The problem is especially acute in America, where the combined share of overweight and obese residents is now well over 60 percent, ranking first among 22 nations represented in this graph from the OECD:

Now consider the trend in the rate of diabetes:

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One of the nation’s foremost experts in environmental health, Dr. Richard Jackson, has eloquently reminded us of the seriousness of this problem, which he highlights in a documentary series shown on PBS. Now consider the correlation between obesity and diabetes:

An excellent (though unsigned) article in Medscape Education summarizes why this should be a major concern:

Type 2 diabetes is a serious problem, not only in our country but also throughout the world. In the United States, probably more than 30% of individuals above the age of 60 years have diabetes (most of which is type 2 diabetes) or impaired fasting glucose. The most recent data support having 21 million people with diabetes in this country with millions not knowing that they have this disease. In general, for every two individuals who have been diagnosed with diabetes, there is another person out there with the disease who is not yet aware of having this condition. More than 2,500 cases of diabetes are diagnosed every single day.

Diabetes is the leading cause of non-traumatic amputations, eye disease, kidney disease, and a major factor in the development of cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in our patients with diabetes.

(The article continues with a very good exposition of the relationship of diabetes and obesity to ethnicity.)  Overall, the risk for death among people with diabetes is about twice that of people without diabetes of similar age.

Now, correlate the problem of the alarming rise in these problems with a serious lack of physical activity in the U.S. Here is a graph from National Geographic showing what shares of the population in 17 countries walk or bicycle to purposeful destinations:

So: we Americans are first in obesity, and last in everyday exercise. While I won’t argue that lack of walking or other everyday exercise is the sole cause of weight-related health problems – we all know the issues with nutrition, for example – the correlation is too strong to discount.

Why don’t Americans walk more? Because, as Dr. Howard Frumkin, another of our leading experts on environmental health, puts it in a fantastic presentation, “we have engineered walking and bicycling out of our communities” with community design oriented almost exclusively to driving. (With Andrew Dannenberg, Frumkin and Jackson co-authored the recent Making Healthy Places, published by Island Press.)

We have, in effect, made getting around by foot or bicycle the most dangerous and least attractive option, though some brave souls risk their safety to walk or bicycle despite the hostility of the environment. Want some examples? Here you go:

There are many remedies available to us, including “complete streets,” which fortunately are gaining favor in planning offices around the country. The research also points us in the direction of better street connectivity, neighborhoods with shops in close proximity to homes, and the presence of sidewalks and transit stops. My post yesterday featured a two-minute video on steps cities can take.  Let’s do it.

All photos courtesy of Complete Streets. This post originally appeared on the NRDC’s Switchboard blog.

Kaid Benfield is the director of the Sustainable Communities and Smart Growth program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, co-founder of the LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system, and co-founder of Smart Growth America. He writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment.  For more posts, see his blog’s home page.

Jody Butterfield and Allan Savory

Surprises

Check out the surprises in store for me when I read some about his work, and that of his wife Jody Butterfield.

Surprise number one: Savory was the first person and only person in my reading who I who I have found who says as I have from time to time that we simply have not thought systematically enough to reverse climate change. Savory looks at the problem holistically enough and on a large enough scale to draft the biology of the planet to serve in the battle to reverse – not adapt to or slow down but reverse – global heating. His particular proposal is to draw CO2 back down into the soil from which it has been shunted by human activities into the atmosphere. More on that shortly.

My point for years now has been that society has not proportionalized well enough and set priorities to deal in the most powerful ways available with our major problems. The accepted and easier pattern is to try to improve what we are already doing, much of it in principle wrong in the first place, actually intrinsically destructive. The alternative approach to solve big problems is simply to start thinking big and holistically from the start. What are the largest ecological problems we face? Start from there: Population, the base demand of humans to appropriate energy in the form of food from solar energy, chlorophyll and the plants of the world, and where we eat meat, from there too. This with 7 billion plus humans require colossal acreage and in present management is, as Allan Savory points out, shifting carbon from the soil of the earth to the sky. He says when you consider the enormous loss of soil and its nutrients it amounts to about the same load of CO2 shifting into the atmosphere as contributed by burning fossil fuels, probably more. Two problems here, actually, both the loss of soil and its organic matter due to degradation and desertification of soils and the outright ill advised burning of vast areas, often in the theory that it’s good for grasslands.

