Dear Members and Friends,
Are we getting closer to going over the threshold into new territory,
ecocity territory? Over the hill with the Sisyphus rock that always used to roll back, but now following what we pushed always up and up but now finally over the top and rolling ever faster into a new world of success, that is adoption of ecocity-related policies and projects? The election of Barack Obama and the end of the eight years of bludgeoning our way into the darkness does in fact represent an opportunity of profound change. Just to be rid of the worst government in our lifetime is a breath of fresh air, but in addition our new man looks pretty inspirational.
Meantime, here at Ecocity Builders we've been contemplating the wild swings of oil prices. Check out oil and gas consulting firm WTRG Economics (www.wtrg.com) for graphs. Almost $150 a barrel in July and now the jagged red line has plunged to $50. Housing prices follow an almost as dramatic crash losing close to 50% of their value in many parts of the country in a year. What does that kind of volatility mean?
Since Richard first heard the warning back in 1971 from solar electric pioneer Aden Meinel that we'd better invest much of our fossil fuels in building the solar age infrastructure, we hear again from English climate change Paul Revere, George Monbiot, that we'd better use our fossil fuels fast to build up a renewable energy system before our planet burns out its fuses, or, as he prefers to describe it, figure out how to drop our energy use 50% - right now. How about the $700 billion bailout for banks? Now our economic planners are running up numbers ten times that astronomical figure, around $7 trillion in a crescendo of adjustments, investments, and with no clear notion of what to physically build.
If you need a little grounding after scanning all those wild gyrations of late, contemplate simply this: 1.) build ecocities, 2.) reduce population and 3.) shift to a lower place on the food chain. (It takes ten times the biomass in plants to support herbivores, and ten times as many herbivores to support carnivores, which means we could save hundreds of millions of acres going vegetarian or close to it.) That's getting back to basics.
Then there is the exciting fact of some of it all coming together: growing interest and investment in solar, rails and higher density development along rail lines, all tending ecocity-ward. A US President who, like our newsletter three months ago, calls for examination of the Franklin Roosevelt initiatives in infrastructure and restoring soils, forests and generally building institutions and... building literally for a vision of a better future.
All this brings us to opportunity. The insight that we need ecocities (along with reasonable populations and diet) hangs on a thread like a giant question mark getting ready to hook the answers. The urge to solutions points to this understanding. Today we may be cultivating a mind set to take advantage of and actually create a time of real opportunity. Ecocity Builders is busy working in West Oakland and downtown Berkeley, Beijing, China, and speaking in Brasilia and Singapore, sitting in our little office among the office towers, and between the residential and retirement buildings between Chinatown and Lakeside.
From all of us at Ecocity Builders, Oakland, California, we wish you a happy and healthy holiday season. Please help us continue our work by becoming a member of Ecocity Builders, renewing your membership if you already have one, joining us for the first time or by making a one-time donation. We'd be most grateful. Plus we'd be even more active! We are a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit organization in the state of California and your donations are tax deductible.
With warm regards,
Richard Register, Kirstin Miller for Ecocity Builders
PS, says Richard, I don't know about you but I'm buying Ecocity Builder calendars (see our newly available products herein) for lots of friends and relatives.
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West Oakland
Community Necessities and
Sustainable Possibilities
Ecocity Builders is collaborating with the Western Institute for Social Research (a multicultural academic institution on the Berkeley-Oakland border) on "The Sustainable Urban Villages Project", funded over two years with a Climate Protection Grant from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Our pilot project area is West Oakland, California.
Over the years, many neighborhoods like West Oakland have been cut off from daily necessities. Shops and businesses, good jobs and housing have been separated. The "urban villages" approach asks, why not have all those things nearby? Traditional villages provide their residents access to all the things they need to have a good life within walking distance. Why not neighborhoods? The
Project's approach is to help residents assess "community necessities"
and "sustainable possibilities" and assist in the planned transition to
healthier, walkable, vibrant and "sustainable" neighborhoods.
