The death of environmentalism? Environmentalists are talking about it, but since nobody else is, or else they are just off doing something else – in vast numbers – maybe there’s some truth to it. Or maybe it hasn’t been thought thorough adequately. Those talking about it sincerely hope the shock value of saying it’s dead will wake us up and we can get on with building a better future – but how? They don’t say. But I will.

It all started when two long time environmentalists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, wrote a paper called “The Death of Environmentalism.” For those who don’t know about this debate, it was launched when they claimed the environmental movement had worked its way into larger social and historical irrelevance, fewer successes, smaller numbers of dues paying members, and worse actual environmental problems: global warming and collapsing biodiversity world wide.

Welcome to the 21st century, and it’s largely their fault. The environmental movement managed this failure by being too narrow, not recognizing its social context, not providing a “vision” of the strength to oppose the political “right’s” vision of an America free, wealthy and victorious. They said the policy wonk approach grinding through bureaucratic forms, the anti-toxics, anti-development, virtual anti-progress, anti-pretty much everything about a vigorous America, was not the approach of a movement destined to acceptance and success. The American public just had to be approached on its own terms.

Environmentalism had good motives and an effective period in the 1960s and 1970s, said Shellenberger and Nordhaus, but the whole enterprise has since drifted more and more into a place where values were murky and momentum was stalling. At issue is the fact that, in America, it is extremely hard for environmentalists to get a handle on the global warming crisis. It is not in your face, much less caught in your hacking throat like local smog in Los Angeles in 1965. It’s distant, abstract, future-oriented.

Well, I disagree, but not only with Shellenberger and Nordhaus but also their environmentalist critics, those half-supporting them, like Adam Werbach, the former, and at the time youngest, President of the Sierra Club, and those angered by and directly opposed to those two environmentalism morticians, like Carl Pope present Executive Director of the Sierra Club.

I even find fault Jared Diamond, of all people, author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Why him I’ll explain later. It’s not that they don’t have good points – they have the wrong ones. Theirs are not adding up to the very vision they all say is lacking.

Mine is not so much a critique, though I’ll do some of that here, but a statement of “yes” to exactly what a new vision of a healthy environment actually looks like.

The environmentalism of improving the wrong infrastructure

Some background first. I’ll throw in a few items now and make sense of them shortly. Item one: To the charge leveled by S&N that environmentalists have ignored the other key political players, attitudes and aspirations in America, Carl Pope has begged to differ. “The Sierra Club,” he says, “has consistently understood CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy, meaning, high energy efficiency standards for cars] as a program which needed to be used to preserve and enhance the U.S. auto industry, the very point they attack environmentalists for ignoring.

As early as the Carter Administration the Sierra Club sought an alliance with the United Auto Workers on domestic content legislation to free the union up to become again an advocate for change among domestic manufacturers.” In other words the environmentalists have a long history of working with labor to make better, more energy conserving cars that would compete well with other nations’ auto industries. The goal: a thriving economy, full employment at good, solid wages and lower environmental impact per car.

Item two: Environmentalists extol the virtues of LEED, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards for buildings. But where are the environmentalists arguing for such standards for cities? Last summer I was a speaker at the Sustainable Communities 2004 Conference in Burlington, Vermont. The organizers took two busloads of us conference participants to admire a beautiful new LEED platinum rated factory that produces towers for wind electric generators. Hard to get greener that that.

The only problem, it took us 20 minutes on the highway to get there and when we arrived there was no other building in sight on the rolling landscape of broad agricultural fields with patches of trees at the edges. Where was the community? Represented by a large parking lot.

Wouldn’t it be more fun, I asked the tour guide from the company, if instead of driving way out there into splendid isolation and back every day you could just walk in and out the factory door and over to a friend’s house, off to lunch, drop by a drug store, grocery, hardware store, or ATM, pick up a cup of coffee, bike over to a class or back home to your residence? At this actually very beautifully designed solar passive and active building with state of the art natural lighting and insulation, and with many recycled materials, people burn almost no energy – except in their cars to get there – by the many hundreds of gallons every day.

To the other environmentally tuned folks on the tour I sounded unconscionably rude to suggest there was a big problem in something as deceptively simple as where the building was located. That is, not part of a sustainable community.

