays and coast and parks, etc. thank God!, as well as sprawl already soundly established.
Moreover, as we approach and pass Peak Oil production world wide we will see gasoline prices continue climbing and alternatives will prove to be expensive or very destructive. Ethanol, for example, is about the price of gasoline now and millions of acres of farmland are now being impressed to feed cars instead of people. This is a social justice issue as well as an ecological one.
Finally, the “love affair” with the car is growing a bit old, stuck in traffic jams, wasting thousands of hours every year, paying enormous bills for the habit, gagging on pollution and worrying about global heating and being run over by humongous SUVs. Times have changed and we’d better grow up beyond that old courtship stage, which many of us enjoyed in the back seats of our now aging, if still voracious car culture.

Basically people ARE reinvesting in downtowns, as we see in housing, conference center, hotel and museum coming to downtown Berkeley and such projects coming to many other places in the country. This is a historic opportunity of a very positive sort. Let’s welcome it and take the lead – the historic moment is now!

My Dear Blog Readers,

I just learned of an article in the New York Times indirectly praising our very own Google (which I use almost every day). It has funded the Google Foundation which is now set to promote better cars. I met Larry Brilliant once upon a time in a basement in Berkeley - about 1976 - and he showed us a slide show of his work putting an end to smallpox!

Fantastic! It was absolutely wonderful work.

Now he's working for Google Foundation as its CEO and screwing up royally.

With his help we might go on NOT solving the Triple Crisis of our place in NOT just history but evolution: global heating, mass species extinctions and Peak Oil. Talk about wasting precious time on side trips destined to change practically nothing while prolonging the destruction!

I wrote to him about ecological cities when he became head of Google Foundation and of course I never heard back. Who am I to say that cars can't really be fixed, that they never existed for the first and much more decent 4,500 years of urban history? Neither are they the wave of the future if we don't have massive extremely cheap energy, which as you dear readers know will not be available. In fact, the very fact that we thought we had endless cheap energy is where the climate/species/Peak Oil debacle came from.

Anyway, I thought I'd write him again, good spirit that I happen to know he really is, but this time it's an open letter to you too. Maybe somebody can get through to him!

Very best,

Your infrequent but sincere blogger,

Richard Register

Hello Larry Brilliant -

Or those gate-keepers who might decide whether or not to send this on to him,

You really should take this seriously:

Reading Katie Hafner's piece in yesterday's New York Times (September 14, 2006) on Google Foundation's help to hybrid cars, please think about the fact that one cannot pull a part out of a living system, as for example pulling a heart out of a human being, make it half as large, and put it back in, and hope for an improvement. Expect the worst, not the best.

The car is part of a whole "living system" with all parts integral to one another, not unlike a literally living organism. The built infrastructure of our current city/town/village is this:

Cars/sprawl/paving/cheap energy infrastructure.

It happens to be a pathological system, but nonetheless it functions basically like any living organism with integral organs, one of which happens these days to be cars.

To "improve" the car is to fool ourselves that we are improving the whole system. In fact we are making it possible for people to expand sprawl development because these parts of the whole do not exist in isolation from one another any more than do our organs, bones, muscles, sense organs and so on do.

Thus "bettering" the car expands geographically and perpetuates in time the disastrous infrastructure we have now that is gobbling land, killing 500,000 people in "accidents" facilitated by policy (that which builds roads and promotes car ownership), paving agriculture, competing with hungry people for fertile soil as ethanol production from agriculture surpasses food production in many parts of the world so elitists can continue driving while many of those 90% of the world's population who don't own cars are hungry and some of them actually starving...

Consider this: the car costs about 55 barrels of oil to manufacture and burns up about 5.5 barrels worth of oil a year while operating at US average rate of driving about the sprawling infrastructure we call home. Assuming ten years average of active life before being wrecked or retired, that means the typical car uses the same amount of energy in moving about as in production. This means energy conservation in the car is pretty limited and hardly the cure all promoted by energy-conserving car buffs who hope to be able to drive forever, despite the fact that they are only 1/10th of the world's people and their driving causes the vastly larger proportion of damage to the planet and its biosphere and climate system.

AND THIS ISN'T EVEN CONSIDERING THE AMOUNT OF ENERGY REQUIRED TO BUILD THE

+ HIGHWAYS,
+ PARKING LOTS,
+ PARKING STRUCTURES,
+ SALES AND
+ REPAIR SHOPS,
+ SHIPS AND
+ PIPELINES HAULING OIL AND GASOLINE,
+ CRACKING PLANTS
+ MILITARY AIRCRAFT AND
+ ENERGY GUZZLING HUMVEES
+ AND BOMBS,
+ GUNS AND
+ BULLETS TO KEEP THE PRICES DOWN AND TRADE PROFITABLE
AND SO ON.

THIS IS ALSO NOT CONSIDERING THE
+ AGRICULTURAL AND
+ NATURAL LANDSCAPES SACRAFICED TO SCATTERED DEVELOPMENT,
NOR THAT FACT THAT
+ POISONOUS CHEMICALS ARE INJECTED INTO THE BIOSPHERE FROM THE USE OF THE THINGS DAMAGING LOCAL ECOLOGIES (electric cars powered by nukes?!) AND
+ PLANETARY CLIMATE,
+ AND A WONDERFUL RESORUCE OF FOSSIL CHEMICALS ARE DESTROYED WITH A SINGLE BURNING.

Making the car more energy efficient (and dangerous in the process, by the way) ends up being a very small fraction of the problem that making it more energy efficient is supposed to solve.

So the "better" car is strictly an illusion and you should get with redesigning the city, town and village for people, not cars. THAT whole organism would look like this:

Pedestrian and bicycle oriented compact development supported by transit, especially the most efficient with such compact development, meaning rail, running on renewable energy (at least people are catching on to that!) - but a very small amount of energy since the infrastructure would require very little energy in the first place.

THAT'S IT! One longish sentence.

Fund that, not continuing destruction of the planet so an elite can drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive.....

Richard Register

By Richard Register

A bicyclist friend of mine appeared the other day in a T-shirt reading, “Ask me how I lost 3,600 pounds in a day.” By getting rid of his car, obviously! I’m going to be talking about some of the big things we are going to need to change. For example, designing cities around something that weights 3,600 pounds instead of whatever you weigh, is something that needs to change. I’m hoping you will have your sense of proportion honed some and will hear some useful ideas for making your own city and planet a little healthier, or in fact, a lot healthier.

I’m going to be talking today about something that sounds rather ambitious, namely solving the crisis millions of people are being alerted to by Al Gore’s new movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” In fact, beyond solving global heating, the subject of that film, I’m going to claim to have one of the most important solutions to that and the crisis of species extinctions and the crisis that is called these days “Peak Oil,” “Peak Oil” being the period of time when world oil production tops out and begins sliding away forever. If yesterday’s announced new Chevron oil field in the Gulf of Mexico proves to be a large one, the date of peak oil production will be pushed back only a very small fraction of the lifetime of this limited resource on this planet. And ironically, the longer we can feel secure in having the oil to burn, the worse for climate stability by way of CO2 build up in the atmosphere.

This conundrum can be avoided by building a civilization that runs on a small fraction of today’s energy requirements. For the small amount of energy it does require, though intrinsically more expensive than today’s fossil fuels, it can be renewable energy like solar and wind. Such a civilization would be one of ecologically healthy cities, towns and villages. Such built communities, a goal now since none actually exist, are ever more widely becoming known as “ecocities.”

Without too much elaboration I need to say now, for clarity later in my talk, that my information suggests that solar and wind energy will never be cheap in the way that oil has been cheap in the past. This is so because we will have to do the work that the biology and geology of planet Earth did for us in concentrating solar energy in the fossil chemicals over something more than 150 million years. Renewable energy sources are diffuse and need human work and developed technologies in order to be concentrated into useable form. The Earth’s endowment of oil and natural gas is going fast, replacements like coal and nuclear are more expensive, environmentally damaging and toxic, and even sources of energy like hydropower are more tenuous in the long run than we’d like to believe. Dams fill up with silt. Having grown up in New Mexico I’m familiar with dams that are already useless, surrealistic planes of sand with cottonwood trees and sage brush right up to the edge of the dry spillways.

Take ethanol, too, for example. That’s grain alcohol, mainly from corn in the United States. If the United States were to drive its fleet of cars on ethanol it would need to dedicate more than its entire agricultural land area to producing the fuel. The social equity and justice issue here becomes gigantic: would we really rather use farmlands to feed our cars than feed people? If that sounds like a distant possibility, perhaps a theme for a Blade Runner type movie, it is not. It’s actually here and now and growing rapidly. Already 10 million acres of land are given over to ethanol production for motor vehicles in the United States. That’s about halfway between the total land area of Maryland and West Virginia.

Again, what replacements we have for our recently cheap energy sources are either more dangerous or environmentally destructive or expensive. The solution is to build a civilization that uses precious little energy, or in other words, uses it very well. By use it very well I mean use it to bring civilization into harmony with nature for the long haul.

