In my recent experiences two interesting themes crossed. One came from reading Richard Heinberg’s books, THE PARTY’S OVER – OIL, WAR AND THE FATE OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES, and POWER DOWN – OPTIONS AND ACTIONS FOR A POST-CARBON WORLD.

The other came from one of the worst talks I've ever heard, in which a speaker at the Towards Car Free Cities IV conference in Berlin this summer – an otherwise excellent, even important event - declared that design was an egotistical assumption of revelation from God forced on the good people of Earth by professional designers, condescending planners and government bureaucrats with zero appreciation for the subtleties of Medieval wisdom and hell bent on redeveloping YOUR neighborhood for planetary self-destruction.

Implication: never presume to design anything. I kid you not! I won't even give the guy the credit of mentioning his name. Bye! Of all the notions for not attempting to do something important, much less do it well, this vague warning against the evils of presuming to design was one of the worst, most disempowering I'd ever heard.

But it did cause me to think about design all over again, just as the bad news of Heinberg’s books did remind me he forgot something that has to do with the fact that nature designs – and that we could design some very crucial things to deal with the ever so real crisis he faces eyeball to eyeball.

To "back-cast" from the crisis Heinberg forecasts, where did the disasters of a society running out of oil and gas come from? When was the opportunity lost?

If we are going to inevitably see an enormous gap between demand for oil and world supply and a frantic grasping for control of the dregs, from buying off governments for the stuff (American tax payers paying oily countries to shift vast profits to the shareholders of American oil companies) to invading those that won't be bought (weapons contractors and "humanitarian" rebuilders of ripped apart countries getting further vast profits)…

If we are going to be desperately tearing up some of the least net energy return deposits such as tar sands and oil shale – ten energy units in for eleven energy units out – in some of the most biologically and ecologically sensitive and difficult to get to remaining reserves of life on the planet…

If we are likely to see a grossly overpopulated world with all its high-energy props kicked out from under it, and a depression to make The Depression look cheerful, along with social disintegration and chaos…

Then how did we get there – from where?

Enough time to invest in the transition I'd like to take us all back to 1971. I had recently read Farrington Daniels’ book DIRECT USE OF THE SUN’S ENERGY, an early classic confirming and enriching what all of us who grew up in the Southwestern US took for granted: the sun delivers us immense amounts of healthy energy – why not use it?

I was writing feature articles for the Los Angeles Times Sunday "West" magazine about then. In that capacity I interviewed Aden Meinel at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He had earlier built the Kitt Peak National Observatory and was currently an advisor to NASA.

His latest enthusiasm: promoting solar energy in the form of large solar electric "farms," that is, power plants covering thousands of acres of desert with big flat panels for gathering the sun’s energy. In a charming rendition of the scheme, one of the renderings for his idea showed a cowboy taking a break under the shade of one of the hundreds of solar collector panels marching off toward the craggy mountains in the background, complete with a power plant nestled in a valley. Random cows nibbled the sage and bunch grass here and there between and under the solar panels.

Meinel said something that's come back to bother me many times since, something very basic and about as important as things get. We'd need to use a considerable amount of our fossil fuel inheritance if we were to make a graceful transition to a renewable energy civilization, he said. We'd have to melt thousands of square miles of glass for concentrating and collecting solar energy. If we did not start planning and doing something about the transition fairly soon, he said, we would be in, shall we say, a serious problem.

This was the set up for the biggest "I told you so" I have ever heard. In the following thirty-three years, who ever heard of the plan to use a significant portion of our fossil fuels to invest in the transition into something self-consciously sane and healthy for people and planet? I for one didn't and I've been searching for exactly that ever since.

My own little voice, hoping to contribute to such a transition scheme, was one of a tiny few voices, squeaky mice at the bottom of an immense barrel rumbling with the reverberations of heavy traffic all around. And now, alas, I'm afraid Richard Heinberg is probably not very far off base, if at all.

Thirty-three years ago I had also heard of Paolo Soleri’s ideas that compact development of pedestrian cities would dispel the dawning nightmare of the automobile’s assault on urban structure, social conviviality, agricultural land, atmosphere, climate, natural species, humans killed by accidents and smog, and so on.

I thought the idea of planning and designing for a transition to such ecological cities powered by renewable energy, probably mostly solar, was the big answer. Paolo Soleri was beginning the debate on the material half of it– the built land use/infrastructure of cities, towns and villages. Aden Meinel was talking about the other half – the energy that flows through whatever gets built.