Third item to contemplate: Amtrak subsidies vs. investments in Freeways. I was aggravated taking Amtrak lately that it came in 12 hours late in what would otherwise be a 10-hour trip. I like being on the train for long periods of time, reading, writing, eating, drinking, looking out the observation car, lounge car or dining car windows, wandering about, meeting new people or ignoring them as predilection moves me.

But when it’s completely stopped for one, two or three hours at a time, a certain tension rises up – side railed again! The freight carriers own the tracks and their trains have priority. Amtrak, in the West anyway, rents them and their trains don’t have priority. Amtrak has a shortage of rolling stock and can’t even afford to keep the machinery they do have properly repaired. I was doubly aggravated recently having to grab onto a rented steering wheel and sit frozen in place with my eyes locked to the freeway for a trip from Oakland, California to Santa Barbara for a workshop, a trip of about seven hours.

I had to do this because I couldn’t count on the train and on this trip, and the arrival time was important. The very morning I left there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. The Bush administration said they were planning on cutting the Amtrak subsidy from $1.2 billion to $.9 billion. They were even considering eliminating the subsidy entirely for the following year. Zero for Amtrak. Let the riders pay all the bills, which at a surface glance sounds fair enough. Our taxpayer’s government says, if you like it, do it yourself, train riders. They say no such thing, of course, to car drivers and regarding the system they use.

For comparison, about ten blocks from my apartment in Oakland, California an elevated section of Interstate 880 collapsed in the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989. A replacement freeway was built. It’s about one and a half miles long. Guess how much it cost? $l.2 billion. One and a half miles of freeway in one smallish US city equals the “subsidy” to the entire country’s passenger rail service. And they never call that mile and a half or any of the thousands of other miles of freeways widened, extended, replaced or repaired every year a “subsidy.”

The government doesn’t call it that, the media doesn’t and the users don’t. Not even the train riders or Amtrak employees I spoke with called money to freeways a subsidy, yet they dutifully think they are being honest calling what Amtrak receives a “subsidy.”

What’s going on here? Brainwashing. We have a mental block of a gigantic scale, people buying into propaganda on a level that oil company owners and executives could only find most amazingly gratifying and profitable. Practically everybody is delivering moral tax dollars to them and sinful pennies to public transportation.

To remove the value-laden terminology, they are both an investment in something, those expenditures for freeway or rail. One is a massive investment in cars, energy squandering, air pollution, global warming, paving of agricultural and natural landscapes and species extinctions locally and globally. The other is a miniscule investment in the opposite. One is an investment in the isolated individual trying to get somewhere, and the other an investment in the public opportunity for anyone, including people who can’t afford cars, to be somewhere pretty nice (in the train) while going somewhere.

A single rail line handles approximately as much freight or passengers as eight lanes of freeway. Where’s the environmental vision that supports making cars supposedly more efficient in light of that? It can’t. An environmentalist vision has to get rid of them.

The physics involved

What if we could build cities for people transporting themselves around mainly by foot? In other words, by design, bring points of departure and destinations closer together. Among planners this is often called “mixed uses” and “balanced development.” Such cities, of course, could be connected to one another very efficiently by train.

The physics of moving something around that weighs around 130 pounds (an approximately average sized human body) compared to something that weighs 2,000 to 7,500 pounds (cars small to Hummer in size) is pretty basic.

Let's say that's about a 130 pounds to 4,000 pounds average ratio, or about a to 1 to 30 ratio. Then if we realize that the human body goes up to about 5 miles per hour in a brisk walk and the car typically runs around, say 40 miles per hour if we average city street and freeway speeds, which is a multiplier of 8, we then multiply 30 by 8 and get a ratio of 1 to 240, right? Wrong! It takes the square of the speed in energy expended to accelerate any particular weight, so if the energy of getting to 5 miles per hour is 25 units, the requirements of getting to 40 miles per hour is more like 1600 units. 25 divided into 1600 is 64, so substitute 64 for 8 and we get 64X30 or a 1 to 1,920 ratio of energy required for moving a car about in the mode we are used to compared to moving ourselves about getting to what could be available simply by ecological city design.

Real averages I don't know: average human body weight and car weight, for example, but my figures probably aren't too far off. In addition, air friction goes up with speed, but I don't know how much.

So this is a crude estimate but basically on track. What it shows is the insanity of depending on cars and urban structure built for them – sprawl – in an expensive energy future. It might also be stated that, as we may have noticed in a cheap energy world, which we are still in but departing soon, it is possibly even more insane to run cars and car cities because now with only one out of thirteen of us human beings owning a car, we are already heating up the atmosphere of the whole planet as well as destroying agricultural land and wiping out local air quality and species diversity.

