SEPTEMBER NEWS FROM ECOCITY BUILDERS

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Essay

Losing the World, One Environmental Victory at a Time –
And the Way to Solve that Problem
7,195 words

Richard Register

I think it really hit me for the first time in South Africa. I was on my way
to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, straining my eyes from the Boeing 747’s starboard window. We were flying down the East Coast of Africa from Dubai to Johannesburg and I was trying to locate Mt. Kilimanjaro, scanning the horizon to the west, remembering the fantastic pictures I’d seen in books since childhood, those clouds floating over the vast savannahs, yellow grasses, cinemascope-stretched acacias, elephants and giraffes, with the dark blue skies above. Rising high above the clouds were the snows of Kilimanjaro, the glacier, the cold gleaming white hovering over that hot continent.

I knew approximately where we were by the coastline, and inland, about the right distance, that brown lump on the horizon was about where the great mountain should be. Maybe I was mistaken. I pressed my nose to the window and looked forward along the horizon to the south. That would be three hundred miles or more and no mountains coming up. Suddenly I felt my blood run cold. The haystack of brown on the horizon was Kilimanjaro. Welcome to global warming.

But that’s not when it hit me.

A few days later and 1,500 miles farther south at the events around the
Summit, I was attempting to get attention for the concepts of ecological
cities as a solution to the problems of global warming and other
environmental disasters. I was approaching delegates, the press and
audiences at my talks, trying to get them interested in thinking through the impact of the city on nature. I’d hoped I’d come to the right place.
Just a few days earlier I was at a conference in Shenzhen, China that I’d
helped organize on nothing but “eco-cities” with architects, city planners,
municipal officials, environmentalists, energy experts, academics, artists,
professional recyclers and various concerned others, totaling 500 people.
They all spoke as easily about “ecocities” as Americans might about “green” buildings.

There in Johannesburg, my approach went something like this: Since cities are the largest creations our species builds, or “develops,” then they must have an enormous impact on the planet’s environment. Some cities in Europe cover one quarter as much land as sprawling American cities per person, use one quarter as much energy yet have equal levels of prosperity. That means cities can be designed in a wide variety of ways with wildly varying impacts. Big hint! But even in European cities, I pointed out, the planners have not been trying to seek out and utilize ecological principles for the city as if it could be a whole, living organism in harmony with its larger natural environment. The Europeans had simply inherited cities as they were built for pedestrians before we had the vast power available from fossil fuels, especially oil, and before cars. In addition, European cities as well as American have been generally saturated by cars, if in a less thorough manner.

Why not, then, look at the possibility of urban redesign as one of the key
components of sustainable development, perhaps the foundation of all others, being such a gigantic construction and the construction that orders the arrangement of all the other parts: work places, offices, factories,
schools, recreational facilities, transportation systems, access (or lack of
it) to nature and agriculture and so on. This would lead one believe that
the World Summit on Sustainable Development should have a strong focus on reshaping the city. I was wrong. But then again, one should not get in the practice of believing what one wants to believe.

A few dozen people did turn up at my talks, but at what the UN organizers called “the Main Event,” after eliciting yawns from environmental leaders, press and delegates alike, that’s when it really hit me. Even there of all places, at a conference on “sustainable development” most people were unwilling to think about the built community of cities, towns and villages as if the built environment had anything to do with the problems and solutions of our world‘s environment. The largest things people “develop” and nobody was looking at it? “My God!” I thought, “This is the key to some
of the biggest problems of our times and nobody is even willing to listen.”

In that blindness or denial lies the solving of the following puzzle.


Fifteen Years Ago was Twenty Years after Earth Day

With a few of my environmentalist, architect, artist and planner friends I’d
convened a conference called the First International Ecocity Conference. A few days before Earth Day, 1990 we had gathered an audience of about 500 in Berkeley, California to hear the organizer of the original Earth Day
organizer Denis Hayes deliver the opening talk. Until Ronald Reagan
scuttled it, Denis was also head of the US federal Solar Energy Research
Institute. Said he:

We’ve won a few victories. The issues then were air pollution, water
pollution, the Los Angeles basin, the Great Lakes dying… Most of those
things have improved somewhat. But it has been twenty yeas of fighting
heroic battles, expending huge amounts of energy. Today, if you really take a look at the big, profound, global trends – global warming, rainforest destruction, ocean pollution, vanishing species, human population explosion – you go on with the litany and it is very hard to find one of them in which we are not in far worse shape today than we were twenty years ago.