Understanding the anatomy and "food," you might say, the body and "natural" energy supply of this living, if human-built creation, would provide us with the understanding of the metabolism of the whole civilization and the outlines of a plan for transition to an ecologically vital future on Earth. So it seemed to me at that the time.

The lost moment of creative initiative We had that leverage point a third of a century ago. There was still probably plenty of time but people in large numbers or with great decision-making power did not go for creativity’s better side – or even simple 2 + 2 planning based on the larger assessments of material and energy resources available and investments required.

There were almost half as many people on Earth then (about 52% of the world population as I write). On average each individual consumed considerably less than we do now. Global warming, which is about as obvious today as the round Earth hypothesis or that gravity exists, was an obscure theory, even in environmental circles. Vast fisheries and whole associated ecosystems covering immense patches of the Ocean Sea had not yet collapsed, only some smaller ones. Oil production was growing rapidly and though everyone even then knew the supply was limited, it was assumed to be centuries before we'd be in a fossil fuel crunch.

The idea that we'd be destroying the planet’s climate and life systems because of using so much had dawned on almost no one at the time.

Some people, myself included, were quite hopeful in the early 1970s that humanity would not have to wait for a colossal disaster before someone would say, "the larger facts of the matter are that fossil fuels are plentiful but finite, while solar energy in particular, and some other good candidates among renewable energy sources are more diffuse but virtually eternal, given the multi-billion year future of the sun as the energy source for Earth.

Therefore we will use our positive side and summons some imagination and figure out how to move forward." As already said, and perhaps you have noticed yourself, that didn't happen. Others who I took to be cynics then, and still do even thought they were right, said we'd never do the right thing until forced by disaster. Or, maybe they were actually wrong – the disaster is here and now for the species already dead and dying by the thousands in 2004 and we still are not doing the right thing.

By 2003 Lester Brown, recent head of the World Watch Institute and now of the Earth Policy Institute, wrote a book called PLAN B. Plan A is business as usual in which the US buys all the governments it can so they will support American oil policies and attacks and kills those that actually have the oil and won't cooperate in letting it go at bottom dollar and convenient schedule.

Plan A is China building highways and cars because, as I've heard in China myself, it is "glorious." Plan A is a lot of other things that could be subsumed under shortsighted exploitation for the material benefit of those already most materially benefited and those that want to help them, and myriad other things we don't face because it would make us feel uncomfortable, a phenomenon called denial.

Plan B, on the other hand, is the attempt to design a set of policies and select the best technologies and practices that allow both human beings and the rest of the animals and plants of the biosphere to thrive into the deep future. Brown takes a courageous shot at doing that and has some of the best information about the state of resources and the present ways politics and economics work. However, he leaves out the structure of the city, town and village almost entirely. To my way of thinking, that means his plan is off to a good start but has no physical foundation and therefore no sense of the literal structure of civilization itself.

Richard Heinberg, on the other hand, doesn't believe many of the solutions in Brown’s book are going to work. The "hydrogen economy," for example, looks a lot less promising to him. A lot of the rest of society, less knowledgeable about "peak oil" and just how dependent we have become on a massive and growing supply of inexpensive energy, have maybe a little too much trust in "the system" delivering ever more of some other source of energy such as lower grade coal, tar sands and oil shale.

I join Heinberg in saying that. What’s beginning to dawn on even the New York Times and National Geographic which have run feature articles on the issue recently is that actually switching to those alternatives, as bad as oil’s global warming has become, will be equally as devastating in additional ways such as water depletion and contamination – while continuing to contribute to global warming.

Check it out and it's not just that we are measuring temperature increases around the planet, watching glaciers recede and penguins and polar bears starve and die out, but that there in no bottom to the slide we are already on unless we do something quick – and there are no signs we are.

The question becomes, then, is it already too late?

This extraordinarily bleak possibility actually looks like a probability – a third of a century after we had our best chance, when the likes of Aden Meinel were preaching a renewable energy transition strategy and Paolo Soleri and others were saying the same about replacing the city of cars, sprawl and gasoline with pedestrian ecological cities. I thought, back then, that human creativity could come to the fore and the positive side of an ecologically healthy future could be built, in the style some call, unfortunately not very melodiously, "proactive."