Returning to our crisis of the three linked crises in climate, biodiversity and energy, it is important to notice just how large it is and thus to give it absolute top priority for our attentions and efforts. It’s effects are changing evolution on the planet as much as any mass extinction in the Earth’s multi-billion year past, and therefore I’ll use the term “ultimate crisis” which a friend of mine named David Greenberg has been using for a number of months. It is a crisis of unprecedented scale and, as the melting of the Earth’s glaciers and the disasters of Hurricane Katrina illustrate, a crisis already well underway. Putting the contribution of ecological city redesign into perspective can give us a clear strategy, something very close to what Lester Brown has lately been calling a Plan B for surviving and thriving on this planet. However, there are major contradictions in his approach that I’ll discuss shortly, and Al Gore’s approach as well. Building ecological cities, however, resolves these contradictions and empowers what could be a truly effective strategy for, as Buckminster Fuller called it, “human success.”

Changing a light bulb and inflating your tires more, planting a tree and driving a little less, as Mr. Gore prescribes among his ten things to do to start solving the climate change crisis, is not going to do the trick. It’s going to require a truly fundamental shift in how we build our cities and live in them. In all honesty, how could solutions be easy when confronting a crisis of this enormous scale? How could we just continue living essentially as we are?

Yet at the same time I’m saying confronting this crisis and solving this overarching problem will be difficult, I’ll make the assertion that if we put in the real imagination, clear thinking and hard work required, our children will reap the reward of a world far more beautiful and lively than can be imagined by any extrapolation of the best of today’s ways of doing things.

I can say this, and it sounds good enough, but if you look around you notice cars dominate cities thoroughly in the rich countries and they are swamping the poor countries more every day as well. Car factories and highways are being built rapidly in China and India with massive investment from the big auto companies and loans from the World Bank. Many cities, like Berkeley, where I lived for 29 years, haven’t a single pedestrian street – and their citizens don’t even notice how completely given over to the car their towns are. Evidently, then, we have not progressed very far toward establishing the city for pedestrians and the city based on ecological awareness. It is also interesting to note that only one out of ten people on the planet actually drive cars (which is hard to believe in America and world culture big cities, though true) and they, through the automobile/sprawl pattern of development, are causing a vastly disproportionate share of planetary damage. The operative plan today is to vastly increase their numbers. Very bad plan!

The difficultly, I believe, is partially psychological: people are afraid of change (though I for one am much more afraid of what will happen if we don’t change). I say people must be afraid of change because the concepts behind the ecological city are fairly simple. Here they are: Switch to a pedestrian and transit oriented infrastructure with ecocity architecture built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit. Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture. Attach renewable energy systems while making things recyclable and using non-toxic materials and technologies.

There you have it! Only three short sentences for the essence of it. Not so difficult conceptually. The whole pattern can be characterized as shifting development toward centers of high diversity.

There is another difficulty in communicating about and actually building ecological cities, too, and that is that we have built cities for cars for the last 100 years and thus many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just to low to allow efficient, affordable transit.

Nonetheless, there are tools available and we can start moving in the right direction immediately. Some of the tools that can help us actually build ecological cities I’ll mention at the end of this talk, but for now note that in may places, such as San Francisco, Chicago and Portland, and even better in Curitiba, Brazil, a certain amount of this “ecocity” thinking is already going on. While people feel dependent on cars, nonetheless even Americans greatly enjoy car-free environments such as the plazas and parks that do exist, malls and playgrounds, sports fields and fairs, festival and expositions. Also, creeks and urban waterways that do exist are much loved in places like San Luis Obispo, California, Boulder, Colorado and San Antonio, Texas.

I started out saying, “Ask me how I lost 3,600 pounds in a day.” Cars are big and the infrastructure that provides for them is even much bigger yet. On our way to doing a good job of prioritizing what needs to be done, this is an important point and I’ll flesh it out with a little more detail now.

If one designs an infrastructure - buildings, streets and open spaces and systems for supply, recycling and disposal – to go along with one set of things that are 30 time bigger and heavier than the other, car bodies versus human bodies, very different results are likely, right? What if the heavy things move about ten to twenty times faster than the light-weight ones when functioning in their usual way, accelerating and decelerating constantly, burning up energy the whole time? Basic physics suggests enormous quantitative and qualitative differences between design parameters. The mass/energy/spatial requirements of cars, as compared to human beings, is on the order of hundreds to one. What if one runs on a toxic fuel that is profoundly transforming the entire atmosphere into an artificial bubble of gasses with a substantially different composition than the planet had for at least 400,000 years, maybe even millions of years while the other eats cereal for breakfast? What about cities designed and planned to satisfy the requirements of such hurtling 3,600 pound objects, such requirements as massive parking structures and freeway interchanges. What about requiring “Big Digs” like Boston’s in which, for tens of billions of dollars, people one at a time in big steel, glass and plastic boxes, can rush from Suburb #1. over to Suburb #2. – which look almost just like Suburb #1. – right under the center of massive downtown buildings and very, very wet waterways? If it sounds a little insane, it think it really is. Especially at this time in history when we are waking up to the triple ultimate emergency.

Could it be that such automobile based cities would be substantially different from cities designed on the parameters of the human body, its speed and its requirements for food, exercise, physical space, rest, culture, inspiration and beauty? Absolutely. Maybe human beings even need and love nature itself, no matter how deeply such “biophilia” might be buried in our everyday world of asphalt, manufactured splendor and intervening suburban sprawl. Could in fact cities be built for humans on foot and for the healthiest conceivable natural world possible?

This is my starting point: I think cities can be built for just these purposes, but to accomplish such a positive goal, we will actually have to talk about it directly, openly, honestly and think it through like I am trying to do here today. We have to get past the psychological resistance to discussing it. On the positive side it is heartening to note that cities used to be built for pedestrians. The cores of some such cities remain in Europe and some in China, though in China they are being bulldozed to dust as we speak. Some cities like Venice, Italy, the Medina of Fez and a hilly Gulongyu, China are 100% car-free – and very successful. As they say in general, so it applies to car-free pedestrian cities: “If they exist they are possible.” We can build ecological cities and we will if we are ever to solve this looming triple ultimate crisis.

The Biggest Things We Build

Now this next part of my talk I’m calling “Cities – The Biggest Things We Build” because I want to emphasize dealing with the appropriate scale. If we have a big problem we need a big solution, simple as that.

Thus I think it is puzzling no end that almost no one connects the largest things we build – our cities – to the largest problems that we are experiencing, much less connects them to solutions to those problems. But that seems to be the case. Consider this story: I was the convener of the First International Ecocity Conference in 1990, followed by four more conferences, one each in Australia, Senegal, Brazil and China. Next comes India, number six, in December. At the first of these conferences our keynote speaker was Denis Hayes, chief organizer of Earth Day in 1970 and past director of the US Solar Energy Research Institute, dismantled by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Denis’ major point was that despite all the good progress we had been making in the environmental movement, all the battles we had won, all the good laws and policies, adjustments in lifestyles and better recycling and energy conservation and so on, somehow in regard to the largest problems of all - chief among which he cited climate change and species extinctions - we were losing the war. To “win the war” he proposed that we needed vision, and in particular the sort of vision we might attain by looking at the way whole cities are designed, built and function. Then, at another talk ten years later, I saw him say almost exactly the same thing as we were entering our new century.

His keynote at our conference was powerful and inspiring but a little vague, delivering neither an image of such cities nor the tools that might be used to built them. But my main point now is that we haven’t won that war for the health of the environment, and in fact are worse off now than ever simply because we never confronted the largest things we build. We said, “Let’s change a light bulb and fill our tires up more,” rather than, “Let’s face the big one.” We still have not looked the city dead in the eye and said, “Hey, what’s really going on here? How is this thing structured? Why does it consume so much land and energy and cause so much environmental and human damage?”

If we do look fairly closely at cities we can see they are what is known as “whole systems,” and that they function something like living organisms. Their main organs are linked together complementing each other’s services for the benefit of the whole and relating the whole to its environment, its resource base if you will, in a way that could be of reciprocal benefit to all organs and the whole organism. The city’s organs include structures for living and working, education and shopping, recreation and entertainment, manufacturing and distribution, transportation and, there are the various networks of nature and resources that connect with and support the city.

