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Ecocities Emerging
To support humanity's transition into the Ecozoic Era
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October 2008
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Greetings,
Welcome to the October edition of Ecocities Emerging, an initiative of Ecocity Builders and the International Ecocity Conference Series.
The world is rapidly changing on nearly every front. Global markets are in crisis and the international financial system is becoming unhinged. The planet's living systems continue to unravel. Scientists report new record loss of Arctic ice and accelerated melt of the Greenland ice sheet. The great forests of Indonesia are being obliterated by palm oil companies. The Ganges River is so depleted that the wetlands and mangrove forests of Bangladesh are now seriously threatened. From the Great Plains of North America to sub-Saharan Africa, topsoil is being stripped off faster than it can be regenerated. Ninety percent of all large fishes have disappeared from the world's oceans.
We are at a precarious moment. As these multiple crisis' compound upon each other, we must seriously and swiftly rethink our approach to "business as usual." And at long last we are hearing more people talking about land use and how we build the largest creations of our species -- our cities, towns and villages -- as something we should be paying much more attention to in relation to addressing climate change, resource depletion, extinction of species and many other environmental, social and financial problems we're facing.
As we build, so shall we live.
Kirstin Miller, Ecocity Builders
Oakland, California, September 2008
ecocitybuilders.org
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The
Ecozoic Era refers to a vision, first promoted by cosmologist Thomas
Berry, of an emerging epoch when humanity lives in a mutually enriching
relationship with the larger community of life on Earth.
Will
we be able to make the transition in time to retain a biosphere healthy
enough to regenerate living systems now under extreme stress? There is
no way to be certain, but our position is that there's no time to sit
around and wonder about it: now is time for action.
Thank
you for all that you are doing to help accelerate progress toward a
civilization in balance with living systems. Maybe one day all cities
will be ecocities.
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Ecocity World Summit 2009
Istanbul Turkey
December 13-15
 Ecocity Builders and the Steering Committee of the International Ecocity Conference Series are pleased to announce that Ecocity World Summit 2009 will be convened in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Istanbul. Our hosts are Yildiz Technical University and Parantez International.
Yildiz Technical University is a prominent state university in Istanbul with more than 17,000 students in three campuses. Parantez International is a well respected conference and event management company. We are looking forward to the launch of the 2009 Ecocity Summit website in several weeks. It's not too early to start making your plans to join us in Istanbul!
Sincerely,
The International Ecocity Conference Series
Steering Committee
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From "50 Simple Things" to The 5 Big Ones
by Richard Register
Not only do we have to look at the whole system of the whole city, we have to look at ... the whole system.
About this, Paolo Soleri had a deceptively simple thing to say about complex systems, the city being one helluva big one, in fact the biggest one people actually physically create. And what he said was that the city should be "lean." Lean and healthy, or lean and hungry? Well there are two diverging routes there and signs are toward the lesser happy of the two at the moment.
Here's what I think the whole system is that the whole city fits, which defines the overall strategy we need to survive and thrive lean, and lean and healthy not lean and hungry. I call them the Big Five. Or sometimes the Five Big Ones. 1.) population, 2.) built environment of cities, towns and villages, 3.) diet and agriculture, 4.) generosity and 5.) education about the above four.
The Five Big Ones idea all started with ten times as many little ones. In 1989 we were busily planning the First International Ecocity conference. We'd rented a small office in the Berkeley Ecology Center and the big new phenomenon in the publishing world as far as us environmentalists were concerned was "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth." We shared our office with Gar Smith who was editor of the Earth Island Journal at the time. He and I were assessing the 50 things, which didn't look that challenging. He made the comment, " and then if we can get around to the four or five big ones that actually work..."
I often talk about seeing cities as whole systems, in many ways analogous to living organisms. But I also say cities aren't everything. Large and important though they are, cities are part of an even larger system. And if we want to understand that whole system, honing in on its five major components gives us an "organic" chance of solving our problems. The big problems I mean, like global heating, end of cheap energy and species extinction. To confront and solve those problems here are the Five Big Ones.
