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ecocity builders earth day 2010
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The
economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other
way around. -- Former Wisconsin Governor and U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson
In September 1969, U.S.
Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin announced that in spring of 1970
there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on the environment.
On April 22, 1970, Earth Day marked the beginning of the modern
environmental movement. Approximately 20 million Americans participated.
A
full-page advertisement in the January 18, 1970 Sunday New York Times
helped spread the word to a wider audience. The advertisement read,
"Earth Day is a
commitment to make life better, not just bigger and faster; to provide
real rather than rhetorical solutions. It is a day to re-examine the
ethic of individual progress at mankind's expense. It is a day to
challenge the corporate and governmental leaders who promise change, but
who shortchange the necessary programs. It is a day for looking beyond
tomorrow. April 22 seeks a future worth living. April 22 seeks a
future."
During the first 1970 Earth
Day ceremonies at the University of Wisconsin, Nelson said, "The battle
to restore a proper relationship between man and his environment,
between man and other living creatures, will require a long, sustained,
political, moral, ethical and financial commitment far beyond any
commitment ever made by any society in the history of man. Are we able?
Yes. Are we willing? That's the unanswered question."
The
question remains.
On Earth Day, please take some time to consider the questions posed by Nelson and New York Times advertisement for the first Earth Day.
As we build, so shall we
live.
Kirstin
Miller, Ecocity Builders
ecocitybuilders.org
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Please support Ecocity Builders on Earth Day - help us raise funds and gain visibility and more supporters
EARTH DAY FUNDRAISING TOURNAMENT
Vote for Ecocity Builders - eBay Fundraising Tournament
eBay has sponsored a fundraising tournament, hosted by Humanity Calls, in honor of this year's Earth Day.
Once you've voted you can earn more votes (which you can in turn allocate to us by simply referring your friends to vote OR donating to us or the tournament.
Any direct donations to Ecocity Builders will put put to good use right away supporting our programs and projects. If you'd like to make a direct donation to a specific project or program, please contact us.
With gratitude,
Kirstin Miller
Executive Director, Ecocity Builders
kirstin@ecocitybuilders.org
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Crossing Paths With Earth Day
Earth Day origin stories and meanings recalled 40 years later
Essay by Richard Register, President, Ecocity Builders
Richard Register back in the 1960s
On the winter solstice of 1969 I was driving through New Mexico's Valle Grande with my ten month old son Aldous, his mother, and a good friend Michael. Some of the ancient Indians of the region think
of the Valle Grande (pronounced VEYE-yea GRAN-day) - the Great Valley - as the mouth of the Earth and it is one of the world's largest volcanic
calderas with an immense grassy bowl at its center, surrounded by the pine and fir draped 11,000 foot Jemez mountains (HAY-mez), dressed in snow at the time. Another claim to fame of the circular ridge volcano: Los Alamos, birthplace of the atomic bomb, sit's on its edge. While driving through the crater, over the edge and into Los Alamos on our way back to Santa Fe, which means Holy Faith, we were discussing how Christmas was too damn commercial, the area was bathed in smog from the new coal-fired Four Corners Power Plant and the mass murder was dragging on and on in Vietnam. Jesus would not have approved. So what would a real holiday be all about?
A little earlier Senator Gaylord Nelson had decided the country needed a National Environmental Teach In. He had recently hired Denis Hayes to launch it. The rest is history as they say, but sometimes the stories just under the surface are at least as interesting, maybe more so.
Also a little earlier than our drive through the volcano a peace activist named John McConnell had taken the famous NASA picture of the earth from space - pre-moon trip - which also gained wide distribution on the cover of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. McConnell made a flag of it, the Earth Flag. He had the further idea, sometime around the fall of 1969, of expanding a peace movement event into the realm of environmental concern for the whole planet. He thought a good name for it would be Earth Day and it could catch on and spread around the world. Later, he claimed Gaylord Nelson was in a large assembly when he, McConnell, announced the idea and name Earth Day and Nelson stole his idea. I met McConnell later. Nice guy,
if a little obsessively focused on his projects, to the point of often looking though you instead of at you. But he was adamant about that. Earth Day was his idea.
Driving through Los Alamos and returning to a Holy Faith of some sort, we were mulling the possibilities. A real holiday would have something to do with wholeness, health and in some sense the holy, the origin of all those words being "holos" meaning "all" in Greek. Like holocaust, meaning everything burns up, but in our case holiday meaning everybody celebrating together, including the other life forms in addition to us two-leggeds with language and thumbs. Maybe, we thought, it should be called something like World Life Day.
When I got back to California from my New Mexico Christmas I looked up an imaginative writer named Paul Encimer. Sitting on his desk at the Draft Counseling Office in Venice, he said, "Well, Armed Farces Day is my favorite holiday - but I do know what you mean about this world holiday idea." He then went on to suggest that if it honors nature and the planet it should pay attention to exactly that, to the calendar of the whole Earth, to nature's own cycles here where we live. The Earth's calendar has four interesting points in time defining the changing seasons for all life: the equinoxes and solstices. "But the Catholics will call you a Druid and try to stop you." "What?" He explained they already quite intentionally and long ago shouldered the pagan off the field, effectively replacing their equinox and solstice holidays with Easter and Christmas there. They will not appreciate the competition. I thought his equinox suggestion was pretty profound, though I had some trouble with which if either to emphasize, March being spring in the north when fall in the south and vice versa in September. I skipped worrying about Catholics. I started working on the idea and even incorporated a non-profit organization to promote it. Art Seidenbaum, daily columnist for the Los Angeles Times knew my sculpture and my work on No War Toys - a couple longish stories for later if ever - and suggested I contact Denis Hayes about World Life Day thoughts, just to compare, perhaps productively. By then it was late January 1970. "Denis has recently launched a national environmental teach in called Earth Day. He'd like to hear from you."
