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Ecocity Builders E-Newsletter, Sept. - Oct. 2006 |  |
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Dear Friends and Supporters, A year ago tomorrow Hurricane Katrina made landfall at New Orleans and the US Gulf Coast. One wonders what we have learned. I went there six months later to make some kind of an assessment: was this the first of amplified storms in the era of a planet’s atmosphere pumped full of CO2, changer of climate, destroyer of hundreds of species world wide — the beginning of The End? Or would Katrina turn out to be a wake up call and new beginning for rebuilding society “in balance with nature?” The signs are not good, and not only regarding the non- planning that followed and the sad fact that sympathy is helping people rebuild – once again! – in harm’s way. The local impression in New Orleans is that the rich will be getting richer and the poor banished (if any prosperity is to come their way again at all). This impression is supported to a large degree by the evidence — and that grates upon the sensitivities of anyone who cares for social justice and values racial diversity. In addition, environmentalists are still continuing to support supposedly “green” reconstruction that turns a blind eye to the overall structure and arrangement of the city and to ecological principles tuned to the local and regional circumstances. In other words, the alternatives put forward by the New Urbanists and those “greening” the houses one at a time continues the habit of building the automobile-dependent and cheap-energy dependent community. "Green” design there continues the habit of refusing to think on a scale that could solve not only New Orleans’ problems, but at the same time problems of cities everywhere and survival of the biosphere in any kind of health. By that I mean that the option of building a city for pedestrians instead of cars is once again being ignored. The car city is the largest cause of climate change and amplified storms via the immense output of greenhouse gasses due to its wasteful consumption of land by way of land-suffocating asphalt and concrete as well as massive consumption of soon-to-be-scarce cheap energy from oil. The solution is the more compact city for walking about and getting things done easily on foot, bicycle or streetcar, like the Vieux Carré (French Quarter) designed on high ground and with buildings clustered together, protecting one another from both floods high winds. That arrangement is standing and spectacularly successful right under the noses of the citizens of New Orleans. And they don’t even see it, so enamored are they, like most of the rest of Americans, with the car-sprawl way of living. Sprawl expanded New Orleans seven times over in land area in the middle fifty years of the 20th century. That the periphery levees and drainage canals to make all this automobile infrastructure possible — all 350 miles of walls against the waters — proved to provide such fragile protection is a lesson ignored by those who fight nature by proposing building yet higher, thicker and stronger barriers to keep nature out of town and out of mind. When you stop to think about it, how obvious can you get? The solution there is to build on built-up elevated land in a compact, “mixed use” pedestrian infrastructure supported by bicycles and streetcars. But something that basic is not grasped, so lost in the details are they in New Orleans (and we in the rest of the country and world). So anxious are we to grasp at easy answers – when hard work and difficult decisions are needed. The issue is very large indeed. In fact, this is the issue that will make the difference between destruction or further healthy evolution of our so-called world “civilization.” We need to develop a sense of proportion and learn to prioritize. The difficult things have been postponed for years while we've been believing erroneously that getting started with small steps will do it for us. Recycle a little better. Insulate your house more. Drive a more energy efficient car. It’s not working and time is running out. I’ll talk about all this below in the context of Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth and in the context of the gradual wake up to climate change he’s helping with right now. That will be under the heading “100 Inconvenient Truths or 5 of Them? - Getting a sense of Proportion and Learning to Prioritize,” below. But now, on to the news according to Ecocity Builders’ perspective. —Richard Register, President, Ecocity Builders CALENDAR ITEMS September 7, Richard Register will speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, 6:00pm, Thursday, September 7, 2006, 595 Market St. at 2nd St. Title: CITIES CAN SAVE THE EARTH: THE URBAN SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE, SPECIES EXTINCTIONS AND "PEAK OIL". INFO: http:// www.commonwealthclub.org/mlf.html#register October 12, Kirstin Miller, Gus Yates and Helen Burke will speak on the Strawberry Creek Plaza Project at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, 2286 Cedar St, 7:30pm, Thursday, October 12, 2006. December 3-7, The 6th International Ecocity Conference, Bangalore, India. Previous conferences were held in Berkeley CA, Australia, Senegal, Brazil and China. This conference will focus on ecocity applications for Bangalore and other cities, towns and villages in India. Side trip to Auroville after the conference. More information follows in this e-newsletter.
It’s out from New Society Publishers and the author is very happy to see 130 of his pictures along with two new chapters and up-dated text throughout! For the first time, these drawings are rendered in a large enough format and with quality printing. Chapter titles include: The City in Evolution, The City in Nature, The City in History, The City Today, Access and Transportation, What to Build, Tools to Fit the Task, and Toward Strategies for Success. You can order Ecocities directly from Ecocity Builders’ website: http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/books
Our friend Rusong Wang, head of the Center for Ecological and Environmental Studies at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing, and who hosted Ecocity 5 in Shenzhen in 2002, has invited Richard to Chungqing in late September for another conference on ecocity themes, this one to be cosponsored by the Chungqing Municipal Government and several NGOs and will be held in that enormous city not far east from Tibet. Rusong says it is the largest city in China. This conference is called the 2006 International Ecopolis Forum.