In other words, he is dealing with two of the primary problems that are really large and key to our future: population and agriculture. The other one, our specialty in Ecocity Builders, is the built environment of cities, towns and villages, the home of about 95% of us humans.

Once we recognize what the really big problems are we need to give them priority and apply what Savory calls “holistic management.” We can’t be reactive but rather systematic, seeking basic principles and taking the stance of observing very stringently how nature actually seems to be working.

Resilience is a good idea as far as it goes and the word is quite popular these days – who doesn’t believe it’s a good idea to be able to react well to changing circumstances. But that leaves to some other sources the initiative to which we must react. But when it comes to climate change, adaptation or even mitigating – making less damaging – is not good enough. Sometimes “resilience” is even seen as a superior concept to guide our actions than “sustainability”. But it is not as good as understanding most important principles in the most basic ways we can about what went wrong and trying to think through creating something new and different. We need to take fresh initiative from more basic principles than even the best of reacting to the forces as they appear to impinge upon us from the outside. In fact, they have been created based on misunderstandings in the first place – by us! We have in fact created these problems we now need to solve as powerful but ill-advised initiatives. The objective should, then, be a better creative process hitched to a better understanding of what is actually happening. Then we might be able to solve problems at the most basic level possible. Perhaps this approach could be profound enough to return us to the dynamic relative stability of the climate system, atmosphere, biosphere and soils. The planet’s soils and atmosphere have maintained a self-correcting healthy balance for the thriving of life for hundreds of millions of years… until humans and our technologies came along and started creating the wrongly conceived things. What if we started creating correctly conceived (healthy) things?

Surprise number two: I’ve “grown up” hearing repeatedly with few disputing the “fact” that pastoral people and their grazing have destroyed soils around the world and turned grasslands to desert. We are talking absolutely immense acreage here. So when I heard Allan (who I’ve been writing to lately and hence think of by first name) say he advocated enlarged herds of large herbivores to bring the soil back to health, I was hearing something very new and strange to my ears. Not that overgrazing didn’t happen in the past causing vast erosion, but grazing of particular kinds ill informed by lack of observation of the way nature actually works on healthy grasslands.

Cattle on The Center for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe

You may remember my recent refrains that there is no reason cities can’t restore soils with organic waste and enhance, not erode biodiversity both locally and averaged around the world. We just have to make that a priority and go for it, design for it. So when I heard the vast concentrated herds of bison, wild horses, wildebeest, zebra and so on healed soils in a dramatic way I decided this was something to consider most seriously. Allan was definitely proportionalizing right.

In my construct of the proportionally large things we cannot postpone dealing with, the largest impact activities of humans, what I came up with was: 1.) base population of people and therefore their food and basic clothing and shelter demands, 2.) the agricultural/diet nexus which covers most of the even slightly productive soils of the planet and, 3.) the built environment of the wrong kind of city, the city built for, by and of machines instead of humans mainly going about on foot in their cultural/economic lives with potentially positive effect.

So he pricked up my ears, I listened and this is what I heard. If I could garner some seriously good news on agriculture from Allan, for one thing, my new book on ecocities and economics in the larger context would be far improved.