If we take this view we can notice immediately that the whole organism of the city we’ve been constructing for the last 150 years has been built on the basis of linking functions through ever lengthening strands of connection. First there were rails and trains and streetcars, then much more massively, highways, cars and trucks. Now, in the wealthy world, our cities are whole systems made up of low-density development called suburbs, largely “single use” downtowns called Central Business Districts, and cars, asphalt and paving covering vast areas of land. This was all supported by an oil infrastructure that stretches from our local gas stations out to our 725 American military bases scattered around the world and heavily concentrated in and around the Middle East and Central Asian oil fields. This scattered city of suburbs is very, very big. With its far flung support systems, says social critic and author James Howard Kunstler, it constitutes “the greatest misallocation of resources in history.” This diffuse structure of the city has been based on fossil fuel energy that became cheaper and cheaper for a long 150 years. Now is getting more and more expensive as it is approaching peak oil production, and after that, it will slide into oblivion and higher prices due to scarcity – for such is the fate of any non-renewable resource that is burnt up instead of recycled.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Cities can be designed for pedestrians and bicyclists, taking up very small areas of land in more compact development. Taller buildings with rooftop gardens and solar greenhouses can be linked to other buildings with pedestrian connections between rooftops and terraces above ground level, making city centers intimately accessible to people on foot. While we are adding population and ecological architecture in pedestrian/transit centers we can be gradually removing low density development farthest from those centers and opening up landscapes for restoration of buried creeks, expansion of parks and community gardens, preservation and recovery of open ridgelines with beautiful views, open spaces for recycling and so on.

If one imagines today’s typical metropolis of low density development and scattered higher density city centers linked by freeways it is possible to imagine a transition in which city centers, district centers and neighborhood centers are becoming much more “mixed use,” as planners say, with more people moving closer to jobs and commerce in areas that can be served well by bicycles and transit. We can imagine city centers in which creek restoration projects open up landscapes beside public plazas as counterpoint to the taller buildings, and we can imagine that the presence of nature in this form is celebrated in conjunction with the gathering places for people. Here, culture and nature link and reinforce one another in this manner. People acknowledge the healthy union of both culture and nature in their architecture and layout of public open spaces. Higher places in buildings celebrate nature by bringing people up into the beautiful views provided by higher elevations in the city. Having public accessibility to rooftop terraces, restaurants and cafes, shops, promenades and mini-parks elevated into the view where we can watch weather developing and rolling across the landscape and enjoy sunsets and sunrises is a powerful contribution to understanding our place in nature.

Meantime, while development shifts toward the centers, bicycle and pedestrian paths begin to reach into the suburban fabric beside formerly buried creeks that are restored, reviving natural plant and animal communities along with refreshed water circulation and filtration. Community gardens and parks appear and expand along these networks of waterways and bicycle paths. Where buildings are dilapidated or damaged by fire, termites, earthquakes, floods or dry rot in these areas, they are removed rather than replaced with new low-density, car-dependent development. With time, larger agricultural areas reappear, and nature can reach in to meet citizen rather than citizen having to drive for half and hour or more through the suburbs to get “out” to nature. In addition, real wilderness expands into areas now invaded by sprawl, and some far-flung patches of exurban sprawl find their centers, add ecologically informed development there and become vital towns and villages with a real connection to the land. They become beautiful, lively, productive places to live in and visit.

Contrary to this vision I’m asking you to contemplate now, many architects and planners claiming to represent something they call “good urbanism” say that city is city and nature is nature and never the twain shall meet. Creek restoration projects I’ve been involved in have been opposed by such architects and planners.

I think this is one of the worst ideas in vogue in architecture and city planning circles today. If we don’t dramatically celebrate nature as brought into cities in small but rich ways, such as by way of waterway restoration with some actual living critters such as fish, crawdads, dragonflies, humming birds and butterflies, then we are in serious trouble. We are already in trouble as evidenced by global heating and species dying all around the planet, and we are in worse trouble if we continue to extend into the future ideas that banish nature from city dwellers. If the biggest things we build are our cities, then it is one of the biggest mistakes we can make to exclude the experience of nature from people who live in them. But if we learn from nature and we come to understand our cultural foundations in nature, we can then understand what sort of foundation in land use patterns and design we need for so-called sustainable cities.

Prioritization

Now in this section of my talk I’d like to make a special point of prioritization. Denis Hayes says we need vision, but equally importantly, maybe even more importantly, I think we need a sense of proportion and the ability to prioritize very, very well. After all, a spectacular vision can be corrupting and corruptible and is generally harshly criticized as utopian. So a fairly good vision will probably be good enough and we can improve on it as we go. I think ecocities are one such imperfect but very adaptable vision. Former Mayor Jamie Lerner of Curitiba, Brazil, perhaps the worlds most advanced practitioner of ecological city design, building and administration has said that city planning is “a very forgiving process” – you learn along the way and if the feedback is negative you amend your plan and continue on. That’s an applicable vision, a practical one.

But to prioritize the must-do-now things, in times when time itself is getting short, is of crucial importance. I’ll illustrate this with the following set of observations:

Recently at a book store I saw a title advancing 1001 ways to improve our world in difficult times. Shortly after, a friend said he’d like to subtitle a book of his something like “One Hundred Inconvenient Truths.” This is, of course, taking off from the current interest in Al Gore’s recent movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

I responded saying that 100 different scrambled problems and solutions was too random, too lacking in a system or order, wasn’t cognizant of the way ecological systems really work and would perpetuate not doing anything effective while precious time slips away. The number 100 was too big, much less the number 1001, the differences between the “truths,” whatever they might be, muddled by the grab bag quality of mixing oranges and apples - much less throwing in blueberries and watermelons and poisonous and medicinal fruits to boot. People tend to take the easy one and think they were making progress - while postponing the difficult ones as precious time slips away.

But there is one approach that looms far larger than anything else I can think of: getting a sense of proportion and learning to prioritize. If we can do that then we will see there are 5 big inconvenient truths under which all others are subsumed. Understanding this approach we can sort out the real solutions in the confusion we see seething about us now. We can eliminate the paltry and the contradictory steps and get on with doing something relevant and powerful. I’ll propose these as the five big inconvenient truths we have to deal with. They expand beyond ecocity building, but they outline the larger picture and provide the larger context very well I believe.

#1. Inconvenient big truth number one. Humanity is overpopulated and must reduce its numbers, and do it peacefully since violence replicates and amplifies itself. This is not a racist statement in the slightest as often claimed by people victimized by actual racists making the statement in the past or still making it today. It is instead relevant to the species-ist humans driving other species into extinction by way of taking almost all of the land of the planet for their own utility and pleasure. Species-ism is even larger and ultimately more destructive than racism, as horrible a scourge as racism has proven to be. That we are overpopulated is massively evident in the fact that human beings constitute more than 100 times the biomass of any other species in our general size range to ever inhabit the planet. That’s too big and all of us need to face it. Inconvenient truth #1.

#2. The built infrastructure - my subject of specialization and main subject of this talk. You’ve already heard about this inconvenient truth, that we needs to shift from cars, sprawl, paving and cheap energy infrastructure to pedestrian oriented ecocities that fit by design perfectly with renewable energy systems.

#3. We need to eat lower on the food chain. Among the changes that imply enormous savings and amount to re-investing in long-term sustainability, agriculture for meat needs to be recognized as highly inefficient. Costing five to ten times the land and energy of eating vegetable foods directly, a diet high in meat is a big part of the geopolitical and energetics problem on Earth, and a diet very low in meat is a big part of the solution. This isn’t a call for a ban on meats but to face the inconvenient truth that a substantial shift away from meats holds very large benefit for life support and biodiversity on the Earth. Small amounts of meat for ample protein and flavoring in mainly vegetable dishes, common in Chinese cuisine for example, is a very different thing from the giant slabs of meat as stakes and big burgers and other large meat portions.

#4. Need needs to replace greed, as Gandhi said. That means we need to invest in the future health of the world – not just in our wealth as individuals – by way of supporting solutions to the problems identified by the big inconvenient truths. We need a new wave of generosity, especially as expressed in giving back to the Earth. In other words we have to tax ourselves more and the wealthier folks even more yet, and do a much better job of spending the money for the general good. We need to prioritize for the best investments. What's new these days in this situation is that finally, with the ultimate crisis beginning to enter our lives in ever more disruptive ways, it is soon to become conspicuous that the children of the rich as well as the children of the poor will inherit a poverty stricken, chaotic and violent world if everybody doesn't contribute substantially to addressing the 5 Inconvenient Truths with real investment and action. Since the wealthy have much more, they need to give more. The fantasy option of holing up in a gated community or super-rich castle retreat with armed guards, with the middle class turning into peasants to harvest our gourmet food and wine, is soon to go out the window if we don't act more generously now.

#5. Education needs to stop chasing the money for its own sake and promoting growh, growth, growth. It needs to shift away from supporting "whatever's coming down the road to maximize prosperity" (at the expense of nature's prosperity) while attempting to make the whole enterprise a little “greener,” for real or for PR reasons. It has to powerfully educate about the four big inconvenient truths, just mentioned. Also, we as individuals need to realize that we self-educate ourselves for nothing in particular if we are staring at television for billions of hours collectively every year or otherwise, literally, distracting ourselves, distracting ourselves from crucial learning and work that needs attention now. Education can help preserve or destroy natural systems and biodiversity depending on what is being learned. Beyond “reading and writing and ’rithmetic,” education is not per se a virtuous pursuit in itself. It depends on what it addresses and what it creates. The content is all-important. Again 100 random things is not a good idea. We need to prioritize and not put the big things on hold.