The "reactive" approach – wait for the disaster to move people first – struck me as having the potential to erode the positive alternatives in a deadly manner. Now we have to face the likelihood that we have waited too long and have little time and resources left for positive investment. As they say, it takes a long, long time to turn a gigantic tanker around when its underway – and our physical "built infrastructure" is a million times as big as the largest tanker ever constructed and it definitely has massive momentum in its destructive direction.

Perhaps the end of oil and beginning of expensive energy will be the iceberg for an even more accurate maritime metaphor. Tanker hell! This is a passenger ship!

Whereas in the early 1970s when several of us interested in Soleri’s pedestrian car-free cities founded the organization that would become known as Urban Ecology, which in 1992 spun of Ecocity Builders, which I now head, I imagined some pretty spectacular pedestrian cities with wonderful artistic and ecological implications.

Now I am beginning to see very sever compromises of those visions as the best we can hope for into the very deep future. Perhaps some day many decades or centuries after the collapse of the Age of Oil and having learned our hard lessons, we will finally decide to be "proactive" for the positive rather than reactive to the negative, selective in our relationship to technology rather than greedy in its immediate application.

Maybe there is something wrong in the genes of our species and that day will never come, even in thousands of years. But to build creatively and positively with the fullest knowledge of large systems and our roles grounded in the small places where we live is THE good work, as far as I'm concerned.

Berkeley since the ‘60s - a telling case study
My history in this regard is not reassuring. I settled in Berkeley in 1974 largely because it looked like an open-minded place of remarkably creative potential, a good place to try out ecologically healthy initiatives in city design – tied in of course with the solar energy I had recently been writing about.

Its geographic location was wonderful, with San Francisco Bay to the west, and the view out the Golden Gate to the Pacific Ocean was inspiring indeed. Berkeley’s creeks were mostly buried by low density, car-dependent housing; it looked like a good place to try opening creeks and teaching the lessons of bringing natural biodiversity back into cities. It's downtown and neighborhood centers were modestly active and vital and could be reshaped into ecologically healthy places working ever better with transit, bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, architecture respecting solar income and providing for rooftop native plant gardens and the like.

It's recent history at the time I arrived reinforced the idea that socially there was great potential: the city had spawned the first Ecology Center in the United States five years earlier and just one year earlier the Farallones Institute launched the Integral Urban House with about everything ecologically healthy a single house could have: solar active systems and solar passive greenhouse, Clivus Multrum composting toilet providing fertilizer for a productive vegetable garden, fish pond, bee hive, thorough recycling – and space for an office, several student residents, classes and seminars of up to 40 people that kept a full schedule for studying and teaching about all that. Off to a great start!

But I badly miscalculated the people themselves. They changed. Keeping the town cozy and pleasant proved to be their objective: by not building a net gain in housing from 1970 to 2000 – while creating several thousand new jobs in commerce, education, research and a "gourmet ghetto" culture to make your mouth water.

This lead to an imbalance between housing supply – limited – and demand – steadily growing. That in turn drove real estate values way up, driving lower income people out, bringing ever wealthier people in, while at the same time freezing innovation in design and development. They didn't want to hear that there was a problem with low-density development and settled ever more so into a pattern of interrupting the discussion and using distorted information, fear, name-calling and outright lies to keep from hearing the arguments for reshaping the city. They "wouldn't go there."

A brief example of how opportunity for transition to eco-cities and renewable energy systems gets squandered now follows. For those interested in "the voice of the people," call it bad process.

In 2000 Berkeley’s General Plan was being revised. Kirstin Miller, program director in Ecocity Builders, and I began promoting something we called the "Ecocity Amendment" which proposed putting several policies into the Berkeley General Plan.

The strongest policy for changing the city would establish "transfer of development rights," also called TDR, as a means of buying up houses and other buildings in willing seller arrangements and then removing them so that creeks could be re-established, community gardens and parks expanded and sports and recycling areas created. On the other side of the equation, housing in growing transit/pedestrian centers would be built.

The idea was that the rights to develop are sold and taken away from the future open space area and sent where the city could be building higher density, higher diversity solar oriented, car-free infrastructure. It amounts to an infrastructure shift to roll back low-density automobile-dependent development and build pedestrian/transit centers.