This gets us back to the issue of environmentalism being perhaps dead because it is failing to solve the biggest problem of all, global climate change. In case you glossed over that last point – about only one in thirteen of us owning a car – let me repeat it in the climate change context. We tend, in the rich world, to think that of course everyone loves their cars and everyone lives in a world of trips through the garage door, out into the city and deep into the country in our cars. We are in cars on the freeway, on streets, in parking lots and structures, gas stations and, some of us, off road crushing small animals and flowers both rare and common.

It’s hard to conceive of a life beyond traffic jambs and dreams of the open road and cushy seats carrying us in comfort and ease out into the fresh air. Probably we have music the whole time. Our strange man-made environment – few women work building cars, oil refineries and sprawl development or defending it with aircraft carriers and attack bombers - looks so amazingly gigantic covered in concrete and asphalt, franchise restaurants and ranks upon ranks of houses that all look the same and swarming with cars by the hundreds of millions under air pollution from sea to tainted sea that it’s hard to believe there are worlds without cars.

And yet for each of us in this world of cars there are many times as many people who do not live in such a world. Every city we Americans can think of is jammed with cars. How can it be that only one out of 13 of us on the planet actually owns one? Could we in the rich “developed” world actually be living in some strange illusion as to how many people there really are and how they live?

With just one out of 13 of us owning a car, and the car’s contribution to global warming being the lion’s share of the problem already, how could anyone think of an automotive future and social justice – everybody gets one of the things – in the same thought? Clean energy on that scale? The idea of the Bush Administration making the whole world like us? Who’d do the cheap labor? If energy is going to get expensive, what does that do to the notion that our car-centered life style is, as President Bush says, “unnegotiable?” That’s an idea for Star Wars, and attitude to destroy a planet.

One last point before I tell you exactly what I’m thinking. The car is obviously responsible for enormous energy consumption and resulting CO2 production as everyone acknowledges. But it is part of a whole system that includes the built infrastructure of our cities.

When small buildings are scattered out over large areas, as they are in low density development, sharing walls with nobody else – compare that to apartment and office buildings that share walls, floors and ceilings between units or rooms – much more energy is required for space heating and cooling as well as for transportation. Add to that the energy to manufacture the cars, oil, asphalt, highways, freeway interchanges and weapons for war for oil. Usually those numbers are figured separately from “transportation” and categorized simply as “manufacturing.” But proper accounting should note that much of the energy that goes into that “sector” is to build, maintain and defend the automobile/sprawl/freeway/oil infrastructure.

Add it all up – transport, interior temperature control, a large portion of manufacturing, war for the resources – and you begin to get a sense of the enormity of the problem we are dealing with in the built infrastructure and the system that holds it together, the transportation system based on cars. We are beginning to understand it as if it were a whole system with its own dynamics. It is. Further, the city built for people, bicycles and transit, the architecture of pedestrian accessibility and renewable energy systems is a whole system with its own dynamics too, though radically different and actually healthy.

Pedestrian/ecological cities could go so far as to not only reduce to a very small fraction the massive pollution and destruction up to the level of climate change, but to actually build soil and host increasing rather than degenerating biodiversity. What a concept!




City for people, not cars

So exactly what I have in mind is this: the only viable vision with a future is one of a civilization in which the cities are built for people, not cars. That is at the foundation of future success for humanity in the environment of Earth’s climate system and biosphere. I’d also argue it’s the only thing that can revive environmentalism, resolve its contradictions and keep its compromises non-fatal to its mission. By cities I mean to include towns and villages, too, the “built environment” or “constructed habitat” as it is sometimes called. We need to rebuild our entire civilization on that basis. It’s time to confront the major dynamics of matter and energy, climate and biology on this planet.

In their desire to deliver what the people apparently wanted, environmentalists did what Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus actually called for: went beyond the environmentalists traditional realm into the social/political that was not informed about many environmental issues. The people wanted cars, so Sierra Club looked for a better car and tried to convince the auto industry it could be built and the environmental situation improved in the process.