I assume with near certainty that former US Vice President Al Gore knows the ten steps he puts forward in “An Inconvenient Truth” for taking action are very small up against the coming crisis. I am almost positive he is hoping to give people a chance to start off small and graduate to bigger, more effective, more basic things later. His movie is a great wake up call, and if rather late in the game relative to already collapsing climate stability, biodiversity and cheap energy, it’s an essential step, and much better late than never.

The problem is this, though: it is hardly the first step. Back in 1970 on Earth Day we were actually ahead of where we are now in strategic approach. By now humanity has eaten up most of our energy and biodiversity options that were plentiful those 36 years back. We did not do a good job of facing the Five Big Inconvenient Truths in the meantime and we still are not. We haven’t built a very good foundation for reshaping our physical civilization upon ecological principles. We had every opportunity to get started with the smaller steps to solving world environmental and resource problems and to use that as a kind of first grade schooling for higher education and more fundamental education and practice in the future. But rather than move on to those fundamentals we were satisfied to stick with the easy first steps. To start off again with those first steps and not address the more difficult ones, is to attempt again a strategy that has failed once already.

Lester Brown’s “Plan B” is another important touchstone for coming to understand what we need to do. Certainly a program by which we can change policy around the world is needed, as he suggests, and he lays out copious good information and many good ideas about what to do. His writings, however, have certain major contradictions that need to be resolved before his plan is ready for application. His strategy is once again to give people the idea that they can get moving with some small but substantial actions. He does in fact face population and meat eating head on, but unfortunately among his most vigorous promotions is the promotion of the energy efficient car, which completely subverts ecological cities, by promoting sprawl development and avoiding whole system thinking, and makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to move forward with a well conceived plan.

Unfortunately, other scientist friends are not helping as much as they could either. You’d think they’d be there ready to rescue us with their superior information and theories, but many of them are lost in the details and don’t see the larger pattern and are not helping us connect the dots and prioritize. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, while providing excellent information and numerous suggestions for government policies to combat global heating, such as promoting trading pollution credits, has practically nothing to say about policy to move cities away from car-oriented and cheap energy design and toward infrastructure based on the measure of the human body and the dynamics of ecological systems.

It seems everyone trying to help avoid global heating is afraid of fear itself. The notion is, “The people can’t handle it. They’ll panic, close down, act in fear and nothing else. Give them something easy and non-threatening. Later we’ll up the stakes, raise the bar.”

But we all have to wake up sometime. At some point you just have to put your faith in people and trust that they can handle the truth of the matter. When you finally get it that Paul Revere has warned you and the British are coming for real, you don’t get out your boots and coat, set the alarm clock for 7:00am and go back to bed. You realize there is a clear and present danger, pick up your weapon (or tool, as our comparison might have it) and move out now!

I’m saving the best news until last. I’ve said earlier that the tools exist with which to build ecocities. You’ve heard my thoughts on prioritization – and that we need it probably more than anything else – and you have a basic idea what an ecologically healthy city might look like. Though I don’t have time to develop what the ecocity-building tools are in any detail, I can at least introduce you to some of the stronger ones.

First there is Ecocity Mapping. It amounts to literally mapping your city so you have a clearer sense where you centers of most vitality are. The map portrays where to increase density and diversity of development, which is in those centers, and where to best open up the landscape for such features as restored creeks and expanded community gardens and parks, which is in the areas farthest from those centers. Thus it directs change, along with the ecocity general plan that lays out policies for ecocity transformation.

The Ecocity General Plan, like any other general plan, lays out policies for the development and maintenance of the city’s physical expression and its functioning. But in the case of the Ecocity General Plan, many policies are described that facilitate an ecocity transition. Those include policies calling for Ecocity Mapping, just mentioned, Transfer of Development Rights, which I’ll mention next, and many others. Those policies have to also include specific reference to financial investment in making sure the action policies are carried through. If the City does not allocate money for the transition, its plan is just symbolic window dressing, an exercise in pretend. No serious money spent, no serious progress made.

Transfer of Development Rights, or TDR, is a powerful real estate investment and development tool. It provides a height bonus for developers willing to put higher density housing or other structures in exactly the right place according to an ecocity transition plan. The developers pay for the purchase of development rights that are transferred from one part of town to their taller buildings in the growing pedestrian transit centers. At the sites where the development rights are purchased, the buildings are removed and no more development can be built there. This tool is a willing seller/developer transaction – when the seller wants to leave, a ready fund is there to buy his or her property. After the sale the building is demolished and recycled and open space such as creek restoration or community garden is created, thus shifting the patterns of development from the fringes and off of natural features and toward the pedestrian transit centers.

There are many other tools, such as car-free by contract housing which encourages building apartments and condominiums with zero car parking provided because their residents don’t need or want cars. Any policy that establishes and expands the pedestrian environment is a tool for building ecocities. Such policies can be used to shape buildings to utilizes the sun’s energy, provide for social equity by eliminating the necessity of having to pay for a car to get access to the city’s benefits, to helping restore natural features. Such tools produce pioneering transit systems fit to low energy infrastructure in Curitiba, Brazil, and provide free public transportation in downtown Portland. There are many, they work beautifully and I write about them in my books, but it’s time to stop.

After one last story anyway. A year ago I took a long ride on Amtrak. It came in eight hours late. It’s conductors and dining car waiters were so embarrassed. They just couldn’t really complete, they said. Those sad Amtrak employees shook their heads and said they just couldn’t function without government subsidies. They couldn’t afford upkeep on rolling stock and had to search around to find available cars. They couldn’t afford their own tracks and so they were operating on Union Pacific’s freight tracks and had to pull over whenever Union Pacific’s trains came through.

Wait a minute! The entire federal government budget for the national passenger rail system for the United States of America, no small Balkan backwater, in 2005 was $1.2 billion. Do you know what the cost of one and a half miles of replacement freeway in West Oakland was for the section of the Cypress Viaduct structure that fell down in the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989? Almost exactly the same amount! Does anyone talk about “subsidies” to car drivers when government gives them these gigantic public works to keep them driving and driving and driving? Those proportions are way, way out of balance, and in the wrong direction at that. These expenditures should be seen as investments, and should be called that, whether they are for passenger rail that fits perfectly with ecologically tuned cities or investments in perpetuating our trajectory deeper into the ultimate crisis.

But what this tells us is that, late though the hour may be for dealing with the triple crisis of climate, extinctions and energy, and flood of money and resources and potential it represents is colossally enormous. It’s like a giant fire hose aimed in the wrong direction, accomplishing in many cases exactly the opposite of what it should do. Imagine shifting that intense stream gradually in the right direction. Little by little, then ever more quickly we’d have the transition to a kind of city that can bring CO2 in the atmosphere down to below what it was at the beginning of the industrial area. Maybe it really can.

Talk about something unpopular to talk about! Not just one but the two cornerstones of the American Dream criticized at the same time. But it’s not me who is attacking them but they who are attacking us.

Here’s the way I slipped into that subject. My friend decided to calculate her ecological footprint both before and after she gave up her car and moved into an apartment. Before, she was costing the Earth 27 acres. After the move she was down to 8 acres. For those not familiar with the “ecological footprint,

My friend Jan Lundberg writes about oil in his mid May Internet column, Culture Change, as he indeed used to write about oil on 'the other side of the fence' for the oil companies as co-publisher/editor of the Lundberg Letter. He reports in the current Culture Change on three peak oil conferences, his own in Washington, DC on 'Petrocollapse,' a somewhat more mainstream conference, also in Washington three days later called 'Peak Oil and the Environment' and one held New York City in April on peak oil.

None of them looked at reshaping the metropolis, cities and towns around ecological principles. None studied major land uses to fit today's for-better-or-worse enormously high human population, nor the reality of the single largest most damaging element in oil addiction, climate change and extinction of species: the city in its present form. And none of them ventured to explore how that present form can be reshaped, how cities can be redesigned. Though I wasn't there and am not positive on this particular I would be fairly confident none of them covered the tools such as ecocity mapping, transfer of development rights and ecological demonstration projects that could transform cities into enormously energy and land conserving entities and actual tools in their own right to reverse the destruction of biodiversity on Earth.

Jan writes about Lester Brown's self-canceling wind power/hybrid car solution, the positive of wind energy cancelled by the negative of the car. But then he, as one of the conference organizers, and the other peak oil organizers are wrong about something Lester's wrong about, too: virtually ignoring the piece of the puzzle which is the reshaping of the city, town and village. The small start with ecovillages is something, but far from enough to prevent a disastrous debacle on the future side of the peak oil slope.

Practically nobody puts the pieces together with the foundation for our architecture, technologies and lifestyles: the arrangement of the built enviornment. Without that, the powerdown will really be bad. The badder it is the less of that rosy post peak oil future some wistfully imagine will be possible. Strange to me, but not only the establishment but the peak oil movement is missing that piece of the puzzle too.