Developers, in this arrangement, get to build more than they would otherwise be allowed while gaining the rights to do that development by paying for the opening up of land for creeks, community gardens and all those other things for which we need open space. In the arrangement, creeks benefit, people needing housing benefit, car free areas become a real possibility and energy and pollution problems are solved at the land use source. The people selling their property for demolition and recycled building materials – and open space – get another option of who to sell to should they want to.

We got 103 organizations to sign on for such a policy, and by the way, such "willing seller" deals are used successfully in Portland, Oregon and South Lake Tahoe to remove buildings damaging natural waterways and send development to areas much better served by low-energy transportation and pedestrian facilities.

Despite the support of virtually all the environmental, housing and low-income groups in town, as well as some popular businesses, youth, bicycle and transit groups, the City Council supposed "progressives" voted "no." They supported instead the neighborhood conservatives and architectural preservationists who no matter what happens in town, try to stop or minimize all development, even carefully considered environmentally beneficial development.

I have to tell you, it is a pathetic scene when a few people resorting to fear, extreme emotionality, gross distortions and outright lying gain the support of a City Council "progressive" majority and kill such a promising and well supported policy. There are many other examples showing the dynamics of intentional ignorance – "I won't even listen to that idea."

What can be built with the time we have left?
Do I think that ecocities can be built now? The signs are not good. I've been traveling the world looking for powerful images of whole systems coming together, and true, since 1970, Curitiba, Brazil has been building pedestrian/transit infrastructure that works, or has for some time worked pretty well – while in the 1990s building three new gigantic automobile manufacturing plants. ("You just can't turn down several thousand high paying jobs coming to town all at once," the city’s official guide told me.)

I took pictures of their high-density housing projects next to their bus boulevards and pedestrian plazas and many pictures of their great open spaces with newly planted and expanding forests. But it would be dishonest to not also take photos of their rapidly hardening arteries stuffed with anxious drivers following in America’s footsteps and I'd be dishonest to neglect that Curitibans tell me they are shocked, shocked that the non-pedestrian streets are getting stuffed with cars and becoming very unpleasant.

In China, where they are building whole cities at a time anyway, I floated the idea of experimental ecocities – and nothing has happened with that despite having contacts right into the Peoples Congress of China and good contacts in the Chinese Academy of Science.

Positive and new examples of pedestrian areas do exist, as does the whole pedestrian city of Venice, but such examples are very small in number, lack anything like the full range of alternatives (Venice by historic timing and circumstance has no real solar energy adaptations, for example) and cities are losing ground, not gaining, against automobile infrastructure.

The brilliant proposed Halifax Project of Urban Ecology Australia, which would have turned six blocks of a former trucking terminal on the high-density edge of downtown Adelaide, Australia, into a major ecocity breakthrough, narrowly lost at their City Council. A sadly prosaic housing project was built at that location where, in 1995, there was considerable public support for a pedestrian car-free area of housing, shops, public plazas, rooftop gardens, and solar, shade and breeze architecture tuned to the bioregion.

Paolo Soleri’s experimental, thoroughly pedestrian ecological town of Arcosanti, Arizona crawls forward like a racer accidentally shot in the leg by the starting gun. From the beginning in 1970 when the first spade of earth was turned at that high desert central Arizona location – I was there – he has never received significant support from government or foundations despite the fact that his project would have provided powerful solutions for exactly the problems governments and foundations claim they exist to solve.

The examples go on and on. Nowhere has there been a breakthrough, neither in Downtown Berkeley where we have been working for a "Heart of the City" project for eight years, nor even in remarkably innovative Germany where environmentally oriented architects and activists are of the mind set that four stories is the highest a decent building, hence, a city should go.

Why this amazing limit to their imagination when they have just barely begun to experiment with terracing, rooftop gardens, multi-story solar passive greenhouses and so on is a real mystery to me. From recent trips I have seen among environmentalists and architects there a complete denial that hundreds of millions of people live or work above the fourth floor and, excepting for people starving in the country, they have in their higher density living, about the lowest average personal demand for energy of any of us, and the smallest ecological footprint.

Its such good news, the way density in ecologically tuned architecture and city design works, it begs for further exploration – which is barely happening anywhere.

I'm beginning to think that the best we can imagine of ecocities powered by renewable energy systems has become something far short of what could have been. People familiar with my drawings will recall some fairly science fiction like city visions, if usually replete with diversity of fine-grain detail and somewhat overgrown with biodiversity. Such cities, towns and villages require a lot of energy up front – but then run on practically no energy at all for hundreds or even thousands of years.

