Restore the Earth, Rebuild Civilization -

Proposal for a Global Rebuilding Program

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 attention 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 connected and that which gives order to the entire system of which technologies and life styles are a part. I call the system “four steps to an ecology of the economy.”

First: the land use and infrastructure, the architecture, open spaces and relationships of the major components have to be understood and mapped out, literally. A map can show where the arrangements of the cities and towns are best located. This “ecocity map” is a kind of overlay that provides direction for shifting development toward building and strengthening pedestrian/transit centers. It also shows which areas are best for “de-development,” that is, removing development. Where development consumes too much energy in its maintenance and operation, and where development covers crucial ecological diversity, there it should be removed. Buried creeks, for example, are good sites to locate and reserve for eventual recovery as open waterways with all their rich biodiversity. This first step then, can be seen as producing an ecocity map to influence the changes in development patterns into the future. In short, this first step toward an ecology of the economy could be called “the map.”

Second: the list of products that help build and maintain the city, town and village that is moving in the ecologically healthy direction. Solar and wind technology, bicycles, streetcars, organic farming equipment, recycled, organic and non-toxic products all fit the list. That list is also a list of jobs that can be created – or supported if they already exist locally. One important criteria for this list is that products and services on it be “relocalized” as much as possible, that is, be supported by local resources, talent and customers and beneficial to the bioregional environment, the network of life in the region. Some basic production, such as for clothes, dishes and building tools, say, don’t have that much to do with the particular ecologically healthy structure and arrangement of the built community but are useful and don’t tend to promote ecological harm. They are fine and would be on the list too. Ones off the list? You guessed it: cars, asphalt, car support products and systems, and large “products” like parking garages and freeway expansion projects, new freeway interchanges and the like. This step to an ecology of the economy could be called “the list.”

Third: the incentives that need to be put in place to help the list get funded and put into production and successful economic life. As long, for example, as the federal government invests tens to hundreds of billions of dollars every year in highways and screams “subsidy” when it invests one hundredth as much on Amtrak, that long will incentives work to make ecological cities, towns and villages impossible and guarantee accelerated global warming and species extinctions. The tax codes, normal allocation of “public investments,” and local zoning laws all have to shift over to creating incentives for rebuilding our civilization or it will falter and crumble, taking much of nature with it in its collapse. This step we can call “the incentives.”

Fourth: the people. Through education, probably best delivered through examples of parts of the ecologically healthy city up and working well, and through activist appeals, we need to have people come on board to support the rebuilding of our civilization on ecological principles. Also, people are needed to be flexible and try out living in the new world. People need to be pioneers in developments and whole ecological communities, built either all at once, through conversions – for example of retired military bases – or through dedicated transformation of existing cities. The people are, of course, also the first step beginning the cycle, in that the entire enterprise depends on many of us deciding to learn about and support and build a new kind of civilization – and quickly, as our time is running out.

What these four steps in practice actually mean is that we need to “remission” industry and technology for surviving and thriving for the long haul. The mission has to change from maximum profit for the investor to maximum benefit to life on Earth.

We need to retrain and retool for shifting emphasis radically in what we produce. There is an effort between environmentalists, liberal foundations and union leaders recently initiated called the Apollo Alliance, named after the project to put an American on the Moon back in the 1960s. I don’t think that’s a very good idea for a name, but that opinion doesn’t matter much. What does matter is that the alliance is vigorously promoting better, more energy efficient cars – to try to gain back for American the lost initiative grabbed by foreign automakers. The alliance leaders see this as a wise political move to protect and expand jobs, win elections for people with their interests at heart and serve the environment by bringing down gasoline consumption. Instead, they are promoting the perpetuation of the car/sprawl/freeway/cheap energy infrastructure and perpetuating dependence on cheap energy – right when the energy piece of that whole system is headed permanently farther and farther away from cheap, and right when all other components of that whole system are paving millions of acres of natural and agricultural land and heating the entire planet. Not a good idea! Once again, not whole systems thinking.

Instead of “improving” its current offerings in this manner, industry should change its product list and create a different set of offerings. The auto industry should gracefully downsize or change its product line to elevators, trains, bicycles – or maybe components for the new buildings. It should create products and processes to better recycle materials and so on. Volvo got started in the late 1800s as a construction company that built its own concrete mixers, cranes, trucks and other machinery. Then it shifted more and more over to busses and cars. We could see car companies running the Volvo transition in reverse and begin leading the ecological rebuilding of the new buildings and networks themselves. Millions of possibilities. It will take imagination and courage, but to continue with business as usual “improving” the car/sprawl system has become the formula for a colossal disaster well on its way already.