Here’s what big animals do on grasslands

Large herbivores for millions of years evolved with the carnivores and grasses, flowers, herbs and scrub bush lands of the world. Think the Bison of the US Great Plains moving in their tightly clumped millions and the almost endless herds of animals we’ve all seen in nature films of Africa. Wildebeest, zebra, gazelles…. Similar patterns prevailed almost everywhere such conditions exist, the conditions being a temperature and moisture range that provides sufficient time for growing and water for the plants, and thus for the animals too. These lands are on the dry side and have spotty forest patches or none at all. What happens is the large herbivores spread manure and urine across the landscape, richly fertilizing the soil. But in addition, the compact herds mix up the soil and excrement nutrients – along with the seeds of the plants they’ve been eating – by punching the hooves down into the earth a few inches. This “herd effect,” as Savory calls it, mixes up the seeds at various depths with dirt and manure, many seeds at precisely the right level below the surface and right concentration of fertilizer “dilluted” in the dirt  for optimal germination.

Imagine instead the typical herd seen in the US west today: a thin scattering of cattle, with all the predators killed off, dropping their droppings and pee in isolated places and traveling on to graze basically separately, not clumping together with their bovine brethren otherwise they are stuck in feed lot where their excrement is so intensely concentrated as to be a major pollutant. Scattered as they are when on the range they don’t scrunch around with their hooves mixing excrement with dirt but instead deposit seeds in their droppings in such an intense concentration of nutrients, in intense competition with other seeds upon sprouting and sitting on the surface not in the medium they grow best in. Meantime the cowboys aren’t keeping the herd together to do what many wild herds do managed largely by predators, but are off somewhere mending fences.

The massing of natural herds of wild large herbivores is defensive. It makes it difficult for predators to attack and kill many of the grass-eating animals, which is one of the main reasons for the tight clumps of animals. Says Allan, the males have horns not for defense against predators but for sparing with other males for mates. The back side of the animals have dangerous hooves powered in back kicks by the enormous muscles of their rears, the same muscles which make fast take off and running possible. The carnivore’s task is largely to try to separate out individuals for attacks on the neck and shoulder area of the herbivore. So the tight packing of animals is partially for defense. In addition, the tight packing of animals means the soil can get optimally mixed up for seeding the next generation of grasses and other prairie plants. The animals both herbivores and carnivores, grasses and flowers and bushes, and the worms and microbes, insects and prairie dogs, meercats, rabbits, snakes, burrowing owls and on and on that live in and on the soil have all evolved together and the pattern had been working beautifully for exceedingly rich biodiversity and very high soil organics and CO2 holding capacity come ice ages and interglacial periods and millions and millions of years. Along comes a rain – most seeds well mixed into the dirt can wait a season or two or even through long droughts – and sprout they do with no human-applied fertilizer required, nor artificial irrigation nor machines nor gasoline nor diesel fuel nor insecticide nor herbicide.

That’s the way nature worked for eons. Human management was more random and not holistic. People have failed to notice what was going on in nature or simply couldn’t for reasons of lack of resources or ability to control their mobile domesticated meat, milk, wool, skin, bone and horn mines that have been our animals for generally fifteen to ten thousand years. Often human owned herds were small in number down to a desperate family’s single animal. Remember the coup de grace of the foliage and soil of the Atlas Mountains by lonely random goats belonging to very poor people. Almost uniformly overgrazing was seen as simply grazing too much and not as a factor of what actually happened when the grazing was going on. Pastoralist, Allan Savory points out, have often been thereby unfairly vilified since when they do manage well they can actually restore health to landscapes.

Pumping water and CO2 back into the soil

He goes much further, though, in not just pointing out but in actually managing his Zimbabwe ranch to prove that large numbers of cattle or other large herbivores can treat absolutely massive areas of land adding soil moisture and chemicals nutritious for soil health to the degree that streams long gone and waterholes and ponds actually return to desert landscapes. These are landscapes made desert by bad management of the very animals that can restore the landscapes to health. He says the amount of water the soil can retain is truly phenomenal. Allan points out that there’s a great difference between incident rainfall and effective rainfall; the first can run off in flash floods and evaporate quickly back into the air. Effective rainfall, however, is the water absorbed by the land, largely facilitated by the plants that break the fall of raindrops, aid in fluffing up the earth to receive the moisture with their own roots including the dead roots of the sod, as well as from the fibrous organic matter from the manure, and, shading the soil to prevent the rapid evaporation that happens when lack of shade produces hotter surface temperatures. That’s a lot of factors working to retain water in the soil. Then if you imagine a few years going by with that kind of management, natural or by humans and their animals, you can begin to see how the water could accumulate in the ever more porous soil and begin moving under ground as ground water aquifers bubbling up in low spots as creeks and ponds. This is exactly what happens on the land he and his wife and employees manage.