Won’t work and here’s why. What I’ll say now is counter intuitive on one level but once you see how the system works, if you can stand to look the truth in the eye, it’s not hard to grasp at all. It makes sense. The more energy efficient car is part of a larger system that includes the land use pattern and the built infrastructure of buildings and connectors like highways and streets in which it operates. Both are built, in relation to the other, the cars and the infrastructure of streets, freeways, parking structures, houses with their millions of acres of lawns and so on. Just as trains need tracks and stations, cars are part of a larger system on which and in which they operate. The more energy efficient car makes it much easier for people to live farther from the rest of their lives. It’s not only cheaper to scatter about the landscape in the energy efficient car, but it makes the environmentally sensitive person proud to be doing something for the environment.

But driving a Prius in pride for the contribution to a better environment, at the same time helps fuel the spread of sprawl. It costs less to travel more. This increase in low-density development in turn requires more agricultural and natural land, more driving, more cars, and pretty soon, more energy to move all those added cars around greater distances. Thus the energy efficient car creates an even less energy efficient city. The problem at the root of sprawl always was that it was too easy and cheap to travel too far on a frequent basis.

To make it even easier and cheaper only makes the problem that much worse. We don’t want to look that in the eye but it is true. It implies too much change and we are used to things as they are. We can handle minor changes, but this is too much! The autoworkers want to keep their jobs and the Sierra Club members their privileges of driving out to nature when they feel like it, without having to rent a car before they leave town or a horse when they get “out there.” So the workers and the club join together to deny the truth of the matter, which is that they are perpetuating the environmental disasters now coming to engulf us when they promote and build the energy efficient car and ignore urban design and structure.

What the environmentalists and autoworkers should be doing is this: studying how to build the city for people instead of cars. Of course it’s a hard assignment. How could solving a problem as large as the end of biodiversity for a whole planet and the rebuilding of a civilization in balance with nature be an easy task?

What it means specifically is that we need to think through new jobs to fit the new reality. We need a clear vision of what needs to be built. Then we need to retrain the workers and retool the auto industry for building the ecologically healthy built environment of cities, towns and even villages, all of which have been gradually over 100 years shaped – literally, physically shaped – for the benefit of owners of the oil industry, such as our very own oiligarchy: Bush, Cheney and Rice.

Autoworkers should shift over to learning to build the more compact city, neighborhood, town and village centers. They should, a.s.a.p., be building construction equipment, elevators, streetcars and bicycles of an extremely low energy city, perhaps not by transforming their own companies but by joining other companies already making these things. They should join the ranks of people learning about and spreading the word about renewable energy systems and voting for and investing in – not “subsidizing” – those technologies. They should vote their own good solid salaries by way of the kind of incentives that now misallocate millions of jobs and massive profits to the people who are building a civilization in all out attack on the planet’s resources and living flesh.

Don’t adopt the ways of the opposition – theirs is not success

I’ll get very explicit soon, but first point out that all those folks saying environmentalism is dead are missing a couple interesting points. One is that all that there is of a consciousness to avert global warming and the species collapse that is well on its way world wide now comes from environmentalists, no matter how ignored or defeated they may feel they are.

If most Americans want to get in on the exploitation, drive bigger cars and live in inflated houses, eat bigger burgers and gain more weight, those aren’t the ones to save us or be emulated, placated or served. If the kind of vitality S&H have in mind is conquering oil fields and bribing other countries with billions of dollars to back the attack, and “spinning” events and information in a way to make a prophet of Orwell, it’s not the kind of vitality to solve environmental problems. There is in reality nobody else there doing that wake up job other than the environmentalists. If they are really dead then we really are in trouble. If it’s just the “ism” that’s dead, it’s offspring might well do the trick.

In any case, the environmentalists don’t have the vision yet that Carl Pope and Adam Werbach call for. Then again, neither do Pope or Werbach. In Pope’s paper critiquing Shellenberger and Nordhaus for calling environmentalism dead (“An In-depth Response to ‘The Death of Environmentalism’ ”), Pope points out that S&N say, “Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 1990s is that, in the end, the environmental community had still not come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that the majority of Americans could get excited about.” They also say, “We resisted the exhortations from early reviewers of this report to say more about what we think must now be done because we believe that the most important steps will emerge from teams, not individuals.”