Then ten years later, in Berkeley again, but this time at a local
bookstore, he said the same thing. And now, five years later it has become common knowledge that he still is right and that climate change, extinctions and – just now dawning on the planetary consciousness, here comes peak oil! – are all far worse today.

What’s happening here? Have we have been so fooled by 35 years of
successes, big though they seemed at the time, that we in fact have not been dealing with the largest problems on a scale or even in the right subject area appropriate to their solution? Our victories seemed so big – national acts for clean air, endangered species, clean water, international
agreements on FCCs, stopping the Super Sonic Transport – it was hard to not think of ourselves as well on our way to solving all problems environmental.

But the fact that, as Hayes said, our successes haven’t worked on the
largest problems, which suggests that we have indeed missed something very, very big.

We defenders of the environment had come to believe it was George Bush, or the US Congress, or the giant corporations that had have compromised our efforts, always the other guy. How about our own unwillingness as environmentalists to look at our own ways of building and living? What about the fact that our cities are in fact the main physical embodiments of our modern civilization, that it is literally, physically, massive scattered generally single use infrastructure – sprawling suburb here, massive central business district devoid of life after dark over there, university somewhere else, manufacturing on the fringe or in the dead or staggering center, big box shopping behind one hundred acres of asphalt parking, and on and on, all held together by broad ribbons of concrete and asphalt and freeway interchanges many of which cost more than an entire years national investment in Amtrak, a passenger rail service for a gigantic country?

Might the civilization be just that: cars, sprawl, paving and oil, with all
its tools of traditional empire to hold it together, ringed by weapons and
warriors on the frontiers where the most intensive exploitation is going on
so we can… build more cars, sprawl, paving and subsidize and process more cheap energy?

In fact that is exactly what has been built in the United States and is
being feverishly constructed in places like China and India now in the early years of the 21st century, and only when those who love this gorgeous dying planet wake up and realize this will we have a chance of saving much of it for the future. That is my, shall we say, strongly held thesis after working on the subject for 35 years.

Could we have been blinded somewhat by enjoying the cars, driving about for fun until it got too congested, making out in the back seat until we got too old, still finding comfort in our isolated “my-house-is-my-castle” reality in front of the television? What about that bumper sticker that says “Respect Mother Earth” when the car demands we bomb the distant landscape to provide it with fuel or face much higher gasoline prices? What about, as Julia Butterfly Hill lectures us, that middle finger that points back at ourselves when we point the index finger at someone else?

But think of it as the finger of responsibility, not blame. We are stuck
with where we come from but we can change where we are going. The excuse is, coming from where most of us come from, that it has always been far from obvious that there’s an insight in ecological city design. The words sound foreign, unfamiliar. But it is the key insight for those willing to take note of the more than one direction those fingers point.

This excuse isn’t a guilty hiding place, it’s a very real explanation of what went wrong and from that understanding we can make the best of it. And the best of it could be pretty good des[ote change, extinctions and peak oil are all heading our way quickly and simultaneously.

Regarding solutions, “where I come from” may be of interest. My father is an architect and so was my grandfather. From almost babyhood I wandered Northern New Mexico’s piñon and juniper, bunchgrass and cactus landscapes near Santa Fe while my father surveyed the land and laid out future houses, office buildings and even a college. Building was second nature to me, and I assumed a service to individuals and a contribution to society. By the time I was in my twenties I was making sculpture and greatly enjoying the three-dimensional forms I could create with ease and gratifying admiration.

Around me there were some of the earliest solar homes in the United States. Santa Fe itself started as an almost strictly pedestrian city – even horses were rare in those days – and the nearby Indian pueblos were not just the first apartment houses in the US by hundreds of years, but compact whole towns in their own right. Like sculptures, the pueblos were and are three-dimensional objects rather than the two-dimensional sprawls of today.

