Hello everyone,

I barely know what a blog is but Celine Rich and my friends at the Post Carbon Institute insisted I should have one so it seemed to me that a little autobiography was in order for starters. Kirstin Miller, who many of you know as my partner in so much of this work and everyday living, says it can double for our Ecocity Builders website, too.

I would not have thought of launching a blog with my own outline story except that, by sheer coincidence, one of my publishers just asked for a short one to cull material from to promote my book, Ecocities. Looking at it, I think some friends and antagonists might find it interesting.

So my understanding is that blogs are about someone speaking their mind and mine runs around ecology, city design, bioregionalism, creek restoration, architecture, energy, non-violence, evolution and extinctions, art illustrating a healthy future, strategy in activism, politics, rooftop gardens, urban fractals (thanks for the idea, Paul Downton), hurricanes and climate change, rebuilding New Orleans, the disasters of cars and virtues of bicycles - the usual we are all interested in, right? So I'll write about all that off and on, maybe a brief piece every couple weeks.

Here goes! And it's what I wrote for my next publisher, New Society, up in Gabriola Island, British Columbia, which I suspect is BEAUTIFUL! (Maybe some day I can visit.)

RR's outline history

From early childhood I was interested in art and nature, war and peace. When I was a teenager I thought there was some special significance in the fact that my crib when I was a baby was on the side of the house in El Paso, Texas and under the window that faced the flash of the first atomic bomb blast in the early cloudless twilight of July 16, 1945. I was one year, one month and 19 days old at the time. The flash was reported by locals and must have lit up my room and left an ephemeral trace on my mind through my sleeping eyelids. Whether or not there was anything of destiny there, the thought stuck with me for a long time and might have some validity.

Later, my parents moved to the country outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to a sort of hobby ranch across the Rio Grande Valley from Los Alamos, the "Atomic City," where the first nuclear weapons were designed and built. As a teenager watching the sun set into Los Alamos, sitting on the roof of my house playing my guitar and howling like the local coyotes, I thought I should figure out what was right and wrong about human conduct on the Earth and try to help save the planet from us and for us. I very consciously sought "the keys to the secrets of the universe," as I said to myself in those days, confiding in no one, especially in astronomy, physics, paleontology and evolution studies - thus setting me up to considerable receptivity to the thinking, in a few years, of Paolo Soleri - he places cities into the context of evolution in the cosmos. At 12 I was by far the youngest member of a philosophy discussion group in Santa Fe enjoying existentialism and transcendentalism in particular.

In school I was always the class artist. This may influence my work on ecocities in two particular ways: 1.) cities could be in some ways like the sculptures I was making - three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional, rather than flat in form like painting and drawing. They could be and should be three-dimensional like living complex organisms, rather than flat like a simple torilla. 2.) I drifted into tactile sculpture from my more sensuous art work and began to see it as a means of helping to get an out of touch society better grounded in the physical world. (Tactile art explores the full range of the sense of touch and involves, in addition to surface form and texture, temperature range from very cold to hot, moisture and dryness, vibration, pressure and airflow, static electricity and so on. For many effects, machines are required, foam rubber, feathers or kapok, fur, velvet, satin, heaters, foggers, freezing and cooling units. Other media include steel, concrete, wood, fiber, ceramics, high-density polyethylene (which feels like skin) and more.)

When I was 21 I started a peace group called No War Toys which was concerned with the informal and home environments that create a tacit acceptance of war and violence or even glorify it, making it seem to the young male like a helluva macho fun good time. That I considered - and still do - a gratuitous big lie preying on the weakness of our confused species. No War Toys gave me other experiences contributing to my future work for ecocities. The strongest insights from that seven-year experience working on No War Toys, and doing sculpture and tactile sculpture at the same time, was in organizing activist work with others.

Primed for exploring ideas and values and the fates of the Earth we might be able to adjust, I happened by sheer coincidence to be hitch hiking through Arizona and my driver said, "How would you like to visit a famous architect?" It was her car so I said, "sure - sounds like fun." It was Paolo Soleri, who was proposing his version of ecocities, and had been since about 1961. That year, the year of the portentous hitch-hiking trip, was 1965.

By 1975 I had organized Arcology Circle, a California educational non-profit corporation, with similarly concerned people with an interest in Soleri's work. Our notions was to explore ecologically healthy city design and building and perhaps build something in Northern California. Eventually it transmuted into Urban Ecology, then Ecocity Builders, Inc., which I am still busy running out of Oakland, California with my partner Kirstin Miller and some faithful seekers and doers.

The ideas have fallen fairly flat in the good old USA, land of the car and home of the sprawl that is presently sweeping the planet and that is the largest contributor to climate change and species extinctions on Earth. In fact, let's face it, I've almost starved to death and raked my poor children through the coals of poverty and small support. But there has always been enough ecocity interest, most of it from outside the borders of the USA, to keep me going all these years. Since 1990 I have traveled the equivalent of 26 times around the world, to all continents several times, always on OPM (other people's money), and if I weren't too broke in the last year to pick up on two invitations, to Brazil and China, it would have been 27. With others in my NGO (non-governmental organization) I have organized or assisted in producing five International Ecocity Conferences - in Berkeley, California, 1990; Adelaide, Australia, 1992; Yoff/Dakar, Senegal, 1996; Curitiba, Brazil, 2000; Shenzhen, China, 2002; and (planned), Bangalore, India, 2006.

These inspiring travels, and the conferences involving more than 2,000 people by now, have included some of the world's best innovators and most creative people in city, town and village design, planning and research. They leave me with a sense that something may be about to happen. Hurricane Katrina may be a horribly helpful wake up call, which will sound hollow to anyone who lost loved ones in the catastrophe, but the most salient enlightenment fact, the most powerful "ah-hah" of my life is simply that nobody takes seriously the form of the city as the largest determinant of destruction of or salvation of the planet and its life systems. But it is! Maybe Katrina will make that difference. Maybe we will need a disaster ten times Katrina to wake people up.

But the lesson of my life, if there be one to date, is that the crucial knowledge I'm trying to put into practice is essential to, as I said when I was a teenager, finding the keys to the secrets of the universe, and in particular, to that smaller big universe called Earth that us humans and all our beautiful co-travelers on this planet call home.