I see this as a thorough going excuse, as does Pope who says, “By failing to offer their own ideas for scrutiny they rendered their report nihilistic – able to destroy but not create.” But what does Pope himself offer regarding global warming as compared with other more localized environmental problems the environmental movement addressed more successfully in earlier times? The environmental movement, he says, “needs deeper, more robust, more sustained collaborations; it needs to be harnessed to a broader vision of a new economic order.” Does he describe what to build, how to live, or give us the outlines of that order? Except to propose working with other elements of the political spectrum to develop renewable energy systems, nothing. Does he see that there may be an alternative to tacking solar onto the automobile/freeway/sprawl infrastructure, a nasty mismatch if I ever saw one? Not in his paper.

Adam Werbach laments the death of environmentalism calling also for an integration of environmentalist’s values and strategies with the rest of society’s in a “progressive” agenda for change. He adds, “No wonder the public doesn’t want to hear the truth about global warming: nobody’s offering them a vision for the future that matches the magnitude of the problem.”

Excuse me! I’ve been offering such a vision to the public for 30 years and I know a few other people too. We are not celebrated but we’ve been out there, and as noisy as possible for a long time. Speaking for myself as just one of those, I’ve seeded and co-produced five international conference on the subject on five continents, written three books, have been hosted in so many places for talks on every continent my mileage totals more than 26 times around the world in the last dozen years and I generally make people so uncomfortable my own home town tries to ignore me.

What does Werbach actually offer: all out efforts for renewable energy. Good idea but not enough. As you, dear reader, are getting the idea by now, the renewable energy regime needs the physical infrastructure in which to operate; it needs the city to match. It’s one of those things I call a “dimensional pair,” either both together or nothing at all. They can’t exist separately because they are dimensions of their combined reality. Like male and female, time and space or energy and matter, one without the other simply doesn’t exist. So we absolutely need to rethink the built environment. The “energy” in the sustainable city is renewable, the “matter” is literally the ecological city of stone, concrete, steel, wood, glass, bicycles, solar greenhouses, restored creeks, plants, animals, people…. That’s the vision they haven’t enunciated that needs to be adopted by someone, and if not those who care about the environment, then I’m something at a loss as to who would do it. Maybe environmentalists becoming also developers or developers becoming also environmentalists.

The thing itself: ecocities described

There are two basic ways, we can build new cities and towns: on “greenfields” or we can transform existing ones where they stand. I’ll treat the ones to be transformed since cities already occupy the best “natural” locations for them, but the same ideas we will be able to apply to new cities and towns too, should we want to go directly to creating experimental cities whole cloth.

Cities are far too spread out, therefore first find the major centers and neighborhood centers and map them for higher density, but even more importantly, much higher diversity of activity. As time goes on, the map can help change zoning – and minds – to facilitate the actual transition of the city itself. Moving towards higher density pedestrian transit centers creates a situation I characterize as providing “access by proximity instead of transportation.” The transformation we need to set in motion starts with pedestrian/transit centers growing in density and diversity and areas farthest from the centers, the most automobile dependent areas, shrinking: roll back sprawl.

Metropolitan areas covering many thousands of acres need to break up into discrete communities again, become an archipelago of compact smaller cities around what are today’s downtowns, larger and smaller towns where major sub-centers are now located and ecovillages where neighborhood centers now exist. This process will progress over many decades, but if always headed in the direction of the city built for people, not cars, it will prove to be the source of countless solutions for most of our environmental problems, solutions that will start appearing early in the transition and multiply rapidly as we get deeper into the transformation.

By now everyone knows that higher density works with transit and low density requires busses to run practically empty – empty of people and money in the fare box. The Sierra Club got its toes wet on this issue by launching the “Challenge to Sprawl Campaign,” which is a start in the right direction, but barely, because it fears the middle class reaction to any buildings over four stories and provides for lots of cars and parking as well as higher density along corridors, a self defeating compromise. This essay isn’t the place to get into numerous urban planning refinements but it should at least be stated that the typical one building wide line of four story maximum density lining a “transit corridor” advocated by the Sierra Club, the school of architects called New Urbanists and supported by people under the banner of “smart growth” doesn’t work anywhere nearly as well as a city of higher density centers of great diversity. The centers, even neighborhood centers, have to be at least a block or two wide and not just one building in width running with the “transit corridor.” Transit as well as pedestrian facilities and pedestrian environments work far better with the centers-oriented pattern than thin lines of modest density.

Create car-free by contract housing in those centers. Builders should advertise for and recruit renters and condo owners who don’t own cars or who want to free themselves from cars. Contrary to legend, there are lots of such people out there. Often the anti-development forces, sometimes calling themselves “environmentalists,” are at the forefront working politically to keep such higher density residential buildings from being constructed in both major and minor city centers. They are not helping solve the global warming problem! This we should all recognize and condemn vigorously. When building sprawl, yes, developers should be stopped. When building “balanced development” in good transit/pedestrian centers, help them.