Ecocity Builders, along with our partners in the community group Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza, is still working to realize a vision for a "green" downtown Berkeley anchored by a pedestrian plaza in the heart of the city featuring a daylighted portion of historic Strawberry Creek. There are currently three primary projects coming together in the heart of Berkeley: a hotel/conference center with additional retail and housing, a large museums project, and the adjoining public space, which we and many others are hoping will become Strawberry Creek Plaza. Unfortunately, our latest attempt at securing a grant to finish an integrated design concept for the plaza was unsuccessful. At this point, we need to be working with a professional landscape architect to be able to coordinate several design options for public review and comment. If you or someone you know can help financially, please let us know. Our fiscal sponsor for this particular project is the Watershed Project. To find out more about the Strawberry Creek Plaza Project, contact Kirstin Miller, email kirstin@ecocitybuilders.org or call her at 510-419-09850.
Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans, received a copy of “Ecocities.” He has written back a very friendly letter expressing thanks and interest. We have written him suggesting Richard travel again to New Orleans to give him and the Bring New Orleans Back Commission a slide presentation. We remain in close communication with Tulane Professor Charles Reith who Richard met in March and with whom Richard co-taught a class on New Orleans, Katrina and rebuilding the city.
Richard has been working with electronic graphics and photography artist Jan Camp, thanks to funding from Joell Jones. (Jan recently completed a beautiful book design for an inspiring picture book about a remote island off South Carolina written and illustrated by Joell, her daughter Cassidy, and her husband Will Wright of Sim City and Spore video game fame. It’s called “Mirror Lake – Images of the Fripp Island Habitat".) The objective of this imagery project is to improve photos and drawings used in Ecocity Builders’ various presentations, flat art presentations and slide presentations alike. These images are sometimes called upon to illustrate magazine articles as well.
After the occurance of bombings in Mumbai in July, our conference organizers and government co-sponsors in Bangalore decided to postpone the August conference dates. We just now have confirmed the new dates: December 3-7, 2006. If you are interested in attending the Sixth International Ecocity Conference, please register as soon as possible through the conference website: http:// www.tciconferences.com/ecocity2006/ecocity2006.htm If the Bangalore website is not current with the new dates, please email Ecocity Builders with your intent to participate. Speakers include: Justice M. N. Venkatachaliah , President, The 25/Bangalore Foundation, Chairman of Ecocity 6 committee, former Chief Justice in the Supreme Court of India, Former Chairman, Constitution Reforms Committee and former Chairman, National Human Rights Commission, India Mr. Rusong Wang , Prof. Ph.D., State Key Lab of System Ecology and Sustainability Science, Research Center for Eco- Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Vice president, The Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, (SCOPE /ICSU), President, Ecological Society of China, Beijing, China Mr. Richard Register, author of Ecocities - Building Cities in Balance with Nature, founder of the International Ecocity Conference Series, President of Ecocity Builders, USA Ms. Kirstin Miller, Program Director, Ecocity Builders USA, instructor on ecocity planning and design at the University of California Berkeley Extension in San Francisco Dr. Ramachandra Gowda, Minister for Science & Technology, Government of Karnataka, and Chairman, Ecocity6 National Organizing Committee, Bangalore India Dr. Jeff Kenworthy, professor at Murdoch University, Perth Australia, author and world's top expert on the form and functioning of cities in relation to energy, transport, pollution, climate change, wealth and poverty and related topics, having worked for the UN, many cities internationally, the World Bank and others, Perth, Australia Dr. Charles Reith , Professor at Tulane University instructing in architecture, city planning, development strategies and technology transfer for developing nations, Orleans, Louisiana, USA Ms. Debra Efroymson , PATH Canada (Project for Appropriate Technologies in Health) delivering health, planning and transportation consultation in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and other countries, Bangladesh Dr. A. Ravindra, urban development expert, IAS (Indian Administrative Service) (Rtd.), Vice Chair, Ecocity6 committee, Chairman of the Steering Committee, Project Agastya; Founder & Chairman, Center for Sustainable Development; former Chief Secretary, Government of Karnataka, former Commissioner of the Bangalore City Corporation, Bangalore, India Mr. Rajeev Kumar, conference host and co-founder and CEO of Project Agastya, an NGO working for better, more efficient and sustainable Urban Planning & Development in Bangalore , India Ar. Lalit K. Bhati, professional planner and resident of Auroville, India. Auroville, endorsed by the the UNESCO, is an experimental international town of peace that has been reforesting its region of India and leading sustainability thinking in intentional community circles internationally Mr. P. K. Shanbhag, Chairman, Project Agastya - Bangalore; Chief Coordinator, Ecocity6, Bangalore, India Mr. Johannes Heeb, president of the International Ecological Engineering Society, Switzerland