Thinking of all this and his statement that the amount of water that can be sequestered in this manner is nothing less than awesome and a game changer for water balances in the biosphere – even hydro and lithospheres – struck me as likely to be a profound truth. I was recalling flying over vast areas of the world looking down from airplanes at very thin lines of waterways glinting in the sun and noticing the “dry” land could be measured in the many thousands of times the area of the flowing waterways of the continents, all land below stuffed like a sponge with water? Well, largely anyway.

As the sod builds, and it can happen quite rapidly if enough animals populate the land and in the patterns of herds clumped well together producing good mixing of manure, seed and earth, the soil sucks enormous amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere, as well as water out of the rain. Then he goes so far as to say it is the only system he knows that could possibly have the power to absorb so much CO2 out of the atmosphere as to arrest CO2 building up in the atmosphere and begin returning it to the soil.

Allan also points out that the animals produce methane in their digestive process and so does decomposition of a certain amount of their manure and just general decomposition of dead grass roots and various leaves and twigs. This methane is a more active greenhouse heat trapping gas than carbon dioxide but occurs in far less quantity. But he says that in normal conditions the soil takes up and process methane too, breaking it down and rendering a net balance that has held the whole atmosphere in balance for millions of years. What he means by “holistic” management has to be this big: to embrace the whole thing!: earth, water, air, energy, minerals, biological action (us animals and plants) and intelligence (which seems to be innate in these natural processes we are talking about now and can be learned in our own minds).

Elegant wording of the principle

I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes when learning about Allan Savory’s work. It was from Alfred W. Crosby’s book, Ecological Imperialism – The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, New York and Melbourne, 1986 p. 173: “…these animals are self-replicators, the efficiency and speed with which they can alter environments, even continental environments, are superior to those for any machines we have thus far devised.”

In Allan’s own words in a letter he sent to me two days ago, “No technology can ever replace billions of organisms in the moist gut of large herbivores cycling billions of tons annually dying plant material while also laying soil covering litter. And why should we ever try to do this with such machines as were developed, all using fossil fuels, when animals do it free using solar energy and feeding people?”

We all know that in many places there has been a long history of rapid population expansion, so I looked up United Nations figures on population expansion all over the world and in his part of Africa in Particular where, other than in just a couple Moslem countries, we are seeing the fastest growth on the planet. The UN population researchers had a nice symmetrical 100 year set of figures what looked at the last approximately 60 years and projected into the next 40 years, with the assumption based on trends, that population growth in Africa as well as most of the rest of the world would gradually slow. In particular they were looking at the period from 1950 to 2050. I said to Allan that it looked to me that these figures would absolutely override any kind of range management, what did he think?:

Zimbabwe would see a multiplication of population 8.1 times over, Sudan 8.3 times over, Rwanda 10.2, Ethiopia and Somalia 10.4, Kenya, 14.0 and Uganda 17.0. He answered as follows.

Population is of course serious and yes we very much bring it into our work – just do not talk about it because it aggravates the situation – something I learned long ago in Africa if a white talks about it then it turns racial tragically. This is dying out slowly.  We point out that almost all the strife here is due to deteriorating land and rising population – the two collide with tragedy as we see repeatedly.  To deal with it our mainstream NGO’s have three kneejerk responses — put in boreholes and dams to provide water (and the situation gets worse), feed starving mothers and children and treat diseases (and family size gets bigger and problem gets worse) and the third thing is to improve the economy with micro-banking, access roads to markets, etc (and family size gets bigger and problem worse).