They were quite a curiosity for me growing up there. In fact, my first real
job, when I was sixteen, was with the Archeological Museum of New Mexico out of Santa Fe, excavating and drawing artifacts from some of those Indian ruin towns.

In other words it was only second nature for me to look at the compact,
pedestrian city and… think a lot about it. Not only that, but to see the
city in its very long term historic context and natural landscape, which can
be pretty gorgeous and well appreciated around Santa Fe.


Trains need tracks, Simple as that

Systems thinking can be hard – or easy – for people to “get.” For
example, no one would expect to see a train click-ity-clacking down the
beach, or out there with off road vehicles, or driving down a city street.
We immediately see the train/track/station whole item without much trouble and, in fact, viewing either the train or the tracks as having any intrinsic sense to them without the other would seem strictly nonsensical.
We also understand that the trains haul something – people and freight – and need energy from fossil fuel, or electricity or something else. Wood worked once, if not that well.

Not so with cities. People find it difficult to comprehend that they
are made of integral, that is to say, complementary, mutually dependent
parts. There is a whole system there with its own internal design and
patterns of function that confuses us no end. Probably that’s because
cities are now so big and dismembered and scattered that we experience them as a jumble of separate parts rather than as whole items. Also, for most people, their houses are their single largest investment.
In other words, the lack of understanding of the whole built physical system of cars, sprawl, paving and cheap energy and how it functions eludes us, and

I’m suggesting, we are afraid of looking the dragon in the eyes. And it is
a dragon with wings, the wings of war. Nobody likes to talk about
exploitation when it gets that serious and we are who we believe to be the beneficiaries. Environmentalists, as typically as just regular folks,
agitate vigorously for cheap gasoline. Where does gas come from? Might we feel guilty about that and want to avoid the subject?
What can’t be escaped, though, as with the trains and tracks, the car and
low-density development are intimately and necessarily interconnected and interdependent in a whole system. This is sometimes called “whole systems thinking,” and when it embraces the natural environment, as indeed the natural environment embraces all cities and enables their functioning, it’s called “ecological thinking.”

There could be another whole system to be built and there are plenty of
“precursors” available for this life form that is the living city. That’s
the pedestrian/bicycle/streetcar and elevator/renewable energy city, which
can replace the city of cars. That is a very different sort of city, and I
believe, it could run on even much less energy and take up even less land than the European cities I was talking about in Johannesburg.

Consider this,
1.) Rail systems run on about one eighth the energy required for
road/car/truck systems per unit of freight or passengers delivered -
profound numbers relevant to our energy future - and they work beautifully with compact more European-like cities. Furthermore, electric cars are massively energy consuming just like gasoline cars, whereas trains can run on electricity at eight times the efficiency; that is, they not only fit with compact ecological cities, they can be powered by solar and wind electric generating facilities. Considering the competing energy ratios, trains for transportation, not cars, fit the renewable energy future.

2.) Space heating is provided in compact development (apartment, condo and larger office buildings) quite incidentally by sharing "waste" heat from lights, cooking, appliances and human bodies at about the equivalent of a 100 watt bulb going all the time. That heat is shared between different rooms though walls and cooling can be provided mostly through opening windows, or in more fancy systems, through air ducts. In cooler climates, solar greenhouses can add enormously to the free energy available simply if we build right in the first place: glass on the sunny side. Thus the more compact cities of more "ecological" or "green" buildings would run on practically no energy for heating and cooling as well as radically reduced energy for transportation. That’s a lot of conservation!

3.) Architects have hardly started to make larger buildings really humane,
even delightful, with rooftop gardens, rooftop cafes, restaurants and
mini-parks with great views, multi-story solar greenhouses full of plants,
bridges between buildings, open creeks running through towns, through
pedestrian streets and plazas and even through building lobbies.

One example: San Luis Obispo, California has a beautiful creek restoration project with several streets and through-building passageways lined with shops that connect to the town’s main commercial street, and people love it.

Before closing a street, turning a small parking lot into a park, restoring
the creek and making the main street easily accessible to the “nature
corridor,” that is, the creek, the downtown had 40% vacancy rate in the
storefronts, and now it has zero. Of course it’s popular. You sit at your
restaurant by the creek watching humming birds visit flowers while parents help little children rock-to-rock across the creek. All that and much more where fresh breezes rustle the trees in a world undisturbed by car noise and blasting exhaust. Why not build in that way and get endless other benefits in addition to energy conservation enough to make renewables like solar and wind completely practical?