The whole enterprise comes down to the following basic outline:

A Global Rebuilding Program

1. Rebuild our civilization – ecological cities as the foundation while

rolling back sprawl development.

2. Provide the services humanity needs to survive in health.

3. Preserve and restore forests and natural landscapes in massive

quantity and maximum biodiversity, thus to absorb billions of tons of CO2, to stop and actually reverse global warming and biological collapse on this planet and to get it back to its slow, steady pace of normal evolution.

Activating a Global Rebuilding Program

How to actually move forward on, first, refining a Plan B, resolving its contradictions and then, second, putting it into action? Lester Brown himself believes the most effective thing he and his Earth Policy Institute can do is to continue publishing the best data on the condition of the Earth, its resources and the various alternatives he sees as healthy in human policy and technology. In the past he was drawn into efforts to implement recommendations similar to his current Plan B proposals for policy and development. First in the early 1980s he tried to further the goals of the Global 2000 report of the Jimmy Carter days working with the likes of Elliot Richardson, Russell Train, Walter Cronkite and others. Later, Ted Turner attempted to implement similar ideas with the Better World Society with such members as Jacques Cousteau, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Lester and others. These efforts hired staff, spent money – and didn’t get very far.

But times are different now. Evidence of impending collapse is becoming incontrovertible and Brown’s earlier plans, like his present Plan B, did not include a clear effort to rebuild the basic infrastructure of our world civilization. Maybe these are essential differences, key differences. Maybe the time has finally arrived and the product is finally tuned up for action. On that assumption I’ll plunge on ahead.

I would suggest that a Global Rebuilding Program Council be created of respected individuals, probably only a few of whom would be chiefly identified with one national government or another. They would be experts in the fields defined as needing immediate and large-scale attention in the Plan B budget. They would be the people to proffer a plan including the rebuilding component with its ecocities, rail and bicycle transport and renewable energy systems all integrally connected. Their second order of business would be massive publicity and education to bring as much of humanity on board for the rebuilding program as possible. And their ongoing obligation would be as stewards not just of protected lands in the model of the biodiversity stewards Doug Tompkins, Gordon Moore and Ted Turner, but stewards for the entire rebuilding and restoration enterprise.

I’m not sure where the vast sums of money would come from, though the tax resources of national governments should be a large portion. As pointed out earlier, shifting only around one quarter of the money spent for war would do the trick. Who would channel and distribute the money and who would receive it and put it into action would have to be carefully thought out. I don’t trust the World Bank very much and many others don’t trust the UN agencies. That corrupt governments and business leaders have frequently siphoned off large amounts of aid throughout history is hardly a secret. That wealthy donor and loan-making nations have sometimes benefited far more than recipients when aid programs have transformed economies is also well known.

But with the severe changes coming upon us very rapidly now, someone is going to have to do some work that will earn trust through its quality and dedication to confronting these changes and improving conditions for humanity and nature alike. Perhaps with the council itself having a shared power position in the distribution, some formula could be worked out, something similar to what we see with United Nations dues and distribution to international relief, education, health and other agencies. Perhaps in the build up – certainly a full fledged budget would take years to gear up to full speed – foundations, non-profits and wealthy individuals would be the sources of certain seed funds matched by city and state governments, with those funds in turn matched several times over by national governments. Some formula for distribution of the funds and projects taking into account righting the massive imbalances of wealth would have to be integrated into such a program. But basically, a process of the sort the World Bank used to come up with the figures adopted by Lester Brown is a start. Much of the basic knowledge of real human need and environmental need is available. The notion of rebuilding the infrastructure of our civilization for very low energy use with cities for people instead of cars gives a clear guideline for another set of policies for what to build and who to build it where.

The crucial steps would be the earliest ones, and I would hope that the foundations set up by the great land stewards mentioned earlier, Doug Tompkins, Gordon Moore and Ted Turner, would take the lead and set up a joint committee to explore – and quickly – strategies for proceeding with establishment and activating a Global Rebuilding Program. These foundations are respectively the Foundation for Deep Ecology, The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the United Nations Foundation. I’m sure there are other ways to begin, but certainly, with global warming coming to ruin their investments in their enormous stretches of some of the most beautiful land in the world, they would have more to lose than practically anyone else – and thus the most to gain in terms of deep satisfaction by rebuilding our civilization and rescuing our troubled planet. Plan A is failing disastrously. Plan B has a real fighting chance.