I gave a talk on these lines in Northern Kenya not long ago and a woman from USAID came up to me after and said Oh how right you are. We have done all that for forty years here and now there are five times as many people killing each other.

So to deal with this we stress – put in your projects but make sure that some money is always going to two things – teaching people to reverse the land degradation (as we demonstrate here  [at his ranch in Zimbabwe]) and educating and empowering women.  Only the latter seems to lead to family size balancing with resources.

These population ideas seem to me as solid as Allan’s ideas about regenerating grasslands from deserts, if far more conventionally accepted by healthy workers and Planned Parenthood around the world if not the Catholic Church. Imagine his whole systems “holistic management” could include a gradual scaling back to a sustainable number of humans as well as animals, and we could conceivably imagine shifting back to many more natural animals on the land too. We might then imagine a more balanced human diet with ultimately less meat. That’s what would make for more room for the natural plant and animal communities doing their ancient and traditional job of maintaining soil, water and atmospheric gas balances. Multiply that by enormously reduced human impact by people through building cities for people instead of cars and we have a serious approach to very long term return to healthy evolution for out planet. My biggest surprise of all in learning about Savory, is that by combining forces and “holistically managing” population, agriculture (largely through – surprise! – grazing) and the ecocity transition we might see the sort of surprise coming to pass that could actually overwhelm all those negatives that are compounding at this same time.

Richard Register is founder and president of Ecocity Builders and can be reached at ecocity@igc.org

Maybe you’re itching to take a wide, full swing to drive the shiny steel of a nice heavy pick deep under the asphalt. You too can leverage up a satisfying big slab of that black, gooey hard stuff. I love destroying asphalt and maybe you’d like to join the party. Here’s a “how to.”

Alas it all begins with land ownership. It all ends with redesigning land uses and rebuilding most of what we’ve built to date, so destructive are today’s cities and towns. It’s useful to divide possible projects into three categories: small, medium and truly satisfying. The last one means BIG-which I haven’t seen yet.

Just to give you a sense of proportion: since 1992 I’ve probably depaved one acre with my various friends. Meantime I guess between 100 and 200 acres of my town, Berkeley, Calif., have been paved for parking lots and freeway expansions, more cars and deeper gasoline addiction. This in a city whose master plan has said, since 1972, that it is already “built out.” Well, always more room for more asphalt-and a few crazies like me who haven’t learned to give up. Now on with the lesson.

Small Depaving Projects
You have to own some existing pavement, or find a sympathizer who does. Obviously there are millions of acres of it around, but surprisingly little is available for destruction. Or at least the owners don’t often think it is.

They say the streets of heaven are paved with gold. Hell, with the sanctity people give to the streets of suburbia they might as well be paved with gold.

Some pavement, like the ubiquitous driveway, functions in a way that owners believe is essential to their life sustenance, security, image or sexual virility. But some can be convinced that two thin strips of concrete could work as well for off-street parking, or that a “turf block” that allows water to soak around the driveway car-supporting surface is okay. Often in residential areas the surface between the sidewalk and curb is paved, and usually there is no law requiring it to be. Here then are two places to begin. I have managed to talk six or seven owners into depaving in these small spaces and have depaved the sidewalk-to-curb space-the “planting strip”-of the house I once owned. In the case of the driveway, unless the owner is in a tightly controlled housing development or condominium association, the owner can just do it. In the case of the planter strip, in my town you should first call up USA-Underground Services Alert-or find a similar service in your area, to ascertain where the buried pipes and wires are located. The service is free here. They come out and spray colorful lines on your concrete telling you where gas, water and electricity lie beneath the surface. Do not dig there!

It used to be that you could then cut the concrete with a big, circular, rented mechanical saw and start to dig. But no, now you’re supposed to go down to City Hall in Berkeley and get a permit for $50 and pay more for every foot you cut with a masonry saw.

This additional disincentive to depaving, which is added to the cost of renting a masonry saw, that may or may not be a law in your town, is imbecilic in a city like mine that claims to be environmentalist. I’d recommend ignoring it.