That's the ecological city. It can be surrounded by natural and
agricultural landscapes. It can welcome back its small waterways and open up its edges with rivers, lakes, bays and coastline to be celebrated in all their richness.


Ignore “Jumpstart Ford,” not Ecocities!

As I write, two very high profile campaigns are being pursued by more
than a dozen of the United States’ largest environmental groups. Their
purpose is to criticize Ford Motor Company and Exxon Oil Company for their energy squandering and alternatives-challenged policies.
While there is nothing wrong with “exxposing” these companies’ malfeasance, what really is going on here, and what happens if the campaign is a “success?”

Regarding Ford, the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and Global
Exchange are claiming Ford is responsible for the worst, most energy
consuming vehicles made in the USA and these eco-groups want people to pressure Ford to produce a line of vigorously marketed hybrids.

Another list of organizations, including National Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, MoveOn.org and Union of Concerned Scientists – and by the way I think these organizations are stuffed with great people and good intentions and have accomplished important progress in many areas – says Exxon has an especially bad record and it should do like British Petroleum and Shell and invest in alternatives. My own recollection is that BP bought up solar patents in my very own Northern California ten years ago and is doing little better than tokenism for solar while waiting for the technology to become more profitable – instead of leaving those crazy pioneers alone to actually produce and sell panels at high price and low profit just because they love solar and dream of its eventual success. Shell’s human rights record is absolutely horrendous including sponsoring murder of indigenous people and their leaders in Nigeria, including Goldman Prize winner Ken Saro Wiwa.

So what if the goal of convincing Ford to build a line of more energy
efficient cars worked and Exxon did initiate some “alternative” energy
programs like BP?

First, the energy-conserving car would promote driving farther on a
gallon of gasoline or kilowatt of electricity, being cheaper to drive –
while making the driver feel righteously “green” about it. That’s sprawl
inducing as far as my recollection goes, watching the trends since about
1965. What if Exxon does decide to spends some on improving its policies?

Should we therefore promote buying its gasoline? Or if we want immediate action, why not buy gas from BP and Shell and otherwise just go about our business?

I recently re-read the paper by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhoaus
called “The Death of Environmentalism” and noticed they never, repeat, never brought up driving less, using bikes and certainly not rolling back sprawl development or even slowing its growth. Could it be they believe we can go on growing and growing infinitely if we just find more benign and ever more massive energy sources? Right at the time in history when people are waking up to the rather mind-numbing implications of the rapid approach of peak oil production and an eternal decline after that? Don’t environmentalists care about paving farmland and extinguishing native plants and animals by displacing habitat? Don’t they care about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people every year worldwide in car wrecks? What about television/auto isolation and alienation in the sprawling suburbs? What about war for oil in Central Asia and the Middle East, pressure for war in Venezuela, Peru, Columbia and Nigeria and anywhere else oil turns up in quantity?

What about the line from the Exxpose Exxon campaign that says, on
their “Get the Facts” page of their web site under “Cleaner Energy
Solutions”: “The best way to reduce our dependence on oil and save consumers money at the pump is to make cars go farther on a gallon of gas.”

False
information! Going farther on a gallon of gas empowers more sprawl and
keeps the Empire of vast exploitation going and growing.
The authors of the Death of Environmentalism paper – are sweeping up the good intentions of millions of wannabe environmentally responsible people. They are continuing to postpone that day of enlightenment and action. Do they know they are? I have no idea. It seems obvious they think that their way is the only “politically realistic” way to make change. But that way adjusts our vehicles and our own life choices to the infrastructure of our scattered cities, rather than making our cities to accommodate the needs of human beings and nature.

The idea as stated in “The Death of Environmentalism” is to support the
United Auto Workers, and labor in general, who after all deserve descent pay and security, like anyone, and get them to build better cars and, somehow, “greener” gasoline. The authors believe environmental activists and supporters should work with the big foundations and corporations and seek large blocks of voters by appealing to their “values.”