A friend recently wrote to me about a book he’s contemplating that would address the “ultimate crisis,” which he is thinking of calling something timely like “100 Inconvenient Truths.” I responded, saying that 100 different scrambled problems and solutions was too random, too lacking in a system or order, wasn’t cognizant of the way ecological systems really work and would perpetuate not doing anything effective while precious time slips away. The number 100 is too big, the differences between the “truths,” whatever they might be, muddled by the grab bag quality of mixing oranges and apples - much less throwing in blueberries and watermelons and poisonous and medicinal fruits to boot. But there is one approach that looms far larger than anything else I can think of if we want to solve the “ultimate crisis” he was talking about —the crisis of closely entwined climate change, species extinctions and collapse of cheap energy. This is it: getting a sense of proportion and learning to prioritize. If we could do that then we'd see there are 5 big inconvenient truths under which all others are subsumed. Understanding this approach, we can sort out the “solutions” in the confusion we see seething about us now. We can eliminate the contradictory and even outright destructive steps to supposedly “green” our world that in fact are helping exterminate life everywhere while postponing doing precisely what needs to be done. 1. Humanity is overpopulated and must reduce its numbers, and do it peacefully since violence replicates and amplifies itself. This is not a racist statement in the slightest as often claimed by people victimized by actual racists making the statement in the past or still making it today. It is instead relevant to the species-ist humans driving other species into extinction by way of taking almost all of the land of the planet for their own utility and pleasure. That we are overpopulated is massively evident in the fact that human beings constitute more than 100 times the biomass of any other species in our general size range to ever inhabit the planet. That’s too big and all of us need to face it. Inconvenient truth #1. 2. The built infrastructure - my subject of specialization - needs to shift from car/sprawl/paving/cheap energy infrastructure to pedestrian, bicycle transit systems/compact mixed-use/ depaving with natural restoration and recovery of agricultural land/ renewable energy systems. Note that renewable energy systems are subsumed as part of the infrastructure since the infrastructure is responsible for the demand on the energy system. That is, the car/sprawl city/town consumes ten times the energy as the pedestrian/mixed use town from the get-go. It also makes possible the restoration of natural and agricultural land and waters, which is completely impossible with perpetuation of the sprawl/car infrastructure. 3. We need to eat lower on the food chain. Among the changes that imply enormous savings and amount to re-investing in long-term sustainability, agriculture for meat needs to be recognized as highly inefficient. Costing five to ten times the land and energy of eating vegetable foods, a diet high in meat is a big part of the problem and a diet very low in meat a big part of the solution. This isn’t a call for a ban on meats but to face the inconvenient truth that a substantial shift from one to the other holds very large benefit for life support and biodiversity on the Earth. 4. Need needs to replace greed, as Gandhi said. That means we need to invest in the future health of the world – not just in ourselves as individuals – by way of supporting solutions to the problems identified by the other big inconvenient truths. In other words we have to tax ourselves more and the wealthier folks even more yet and do a much better job of spending the money for the general good. (They, the rich folks, have a rightful complaint here, though they are usually hypocritically the greatest beneficiaries of the practice too.) What's new these days in this situation is that finally it is becoming conspicuous that the children of the rich as well as the children of the poor will inherit a poverty stricken, chaotic and violent world if everybody doesn't contribute substantially to addressing the 5 Inconvenient Truths with real investment and action. Since the wealthy have more, they need to give more – on pain of their own children’s misery and unpleasant demise. The era of holing up in a gated community or super-rich castle retreat with armed guards is soon to go out the window if we don't act more generously now. 5. Education needs to shift from "whatever's coming down the road to maximize prosperity" (at the expense of nature's prosperity) to education about the four inconvenient truths above. Education can be a means to destroy as well as create cultural advance and evolution. Education can help preserve or destroy natural systems and biodiversity depending on what is being taught. The content is all-important. Again, 100 random things is not a good idea.
In the transition from a very old version of Filemaker to a new version, new computer and new system overall, we somehow lost half of our postal mailing addresses, including information about your membership status. Could you please take a moment and send us your address if you want any notifications or newsletters by mail? Also, if you are a member please consider renewing at this time. Renew/rejoin at http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/join.html If you are not currently a member, please consider becoming one! You can also mail your donation to Ecocity Builders, P.O. Box 697, Oakland, CA 94604. Contact Kirstin Miller if you have questions: kirstin@ecocitybuilders.org
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