I’ve never been stopped and if I had been it would have been a good educational fight. If you are up to it, and willing to take the risk, it could be fun. Otherwise you can pay the money and waste the time so the bureaucrats can feel important.

Speaking of which, depaving isn’t cheap. If you want a smooth edge, you can’t just sledge hammer out the unwanted stuff up to a public street or sidewalk. Using a chisel to refine such an edge doesn’t help much, unless you come up against an expansion joint or a crack that is actually an edge created originally by pouring a separate slab of concrete. Ragged edges are bad press and alienate people we need to communicate with about depaving. So rent a concrete saw from one of the thousands of construction-rental-equipment places around the world. The machine rental is modest-usually about $30 a day-but the circular blade encrusted with industrial diamonds gets worn down a few microns that they measure. A depaving project with about 80 feet of concrete cutting (a typical planter strip removal) costs about an additional $l20. If removing asphalt, a softer material than concrete, the blade wears out at about half that rate. Hence half that cost, plus of course the $30 per day and the idiot city permit fee, if you pay it.

Then, what to do with the old pavement? It adds up faster than you think. Three to four inches of concrete slab, in our town, figuring the above typical planter strip depaving, adds up to about $35 in dump fees.

An alternative is to turn the material, if concrete, into benches in your garden, by cutting the slabs into sections about eighteen inches by two to three feet.

Asphalt, by contrast, will fall apart over the ensuing months. Give up on it, just like you should give up on gasoline, as soon as possible.

This extra cutting so that you can use the concrete may actually be more expensive than taking it to a dump or transfer station, because of the added wear on the expensive diamond blade. Diamonds to cut those streets of gold! Are we living in suburban heaven or what? Old pavement taken to the transfer station is usually “recycled” as clean fill in some kind of larger construction site or highway building project. It’s hard to be pure and do something good at the same time in this bizarrely mis-built world.

Once the lines are cut in the pavement, the fun begins! Sledge hammers, picks, crow bars, digging bars and shovels are the tools of choice. First, with your sledge hammer, smash down on a portion of the material to be removed fairly close to one of the cut lines or an edge of the slab as defined by its original construction.

After the material is pulverized, with cracks leading out from the center of the slab, dig out the crushed material with pick and shovel. Now you have a point to enter the surface with a crowbar. Put the tip of the bar under the slab you want to remove, while using the edge of the saw cut that you want to save (or a wooden block) as a fulcrum. Then press down hard on the outward-bound end of the crow bar.

The longer the crow bar or digging bar, the better. And the greater the distance from the fulcrum to your hands relative to the distance from the fulcrum to the concrete or asphalt, the more upward force you are able to exert on the material you want to remove, and the easier it pops up and away. Danger! Do not immediately throw all your weight into pressing down on the crow bar. Get used to it a little at a time. It may suddenly snap upward at the business end and it can crash down catching your fingers between the old pavement surface and the metal of the crow bar. You can actually break fingers this way.

By cracking with sledge hammers and prying with bars and picks you can now happily work across the area to be removed, allowing the earth to again breathe free.

Next, move the pavement out of there-by hand, wheelbarrow, car, pick-up truck or big truck. If you’re making garden furniture of it, carry it or use a wheelbarrow. Otherwise it’s gotta be just a little fossil fuels and driving to balance our society’s paving karma.

Next, prepare the soil. The surface under pavement is generally highly compacted and needs a lot of digging with pick and shovel. Don’t try a rototiller unless you know something I don’t know-like explosives. Someone brought a rototiller to a depaving project once, and he just drove it around on its blades, bouncing off the compacted substrate like a bronco. The rental place would’ve killed him if they’d known.

Then you need to condition the soil, adding humus, perhaps soil amendments and fertilizer-I’d recommend organic of course-appropriate to whatever you want to plant. Dig it all in, then water. Next it’s time to plant. Find typical instructions copiously available elsewhere. I’m partial to food plants, especially fruit trees, which are not on my city’s list of acceptable street trees. I plant them anyway in planter strips, just spoiling for a chance to talk about ecology and growing food in the public realm. Once again, you decide what level of risk you want to take.