I know something of the theory and its history, though. David Brower was on my Board of Advisors for my non profit organization, Ecocity Builders, and I knew him personally since the First UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. He wasn’t a good friend but an acquaintance of many meetings. Once, at an event I attended with him he said, “Are there any developers here? I hope not, because developers scare me to death.” Huey Johnson, recently Resources Director for the State of California at the time, who had invited Brower to the meeting said, “Whoa! Who invited him?” which sent a ripple of laughter through the crowd, which was followed by a litany of disasters developers were in fact perpetrating on the environment
in various places referenced.

But what about good development? That, for many environmentalists, is a bit of a blind spot. But David Brower was a much more complex person. His usual strategy was to pick a fight to save something, stay focused and summons dozens of good ideas to win it – and he did, saving perhaps more land for nature than any other American in his time. But he could always see the larger picture. I spoke with him in the early 1980s about his idea to make common cause with union people to find a way to build a better world. That would be a good idea to get more political muscle behind legislation for good environmental changes for sure. It was a good start.

Fast-forward to today’s campaigns trying to make common cause with
unions and environmentalists and it’s a good idea all over again. But it’s
not a good idea to help them make something environmentally counter
productive, much less to preserve and expand the Empire of cars, sprawl,
asphalt and cheap energy. That’s like putting the family’s treasure and
efforts into reforming your crazy, violent brother and ignoring the gentle
genius of your sister, letting her languish while he’s further empowered to
do what he does – a chancy and tragic errand at best.

What might work: support the unions to keep the businesses going, and in all honesty that means supporting the managers and owners, too, if you think you are being “left wing” about it. But don’t try to reform their versions of the crazy brother. Instead, if you must extend a helping hand to the rich giants, do it for shifting their line of products over to the gentle genius alternatives. Shift the list from cars over to streetcars and rails, bicycles and elevators, greenhouse materials, recycled products and organic farming supplies and so on. The car and oil companies are good at advertising and lobbying for the wrong thing. Get them working for – and making money at - the right thing.

Even better, simply ignore the companies doing the damage, or “exxpose” them if you want and boycott them too – that’s always an excellent idea –but let them figure out how to improve themselves on their own time and money. Instead of subsidizing Ford and Exxon’s advertising and lobbying departments for free, invest the environmental movement’s energy in supporting the businesses that are already on the list that helps build the ecocity.

Ignore the Prius, don’t buy it. The Prius won’t save us. Just drive one half as often in the same old car until the earliest opportunity
you have to move somewhere where you won’t need to drive at all, or so
little you’ll just rent a car every once in a rare while and take a bike or
streetcar more often than in the past. Promote ecocity ideas in particular
and help the developers who what to build the buildings and arrange the
public landscapes and natural areas of a healthy future tuned to its
bioregion.

Investment in Renewables and the Panic for a Panacea

You know environmentalists are in a rout when not only are they becoming designers and sales people for cars but when many among them are so panicked about global warming and peak oil they are desperately grasping at the straws of nuclear power. Even James Lovelock, co-author with Lyn Margulis of the Gaia Principle, sacred to deep ecologists and many environmentalists, has started to promote nuclear energy. James Howard Kunstler and Jared Diamond and many others who I respect enormously have recently said they are considering it – if it could just be made safe. The effects of global warming, they say, and the prospects of “petrocollapse,” the term of oil industry analyst Jan Lundberg, are so bad, we can’t save civilized humanity without a mass energy source of some kind. We don’t have any other choice.

Not so! Ecocities prove we have choices we haven’t considered.
The short list on nuclear power is that:
1.) It is very expensive. It’s another energy source that can only satisfy
massive demand with massive subsidy. This, by the way, is where oil is now in history if you look at its true costs. It used to be very cheap, but the situation gradually changed and a new reality crept up on us without much notice.

2.) Economically available uranium is in limited supply and will be gone in
40 to 60 years even at the current rate or modest growth, much less pedal to the floor. Unlike solar and wind energy that will be around as long as the sun, uranium is not part of our income but rather a temporary stash, like oil.

3.) Plutonium could be used for “breeder reactors” but is also
extraordinarily poisonous as well as intensely radioactive and much more
easily fabricated into atomic bombs, and bombs of a smaller size than
uranium is used in making – the terrorists’ dreamed of “briefcase atomic
bomb.”