Create car free streets, then car free areas, then expand them. They are extremely pleasant, work well with bicycles and, if enough people live close by, thrive economically.

Restore creeks, shorefronts, wetlands, ridgelines, notable rock outcrops and other natural features of the city. This often will require removing lower density housing. Excellent! This is a great way to also remove people from car dependent locations. I have run into relentless opposition in such work from people who don’t believe it is important or appropriate in the slightest to bring elements of nature into the city. They say the city is for people and nature is, frankly, outside. That’s true in large degree, of course, but if cities don’t honor nature and consciously seek a balance with nature, we – and nature – are doomed. In addition, having natural features restored in cities, such as creeks, brings those beautiful and educational features to our children – without the need to drive them in a car out into “nature” at a distance. This is especially important for providing an educational opportunity for poorer children.

A refinement here is that many people will say that a restored creek that is not in exactly its original position, for example one that is buried in a concrete pipe under a street, is not a natural feature at all and thus there is no reason to recreate it. Better to use the street for cars or pedestrians. Once larger infrastructure, like big buildings and transit stations, has been built it is not likely to go anywhere.

However, if enough room can be created for banks and planting, if native vegetation and a creek bottom of the right materials and shape will bring back dragonflies, butterflies, humming birds, fish, crawdads and on and on. Many large wading birds like egrets and herons don’t even care about the presence of people once they discover no one is going to bother them. If the life of the creek can be re-established, its natural essence will return.

To make the major land use transitions proposed by ecological city design, a great real estate financial tool is available called “transfer of development rights” or TDR. In this arrangement, a developer can pay for the purchase and removal of a building that is on top of a creek, next to a community garden or public park, recycling yard, sports field or other open space use and thus participate in rolling back sprawl development while providing for restoration of a natural feature, expansion of a community garden or park and so forth. For the contribution, the developer then has the privilege of building a larger building than would otherwise be permitted in one of the pedestrian/transit centers. He or she gets a “density bonus.”

And what about those buildings in the centers of increasing population and activity? Make them with solar passive orientation– lots of sun pouring into the interiors, heating and refreshing the air without the use of fossil, nuclear or hydropower energy. Build rooftop gardens, cafes, promenades, mini parks and other places higher in the building and make them accessible to the public for enjoyment of the views out over the city’s bioregion. Make bridges between buildings so that clusters of buildings become easily available to pedestrians – high pedestrian permeability it’s called. Put glass elevators on the outside of buildings for access to rooftops and terraces so that people can see and feel secure about who they want to get into an elevator with and have a fun ride rising up into buildings and back down.

One major feature I think is important is what I call a view plaza. Gather the people in a public plaza with your best ecologically tuned building around the plaza, but leave one side or corner of the plaza open to a cherished local view. Place no buildings there. Say you don’t have a creek to “daylight” and restore in your downtown or neighborhood center. You probably have a bay, river, mountain, interesting agricultural zone, coastline or some other natural feature to celebrate, framed by the town’s best buildings. Build that. People will understand it represents the society working with nature and based on ecological values and esthetics.

Problems in building the ecocity

There is no technological problem. These days people are waking up to something called “peak oil,” which means we are about to arrive at peak production of oil and for the remainder of geological and evolutionary history on Earth that supply will go down, down, down.

Oil company “optimists” say we will find other substitutes, but most students of the field don’t believe it. The notion that we will find something new – vast under the sea pools of methane, for example, or “free magnetic energy” – don’t look promising and magic new breakthroughs are highly unlikely. After all, it was in 1971 that oil production peaked in the United States and in 1931 discoveries of our reserves peaked – a very long time ago! But what is proven already is that conventional building techniques can build the ecological city. Only the human decision, backed by bad habits, is in the way.

We have to be honest about this. The fear of change is great, or maybe just comfortable laziness. But are they greater than our caring about the future and the world our children will inherit? This sounds harsh, but my experience is that, yes, they are greater, to date anyway. Since their beginnings, various civilizations have held to the notion that they would leave to their children a world more beautiful than they found it, the dream of improvement. We may be the first to become suspicious, due to climate change and mass extinctions already well under way, that not much more improvement may not be in the cards for our society, our whole species and likely the whole Earth.