Medium-Sized Depaving Projects
The medium-sized project-such as actually removing a parking lot, part of one or part of a street, or getting rid of a driveway entirely-requires considerably more preparation and work. First you have to find a likely place, where use of such a surface is low, or where pressure for non-automotive uses is great.

In Berkeley, University Avenue (UA) Homes had an under-utilized parking lot. Only three of its 75 residents had cars and one didn’t even run.

But that was a rare low-use situation. The city has a requirement to provide off-street parking for every unit of housing in most parts of town so the nonprofit owners of UA Homes had real difficulty persuading City Hall to allow us to depave about six places for a garden. The regulations said every square inch of the entire lot besides the building had to be paved for parking-not an inch for a garden, chair or barbecue. Because of the extreme situation, the city relented and we depaved those few parking places.

Ultimately, we need to change those city zoning ordinances. Meantime we crawl around under the legal rocks and pop up once in a while to get away with anything to make the place healthier. Some people might be entertained by this sort of thing, and its often the only way to get any depaving done. But I think it’s the very definition of pathetic.

The medium-sized depaving project itself requires a lot of muscle power and more gasoline than I’d like to admit. Thus more importance in the idea of a paving moratorium. We’ve built an edifice that’s destructive to remove, but it’s so destructive in the first place that we need to remove it. Again, rectitude and purity escape us.

Call up all your friends. Have them bring sledge hammers, picks, digging bars, shovels, lunch-don’t forget the gloves. And line up the trucks. It’s a bit horrifying how many truck loads come out of a modest number of parking places.

At UA Homes, for depaving five or six parking places we took about four pick-up loads and two (donated) dump-truck loads (holding as much as four pick-up loads each) to take the material to the closest land fill. That’s twelve pick-up loads. It was so many loads partially because compacted gravel was used under the asphalt, and we dug out about two inches of asphalt-contaminated soil-it smelled oily. With medium-sized projects, and even small ones, organizing big group efforts makes the job much easier and, by passing the hat, makes a high total price low per person. If you do pay your city fees, by the way, and have some time to converse with them over the months, you can sometimes get permission to dump for free.

As for soil contamination, I don’t know much about it. Maybe an expert should be brought in if you are suspicious. At UA Homes, the soil didn’t seem quite clean of oils but we were at the end of our rope-time, energy and money wise-while piles of manure and yummy soil amendments, seeds, plants and volunteers were waiting around for the gardening part of the project. So we plunged on into that. I suspect that a small residual of toxics is slowly disintegrating chemically while doing minor damage to some of the plants. Almost all of them look great, however. and I and others have eaten a lot from the garden and seem healthy enough. Here too, with limited resources, results are very good but perfection eludes us.

Depaving for the Ambitious
We’ve had one depaving project somewhere between medium and big in Berkeley recently. About 80 feet of 9th Street at the Berkeley-Albany border and a section of a parking lot-enough space for about ten cars-was removed.

Urban Creeks Council secured permission to restore one block of Codornices Creek from the land owners, a private company on the south side of the land in question, and from the University of California on the north. California State Department of Water Resources gave $25,000 to hire a landscape architect and bulldozer operator. (You might smell a rat; it takes a pretty well established and respected institution like Urban Creeks Council to line up such a project. Maybe you have such an environmental organization in your town…?)

The landscape architect designed a new small canyon for the creek to replace a stretch where it was underground at the time in a concrete pipe-the creek had been buried for about fifty years-and the heavy equipment operator, my friend Pete VanValkenburgh, cut a rough trench for the new canyon. Over the next two years on Saturdays, through my organization Ecocity Builders, over 320 volunteers took part in digging and wheeling dirt about so that the trench shaped up into a canyon that looks quite natural. To do that, the telephone was the most important tool, and letting prospective volunteers know by putting information into our newsletter.

