I was reading about ecology recently, as I often do when I wake up in the middle of the night, this time in a book called "Life - A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth" (Richard Fortey, Vintage Books, 1997). Where I opened it up, sitting in the tub at 4:00am, he was talking about dinosaurs and the human propensity to imagine, obsess on and even relish monsters. Then he makes this comment: "In the dark etching by Francisco Goya a tired scholar sleeps at a table; behind him, the brooding sky is full of horrible imaginings. Goya entitled his unsettling picture 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.'"

Let's put this into context of coming "peak oil" and building a civilization that could run on very little energy, instead of the massive supply required now and soon to be on its way out.

Since 1965, when I started noticing and working on ecocity ideas, reason didn't progress much in the realm of city design and energy responsibility. Starting then, humanity could have produced both renewable energy systems of real power and ecological community infrastructure to match (ecocities, towns and villages). Reason would have said, "Cities are the largest things humans create and they are spreading out across the landscape powered by gasoline in a massive flood. We know that fossil fuels, though large in quantity, are finite on this planet. Also, renewable energy such as wind and solar, are diffuse energy sources that require very major investments to tap, investments of money, physical materials and energy - all three. A large fraction of the fossil fuels humanity has received as a legacy of almost two hundred million years of biology and geology working round the clock on planet Earth will be required for the transition." We were then, around 1965, using up about a half million years of deposition of these fossil "fuels" every year - and more now, of course. To have used reason then would have delivered two intimately connected things at once: renewable energy systems and the infrastructure in which they could work harmoniously: the ecologically informed city designed for people and other living things, not machines, i.e., cars, asphalt steam rollers, and Air Force bombers to secure ever more oil fields.

But the reason of Goya was not awake, and thus monsters were conjured and made real. And still there is little sign we are awaking. Who among environmentalists, planners or civic leaders has anything to say about reshaping cities, making them car-free, rolling back sprawl, reducing parking, depaving everywhere possible, using tools like transfer of development rights to create vital pedestrian/transit centers and build highly mixed-use ecological city centers, "ecological demonstration developments" and the like? Not many, though it would seem reasonable.

Will such headlines as that, about Hurricane Dennis of 2005 in this case, and its implicated relation to global warming, wake us up? How about the revelation that in 2004 China expanded its use of oil by 19%, almost solely related to expanding automobile dependence, and shortly after that, how about the July 1 meeting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao in Moscow declaring an end to "world domination" by "a single power," implying (the only possibility) the United States. That country, my country, is currently building military bases in several of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. Competition for the last of the oil is getting stiff. China Offshore Oil offered $18.5 billion for Unocal after Chevron offered $16.4 billion. Suddenly, there appeared double full page spread ads in the San Francisco Chronicle and who knows how many other newspapers by Chevron, these ads sounding like Richard Heinberg and almost even like me, but from David J. O'Reilly, Chairman and CEO of Chevron: "One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over. Demand is soaring like never before. We can wait until a crisis forces us to do something. Or we can commit to working together, and start by asking the toughest questions: How do we meet the energy needs of the developing world and those of industrialized nations? What role will renewables and alternative energies play? What is the best way to protect our environment? How do we accelerate our conservation efforts?" Dave's assumption - he signs the ad with the familiar of David - seems to be that conservation is called for, but he's not for a second questioning the sprawl/car/asphalt/cheap energy infrastructure of our western civilization - conservation in that context. Here he differs from Heinberg and myself in a very big way. What is the motivation of the ad? Maybe he is trying to say, "Trust us, we are concerned, whereas the Chinese may have dubious motives. Pass laws so that we, not the Chinese, can control that oil. Americans can solve this problem if we work together," he seems to be saying, but to do what?

But I'm more worried about my friends and allies here stateside. Environmentalist are losing the battle for the Earth, scratching their heads and using the same old approach that has failed to deliver us from the worst ecological disasters in the last 65 million years: climate change, species extinctions collapse and peak oil, which is the collapse of easy energy, and all three of these crises hitting all at once. "Jumpstart Ford" and "Exxpose Exxon" are perfect examples of what has worked to make modest change while continuing to keep exploitation looking good. These are hard words, and certainly many good steps have been taken in the right direction. But, said Denis Hayes, organizer of the first Earth Day (1970), while he was keynoting the First International Ecocity Conference in Berkeley in 1990, "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 years of fighting heroic battles, expending huge amounts of energy. Today, if you really take a look at the big, profound, global trends - global warming, threats to the ozone layer, rainforest destruction, ocean pollution, vanishing species, human population explosion, acid rain - 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 his year 2000 book, "Earth Rising - American Environmentalism in the 21st Century," Philip Shabekoff had almost the same thing to say. He was chief environmental writer for the New York Times, so, through his hundreds of interviews of activists and studies of the "environmental movement" for 20 years we should pay attention when he reiterates Denis Hayes' theme in his own words. "The problems are, indeed, becoming hard. We are discovering that quick fixes and short-term solutions often not only fail to solve the problems but also make them worse." Five years after he wrote that, despite yet more steps in the right direction, in expanding greenbelts, fighting "toxic racism," building a number of New Urbanist transit oriented developments and doing the sort of things my organization did, such as daylighting a few creeks, depaving a few parking spaces, building a few solar greenhouses and so on, things became worse than ever. Climate change has now come to shock all but those with heads of wood and hearts of stone, the krill off the coast of California and Oregon are collapsing with dozens of fish and bird species going into radical decline, and people are just beginning to notice the upward curve of energy production straining toward its highest peak, beyond which it will slide off forever. But back to the Exxpose Exxon campaign initiated just days ago. Here's how the e-mail "blast" (7/17/2005) starts out for the countless number of us in internet land who must have received it: "Dear (your name here), ExxonMobil has continually worked to make the U.S. more dependent on oil and failed to invest a significant sum of its considerable profits into clean energy, unlike competitors such as BP and Shell. Americans want clean sources of energy that protect public health, reduce pollution, curb global warming, and save consumers' money. That's why twelve of the nation's biggest environmental groups just launched "Exxpose Exxon," a major campaign to mobilize thousands of Americans to urge ExxonMobil to clean up its act!"