Once a few such places could have been built with even half the commitment that was made to place a man on the moon, that is, stunning examples could have been constructed and tried out and, I am completely confident, would have proved to be amazingly popular and beneficial in energy, biological, economic and social terms. Certainly with even a late wake up call we can do better than what we can expect continuing down the road of Plan A: to conquer and suck oil as fast as possible while considering our life style (and all the cars and cheap energy that support it) as "non-negotiable," to use the words of George W. Bush.

A kind of retreat to villages and small towns with limited ecological design ambitions, with few successes beyond raw survival, while serving as monasteries of the next great Dark Ages, is much more likely.

That could at least give us some vestiges of what could have been and preserve the larger ideas that we ran out of energy to build. That would at least give us grounds for the conviction that hope is not hopeless, in the face of even more dire predictions of the students of peak oil who see profound economic and social dislocation, constant resource wars and successive division of larger political units into smaller more paranoid and dangerous ones – Balkanization of the world – grasping to figure out how to survive with energy so rare and expensive one just can't use much of the stuff or build many if any of the fancy contraptions we've gotten used to. But the quasi-monastic ecotown in the context of no plan for a graceful transition no longer looks like a high art of human expression attainable in a couple generations.

That's what I'd hoped and worked for in the 1970s. Instead it looks to me like society will be in a long-term retrenchment taking a very long time to think over the destruction of most of the other species, well underway in 2004, and even the incredible contemplation of radical and profoundly impoverishing climate change, also well under way in 2004.

Is this the end of the world as we know it? Or is it just my fantasy world of a better future that's ending? The high energy, cheap energy world will most certainly be gone in a generation or else the living world of the biosphere will be a ghost of its old self.

I for one will continue designing as if we did have a plan, and among my drawings and ideas will be designs that assume we can use some of the last easy energy (oil and natural gas) and some of the first renewable energy to build a physically healthy civilization. I no longer feel this approach is as close to realistic as it once could have been. But we need a to understand this approach to designing and building our civilization and even if we are starting "far too late," the more we know of it the better we will do.

Back to design: it’s only natural Richard Heinberg, speaking about the environmental and social justice movement says this, "Instead of calling for a massive reduction in energy usage by industrial societies, Movement leaders sing the praises of the illusory hydrogen economy. They promote the reasonable idea that there will be enough for everyone, as long as goods are fairly distributed – but omit the other necessary conditional phrase: if human numbers are kept within the long-term carrying capacity of the environment and human demands are kept modest.

I am pounding on this point because it is not an incidental one. Population pressure and resource depletion are not side issues, they are the issues."

I think he's basically right but he to omits a phrase himself: and adopt whole systems design. There's a lesson here beyond the necessary wake up call that disaster is coming and we should do something about it, a lesson that says something about what we should do about it.

That physical thing we've constructed and live in, the built community of cities, towns and villages, has principles of physical form, organization and metabolism like all other living systems. And like everything else, all the subsystems of the universe and the universe itself went through a process suspiciously similar to, if not in fact, design.

Something – or someone, if you believe human identity with God is essential – designed it. Or else so many of those fantastic designs, from swirling galaxies to DNA replicating itself, were "self-organizing systems," as much current research in physics and biology is suggesting. Our insufferable speaker at the car-free conference this summer, in belittling design and casting designers as no less than self-styled messengers of an avenging God, missed the fact that design and creativity permeates all existence.

Personally, I don't care if design comes from God, my mother, one too many resentful diaper changes, a recessive gene, or the way my imagination happened to be feeling that day. Whether the whirling galaxies were designed by gravity and angular momentum or my house was designed by an architect or self-taught owner builder using his grandfather’s ideas about how one should work in wood, the design process was at the core and we can understand it and use it well – or ignore it, which would mean other people with less savory than helping the Earth motives will do it by our omission.

True, it seems obvious now that we will need to "powerdown" to a more reasonable human population and frugal ways, but in many ways the degree to which we thrive or grasp for survival from now into the deep future will be determined by the degree to which we utilize natures principles of design in creating our own human-built world. That means designing ecocities integral to renewable energy systems, specifically the city for people and the biosphere, not cars.

Think about it.