Letter to Albert Bates of The Farm after commentary on Ecocities
Copy to my Post Carbon Institute blog

Thanks Albert,

A little more detail on that.

A major issue is writing the story so people can hear it and change. We don't have much time left to change either. You know why: global warming, peak oil and species extinctions, not to speak of paving almost the entire agricultural soils supply of the Central Valley of California and dozens of other such places, etc. I think the threshold is when we begin to systematically roll back sprawl development toward ecologically healthy pedestrian centers. Hard to say it more basically than that, and I've always been impressed that you are one of the few capable of basic thinking, so you'll probably fully appreciate what that means.

The wave of development has been outward from low energy pedestrian cities of the not too distant pre-oil past to the sprawl of extremely high (and cheap) energy cities. The "cheap" isn't cheap any more, but propped up by hidden and silenced subsidies and as it gets even more expensive the hiding and silencing won't work any more. WHEN that wave of sprawl turns around and heads back to its pedestrian centers is crucial. Too late and the "die back," in Jan Lundberg's terms, will be in the form of a collapse free fall. If soon, we might salvage something of civility and complex, creative - rather than strictly reactive - possibilities for humanity.

Yes the local wildlife you've mentioned and which we help regenerate with our creek daylighting native plant planting projects is important to restore with our help, and that can be done. But at the same time we need this notion of moving away from the city of machines to the city of the human being on foot, bicycle and, to a degree supportive of that pedestrian environment, such motorized transport as train, streetcar and elevator. The image of the architectural solution in clusters and centers of buildings relating in a beautiful and inspiring way with open spaces - both natural and agricultural - and the very low energy transport system is a key component of that "roll back sprawl" image in the mind, that can be summarized in one sentence. "The world lives by phrases," said Herbert Hoover. That story is the foundation upon which a healthy future can be built in the mind and the land use pattern of the ecocity is the physical foundation upon which it can be built in our physical reality. Without the right story and land use pattern, expect collapse.

By the way, the amount of energy available from renewables like sun and wind, in relation to the energy required to harvest that renewable energy, will always be small compared to what oil gave us. Energy, then, will always be expensive in energy terms and in any realistic economic terms from now on out. The ecocity is absolutely essential, then, to the realistic plans for a healthy future.

About China, I have one major supporter and fellow advocate of all this there, Rusong Wang, head of the Center for Research for Environmental and Ecological Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Science and a member of the Chinese Peoples Congress. But the fly in the ointment is that the Chinese want their ecocity mainly in name and emotional/political intent but also with loads of cars for the elite. Can't happen that way. Cars for highly specialized uses outside the cities (cities like Venice, the Medina of Fez, Gulongyu that would be destroyed by an infrastructure for even a few cars) will be possible in an ecocity world, but for a major fraction of the world, say the top half of the middle class and the rulers of business and governmen, that's just too much poison for the critter to survive. The critter being human civilization. Says Rusong about the vast majority of government decision makers and planners in China, gesticulating wildly and impatiently in imitation, "when you say anything against cars THEY GET VERY ANGRY!"

Cheers and good luck to us all,

Richard