Sure we’ll have fancier irrelevant video games – until cheap plastics run out with the oil – but a lonely planet with little more than people and our food organisms is not more beautiful than we found it. Are we environmentalists enough to actually entertain, for example, the use of transfer of development rights to provide more housing downtown while opening up creeks by removing narrow stings of houses through the city? Is it that big a deal? That would begin removing cars from car-dependent areas while reviving some significant environmental restoration. It would be a breakthrough on the way to the city of one/tenth the energy and ten times the biodiversity.

In my organization, Ecocity Builders, an educational and research non-profit, we got 103 local, environmental and sustainability groups signed on for a general plan policy supporting this tool called transfer of development rights, or TDR, mentioned above as a powerful means to reshape cities in a pedestrian and ecological direction. Those supporting the policy included the local Ecology Center (first in the US, founded in 1969), Sierra Club, bicycle groups, community garden and parks groups, recycling companies, youth environmental clubs, coop housing advocates, University of California Associated Students, poverty programs and on and on. Yet our supposed progressive City Council voted against this strong and promising tool for reshaping the city. Let me emphasize that TDR is a strictly willing seller arrangement. It is not eminent domain. Only people wanting to sell do.

We actually had letters from four households whose homes were constructed on top of a crumbling creek culverts. They wanted the option to sell. No one else would ever buy their houses if we couldn’t raise transfer of development rights money for creek restoration because their property had become dangerous.

Still the City Council, voted against it. Guess what? They call themselves liberal and environmentalist. But every now and then they have to prove they are anti-development. But this is good development providing housing – 20% of it required by law to be low to moderate income housing in the city – as well as natural restoration. No matter, the battle lines must be drawn on traditional environmentalist vs. developer ground. This is the kind of “environmentalism” that reflexively hates developers that I hope really does die.

Two reasons are brought forward reflexively as excuses for public and political inaction on ecocity issues. First that people can’t see what’s in the future and can’t imagine what it might look like. Second that the issue is so big and complex nobody can relate to it, be empowered and act. It’s time to say dump the excuses and have a little backbone. First, everybody is concerned with the future and pictures it in science fiction books and movies, video games, discussions about saving species the world over, determining other countries political systems, even positing life after death in many religions and so on. I draw dozens of picture myself and people can discuss these future city images with signs of clear understanding of what they mean.

Not being able to imagine a future is patently an excuse for inaction. As far as the whole field of transforming cities being to big and complex, I find hundreds of people in every city I know of who are already extremely knowledgeable regarding and adroit at manipulating general plans, zoning codes, political activism, initiatives, bond measures, height limits, publicity strategy, letters to editors and politicians, candidate support and on and on, knowing full well they are using this to, on one side, oppose development or on the other, to make money on it. That too is an excuse.

To get past those excuses and move on from here to a civilization of cities, towns and villages designed to confront the larger environmental problems of our times we have to be alert to the dynamics of evasiveness. I’ve heard many more excuses than just the two above used to interrupt my own attempts to describe ecological cities and their benefits. Scoffing at the idea with a wave of the hand, then changing the subject, is the most typical tactic.

When polled, in the range of 70% to 80% of the people in the United States say they think of themselves as environmentalists. We need to run with that. Say, “Good! Now stick with the explanation of what the structure of cities has to do with climate change and extinction of species.” We need to hold them to it. When they try to cut off the conversation we need to get them back on track or call into question whether they really are environmentalists or just pretending to be.

We need to be clear that environmentalism is a tough commitment to looking honestly at the real predicament we are in and there is no easy answer, even if the ecological city would be a whole hell of a lot more fun to live in than what we have now. We have to get past our own mental impediments first, and that’s undoubtedly the hardest part of the whole enterprise.

Collapse – and avoiding it

Now you were probably wondering why I had a problem with Jared Diamond – a lot of praise, but a problem too. Here it is, and of course it reflects upon the main points of this paper. You all know the story of Easter Island, 2,300 miles from South America to the west and 1,000 miles east of Pitcairn Island and nothing else anywhere around. They famously cut down every last tree for the building of those colossal stylized statues that, to us, all look the same though varying from 20 to 60 feet tall. What could they have been thinking?! Wood for boats, to make shelter and fire for cooking and warmth in an uncomfortably cool and windy place – everything wood can give you, all gone.