Introduction for Post Carbon Institute Friends

My frustration rises daily with every book and every article I read on global warming. Nobody looks the main culprit in the eye.

I admit I don't have a checklist of the relocalized businesses we'd need and a well thought out strategy for putting those jobs on line, But here is a start with addressing the larger context, and the imagination can begin to picture what not only to design, but what manufacturing and services would fit. The reshaping of cities, breaking them up into smaller cities, towns and villages, opening up landscapes to agriculture and nature where car- and oil-dependent sprawl used to dominate offers us a physical vision of how to address both climate change and what we can do about it in our own communities.

Reversing Global Warming
Richard Register

"Well, what can I do about global warming? It's such an overwhelmingly large issue, I hardly know where to begin."
I've heard this lament many times and the answer returned is generally something simple like, "Businesses should cap and trade, encouraging big CO2 producers to pay little CO2 producers and then the bigger offenders will improve their performance in order to regain the competitive advantage at a later date." Or, many say, "Save energy anyway you can as an individual - from driving less and bicycling more, to insulating your house, to wearing a sweater in winter."
Something positive has to be said for pushing government and industry to incrementally improve what they do and for adding up the small things in life style change. But you might also have the uncomfortable sensation that this kind of answer just doesn't ring true because something truly gigantic is going on in human affairs that's leading to first signs of something utterly exterminating that's going on in nature. Even assurances of a Tim Flannery, author of THE WEATHER MAKERS, that each of us can cut our share of humanity's carbon dioxide effluent 70%, leaves us a little suspicious after his fact-packed, lucid and truly frightening description of the gathering catastrophe. If you have a little feeling that it is going to be much harder than that, the sensation probably has a lot to do with the fact that, after all, it's the biggest bind humanity has gotten itself into to date and getting out of big problems takes very hard work. It usually takes systematic work too. In fact I think we're just now beginning to comprehend we've really screwed up and will have to face it that the little things simply will not add up.
What could make the difference, reverse global warming and get evolution of a healthy biosphere back on track? Maybe we could try prioritizing.

First we need to acknowledge that there are different ways of approaching the problem. They go something like this:

The individual
We all make decisions every day about what we will think about and learn, what we will do, how we will vote, what we will buy and how we will effect other people - in conversation, through direct effort to communicate, in educating our children and in how we vote, join protests, support policies and otherwise try to directly change things.

The specialist
Some people know a great deal about industry and business, environmental regulation, climate, biosphere and how we go about building what it is people create that causes the build up of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere.

Working with others
Politics. We need to change the way we do things and, whether it's one's personal inclination to be involved with others or not, changing policy is crucially important. We can be passively supportive about it, participating in a low-key way, or very active as advocates of particular policies. But in any case the important thing is to act, and act resolutely and consistently from now on. Together we can make all the difference.

A sense of proportion

We can all get a sense of the scale or effectiveness of various approaches; we can tell the difference between the common cold and a dangerous cancer and most of us would quickly give attention to the more serious problem first.
Let's start with the last one and prioritize cancer first, cold second. It will be a good idea to save energy in small ways. But shouldn't we look at the big ones first? And those include decisions about having a large family or small. Another big issue is diet, and whether to eat lots of meat or a small amount or go vegetarian. Meat eating is responsible for consuming up to ten times as much energy and land as eating no meat. The choices there are obvious, even if we have our tastes and don't want to face any change. The third Big One has to do with the sort of cities, towns and villages we build, which in turn determines our demand for energy and land consumption in a gigantic and little-noticed way. The culprit here is sprawl, cars, highways and oil, that is, cheap energy. The big problem is the city designed for cars. This is the problem that's so big we go to war to keep the oil flowing and the suburbs growing.
Families can be smaller, diet shifted away from heavy meat emphasis and cities can be reshaped for pedestrian, bicycle and transit while becoming far more lively and beautiful places, relieved of the pall of franchise restaurants under smog and the sameness in asphalt and billboards from Boston to Beijing, from Johannesburg to Jakarta. These are the big three that can be seen as a whole system of parts that reinforce one another and that, if addressed directly and effectively, could relieve the massive dependence society has developed as it drifted with relatively few second thoughts into ever more, more, more. More people, more consumption of energy and land for agriculture and more sprawl for space to stuff in ever more, and more and more stuff into our lives.
Regarding specialists, the first thing to notice is that the issues around climate change are complex and we can't all become specialists on the many various aspect of the problem. That means we need to trust someone among them. But many are severely compromised. A specialist from the oil industry is not the least compromised of sources for information on climate change. If we can be as careful as possible in finding specialists who appear knowledgeable, conscientious and not compromised by association with those who make money on processes that produces CO2 massively, then we are exercising reasonable caution in trying to understand what needs to be done for reversing global warming.
But in seeking best counsel, note that there is a difference between focusing on experts on the subject itself, and experts in what to do about the problem. The experts on the situation itself are doing quite well waking us up to the problem. But for all the massive quantity of information pouring forth in the papers, magazines and television, from pole to pole and melting mountaintop to steaming coral reef atoll, good information on what to do about it stealthily avoids the Big Three mentioned above. Few people want to face the real answers because they really are more difficult than the easy ones. Everyone is trying to get to the big solution in baby steps. It's far more comfortable that way, yes?
No! Not a short while farther down that path it isn't. That's when we discover that, as is proverbially stated, you can't cross the chasm in baby steps. More graphically, you fall off into the abyss if you try.
We are going to have to do some training, get warmed up and get ready for a difficult leap. If we are going to solve the climate change problem then we'd better pay attention to the Big Three, in other words, the experts who have knowledge about what family planning has worked and where in the world, the experts on low-meat agriculture and diets and the people who know a great deal about building cities to liberate us from cars and oil addiction need to be given highest priority as advisors to ourselves.

Up to us

Ourselves - we are the real experts, ultimately. Unlike politicians and wealthy, successful people who led us into this mess, even advertised us into this mess, we don't have to risk our careers and fortunes by admitting such big time mistakes. We can help matters, though, by helping those politicians who are courageous enough to admit their earlier mistakes and change.
We can listen to the right people but, more fundamentally, we need to decide what we can do. And then do it, or else this problem will carry our children to a lonely planet and a fate very unpleasant to contemplate. We may need spiritual discipline, psychological support, involvement of family or friends, or simple study to gird our loins for the battle to win our own best serious decisions, such as to have a small family, change our diet or move from a suburban house to one in an urban neighborhood or near a small town center where things can be done with one fifth as much energy and land. We may have to pay more attention to voting for people who are willing to face uncomfortable truths about economy, business and planning of our communities. We may discover we need to change our whole career if we hope to significantly help in what could be this last battle for humanity's future.
We may have to have real courage to face our families, neighbors and colleagues when they think we're over reacting or misinformed and there is no big deal, or, nobody can really do anything about it anyway, or, accuse us of guilt tripping them, or, think that we are violating some cherished idea they have about what we should do. We may have to choose to be somewhat unpopular, hopefully not forever, but to throw our efforts in with the only side that can ultimately win, the side that stabilizes climate on this planet.
When it comes to working with others and it might not be in your nature - perhaps you are one of those with a low tolerance for meetings, meetings, meetings - taking action via the ballot box, writing letters to the editor, talking to friends one-on-one, teaching your children, just reading and learning and so on are all crucially important. There is plenty to do and given the billions of hours people waste collectively on mindless television and other deservedly called "diversions," plenty of time to do it in. But if you thrive on or can handle the pressures of debate and attempts at influence, the big thing is the big thing.
Here's an example of something big. The US Government spends $34 billion a year on highway programs - 2005 Department of Transportation (DOT) figures - with plans for $35.5 million in 2006. Something small: $1.2 billion on Amtrak in 2005 being reduced to $.9 billion. These numbers are only the tip of the iceberg since developers and toll road builders are out there scraping away, private parking lots and parking structures are a-building, cities and states are spending other funds on their streets and highways, putting money into county hospital services for car wreck victims, paying police for traffic regulation work and so on. Some researchers claim the total car infrastructure and maintenance investment in the US is as much as $900 billion a year, about 30 times more than the DOT tip of the iceberg. Rails, from Amtrak to regional commute mid weight trains to streetcars have many other sources of support in addition to federal dollars too. They have their switching and maintenance yards, stations to maintain and so on. But it is interesting to see that the federal support is in the range of 36 times as great for cars than rail, and cars are part and parcel - that is integral to - the sprawl/paving/oil infrastructure. Imagine if it were reversed and the rails/pedestrian/renewable energy city were getting 36 times as much as the car infrastructure, the environmentally damaging one currently getting the big subsidy. Reverse that and we might just have an initiative big enough to start to solve this biggest of all problems humanity now faces.
For problems and changes that large, we need to deal with it together as a whole society in larger political ways or we might as well roll over and play dead. Dream as you may, biking and separating recyclables and all those other individually initiated activities, if not built on a foundation of improving policy that maximizes all those good personal actions by giving them the context of a healthy city is not going to get us very far.
Political action on the big items must actually be done, and not just fiddled at, while not just Rome, but the very atmosphere of our whole planet burns. Kick the knuckleheads out of office. Write new policies. Turn that fire hose of money for freeway overpasses and urban sprawl away from its destructive direction and aim its full stream toward creating cities and towns for people instead of cars. Every year 10% less for highways, cars and trucks. Pop Amtrak up to $5 billion immediately and increase it's budget 15% every year. Increase funding vigorously also for streetcar systems and regional rail. Take away those $4,000 tax credits (you still pay around $5,000 more anyway) given to hybrid drivers so they can help keep suburbs spreading out over the countryside and instead, give 100% tax credits for all bicycles. But most important, with government loan guarantees, pressure on bankers to lend to them and zoning to support ecological city changes, help developers invest in growing pedestrian/transit centers while removing urban dead tissue that is far from pedestrian/transit centers to restore an ever growing, not shrinking, amount of agricultural and natural land. Those who say we don't have the money to do this are either not thinking or they are lying. Educate the former. Fire the latter.
Do the big thing also means don't pussy foot around the crucial issues saying, for example, population is a taboo subject. Don't say working for urban rearrangements that favor the bicyclist and pedestrian over the driver is "politically unrealistic." That's just an excuse for inaction. What was "politically unrealistic" yesterday will be our salvation tomorrow.
As they say, what exists is possible. Regarding "overpopulation," in the "if it exists it must be possible" category was a society as religiously committed to anti-family planning values as the Catholic Church: Iran. During the war with Iraq the leaders in Iran finally began to realize the wildly high birth rate they were encouraging was a real disaster - and instituted policies to reduce it precipitously, despite the religion, and in fact despite the fact that it was their religion and the official religion of the state to boot. Car free cities are obviously possible too, proven by the fact that they exist, and often as prosperous and very pleasant places such as Venice, Italy; Zermatt, Switzerland; Gulongyou, China and a few other cities. To say, "Well, that's just not right for us" is to contravene espoused concern for climate change and amounts to saying, "I'd rather have the destruction of global warming than to think this one through." Very bad idea. You can't have it both ways. Either we face the necessity for fundamental change and get on with studying it and doing the best job of it we can, or we should stop pretending to be deeply concerned about climate change.