West Oakland is steeped in a tradition of hard work and overcoming extraordinary challenges. The vision emerging from current residents for the future in this location is one that is mindful of the past, that attempts to repair the fabric of neighborhoods ripped apart and damaged by an American culture valuing freeways and cars over communities, and that rebuilds upon prior decades of hard work and giving, especially by the Black community.
In the Lower Bottoms neighborhood, local artist and entrepreneur Marcel Diallo and the Village Bottoms Neighborhood Association have a powerful vision for social and economic regeneration unfolding. There are many synergies between this
organizations' objectives and that of the Urban Villages Project. We will work to support and advocate for
this promising vision for an emerging "green" Black Cultural District
in Lower Bottoms.
Marcel Diallo, Chief Creative Officer, Black Dot Artists and Board Member, Village Bottoms Neighborhood Association
With good design, key
community improvements and added resources, this neighborhood and others like it could
provide more security while also bringing necessities like shopping
and jobs closer together. Coordinating new buildings with old, leaving
room for public open spaces like parks and plazas is all part of
renewing a neighborhood with thriving centers for people to live in.
For more information about the Urban Villages Project, contact Kirstin Miller, Project Manager at kirstin@ecocitybuilders.org.
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Ecocities Emerging
To support humanity's transition into the Ecozoic Era.
Ecocities Emerging is an initiative of Ecocity Builders and the International Ecocity Conference Series. Click here to read the November eNewsletter.
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Support Ecocity Builders!
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Ecocities, Rebuilding Cities in
Balance with Nature
by Richard Register
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Terraced Hybrid by Hood Design
Berkeley's Downtown Strawberry Creek Plaza Update
In the summer of 2007 Ecocity Builders hired urbanist Walter Hood to stir up the imagination of the world in downtown Berkeley. Utilizing ecological design approaches, the Strawberry Creek Plaza Project attempts to reveal the larger connections between people and the world we are part of. Hood's design for a new urban plaza on Center Street is in accordance with the guidelines of the Berkeley Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee's Center Street recommendations and the 2004 Berkeley Planning Commission's UC Hotel Conference Center Task Force recommendations.
We are currently finishing the hydrology analysis, working with San Francisco's Philip Williams & Associates, and are looking forward to presenting the final design proposal to the Berkeley Planning Commission in the coming weeks.
As part of the documentation and outreach process for the project, Ecocity Builders and Hood Design are also nearly finished with a booklet detailing the process of engagement with citizens of Berkeley to date on this project's evolution. The booklet is dedicated in memory of Berkeley City Councilmember Dona Spring (1953-2008), a passionate advocate for a Strawberry Creek Plaza. Her enthusiasm and support over the years helped sustain the vision and kept it moving forward. We will always be grateful for her positive spirit and encouragement.
We'd also like to acknowledge generous project support provided by Marco Vangelisti; Diana & Arjun Divecha; The Helen and William Mazer Foundation; and the Foundation for Sustainability and Innovation.
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By Design or Default
by Richard Register, President, Ecocity Builders
Those of you familiar with my book, "Ecocities," have heard this notion before. Either we get ecocities by design or by default. They are inevitable. But the difference between one route to ecocities and the other is - shall we understate it? - dramatic. Certainly the present city designed of, for and, in an unconscious kind of way, by cars can't go on much longer. That above all else is what we should be learning from climate change, paving farmland and wiping out a whole planet's fossil fuels reserve. By design we might manage to maintain something close to the complement of species we still have on this planet. Population would gradually decline to reasonable limits. We'd have transitioned to energy and land conservation ways and our recycling would be assiduous. We'd still have exuberant cities, if of very substantially different design than today's.