The Big One # 1: Population
We can't ignore it. Some compromised souls of confused or weak heart or outright evil did use the issue to attack others in racist and exploitative, lying manner. History is history. But Jane Goodall loves people of every race as much as she loves her chimpanzee friends. When she's upset with population pressures in Africa there is no racism present at all. There is an urgent, crying sense of tragedy. It's starving people against the last of the wildlife. Too many people. People cutting down the trees to raise humble survival crops - and hunting bush meat. Bush meat is any moving animal and almost all species are targeted in the hungry central Africa region. For the nightmare of overpopulation, when it hits home, "all history is prelude" and not so relevant to me and my family surviving now. That's Rwanda, points out Jared Diamond in "Collapse." Says naturalist E. O. Wilson, there is approximately 100 times the biomass in human beings on this planet than of any other land animal in our size range that ever existed on the planet. That's a disproportionate amount of sheer food needed. Multiply that by our other demands, especially in the rich countries that feel comfortable and entitled, magnified by our machines and cheap energy. We need to deal with this and see how it connects to the other Big Five. Many people are dealing with population, though many others are doing everything they can for religious reasons or personal feelings about sex and family, privacy or just plain secrecy, to obstruct even thinking about the subject.
The Big One # 2: The built environment
We need our largest creations to use a small fraction of the energy they now consume. They need to cover a lot less land and have some exciting, "lean" design of the healthy kind. It is worth noting again though, especially in the context of CO2 in the atmosphere and water in New Orleans attics, that cars are 30 times as heavy as human beings, 10 times and fast and take up about 60 times the volume. To call them overbearing as dictators of urban design is something of an understatement, in that they are about as overbearing as anything else in the world and its gradually rising fever. Can't say Lewis Mumford didn't warn us about the car, not to say Paolo Soleri, un-sung Ken Schneider, myself and a fair number of other observers of the urban/nature scene going back many decades now. Further stonewalling of this subject is dangerous to your health!
The Big One #3: Diet and agriculture
This line of thinking, as you will see momentarily, fits into the over all context of today's economy running out of real energy - oil, and later and nastier, coal - and money of agreements, not necessarily real, fraying out around the edges largely because economic agreements don't have much to do with the resources, creativity and labor that actually delivers prosperity.
If this sounds a little like code, it really isn't. I am not trained in the language of economics and either don't "get" or don't believe their code works that well. But I do know something about building, having worked on something like 75 of them to supplement my ecocity income and keep body and soul together over the last 35 years. It's all very real economy, of stone, wood, glass, concrete, paint and energy of the arm and electric saw. Reading Van Jones new book, "The Green Collar Economy," I understand all too experientially his comment that we had our chance in the 1970s and "blew it." He was speaking about solar energy and other sane steps to solving both ecological and economic/social/poverty/racial problems all at once. The vision was there and the start was made in the era right after Earth Day 1970. But it stalled out as everyone went on with their driving about an every expanding amoeba of sprawl. That's the big truth of our economics as related to nature's economics we tend to call "our" resources, transferring from the land and energy to real products.
Also missing in action, the real action of sprawling cities out over the landscape, was farmland. Not only that, but the meat-heavy diet of hundreds of millions of people was driving both agriculture and nature of a "leaner" sort deep into the forests and in many landscapes just plain out of existence, putting ever heavier pressure on chemical agriculture, powered by oil, to squeeze out ever more from the soil. Remember, there is 100 times as many of us as our runner up, which is a lot of agricultural demand. Eating meat is about ten times less energy/nutrient efficient as eating grains, fruits and vegetables. With chickens and fish its supposed to be a little less than half that. But it's still more solar energy, soil fertility and land area consuming than eating plants. Hundreds of millions of people are perfectly healthy being vegetarians and many use small quantities of meat for flavoring that's hard to give up, but with little bulk demand for MEAT! If future cities take up much less land area, that's good. If solar energy is good, remember it takes up quite a bit of land area; it's not like poking small holes in the ground and draining pools of oil beneath the ag land that underlie hundreds of square miles hundreds of feet thick. Looking at the whole Big System, we need to consider eating much lower on the food chain.
The Big One #4: Generosity
It's hard to get there with the philosophy of "me first uber alles." (Referencing "Deutschland uber alles," meaning Germany over everything, which ended up in a pretty serious nightmare in the 30s and 40s.) One can over-emphasize to the detriment of both individual and collective health. This is a dimension of priorities and balance getting way out of touch with future hopeful healthy realities. But if we get there to a healthy future it will be that we are taxing ourselves and directing government - and our own personal efforts and investments - to support the above three as absolutely indispensable. Yes support organic agriculture. Yes help build ecocities and see to it that related initiatives, legislation and political candidates get your support. Yes don't have more than one or two children.