What's our home?

Regarding prioritization and where to begin, this concept isn't a bad first step: our home is the city not the house, the planet not the neighborhood. It's a question of full and proper services of the civilization - city - and full and proper services of nature - the whole planet, its atmosphere and biosphere - and our duties and reciprocal obligations to both city and Earth.
Now, as can be expected from one of those "experts," my area of knowledge and contribution being the ecologically-tuned city, I'll say a word or two about how anyone can make an enormous difference in the future of cities, in helping to build cities that don't cause global warming and possibly cities that can even help reverse it. I defer to others on family planning and good agriculture and diet, but regarding the city, town and village I believe I can identify the priorities if we want to solve this climate change problem which is taking on almost end of the world proportions.
Yes take transit, bicycle and walk when you can. But don't expect miracles on that front. It's far from enough. You will find yourself fighting constantly against long distances, traffic stuffing the streets, intersection lights that make you wait, wait, wait for the cars, and cars threatening your very life - and actually killing a fair number of you. For thus it has been built! The city, town and village - our home - has been remodeled for cars over the last 100 years and in this design it exists. It dominates life almost everywhere and is still the growing trend despite decades of solid evidence that it is failing on an environmentally colossal scale. One hundred years of massive investment in building the wrong kind of city delivers us a problem of planecidal - planet suicide - proportions. We have to change the city down to its very foundations in land use patterns to make serious progress on the "home" front. To expect solving the climate change problem to be easy or even only modestly difficult makes no sense. Yet to succeed at the difficult project of addressing it with ecological city building at the center of a strategy would produce a beautiful place and end up a whole lot more fun than where we're currently headed.
Getting a "better" more energy efficient car only postpones dealing with the way cities are laid out, built and maintained. Time is of the essence now. We don't have much of it if we are to reign in global warming. We need to do big things fast. Worse, the energy efficient "better" car, should it become generally more available, promotes sprawl development by making it cheaper to travel longer distances. This situation probably won't last that much longer due to the fact that gasoline prices are going up from now on as cheap energy, that is oil, passes its peak level of production and begins sliding away forever. But the counterintuitive benefit in bad gasoline mileage is that it alerts people to the expense of living too far from everything - an absolutely crucial lesson at this point in history. We've come to the point where the big car with lousy mileage looks ridiculous and the smaller car with good mileage is counterproductive, promoting more of the same whole sprawling urban package - and finally we figure out why: we built our cities for cars instead of people. If this isn't obvious to us soon, it certainly will be to our victim descendants soon enough.
That then means we need to reverse the process and begin building cities and towns for people all over again. Profound idea! That idea, plus small families and low energy and low land consumption agriculture, gets us almost to success in reversing climate change. I'll add one more point in a minute after finishing the discussion about designing and reshaping city and town.
Each of us can't move quickly as individuals in regard to changing the city in terms of design and policy. But we can move steadily and very effectively and we can start today to help those big changes in many ways. As Jaime Lerner points out - he is the world famous and highly successful architect/mayor who reshaped Curitiba, Brazil and turned it into the world leader in ecological city design and planning - in two years profound change and progress can be accomplished. In relation to something so big and ponderous as global warming, that's fast. Beyond moving from a house to an apartment or condominium closer to work and other things important to us - friends, shopping, recreation, socializing and so on - we have to work together or take personal initiative to support others who are. We can do this by supporting and voting for a "density shift" toward pedestrian/transit centers. We need to support growing centers that are liberated from automobiles and we need to withdraw development from the most car dependent areas and best soils and habitat. Some say, "Now this really is overwhelmingly hard to do. The city grows with a mind of its own and us small players can't effect it in the slightest."
Not true! There are millions of people with extensive knowledge and experience in shaping cities, if unfortunately generally in the wrong direction. They are developers, bankers and investors, architects and builders, planners and politicians and hired city staff members in planning, public works and parks, administration and on and on. That's on the development side, which can be either ecologically destructive or actually, in rare cases to date, ecologically helpful. On the other side there is immense sophistication among preservationists, neighborhood organizers against any change other than increase in property values, politicians cultivating voter favor by refusing to tax cars and gasoline, by holding on to the status quo that isn't. By that I mean the status quo is anything but static. It's us running in place, wildly churning our wheels, burning billi0ns of gallons of gasoline and diesel a year, the city standing there looking sort of sedentary, but its vehicles hurtling about as meantime bulldozers and steamrollers gradually, relentlessly spread that layer of asphalt out into, way out into agricultural lands and natural habitat in the US, China, India, Turkey, South Africa, Australia, Brazil...
But the bottom line here is that we can actually turn this around and build cities that cover far less land, rise a little taller, reintroducing creeks winding their way through our communities and redesigning clusters of buildings that add up, with public open spaces and transit/bicycle facilities, to cities demanding a very small fraction of the energy and land we now consume.
What this also means is that we all need to summons a little courage to face change and be willing to use our imaginations - then to support efforts to shift cities in the direction of "ecological" cities, cities informed by ecology in their design, construction and functioning. If you are not up to speed on the subject there is a critical need for self-education and education of friends, colleagues - everyone. There are books and classes available.
To get involved in advocacy and active projects, or join and support their activities if you are not the out-going sort, is crucial. There are organizations engaged in moving toward ecological city changes, restoration of nature in or adjacent cities, good urban design, greenbelt protection, support for rail and bicycles and so on. They are organized and very helpful - join them and lend a hand. Support your city's leadership when it is on the right track, both elected officials and staff - and oppose them when they are not. Contribute to open-minded flexibility in public deliberation keeping the urgency of the issue and necessity for new thinking ever in mind.
There are tools such as transfer of development rights, "ecocity" zoning maps and ecological demonstration projects that stand as examples of all the parts of a healthy city coming together in a small portion of a city or town and functioning harmoniously. These are too much to address adequately here in a short article, but they exist and a little reading elsewhere will reveal there are many other tools just waiting for service.
There are indicators of progress such as parking availability - we need less of it, not more - better transit service and new car-free pedestrian areas. We need indicators that are not just showing that we are chipping away at a few parts per million of this pollutant or that. We need to look at the big indicators. Many could hardly be more obvious: massive traffic jams, sprawling suburbs to the horizon, gigantic new single use buildings in city centers without a hint of consciousness about how they might be heated passively by the sun or how they might be part of a mixed use, fully lively pedestrian transit center. The big positive indicators would be ever fewer cars each year, progressively increasing number of car-free streets, bicycles everywhere and more and more people able to walk to most things they need.
Generally, the largest tool and indicator, rolled into one, is the ecologically tuned city or "ecocity" - is it growing or not. Good if so, tragic if not. Among all the things we can do to effectively deal with climate change, this is one of the Big Three that are indispensable if we hope to solve that problem.
Earlier I suggested there was yet one more point to add that might be indispensable. If we get a high level of success in reducing our production of CO2 and its damage to the atmosphere and climate with the Big Three, we might get close to or achieve stabilizing the CO2 levels in the air. But we will by then have way to much in the air and will need to start removing it or the heating will go on building up. Y0u've heard of the techno-fix of sequestering CO2, by pumping it out of the air and into the earth, with exotic chemical processes and so on. Well, one of them might actually work, if we can reduce demand far enough, and shift over to renewable energy systems, and that's a forest planting campaign like humanity has never seen before. Billions of trees. The sophisticated version of that is to, at the same time, restore as much of nature as we can with the very best knowledge we can summons for highest biodiversity. We can learn from indigenous people, where they still exist and have the knowledge, and we can learn from the biologists and ecologist who study these things. We can get busy at it right now. Big is not only beautiful in cases like this, it is likely to be our only hope.