If we get ecocities by default we would have burned out the cheap energy without redesigning for energy and materials conservation and highest possible biodiversity in this here biosphere. We would have produced a very small population, probably by starvation and violence, and a pretty lonely planet: us and mainly our food species, pets, pests and a few species in zoo-like protected areas, maybe in just plain zoos if we could afford even that. Maybe the collapse before reorganizing a civilization based on low-energy, land-conserving cities, towns and villages, would even be a nightmare plunge to a Second Stone Age. With the metals rusted, corroded and frittered away in lost bottle caps, cans, bits of foil and the like squandered by tens of billions of people over a few decades, pottery might return as the new high-tech. With the metals and with other minerals locked in poor quality ores unavailable with any other energy source than by burning massive amounts of wood and dung where you could still find just a little on a hot and rocky planet, don't expect the post apocalypse cities to be very large or complex or expect to find life anywhere very comfortable or graced by the pleasures of cultural complexity or leisure arts, except maybe in imaginative folk stories or sheer fantasy and superstition. There would likely be ecocities as the earliest small cities were simply because they would be pedestrian environments incapable of much damage to whatever would be left of ecosystems of the remaining organisms.
What would Obama Do? New Economy by Design or Default
President Elect Barack Obama is already talking about infrastructure change and "green jobs." The biggest green job would be redesigning and rebuilding our cities, as a whole package with best transport and energy systems. The implications of his musings to date run to some city reshaping, but mostly as a second thought tacked on to the idea of supporting more public transportation. His notions revolve around economic recovery ideas, not wholly different from Franklin Roosevelt's job creation through infrastructure projects during our last great downturn. That was the subject of my recent essays on building out, not bailing out, creating a well coordinated economic plan as only governments are set up to do: for everyone, not just the stockholders. Mr. Obama is also promoting more energy efficient cars, which maintain the idea that sprawl can be fixed, which it can't, and clean coal, which doesn't appear to exist or be possible at any reasonable cost, and nuclear, a very big and dangerous gamble. But he is on board for sure on energy conservation in general, solar and public transportation.
In any case, here are more reasons to go down that path of thinking about investing in particular infrastructure as a strategy for economic recovery. Just turning money over to the banks for fresh loans for... whatever, is just too vague and could end in reinvesting in the very disasters we've seen developing right now in the environment and resources situation of the planet. Probably there would be 5% less greed, but maybe not even that, since catastrophes tend to make profit seekers yet more imaginative and less moral.
But back to basics. Not only will the city be transformed into the ecocity by design or default, so too the entire economy - agriculture, mining and recycling, manufacturing, forestry, range management - everything. After the collapse, should we fail to design and build an enduring civilization and its functioning, which we could call the economy to go with the infrastructure, we will see an economy incapable of much damage, being then too small and damaged itself to do much damage. The economy of short distance trade, if not constant bandit warfare, would be reduced to picking at the leftovers of nature. Imagine Somalia but without the yummy shiploads of goodies just steaming by, falling regularly into pirate hands. In that post-collapse, default instead of design future, a much smaller human population would give nature a chance to start its long haul back to biodiversity, this time with minimal interference from a disorganized humanity. Voila! An ecocity future delivered, but again, with very small and much more simple cities than we tend to enjoy today.
But if we were to design an enduring economy, what might it look like, should we take seriously the laws of ecology, that is, paying attention to living systems in a healthy biosphere and the lessons they deliver?
Link to rest of article
Richard Register is President of Ecocity Builders. Contact him at richard@ecocitybuilders.org to comment on this article.
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Ecocity World Summit 2009 (The Eighth International Ecocity Confernce) will be held at a critical crossroads for world civilization in Istanbul, a city that itself is at the crossroads between cultures and continents. The Conference Series started in 1990 in Berkeley, California; not so long ago, but in respect to the current environmental and economic situation we are in today, seems like another era. The Series then traveled to
Adelaide, Australia, then Yoff, Senegal, and on to Curitiba, Brazil;
Shenzhen, China; Bangalore, India and, in 2008, San Francisco,
California.
We were, in those years, building a tradition of building an
ecologically healthy civilization. The new crossroads, the intersection
of that tradition with the growing awareness of people everywhere that
we need to solve a problem never before faced by
humanity, the very survival of climate and life systems of the Earth,
gives the Eighth International Ecocity Conference the potential for
powerful and extraordinary influence on humanity's literal building of
the future.
We hope that many of you will be joining with us in Istanbul in December 2009 to continue this joyful, difficult work rebuilding civilization in balance with living systems.
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