Amazing. Why would they do it? Says Diamond: cultural blindness to ecological and resource realities. It happens over and over and over. This tale he tells and many more, including the unfinished tale about our own culture likely headed toward its collapse, but one big enough to take down all the other cultures with it and most of the biosphere.

What I take away from the book more than anything else, though, are the occasional insights among “primitive” people that should give us pause – and good ideas for application in our “advanced” culture facing our own big environmental realities. Take Tikopia, for example, a small island in the Western Pacific. It is so small, just shy of two square miles, that directions are given as “inward” and “outward” meaning inward toward the center of the island and outward toward the sea, as in, “Your outward cheek has a fly on it.”

We chuckle, then hear this: They had high spiritual ceremonies to celebrate zero population growth. Zero Population Growth is the name of the “Developed” World organization identified early on with Paul Ehrlich and his book, The Population Bomb, a very sophisticated and effective organization in the heart of the modern beast. But zero population growth is the best English translation of the annual ritual on Tikopia to remind its people to keep the population from over reaching the carrying capacity of the small island.

When the Tikopians arrived almost 3,000 years ago, according to archeological evidence, there were several more species of bird, fish and shellfish available. They brought pigs with them, with the deep Polynesian tradition of relating to them as a staple food of life, ceremonial delicacy and ever-present front, back and side yard companion. Over the centuries the natural species were reduced in number, and the surviving shellfish species grew smaller, showing selective harvesting favoring the larger individuals, leaving the small ones to survive and reproduce.

But Tikopians eventually learned, sometime around AD 1600, and stabilized their relationship with their resource base and natural biotic community. They stopped the slide toward island species extinctions. They made very explicit their several means for birth control and integrated it into their cultural daily life and special ceremonies. They made a momentous decision, too, reported by Diamond, and slaughtered every single last pig for the broad ranging damage they were doing to the island.

Harvesting the sun’s energy via the plants, then the pigs, they realized, was far less efficient on an island susceptible to famine than to eat the products of the plants directly. About ten times less efficient. Plus the pigs damaged the remaining native species. Getting rid of these animals and finding a balance cognizant of their world’s carrying capacity shows an intellectual sophistication that would be the equivalent of Americans slaughtering their road hogs every last one.

Fascinating as Jared Diamond’s accounts are, he joins the long list of perceptive people and crystal clear writers and even the environmentalists I’m citing in this article who have not noticed the 800 pound gorilla in their own living rooms. Or rather more personally, the 800 pound gorilla in the biosphere that is the town in which Diamond lives himself: Los Angeles, California, famous as the world’s original capital of cars, sprawl and inventor of smog. In his book he flies off to the far corners of the world – South and West Pacific, New Guinea, Australia, China, Japan, Greenland, Iran, Rwanda, Haiti, Guatemala and even Montana and New Mexico – and back again to the thin, suffocating coating of concrete, asphalt, grass and air borne particulates that is his city’s physical structure.

Yet he never says its very design or the shape and organization of its anatomy has anything to do with the calamities we may be facing. Nor does he notice with all the successful adaptations cultures devise in forestry and agricultural practices and policies, stewardship of the ocean harvest and so on, that this scattered urban structure is a gigantic mal adaptation in its own right that needs fundamental change.

His lesson is very explicitly stated repeatedly in his book: societies collapse mainly because they have cultural blind spots for crucial ecological realities. We, and he, have a gigantic cultural blind spot about ecological realities when it comes to our cities.

Where from here?

Methodology is worth thinking about. Earlier in this paper I quoted Shellenbeger and Nordhaus when they excoriated environmentalists for failing to “come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that the majority of Americans could get excited about.”
Forget that approach.

The new environmentalism, the environmentalism that realizes we have to build a vision, that is, develop a new, ecologically sane civilization of cities for people not cars, does not go to the “majority of Americans” or to the United Auto Workers and say, “What do you want? let’s do that.” We have to say, “We’ve been thinking about this a long time and here’s what we think. We have plenty of evidence, plenty of data supporting a strategy to rebuild this civilization and we think we have the tools to do it.” When they say, “Do you think we can do it without changing anything very much?” We have to say, “Are you kidding?! Let me remind you that the oceans are rising, the glaciers are melting, four hurricanes hit Florida last year in six weeks and it’s already six degrees warmer in the artic than it was twenty years ago.

We got a problem on our hands. Are you with us for doing something about it or not.”