`It's a long one dear friends, but I'm hoping it will be one of those essays that makes a difference. You saw it first here! Send your own opinions on the subject to me at ecocity@igc.org - and keep your eye out for the second edition of my book ECOCITIES, ink to dry out in early May, New Society Publishers. Lots of pictures!

Richard Register

A MAJOR OVERSIGHT

The crisis builds, but no one thinks to rebuild.

That we are hurtling toward the cliff of climate change, the collapse of biodiversity and the end of cheap energy all at once, is hardly a unique realization at this point in history. That it might have something to do with the way we are physically building our 'World Civilization' has dawned on only a very few. But it should strike everyone like a thunderbolt.

It's this simple and this important: The biggest things we build - our cities - are creating the biggest problems we have. More precisely stated, the built infrastructure of our global civilization is the literal, physical foundation for much or probably even most of the crisis of colliding crises we find ourselves in today. Why? Because cities are not planned and built on the measure of the human being, but instead on the measure of the automobile and massive amounts of cheap energy to run it. These car-based, scattered, energy profligate cities demand a greedy share of the earth's bounty and exude CO2 enough to transform the atmosphere and climate of a whole planet.
Comes the idea of a means of some sort to get us out of this predicament. There are a few proposals for such steps: In a curtsy to capitalist domination in the wee years of the new century, trade pollution credits. Switch from a Ford to a Prius. Recycle more thoroughly.
Or, to make a much bigger difference and be much more organized about it, read Al Gore's far-seeing book of 1992 EARTH IN THE BALANCE and give some serious thought to his idea for a 'Global Marshal Plan.' It's a good place to start this line of reasoning.
'Human civilization,' says Gore, 'is now so complex and diverse,
so sprawling and massive, that it is difficult to see how we can respond in
a coordinated, collective way to the global environmental crisis. But circumstances are forcing just such a response; if we cannot embrace the preservation of the Earth as our new organizing principle, the very survival of our civilization will be in doubt.'
And, so we should add, will be the survival of most of the diversity of life on Earth, which is rapidly slipping through our ever-busy multi-tasking human fingers.
Then there is the offering of Lester Brown, founder of World Watch Institute, and more recently, Earth Policy Institute. He proposes a 'Plan B' and in his subtitle to his book by that name, proposes 'Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.' There is also author and naturalist Edward O. Wilson's strategy in his chapter called 'The Solution' in his book The Future of Life.
The first two proposals are replete with good suggestions for ways to conserve energy, switch to renewable energy technologies, move to better forms of agriculture, provide more effective health care and education around the world and slow growth of population and excessive consumption of resources. Wilson's has many good steps toward inventorying the most important pockets of life to preserve on land and in the seas, and he champions preserving large tracts of land and with them, about as much biodiversity as can be assembled in a grand effort by purchasing crucial habitat for preservation.
There is, then, something of a tradition for such 'plans' but notably, they all lack one key element: a strategy for literal, physical rebuilding. For rebuilding what? The largest thing we build: our home, our community, our cities, towns and villages so that they are designed to run on one tenth of the energy they do now, take up a small fraction of the land area that a car-based city does, and actually contribute to the regeneration of the earth's living systems. It is just not possible to continue building this immense infrastructure designed for the convenience of machines running on cheap energy and solve our environmental problems too. Can tuning up this physical civilization to make its components run more efficiently, such as by making cars a little more energy conserving, solve our problem? Or will we need to build something else, namely the city built for people instead?

BIG NUMBERS TO PAY ATTTENTION TO. SMALL FIXES WON'T WORK

The big numbers I'm about to introduce tell us a major rebuilding of our world technological civilization is the foundation for any scheme that might work. Pollution credits are OK but far from enough. More efficient appliances and machines can help - a little. Recycling and use of solar and wind energy are a large part of the solution but will always struggle against the massive wastefulness of the infrastructure - unless that infrastructure is fundamentally redesigned and reshaped. That's because there are gigantic numbers lurking beneath the surface, like basaltic bedrock, upon which to build something permanent, unlike the present civilization that's built upon the ephemeral ever shifting literally burning away fossil fuels.
I don't just mean the big numbers that represent parts per million of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, higher than at any other time in the last several million years, nor the millions of tons of ice melting away from glaciers and the poles, nor the millions of species facing extinction due to the above if we humans don't get our act together and act right.
The really big numbers look modest at first glance: 8, 6 and 10 - but they stand for ratios of 8 to 1, 6 to 1 and 10 to 1 and represent a gigantic potential change for the better. No little chipping away at increased random efficiencies of one product here, one process there.
Specifically this is what I mean: First, European cities at levels of prosperity comparable to those in the United States use about one quarter the land and one quarter the energy per person as the typical American city of cars and sprawl. Second: train, streetcar and rail based transportation systems are around eight times as efficient in terms of energy and delivery of goods and passengers as the car, truck and highway system. Two lines of track side-by-side equals 16 lanes of freeway. That is massively significant. Considering that, promoting cars of any kind and neglecting rail at this point in history borders on insanity or stupidity. Freeway building should stop cold in its tracks right now.
There's more. Considering European cities are swamped in cars despite their history originating as pedestrian cities, and none of them are going all out for ecological redesign, the land required for lively, livable, ecological cities is likely to be more like one sixth the area American sprawl occupies with a particular population. Taken together, as indeed land use patterns and transportation modes are one seamless larger whole pattern, we begin to see the enormous import of those numbers. Considering factors represented by these number that are this significant and considering that an industry building such an infrastructure would be building less in terms of material resources if more in terms of healthy services, then, should we choose to build upon these factors, a redesigned city/civilization infrastructure could run on about one tenth the energy and a small fraction of the land consumed by the city of cars. That city is sweeping - no, paving the world, and engulfing the atmosphere of an entire planet in a historically new mix of gasses, aerosols and particulates.
Those small sounding numbers of gigantic consequence, 8, 6 and
10, are key. Factor of 8 for transportation. Factor of 6 for land use. Factor of 10 for cities, towns and villages designed for people instead of cheap energy transport machines, that is, cars and trucks. These numbers will come back over and over to stab us in the back if we don't pay attention to them. In fact, they have because we have ignored them so cavalierly. Mile by sneaky square mile city sprawl crept up on us. Car by millions of cars replicated out across millions of acres until just to deal with everyday needs we pump massive doses of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and throw the entire climate system of a planet out of balance, destroying half of New Orleans in hurricanes on steroids and soon to sink and wash away the low lying islands and deltas, reefs and beaches of the world. These are not warnings and predictions. They are observations of what already is beginning to come to pass. Yosemite is already 9 degrees warmer on average in 2006 than it was in 1900. The glaciers and poles are melting, and no amount of denial from the current government of the United States can change that. Starting today, any government leader who can't read a thermometer should be thrown out of office.
Some people of influence and some of wealth are deeply disturbed by escalating extinctions and rapidly degenerating biodiversity around the world. Naturalist and author Edward O. Wilson has lead the charge to buy and defend 'ecological hotspots,' a few remarkable places of relatively small land area that support enormously complex ecosystems - 7.9% of the surface of the Earth harbors 75% of the most endangered mammals, birds and amphibians. Doug Tompkins with his fortune from founding the popular clothing companies North Face and Esprit has bought 1.87 million acres of fiords, mountains and forest-draped, snow-capped volcanoes in Chile and Argentina. Gordon Moore of Intel, lover of fishing and traveling in wilderness, has set up through the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation a program that has funded Conservation International and purchased 2.1 million acres of Peru and Brazilian rainforests. Ted Turner through his Turner Enterprises has bought up to preserve 2 million acres of North American prairie, hills and mountains. These great land barons of biodiversity have taken it about as far as one can imagine.
But there are some problems with the approach: First, climate change. Second, not having a strategy to stop that particular problem at its source. To successfully address that lack of a strategy we need to physically redesign and rebuild our world civilization.
What if temperature does go up a few degrees and the plants and animals have to move up hill a couple thousand feet to get back to cooler weather - and there's no hill there? Or have to move 2,000 miles toward the poles in a few short decades? What happens to the biodiversity hotspots strategy if that happens? I asked Edward O. Wilson once. Said he, 'Well, that would trump it.'
Tompkins, Moore and Turner have done a magnificent job in securing 5.98 million acres of wild and close to natural land and habitat. Yet in the last five years, says Lester Brown's Earth Policy Institute, 91 million acres of forest has been lost. That's swimming upstream in a downstream flood at only 6.48 percent the speed of the current.
We have to try something in addition, like ceasing the wrong kind of building and getting on with the right, and as quickly as possible. Otherwise the investment in habitat protection will be overwhelmed and lost in the biodiversity hot spots as well as everywhere else from pole to melting pole.

