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Events
April 26: "Biofuels: a conversation between science, engineering, ecology, social justice,
and urban design."
Thursday, April 26, 7pm
750 Davis Hall, UC Berkeley.
The University of California recently announced that it is signing a $500M deal with the oil company BP, to establish a research center on bioenergy, in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The main focus of this research center would be to develop biofuels, a technology that is presented as holding great promise for reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases. Yet, many scientists argue that biofuels are far from carbon-neutral, and may actually exarcebate environmental problems.
Featuring:
Tadeusz Patzek-Professor of Geoengineering at U.C. Berkeley.
Richard Register-Author of Ecocities - Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature.
Alice Friedemann-Freelance journalist who specializes in energy.
John Harte-Joint Professor in Ecosystem Sciences and Energy and Resources at U.C. Berkeley.
Jessica Lawrence-Has worked the past 12 years in the fields of ecology research, indigenous land rights advocacy, community forestry, and rainforest conservation.
Sponsored by Ecocity Builders, Green Century Institute and the StopBP-Berkeley.org student campaign. *The views of the presenters are independent from those of the above sponsors.
April 28: Kirstin Miller speaks on The Ecological City Structure at the League of Women Voters of Fremont, Newark and Union City's General Meeting, entitled "Cool Cities" Solving Global Warming One City at a Time. Fremont Main Library, 2400 Stevenson Blvd. 9:30am
May 3: "Searching for Ecocities in India, Bangladesh and Nepal." Evening slide show and talk by Richard Register and Kirstin Miller. 7:00PM at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way, Berkeley. $10 suggested donation.
Richard's Upcoming Talks
May 10, 7:00pm, Mission College, Main Building, room w-2-101, Santa Clara. Lisa Hawes class "Global Issues, Local Solutions: Intro to Ecocities"
May 24, Beijing, Ecosummit, UC/BP Deal Climate Change and Real Solutions in Urban Design.
June 23, David Dobereiner's UC Extension class, 95 Third Street, San Francisco.
August 31 -September 3: Biennial Asia Pacific Conference, Brisbane, Australia, Ecocities - Solution to Global Heating.
October 19 - 21: Bioneers Conference. "From Ecovillages to Ecocities: Rediscovering Sustainable Human Habitat."
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Ecocity World Summit
April 22-26, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO
Ecocity 3, Senegal, 1996. Photo by Susan Felter
Website Launched
Earth Day Weekend 2007
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News and Notes
Quick updates on our projects and programs.
Above: Ecocity Builders' Executive Director Kirstin Miller at the Nob Hill Masonic Center in San Francisco, main venue for the 2008 Ecocity World Summit.
1. In Berkeley: Heart of the City/Strawberry Creek Plaza Project. We are currently in discussions with a world renowned landscape architect regarding a collaborative design process for the public space! (See our short article about it in this newsletter.)
2. Berkeley/Albany: Cordornices Creek Daylighting Project with Pocket Park and Community Urban Orchard. We hosted our Little Annual Spring Picnic at the creek a couple of weeks ago. A good time was had by all and the creek was at its most gorgeous springtime best, full of birds, flowers, grasses and fruit trees in bloom. The banner photo for this issue is of wandering picnic-ers from the perspective of the creek itself.
2. In Oakland: The Oakland Urban Villages Project is moving forward, much of it thanks to the initiatives of students in Kirstin's class at UC Berkeley Extension and the ongoing support from Rick Smith, one of the three Cal graduate students who brought the system into GIS, and Lucas Patzek, a new partner in the project and a director at Green Century Institute. Oakland Oil Free by 2020 Task Force member Mike Petouhoff has also been active in helping think through how the Urban Villages approach could help the city move towards an oil free and more sustainable future.
3. International Society for Ecopolis Development: In partnership with our colleagues in China, Belgium, and Bangladesh, we are working on finalizing the website for this new organization, working with a talented local designer, Eva Ruland. Through this international society we intend to ramp up action on truly sustainable and socially just development around the world.
4. Ecocity World Summit: We're launching the website on Earth Day weekend in 2007, a full year in advance, in order to attract the broadest participation possible. BIG THANKS to our brilliant webmaster, Max Heim, for getting this up and running and looking really great!! See our special announcement and link to the site in this newsletter.
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Ecocities, Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature
by Richard Register
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Order "Ecocities"
"Well-prepared, with vision, enthusiasm and powerful, practical tools, Ecocities enables us to challenge the doom-sayers and doom-makers to this race for a healthy, sane, compassionate future. We have to win, and the author explains how."
-Lester R. Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
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Dear Friends and Members
It's Earth Day Weekend 2007. Living systems are being strained to the breaking point, largely because we are consuming resources much faster than the planet can regenerate them. We are in "overshoot", meaning that the collective harm we've already done cannot be mended in any normal ecological cycle.
The gravity of the situation is making headlines in the United States. Nearly every day there is another front page article detailing the scope of the damage and predicting what's to come if we don't do something, fast.