War and exploitation of people and nature are the extreme antithesis of generosity. Making government all the way up to the United Nations and World Court responsive and accountable in addressing the first big three needs our support and our investment. Preemptive wars, denial of international agreements, "signing statements" making a joke of the legislative process are all means of taking away, of violating others. Saying it's a lack of generosity is an understatement, but it is a lack of generosity and has to be dealt with along with taxing ourselves and investing together in a better future. The big productive engines of the economy, the big companies, need a much stronger dose of what some companies and their owners and managers have taken seriously in many case in the past, which is "civic responsibility"... expanding into duty to the planet and its climate and biosphere. Investing in the right things, after thinking about the first big three, people (seen as producers even creators as well as consumers) can decide to buy only the products from the companies expressing their generosity in their conscientious practices and contributions to society and nature.
The Big One #5: Education
Everyone gives high marks to education. But we need to understand, here at the fulcrum of history where we balance toward a happy healthy future or fall over the brink, times demand that education focus on the above four big ones. Education for sheer job aggrandizement is history, the history of losing the war for healthy life on Earth. Education to make the next little popular do-dad that glitters and distracts - we don't have time for that anymore. Get on with the above big four. And while we are at it, we need a Survival U that is structures exactly on the Big Five, curriculum built around it. In that university we need an Ecocity College that directly addresses that set of issues in a physical setting of buildings and grounds, networks, natural features in and near by and proper relationship to sun, wind, climate and views.
Soleri was right. We need lean. What we are leaning toward today, however, is desperate attempts on Wall Street and in Washington to prop up the fat to keep gobbling and guzzling. It won't work, or if it looks like it might be for a little while, that's illusion. The fact is the oil, soon to be followed by gas, uranium and coal, is running out. There are too many of us. Our built communities constitute a machine designed to destroy resources, especially energy, as quickly as possible. And we are, ultimately, grazing on several times the number of acres we need for a good diet. We also are focusing so much more so on Number One that we see war as something "over there" without realizing what it has to do with our own generosity or lack of it. We have to create a world in which the material economy is radically reshaping itself and the Big Five is the best way to get there. Make money trading paper on that!
I started with Soleri, so back to his idea of - experience of - leanness. Visiting him in the late 60s I'd see him up at sunrise in his bathing suit and off to race his two Rhodesian ridgeback dogs before breakfast. Of course they were faster, streaking across the clean desert sand under bright blue skies. A little faster anyway. He believed in lean and active health and lived it, as well as preached it in his writing and drawings, models and work life. He believed the creative process could take us to a lean life of prosperity of the cultural, natural kind. The views on that desert low land, with distant rocks rising surrealistically into dry air, were truly stunning.
Now his small property in Paradise Valley is up against tall cinderblock walls, hemmed in by sprawling suburbia with no open sand to run on, all taken over by cars and asphalt, gasoline and people spending lots of time sitting on automobile upholstery. Time's up for ignoring lean. We either get lean and healthy or we go down lean and hungry, with a whole lot fewer of us.
What will be necessary will be doing the best we can with all Five Big Ones at once and doing and the whole set of Big Ones together. Maybe call it the Biggest One. It, like any other living system, has its inner design logic.
Richard Register is President of Ecocity Builders and author of Ecocities, Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature.
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Car-Free Journey
by Steve Atlas
Are you considering moving to a new community where you don't need to depend on a car? As many of you may know, it's not enough that St. Louis, Sacramento, or any other community has public transportation. What is even more important is to find neighborhoods in each community where people can easily walk to grocery stores, other shopping, parks and libraries, and (if possible) good public transportation.
So, after checking out the community of your choice, you decide that perhaps it could be a good place to live without owning a car. You start looking for houses or condos that are right for you. After finding a specific house, you call the transit provider to find out how close that house is to transit and how often that transit route operates. But, that's only part of the answer.