So then what would happen? They'd clean up a little and the American public could feel great about buying a slightly improved means (burning massive quantities of gasoline while saving money while the company invests some of its money in "alternatives") - or just feel good about buying from BP and Shell?

Then there is the "Jumpstart Ford" campaign that is trying to help Ford (ownership, management and workers all - very "inclusive") produce a line of more energy efficient cars. This has been organized by Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and Global Exchange, all generally good allies of Ecocity Builders in many ways, but this? Someone is missing something very fundamental here, which is that energy efficiency and cheaper travel in the automobile is most efficient at empowering people to destroy the humanness, ecological health and energy conserving potential of cities, towns and villages. That is, the "better car" makes the worse city.

So what is the solution? To get a sense of scale, priorities and sequence. Environmentalists have never taken seriously, in my lifetime, that we need to build the largest things human beings create - cities, towns and villages, the built community infrastructure - as a structure designed for people, not machines. How should a city be laid out? The answer for decades has been, "Ask the traffic engineer who drives in to work from the suburbs every day." For the dozens of excuses available, environmentalists, no different than the average Joe and Jane, have delayed over and over and over, decade after decade, dealing with reshaping the city so that it requires only a tiny fraction of the energy to run than it uses now and takes up a much smaller land area than today's car/sprawl/asphalt/ cheap energy infrastructure.

What should environmentalists do? What should all of us do? Skip fooling ourselves any more. The present strategy of significant but very insufficient campaigns and actions, some with wildly unanticipated and destructive effects, is failing miserably. We are not going to get anywhere "picking the low hanging fruit," as Amory Lovins counsels, going for solutions that make everyone feel comfortable. We need profound change and it has to start with the largest things we build. Period. No more excuses. We've put it off far, far too long. Instead of investing massive energy in cajoling car and oil companies as if they were our best buddies and with a little reform could produce a better world, realize that we need to scrap campaigns like that and - finally! - go for the whole banana: the built infrastructure of our whole "civilization." There is plenty to do and - the main point of the peak oil experts - not much time, if any, left.

Many people, alerted to the dangers of sliding down from peak oil production and into scarcity, are planning vegetable gardens and solar collectors for their houses and how to make crafts items on their own and ways to work together with their neighbors, which is all OK as far as it goes. But if that's the highest level of organization we prepare for, by the time things have fallen to that level, very likely it would then be all the way to the bottom described so starkly by Jared Diamond in his new book, "Collapse." What's missing in this thinking, once again, is the approach that looks at the character of the whole city and comprehends that we need cities, towns and villages built for people on foot, on bikes and in streetcars. Forget the cars, suburban ways of living and cheap energy. Start thinking about how the city can develop an economy that relates intimately with its bioregion, recycles assiduously and ships in and out some important supplements to its economy but handles its crucial staple items within a relatively short haul. No more 2,000 mile Cesar salads flown in for dinner, as James Howard Kunstler likes to describe.

There is a way, and a sequence - and it will take a lot of educating and willingness to learn. People will have to be genuinely concerned about the collapse of systems we are seeing now and realize something difficult and big has to be done. People like myself, who are identifying the larger patterns and suggesting specific tools and directions for the transition will have to learn about their localities ever more intimately and learn to plumb the experience of locals in the detailed application of principles one place at a time. We will in general have to pay attention to the kind of council given to us fifteen years ago at the First International Ecocity Conference by Denis Hayes: "There are many things missing in America today, but I think the most important is vision. We have grown in a way that is utterly haphazard, from communities which were designed first for farm animals and horses into communities that evolved into something for passenger cars. As they got bigger and bigger they began to grow like onions in ever-expanding concentric rings, to make it virtually impossible to lump things together into meaningful communities where we are able to live close to where we work and where we buy our food and where our kids go to school. It is difficult to figure out how to get around on transportation that has a vast number of convoluted bus routes, taking an inordinate amount of time to get from one place to another. If it were a product of deign, it would seem to be a design to keep us out of energy-efficient transportation and in our single- person automobiles.

"How do we get past this to the kind of society Richard Register has been talking about for the last twenty years? [Now it's fifteen years later yet.] Not by taking a series of incremental steps - if you find yourself in a society that is dominated by automobiles, it is always going to make more sense to add one more lane to the road than to do something diametrically different. What we need is the kind of political courage and creativity involved in sensing what our cities ought to look like if they are to meet the genuine needs we have as people and live within the resource constraints we face. How do we do this? I think we do this by first choosing the design and then investing in the infrastructure, even if it seems not to make sense today, knowing it is something our children will thank us for."