But what are we proposing to do? In America, we are still largely trying to fine-tune a dysfunctional system to which we feel entitled after nearly 100 years of having at our command the super-concentrated experience of abundant and cheap fossil fueled lifestyles.
Einstein observed that problems cannot be solved from the same mindset that created them. In America, the patterns of our overconsumption are collectively laid out in relationship to the way we live, and that lifestyle is based on the expectations we've become used to during the Age of Oil.
Part of the current pondering is rightly focused on the primary enabler of our energy hogging way of life: the car. "How can we make cars better?" we wonder. "What about biofuels, or electric cars?"
The problem is that there IS no better car, no matter what energy source powers it, because the car itself lays the foundation for the thinly scattered, resource demanding environment that we've built around ourselves. The only way to solve the car problem is to get out of the old mindset and move to what would actually work. The ecocity approach, we think, is a powerful solution/strategy that address the situation at the level of response the problem demands.
In this Earth Day newsletter, we update you on the projects, programs and events that Ecocity Builders is currently involved in as we continue to build the new mindset and the new city to help save the environment, now and into the deep future.
Please visit our Ecocity World Summit website (see the announcement and link in this newsletter). We're already well on our way to designing an important international event that will address crucial problems and promises of cities, towns and villages everywhere. We hope to see you in San Francisco next April!
What would we gain by rebuilding cities for people instead of for cars? The world.
Happy Earth Day,
- Kirstin Miller and Richard Register
THANK YOU
We'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Helen & William Mazer Foundation for their financial support for launching the Ecocity World Summit website. Also thank you to HealthBridge, Rusong Wang and Foundation for the Urban Environment for supporting the preparatory work and website development for the International Society for Ecopolis Development.
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Heart of the City Takes Shape in Berkeley
by Richard Register
Toyo Ito, architect for the new
Berkeley Art Museum
Some of you may have noticed a relative silence around the Heart of the City Project in these electronic pages. It's not that things are not happening. In fact the clock is ticking most relentlessly about now, as architects for the buildings involved - the Hotel and Conference Center and the Berkeley Art Museum - are busily drawing away, as the day is drawing closer for their offerings to launch into the official approvals-seeking process.
We have been looking into possible landscape architects we think could produce an inspiring plan in enough detail for all parties to sink their teeth into it cooperatively, or at least with serious collaboration. This "unified approach" has been called for in the Recommendations of the "Hotel Task Force" organized under the auspices of the Planning Commission starting three years ago, but is precisely what has not been happening recently. The missing piece is the open space piece, which the old Heart of the City notion - ten years old this summer - proposed to feature as an open creek and public plaza.
With a landscape architect providing a vision powerful enough to get the architects of the buildings thinking in terms of the whole ensemble, and respecting the prominent natural feature of the neighborhood, which is Strawberry Creek, we'd be well on our way to pulling together the pieces of what we've described in this newsletter as an "urban fractal." Not just a green building, we'd be moving toward a suite of several interrelated buildings and an open space celebrating both the people and nature in this unique place of enormous potential.
Link to rest of article
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Climate Change News -
Mainstream Climate Change Initiatives
by Richard Register
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about how we can avoid guilt about destroying the planet on MTV's "Pimp My Ride"
It's almost May and the world is worried about too much spring. Strange state of affairs! Or worried about spring too early, anyway. "Step it Up 2007" was the banner under which something like 1,300 events from seminars to demonstrations took place around the United States focusing on global heating. I went to one myself, hosted by Assemblywoman Loni Hancock in Berkeley, California called "The Temperature's Rising! - A Town Hall Meeting on Solutions to the Global Warming Crisis," April 14, 2007.
800-horsepower Cars, not Guilt!
Just three days earlier, Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger said, "For too long the environmental movement has been powered by guilt." I agree with him on that point, though my own approach of looking into the creative and positive alternatives never worked as well. I certainly appreciate his helping to alert millions of people to the problems of global heating, but his solution - to switch energy sources - neglects the fact that the sheer quantity of energy consumed by our present land use infrastructure is way beyond sustainable.
"We don't have to take away the muscle cars. We don't have to take away Hummers or SUVs or anything like this, because that's a formula for failure. Instead we have to make those cars more environmentally muscular," he said, quoted in the April 12 San Francisco Chronicle. Somewhat before he made that comment the Governor was on an MTV show called "Pimp My Ride." (Would someone please explain to me exactly what that means?) He was illustrating his advice by helping install an 800-horsepower biodiesel engine in a '65 Chevy. He added that in the days before they embraced biofuels, "environmentalists were not fun." Apparently it's a lot more fun to drive a Hummer on biofuels than a Mini Cooper on anything, why I don't know.
Link to rest of article |
Ecocity Builders is a small nonprofit with a big message to get out to the world. If you are interested in helping financially, please give us a call. We'd love to talk to you more about our work. 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
Sincerely,
Kirstin Miller and Richard Register
PO Box 697
Oakland, CA 94604
Ecocity Builders
510-444-4508
ecocity@igc.org
www.ecocitybuilders.org
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