4.) There’s what to do with the waste with no economically viable and safe
means of disposal in sight – and six decades of failure in the search.
Maybe you really could bury it 25 miles down – ever tried to dig a hole that deep?

5.) My favorite one is this: Extremely complex systems in extremely high tension, like nuclear power stations, happen to be rather delicate at times of degenerating maintenance under difficult economic circumstances, which is almost guaranteed to be the case when oil runs short in the near future.

Remember the recent news story about rescuing the sailors in the Russian Navy's Priz AS-28 rescue submarine? It got tangled up in wires on the bottom of the ocean just off the Russian Pacific coast. The wires were an antenna that was part of the coastal monitoring system used by the Russians to track the movements of foreign submarines. In other words, their antenna couldn't even track their own submarines, and their own rescue submarine at that, but rather trapped one in their own deferred maintenance! Throwing our lot in with nuclear is the one thing that might be more dangerous than helping cars.


What Needs to Happen, Like Yesterday

What should happen is that scientists and people willing to methodically think through this situation should say, “What’s the natural energy balance on Earth, anyway? We have a certain amount of solar energy coming in – and it happens to be a lot – heating the land, water and air and stirring up the winds, causing the rain to fall and run down rivers.

And we have a much, much smaller amount of easily tapped geothermal energy percolating up from the nuclear energy of decaying isotopes like uranium, way down in the hot bowels of the Earth. The fossil fuels in use at large quantities are destroying the place. Replacing that massive flow of energy with another, however, isn’t the only option.

How about reducing the need for energy by 95%?”

If we were to take a “whole systems approach,” as scientists should be able to do, or anyone concentrating on it for a while, we might also say we need to slow down its growth then slowly reduce our enormous human population.

We need to think through which products make our lives genuinely more
beautiful and meaningful and skip most of the other stuff. If we can’t quit eating meat that costs our land and energy resources ten times as much as vegetables, grains, fruits, nuts, berries, tubers, spices etc. per acre, we can at least reduce meat to a smaller more relished and celebrated portion of our food. We can recycle acidulously. And on and on. Add it all up and who says we don’t have any choices?

But back to reducing the need for energy 95%. How could we do that? It
sounds impossibly ambitious.

By building ecological cities. Remember that some cities in Europe run on one quarter the energy per capita of many of America’s sprawling giants.

That’s a reduction of 75% right there, though obviously since the big
offenders are not even the majority of cities and that first level of
improvement, the European level of city design and functioning, would
probably only get us down to about a 40% reduction. But if we applied
ecocity principles to all cities over the long haul and improved even the
European model by 50% we’d be saving 80% of our energy demand, which is getting into range of beginning to deal with global warming realistically.

We’d be building cities of pedestrian/transit centers and rolling back
sprawl development steadily. Rails, bicycles and walking would be replacing cars and the massive flow of energy said (falsely) to be “cheap” and would be built into the design of the cities in their changing. Then if in addition we dealt with population gradually, switched to a more vegetarian diet on average and adopted all those “green” lifestyle steps from recycling to bicycling, and added in the sorts of policies to simply pay for cleaning up pollution methodically… 95% looks possible.

People have pointed out the rebuilding of the city would be an enormous
investment in energy and materials in itself. Very worthwhile point to
consider. But remember, it is not as if we would be adding ecocity building while continuing to build the same amount of what we are building right now.

The idea is to replace our insanely wasteful suburban construction project
with an enterprise that’s energy and materials conserving from the get-go.

Notice that what we are currently building is massively energy consuming
with its freeways, interchanges, big box stores and McMansions, giant land moving bulldozers grinding away at the countryside and parking structures typically costing $40,000 to $60,000 per parking place.

Constructing the new buildings without stories of parking below, building
new apartments near transit that are not McMansions and building cities
without thousands of acres of parking lots and freeway interchanges starts saving energy immediately. In addition, the flimsy housing and crass franchise commercial development of short life span just has to be replaced by more substantial and long lasting infrastructure. If we build well and strong in the first place and learn how to invest in that, it amortizes into maximum cultural and biological survival and prosperity.