Crews were seldom larger than a dozen, but it went on weekend after weekend. The old curbs and sidewalks were laid into the steeper slopes of the canyon and covered by grasses and wildflowers. Now they help prevent erosion when the creek rises in the rainy season. We are planting native trees and bushes, and a small orchard of 20 fruit trees is growing away on one of the new hills we created. All sorts of birds and insects are coming now, small fish and crawdads and frogs. For better or worse, egrets and herons are eating them now. The project will be completed soon.

The Big Picture
So now you know a little about hands-on depaving. But here’s the big one: getting rid of suburbia and replacing it with pedestrian towns and villages and cities of much more modest “footprint” than today’s sprawling behemoths.

As we have noticed in depaving projects to date, land ownership and consensus about land use, usually enshrined in laws and codes, are crucial. So is some notion of what we are doing and why it is important.

For “why,” we have all the arguments seen quarterly in this magazine. But for “what” we must do, we need a little more clarity.

In reorganizing the city, from its land use foundations on up, we have the solution for turning asphalt and concrete into gardens, creeks, playgrounds, nature corridors, restored forests, etc. In creating the more compact neighborhood, town and city centers, and real ecovillages, we also create the densities of human population to reestablish vital civic community and economy, practical and economical transit, the potential for a bicycle revolution, energy conservation that is otherwise inconceivable and many other things. Let’s do it!

Start small, think big. Think it through, then swing that pick.

Ecocity Builders’ members recently returned from another round of meetings with United Nations Member States and Major Groups in New York City in the lead up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20, convening this June in Rio de Janeiro. While there, we met with Sweden’s Rio+20 Ambassador and city focused groups to discuss how countries can better support local authorities and citizens working to improve the environmental and social health of human settlements.

Also in recent developments, Richard Register and I visited Tianjin Eco-city in China early in March where we consulted to the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city Administrative Committee (STECAC) that is responsible for the building of this the flagship Chinese ecocity project currently in construction. Eventually it will house 350,000 citizens. The first 17 families moved in just a week or two before our Ecocity Builders crew arrived. Richard is currently on assignment to the STECAC writing an assessment of the project with suggestions for this city and successor projects into the future.

In other news, Ecocity Builders has formed an ecocity partnership agreement with ICLEI, Local Governments for Sustainability. We will be working together, along with our other key partners and supporters (including British Columbia Institute of Technology’s School of Construction and the Environment), to develop the Ecocity Framework and Standards Initiative and assist in the development of and services to an international Ecocity Network within ICLEI’s membership of over 1,000 cities worldwide.

We’ve also submitted an exciting proposal for a Rio+20 side event in partnership with the US Department of State – Bureau of Oceans, Environment and Science, Esri, (a geographic information systems mapping company), Mozilla, (an internet technology foundation and the builders of the Firefox web browser), Ushahidi, (a citizen crowdmapping organization based in Nairobi, Kenya), and the Association of American Geographers. Together, we will showcase a mapping, geodesign, and citizen participation toolkit for building ecocities.

Also at Rio+20 this June, we will seek to demonstrate ecocity action in real time, on the ground, in one of the favela communities in Rio, likely working with UN Youth delegates paired with local youth and citizen mappers. We want to demonstrate how ecocity mapping assessments can be used in informal settlements and low income communities to educate and build up important networks of communication while providing access to data that can inform citizen-initiated ecocity action plans.

And, adding another critical tool to the ecocity toolkit, we will be working with Sebastian Moffatt and the Consensus Institute to upgrade Moffatt’s existing urban metabolism visualization and accounting program (a process for diagrammatic mapping of energy, water and resource flows through cities, neighborhoods, and buildings) into an open-source, easy-to-access tool that will be based upon the best urban metabolism methodology (confirmed by an advisory group) and released in Beta version at Rio.

We have a real whirlwind of action happening. We are doing our best to build strong partnerships with like-minded businesses, cities, and associations working to increase urban sustainability and resilience around the world.