The next place to go is www.walkscore.com. On this website, you type in the address of the house you are considering, and the website gives it a walkability score from 1-100 and a description of what that score means. Here are the guidelines:
"read on"
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Ecocity Trust, Ivory Park, South Africa
Links Between a Poverty Fighting Present & a Sustainable Future
http://www.ecocity.org.za
 Drive into Ivory Park on the outskirts of Johannesburg and you are in a sub-Saharan African everyplace. Poverty extends its claws everywhere. A line of smoke lingers across its skyline - the detritus of umbhawulas, the traditional tin-drum coal fires that continue to be the dominant form of energy in most poor black areas. Respiratory illnesses are common. Children run across pot-holed streets while taxis hoot at them. Four in 10 people live in shacks, with the rest in small brick homes. Unemployment afflicts four in 10 adults. Polluted water runs through Ivory Park. Hunger is not acute, but it is apparent. Life is hard and the environment, one would think, is a distant concern in a community where thinking about the next meal is a much more immediate concern. In this context, was born a brave experiment in finding the nexus between sustainable development and poverty eradication. "We realised that we had to focus on local economic development and not on the environment," says EcoCity managing trustee Annie Sugrue. Born in the early Nineties of community struggles against a waste dump, the initiative is a partnership between the City of Johannesburg and an NGO, the EcoCity Trust. Other partnerships have since developed between the original public/private partnership and various levels of government, the community and activists. "However," says Sugrue, "the most important partnership is the one between the NGO and the local government. This allows for easy mainstreaming and political support, but the NGO keeps the programme close to the people and the community."  EcoCity takes the form of several innovative projects which all interlink with the long-term goal of creating a self-sufficient and ecologically friendly community. In the short-term, all projects run on the principles of poverty alleviation and job creation. Food security was the paramount challenge and one of the first initiatives was the establishment of six co-ops to grow and sell organic vegetables. Planning posed a second challenge and has seen the installation of environmentally sound water, transport, energy and sanitation pilot management schemes. An EcoVillage showcases better ways of building, managing water and energy and planning development. Transport needs have given rise to the successful Shova Lula bicycle co-operative, which encourages cycling as an alternative way of getting around while making a living from the increased use of cycles. And the Iteke waste recycling co-operative is a path-blazer in waste management. Much of the waste generated in Ivory Park and the surrounding suburbs of Midrand is recyclable and therefore has value. Iteke has created 40 full-time, green jobs and heightened awareness of the need to recycle. The waste recycling scheme operates through a system of buy-back centres to which residents take products for recyling. Simply through their involvement in going to the Buy-Back centre, individuals and groups have a heightened awareness of the environment and of keeping their area clean.  All the various projects form the matrix of the philosophy. The primary focus is on poverty alleviation, based on the belief that sustainable development can be best implemented if it improves the quality of life and the standard of living of local residents. The gains have been small in material terms. No more than 100 jobs have been created, but the philosophical changes are significant. People have received skills and training which many are using to establish decent livelihoods; there is a palpable sense of "let's do it for ourselves" in Ivory Park whereas government is struggling with huge expectations in other parts of the country. Long-term environmental successes are dependent on the economic, social and environmental security of the person, the home and community. Self-reliance, capacity-building, green transformation, equity and public participation are also key principles of the initiative through which EcoCity has been able to orient urban planning and investment towards sustainable development. Key to its future success, says Sugrue, is the full transfer of the initiative to the community in the medium-term. A low skills level is slowly being overturned through training received in the network of co-operatives. Such skills transfer includes administration, computer training and basic financial management. And the core of residents involved with, and who have taken stakes in, various initiatives is growing. "Success is not about profits," says Sugrue, adding that it must also be tallied by the levels of commitment the community has shown. "And, ultimately, it must be measured by a decent quality of life." What EcoCity has demonstrated to community members and to politicians is that it is possible to create economic benefits while making a contribution to a more sustainable community. Since the focus is on poverty alleviation through respect for environmental principles, it is able to generate greater community support. Trying to measure EcoCity's success in five, 10 or even 20 years would be unfair. Ultimately, the vision is so big and involves so many mindset, policy and philosophical changes in the way we think about sustainable development, that a fair assessment can only be made in 50 years - the horizon that its architects and owners have set.  http://www.ecocity.org.za
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Colin Grant Weighs In
 Colin Grant is Founder and CEO of Visible Strategies and will contributing a regular column in Ecocities Emerging. October 2008