THE BEST OF THE PLANS

The best of these larger plans, published in 2006, fourteen years after Al Gore's contribution to the literature, is Lester Brown's in his second book on the 'Plan B concept,' which he calls PLAN B 2.0. Plan A is business as usual backed by the capitalist religious doctrine that growth can and must go on forever even in a limited environment like the Earth, its atmosphere and its biosphere. It's worth looking at Brown's Plan B and critiquing it because it is well on the way to what we need. Honing it could actually take us a long way toward 'rescuing a planet under stress and a civilization in trouble.'
Lester Brown says the situation is so critical we have to organize on a scale and with the focus and commitment of fighting a war for our lives. Since we did just that in the United States in the Second World War he portrays that intense and remarkable - and successful - effort in some detail in his book. It required a plan. It could not have been done by vague 'market forces,' stumbling in the general direction of organizing troops and materiel. In fact, in the heat of the war automobile companies were ordered to stop all production of cars for almost three years to keep them to the task of defending the country, spring of 1942 to the end of 1944. Boeing was even forced to give its plans for the B-17 bomber to competitors so that the airplanes could be produced faster and faster. Boeing wasn't even compensated for its forced generosity, regarding which it held the patens. And those are only two of many cases of government-organized planning and execution of policy to actually meet the war's clear and present danger realistically.
The best brief way to grasp what Brown is saying is to go straight to his Plan B budget.

Basic Social Goals

Universal primary education $12 billion
Adult Literacy 4
School lunch programs for the 44 6
poorest countries
Assistance to preschool children and 4
pregnant women in these countries
Reproductive health and family planning 7
Universal health care 33
Closing the condom gap 2

Total $68 billion

Earth Restoration Goals
Reforesting the Earth 6
Protecting topsoil on cropland 24
Restoring rangelands 9
Stabilizing water tables 10
Restoring fisheries 13
Protecting biological diversity 31

Total $93 billion

Grand total $161 billion

Brown obtains these figures mainly from the World Bank. Without describing them in great detail - you get the general idea - I'll shift over to another angle and point out that physically rebuilding the civilization amounts to rebuilding cities, towns and villages for people instead of cars and trucks. Remember those enormously significant numbers suggesting we can rebuild an infrastructure that runs on one tenth the energy of today's? We have been building ever more over the last one hundred years for cars, low density development, highways and very cheap energy, which is approaching peak production after which it will be on its way out forever.
Instead, we will need to build for people, transit and bicycle, rails and very expensive, but healthy renewable energy. It will be intrinsically expensive energy because we will no longer have the whole biosphere and lithosphere working for us for 200 million years just to deliver the oil, coal and gas. We'll have to do the job of concentrating energy into useable forms all by ourselves, mainly from sun and wind and to a more limited degree, as dams silt up and as hot rock gets cooled down, hydro and geothermal power.
These ecological cities or 'ecocities' that could constitute the built infrastructure of our civilization could be designed to bring back millions of acres now paved for streets, parking lots, parking structures, freeways, gas stations, hundreds of millions of look-alike houses and more millions of acres of the near biological deserts, green though they appear, called lawns.
We can roll back sprawl with a number of real estate and financial tools like transfer of development rights. We can direct the process of shifting development away from sprawl and toward pedestrian/transit centers with tools like 'ecological zoning maps,' clarifying where to build and where to remove development. We can dig up and liberate buried creeks and place bicycle and pedestrian paths along them on one bank and wild habitat and native critters on the other. We can expand community gardens, parks, sports fields and recycling areas while building ecologically healthy cities, towns and villages where now in the metropolitan landscape we see business-only Central Business Districts, specialty districts and neighborhood centers.
We can build clusters of ecologically informed taller building with rooftop and terrace gardens with beautiful views. We can make for rich pedestrian 'permeability' with mid-block street-level passageways of many designs and bridges between buildings creating environments like adult playgrounds and jungle gyms. Solar greenhouses like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon can roll up the sunny side of buildings for many stories providing all the heat in winter we could ever need. We can do all this if we simply decide to and get organized with some sort of a plan.
Lester Brown's weak spot is that he doesn't include rebuilding civilization in his budget - which is quiet surprising considering he describes in some detail various renewable energy systems and makes clear in a chapter called 'Designing Sustainable Cities' how important they are. So let's complete his budget by representing that now:

Rebuilding Civilization
Ecocities
Education, advocacy and planning $2 billion
Promoting specific general plans, 2
zoning and incentives at all
government levels
Building ecological demonstration 13
projects
Matching funding for transfer of 13
Development rights and other
means to shift 'density'

Rebuilding rail transportation inside 16
and between cities

Renewable energy systems
Education, advocacy and planning 2
Promoting specific remissioning, 3
retooling and retraining programs
Investing in renewable energy 20
technology
Total $71 billion

Grand total $232 billion

(less than 24% of the world military budget)

Plan B in its present state has another weakness which is that it contains several contradictions that can only be worked out if we take a 'whole systems' view to rebuilding our civilization, that is, our constructed habitat of cities, towns and villages. One such contradiction is Lester Brown's advocacy of hybrid cars like the Prius. Sounds good to run cars on less energy, though EPA standards by which mileage is claimed is based on a tail pipe exam. Whereas, actual mileage measured as you drive about is considerably lower. Also, it turns out that, according to CNW Marketing Research of Bandon, Oregon, hybrids do save some energy, if less than claimed, but they require more energy from beginning of manufacture to junking. Their two year study reports that is so because these vehicles have two power plants, not one: an electric motor as well as a gasoline engine, plus all the connectors between. Their complexity and higher orders of demand for recycling batteries and other components add to their energy bill. These factors, says the CNW report, reveal that the Toyota Prius, Honda Accord and Civic hybrids and the Ford Escape Hybrid are all worse in terms of lifetime energy use than several large SUVs including the Chevrolet
Tahoe and the Suburban.
But, reality aside, getting back to the theory that an energy efficient car helps - it doesn't. The more energy efficient a car is, the farther it can drive on a certain amount of money. That's bad, not good, because it means the car promotes driving more, not less. It promotes sprawl development. This seems counterintuitive unless you begin to understand whole systems thinking.
Whole systems thinking is sometimes called ecological thinking because it looks carefully at interconnecting networks of influence and chains of cause and effect in the whole environment of which the part is a member. That is, the parts and the total 'environment' are integral to one another and all parts within that environment have important relationships to one another. The whole system is not your car and its energy use. It is the car/sprawl/freeway/cheap energy system. Improve one part and you perpetuate the whole thing - and people feel good about it! For many people who buy hybrids, since they are more expensive than supposedly less 'ecological' cars, that may be about all they can do to feel good about their contribution to improving the environment - while making it actually worse. Only by looking at the whole built infrastructure, the whole system of which the car is a part, can you 'get' that. The only solution is to rebuild that whole system on ecological principles.
There are a few other contradictions that need to be ironed out in Brown's Plan B. One is the promotion of ethanol as a fuel for cars and trucks. Ethanol really could go a long way to providing motive power for whatever vehicles we decide we truly need. But at the same time, Lester Brown is more than a little disturbed by something that happened in 2005. Brazil stopped subsidizing ethanol production. What this means, the change this indicates, is that gasoline prices have risen to the point where it is more profitable for farmers to raise ethanol for vehicles than food for people. The market, rather than government policy, is now edging people into a word where machines will be treated better than people. Feeding cars instead of people? Careful! The solution is to build our civilization so that it requires absolutely the minimal amount of energy to run, so that renewable energy systems can do that, and so that people aren't rendered back into hungry slaves when the energy slaves called machines become more expensive to maintain than very low-paid people. The only way to reduce energy demand that much is to redesign cities - around people instead of cars.
But with some of these contradictions ironed out - and they can be if we add the 'rebuilding civilization' lines to the Plan B budget - then we are well set to have an ecologically healthy world.

FOUR STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF THE ECONOMY

A Plan B with the power to turn into an actual 'program' of action - the Marshal Plan was not just a plan but the follow through as well, and thus was officially the European Recovery Program - needs a foundation in realistic economic theory. Little economic theory exists for a Plan B, especially as described by economists since they almost universally ignore the natural base of human economics in nature's economics. But if theory got solidly anchored to that base, it would clearly suggest the following sequence in reshaping the built environment that houses, shelters, is that to which technologies are connec