Isn’t saving the Earth and helping it thrive worth that kind of thinking and effort? It’s just a few neurons and nano volts of brainpower and the best most long-lasting, energy conserving investment we could make.

Lester Brown‘s “Plan B” works out much of the above, but is weak on city
structure, architecture and arrangement of public spaces. However his idea gets us off to the right kind of start. With a strong land use foundation it is the approach we need since plan A, all the way back the alphabet to the Apollo Alliance, supports the Car City Empire. With a strong ecocity foundation, Plan B would put us on the path to solving the big ones.


The Real Alternative is This

In 1971 I was interviewing an optical scientist named Aden Meinel in
Tucson, Arizona. There under his giant saguaro cactus straight out of a
cheap cowboy movie from the 1940s, but in his front yard and festooned in Christmas Tree lights – for it was that time of year and it was Arizona
after all – I was thinking it was nice to find scientists with a sense of
humor. He’d recently directed the construction of Kitt Peak National
Observatory. I went to Arizona to cover his solar energy story for the Los
Angeles Times Sunday Magazine. One thing that stuck in my mind was his warning that we’d need to spend a fair fraction of our fossil fuel endowment putting into place a renewable energy system. We couldn’t wait until oil became expensive. We’d need too much of it. His favorite solar “system” was something he liked to call a solar energy “farm” with reflectors to send light to a central boiler to turn water into high pressure steam, turn a turbine, then an electric generator. Another notion was to collect the heat of the sun under long lenses that would magnify the sun’s light, heat a liquid material like sodium to a very high temperature, pump that to the central plant, then produce electricity with the steam boiler, turbine and generator. In any case, he said, we’d have to melt lots of glass and build a massive infrastructure for the renewable energy system because we, not the geology of the Earth over the one hundred to two hundred million years it took to make the fossil fuels, would need to gather and concentrate the energy ourselves.

That year, 1971, was coincidentally the same year oil production peaked in the United States, though I had no idea about it at the time. His point was, I believe, absolutely profound – and we have not made the investment in the meantime. Worse than that, there has been even less investment in the physical infrastructure in which the energy would work well: the ecological city.

Now, the energy is being burned up on the freeways of the world and sent
haste post haste directly into the atmosphere, whether from Priuses driving longer distances or Hummers driving shorter ones. Like the train and the track, time and space, the mass and energy relationship is primary in this universe. These are “dimensional pairs,” each one, without the other, nothing. You can’t imagine our universe with only time but no space, energy but no mass. That’s getting very basic and looking at renewable energy for an absolutely wrong infrastructure, one that doesn’t fit renewable energy’s intrinsic healthy relationship to biology and ecology on Earth, an infrastructure that is scattered over great distances on asphalt and maintained only by massive military force burning much more energy in its operation and expending concentrated energy in the oil producing regions of the Earth in explosions even, is the beginning of the end of society, climate stability and biology. But if the energy and physical infrastructure were designed together, designed “integral” to one another, that’s an entirely different story, and the solution to Denis Hayes’ Puzzle.

To wind up Dr. Meinel’s point, though, we may have lost some options but probably still have enough energy resources available if we can just
enlighten and reform the elements of the “establishment” that really do have the power to write policy for ecocities. Do they get it? Are they blind?

In denial? In debt? Bought off? Is their world so much fun to live in
that they don’t want to change it? I have no idea. Maybe all of the above.

But if we rapidly put in place a massive shift to renewables and supported
the ecological city, perhaps we’d have a chance. Then mass (the built
environment of the ecocity) and energy (renewables) would be united,
effective, true to ecological principles and powerful instead of knotted up
in contradictions.

The good news is that the tools are there and there is no bad news other
than our not yet very clear or open minds. But here it is:

Find the centers that are already the most vital centers in your cities,
neighborhoods, towns and villages and even in that uniform zoning thing
called sprawl. Even there some places seem somehow more alive, busy,
productive, friendly. Plot those centers on a map of the existing town
using the insights of ecological urban design. Reinforce those centers over time with more diversity and density, while working to remove as much development as possible farther from those centers. As the post peak oil future sets in and people can’t travel very far on, say a $100 tank full, real estate prices are going to be coming down far from the centers anyway.