So how much eco is enough for your city - and how to make it happen. Quickly.Did anyone else notice that in the US presidential debates, when discussing energy and climate change, neither candidate told the American public that a number of communities around the world had already become net exporters of renewable energy. While I'd imagine it would be risky for John McCain to refer to anything achieved in Europe as an example to emulate for fear of alienating his base, I suspect Barack Obama is unaware of what has already happened in �vertornea, Sweden, Gussing, Austria, and Samso Island Denmark among many others. Hopefully a new era of US-Euro collaboration and shared learning is about to open up and that French Fries will soon resume their rightful place over Freedom Fries. Last month I discussed targets and what humankind needs to achieve by when if we are to transcend the massive challenges we face. This month, I'd like to focus on the how-to (and indeed the how-it -was-done by some of the world's leading communities). To recap, I suggested that a useful (but not exclusive!) definition of an Ecocity or sustainable community is one that can generate most of its own energy from renewable resources, can generate most of its own food (to see how easy this could be done read Solviva by Anna Edey), and which provides living options that allow people to thrive including equal access to essential quality of life services such as health and education. So how can the typical city get from where it is today to where it needs to be? 1. Set a stretch goal that will excite and motivate the community and unleash pride and entrepreneurshipThis could be Al Gore's call for 100% "clean" energy by 2020 or Sweden's national goal to be free from oil by 2020 or Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute's Plan B 3.0 which calls for an 80% reduction in GHG emissions by 2020 through the type of massive societal transformations we have managed in the past during times of war. Alternatively, a more jingoistic desire to be free from foreign oil may be more motivating, depending on the political sensitivities of the community. 2. Invite the community to a process to design the futureCitizen engagement is a key element in every community that has already made dramatic transformations towards sustainability. While early greening pioneers had to work largely from vision, imagination and hope and therefore had to have particular combinations of leadership and community dynamics, there are now so many case studies of what has already been achieved. A critical element is to show that everything that you are trying to do has already been achieved by a community somewhere in the world. "Twin" or otherwise align your community with one or more of these communities to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Be sure to involve youth in the process - they add an essential element of can do, will do, won't let adults get in the way of the future we demand. It is worth pointing out that one leading Swedish town, �vertornea, which has already achieved the Ecocity definition I suggested above had only around 10% of the population turn up for the design process to reinvent the town. Moving ahead with towards a vision created by only 10% of the population is still democratic if 90% of the population exercised their democratic right to sit on their backsides and do nothing. 3. Set up a citizen's bond to help fund changeThis could provide a return based on savings between the "business as normal" addiction to fossil fuels and their ever increasing costs and the lower costs of renewable energy and energy efficiency and conservation measures. San Francisco has a $100m dollar bond like this in place (strange how small that number sounds in the era of multi hundred billion dollar bail outs). 4. Forget about the pilots, be bold, do first, finish the plan laterMunicipalities are great at creating planning documents. They are generally less good at getting on with things. We desperately need bold leadership in elected officials and staff. In the 1970s, when Mayor Jamie Learner of Curitiba, Brazil decided to turn the city's main thoroughfare into a pedestrian precinct, he barricaded off a major city centre street on a Friday night and had created a pedestrian precinct by the following Monday morning. There is no time left for another full cycle of traditional planning and all of the solutions that are needed are already out there and proven.  Rows of solar panels sit in a pasture near Norby on the Danish island of Samso May 20, 2008.Samso Island in Denmark became a net exporter of renewable energy in only ten years of focused action, (once they got past the five years of discussion and argument). In 2001, Overturnea was declared the first Swedish municipality to earn "eco-municipality" status, achieving Sweden's national goal to be free from oil. Gussing in Austria is already the first community in Europe to claim a 90% reduction in Greenhouse Gas emissions. It too is a net exporter of renewable energy. Get something started and show success. New LEED platinum buildings are great but it is the existing building stock where the majority of improvements will have to be achieved so a program of existing building energy saving retrofits is an obvious place to start. Offer packages of insulation, calking, window upgrades, boiler replacement and solar hot water refits to homes and commercial buildings. Tap landfill gas and use it to generate electricity, and/or to heat greenhouses. Tap heat in the sewer system to create a district energy system as the Vancouver Olympic Village will do. Turn biogas from sewage systems into fuel for buses (ideally school buses to ignite youthful imagination as well as engines). Everything needed for every city to make its own clean energy, organic food and to provide living experiences that allow people and nature to thrive exists somewhere today. It needs to exist everywhere tomorrow and tomorrow must happen very soon.  www.visiblestrategies.com
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Ecocities Emerging Sponsors and Partners
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An eco-friendly place to live, work and play.
Designed for people, animals and the earth.
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"Ecological Cities" begins November 6, 2008.
Instructor: Kirstin Miller, Executive Director, Ecocity Builders Inc.
Click here for more information and to register for this class or other classes
in the Sustainable Design Program at UC Berkeley Extension.
Go Green with Berkeley!
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13-15 November, 2008
Shenzhen, China
http://www.gfhs-un.org
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