The centers themselves will become “pedestrian/transit centers” over time, car-free areas easily traversed by foot or bicycle and easily and cheaply accessible by transit to other centers. “Density” will work and will make sense.

The term “density” is a bugaboo in the US, however, though millions of
people in cities enjoy the benefits that can only come from gathering many people together in relatively “dense” development. Yet density per se is not the answer since gigantic business districts of nothing but office
buildings force massive commuting as surely as low-density sprawl. So what we need is a combination of density and diversity at the same time.
Maybe the healthy city can only be constituted of that “dimensional pair” or will not exist at all: density and diversity together or no ecocity possibility. I’ve noticed there is no good word for the pair, and friends for years have counseled “you have to stop using that word ‘density.’ It scares people – Americans, anyway.” So why not simply combine the words and say we need high diversity/density – or “divensity.” It’s far more accurate anyway. It sounds thoroughly strange, like most new words, and floating it here may come to naught, but I can say this much: no density and diversity together, no future.

So back to what’s becoming a scenario of reshaping cities… When you
find those centers of high divensity in your town, mark them on a map. They are going to become the pedestrian/transit centers of the future. In the areas farthest from those centers we will use every opportunity to remove buildings and other development “improvements.” That’s because those areas are those most automobile and high-energy use dependent. This map can be called an “Ecocity Overlay Map” because we can lay it over the existing zoning map of the city and use it to influence future zoning decisions. The general “divensity shift” represented in this map is, simply, toward the centers. In those centers we have the kind of meta-architecture, the clusters of buildings and open spaces, hyper low energy transportation systems like bicycle, elevator and streetcar, and functioning nature corridors like open creeks that I’ve mentioned earlier. There is where we build the solar greenhouses on tall buildings and feature rooftop and terrace gardens, cafes, restaurants and other places to celebrate the beautiful views you get in any town when you rise up some into the air.

Far from the centers, in areas most dependent on automobiles and cheap energy, which is on its way out anyway, buildings are removed and their building materials recycled to the greatest possible degree. There, nature can regenerate with a little help and agriculture can be reestablished.

The tool called transfer of development rights, or TDR, can be used to
buy up property on those car-dependent fringes, and property covering
particularly important and potentially ecological rich areas such as creeks
and their banks and ridgelines with their wonderful views, and properties
that could expand community gardens, public parks for recreation, sports
fields, recycling areas, and on and on.

We need more open space for cities to function well, paradoxically it
would seem to people used to sprawl living, and at the same time we need much higher divensity in the centers, including today’s small but vital neighborhood centers and even suburban centers. The blessing of TDR is that it is an arrangement that offers to the owner of property to buy if they want to sell – otherwise the buyer just looks elsewhere. The developer who buys the property or pays money into a fund to buy the property for removal gets to make more money by building at a higher level of divensity somewhere else in one of the evolving pedestrian/transit centers. Call this the positive corollary of pollution trading – but done to avoid pollution in the first place. The hard-ass way to produce such a density shift is to initiate eminent domain actions and make the divensity shift by political force, assuming a majority of people really did want to save the Earth by reshaping the city and others opposing the shift wanted to stay and fight. I recommend the TDR route, believing it will prove itself if given a chance.

For those who will denigrate this idea for being an idealist fantasy, I can
fortunately say that it is in place legally in South Lake Tahoe on the
California and Nevada border, functions beautifully and is a great model for emulation elsewhere. Around 140 houses unadvisedly built in places that caused erosion and were contributing to silting Lake Tahoe and fogging up its crystal waters have been removed through the program, natural landscape has been reestablished and developers took their new efforts elsewhere.

So now you can begin to see the city shifting its form—and add to that
all the good things of green building and renewable energy systems like
solar and wind. Add to that that we’d eat less meat, have smaller families, clean up pollution and recycle fervently. All the pieces are beginning to fit together at last. Transit begins to work at unprecedented levels of success, and people can walk and bike everywhere and even travel from the “divence” centers to the open landscape of nature and agriculture with a short walk or bicycle ride. Is this “ecocity” possible?

It’s inevitable should we decide to solve the big problems and
systematically set out with the courage to look our collective home that we build dead in the eye. It will be a great journey.