We talked on the phone. Denis knew I was involved in the peace movement, having had a short introduction from Seidenbaum. Did I believe Earth Day would distract from work to stop the war? My notion was peace with Earth as well as peace on Earth so I saw the two as complementary. Of course emphasis would be on the environment and that was just fine. After six years of peace events I thought we were all a little weary already and a little variety couldn't hurt. There was room for many initiatives in those days, a wide range of arts and music, counter culture strains, peace, environment, civil rights... Did I think Earth Day would be an occasion for violence? That was something of a surprise question but I thought the likelihood was far smaller than for anti-war events with all the pro-war supporters that regularly turned up to taunt and bait. Discussing the equinox some, Denis pointed out weather in March in much of the world is pretty dicey with winter hanging on - can be very cold and nasty in temperate climates around the world. April 22, the day he and his associates had selected was much more likely to be favorable to large events, especially outdoor events. Earth Day happened three months later with 20,000,000 people involved in the US and "its possessions" a term you'd hear in those days but not these. And we possessed a lot of military bases, a lot of even them getting into the Earth Day groove when it happened.
Now if we slither back in time a bit, to 1965, five years earlier, I had run into Paolo Soleri, the architect warning the world that cars were going to do in the city and likely much else about civilization and a once-healthy Earth. He was talking about bring architecture together with ecology, and ecology was a pretty new and radical word at the time. Only three years earlier, 1962, Rachel Carson was one of the few introducing the term with the publication of her book "Silent Spring," and eight years after meeting Soleri - a fairly long time - DDT would be banned in the US. Soleri said the spread out infrastructure of the American city with all its scattered smaller buildings called single family homes and their streets, cars, parking lots, gas stations and on and on was actually an enormous structure, much larger, counter intuitively, than the compact city of larger buildings such as you find in Europe. The dense city of apartments and transit was actually a much smaller structure relative to the number of people with shorter lengths of everything including pipes and wires, walks and bicycle rides to get anything anywhere from electricity, gas, water and sewage to words on the phone and people face to face. The car city, in contrast, paved and wasted former lands of agricultural production and ecological richness. The car city was the city of excess and waste, the pedestrian compact ecological city was the lean city of efficiency and health. The car he said was a very bad actor and a corrosive influence on everything it touched.
But did anybody listen? Yes! And before Earth Day in an odd San Francisco Bay Area story. John Sperling, now one of the wealthiest people in the country after launching the University of Phoenix, the working stiff's answer to a higher education, was in 1968 professor of the Humanities 160 class as San Jose State. Brainstorming class projects the students came up with the idea of burying a car as a protest statement against their many environmental sins including smog. Sperling was delighted, the event came off smashingly in October, 1969 and his students all got As. Covered well in the papers, this incident undoubtedly helped prepare and radicalize the soil for Earth Day, then six months away, for with Hollywood, oil spills on the Santa Barbara beach, LA leading the world's cities into the glories of mass mobility, all eyes were watching and brains taking note, following California into the future.
When Earth Day did come in 1970 I was one of the many everyday folks planting trees and cleaning up and scurrying around Los Angeles. My non-profit, which I named World Community Events, had had a small event a few weeks before on the day recommended by Paul Encimer, the spring equinox - I don't even remember what we did! Other than observe the exact time of the crossing of the equator by the sun, as did some of my associates at wildly varying times in their different zones around the world. I think on that occasion we fasted for the day to remember those who were, by force of circumstance, not able to eat. But our corporate papers were shaping up and plans were in gear for helping the world holiday idea in general, including Denis' big event. In following seasons we had some fairly large equinox teach-in events ourselves and got some proclamations from, among others, the State of California and City of San Diego, but not much compared to the April 22 Earth Days. Three years later after it became evident the best thing going that was close to a world holiday was Earth Day I closed down World Community Events. When I learned of John McConnell I'm not sure but sometime in 1970 after my own world holiday thoughts had flashed into the dark night driving through the volcano and the A bomb birthplace. And it was well after meeting Denis Hayes on the phone.
When I did meet John he was most gracious and congratulated me on independently coming up with the equinox for the world holiday idea, just like I assured him Encimer had come up with the date, but at least I'd recognized the ability of holidays to ducate and wanted to harness the medium - and it is a medium like radio, television, books, classes, etc. but extra powerful for involving people in actually doing things - for peace and ecological sanity. Then it came: the barbs that they stole Earth Day from him.
Getting to know Denis later - he was keynote speaker at two conferences I convened with partners at later dates: the Energy and the City Conference, 1982 and the First International Ecocity Conference, 1990, both in Berkeley. Hearing McConnell's many reminders of priority I decided to Denis to recall for me the origins of the name Earth Day. He obliged in an undated letter sometime around 1980 writing on a typewriter with worn out light gray ribbon. After complaining about McConnell and his friends threatening to sue and harassing Denis for several years he said of the name "Earth Day," "The fact of its derivation probably is best summarized in the phrase sometimes used for scientific breakthroughs: 'Dr. X. and Dr. Y., in independent efforts, found that...' "In an entirely independent effort, Senator Gaylord Nelson decided to attempt to focus public attention upon environmental concerns... Nelson tossed out the idea in a couple speeches and received a very good response. "'Teach-in' sounded very 1966-ish, and might have been interpreted as an attempt to trace the steps of the anti-war movement and divert attention from that movement. I resolved before I took the job that the name (and hence the image) of the affair would have to be changed. "In early January we decided to place an ad in the News of the Week section of the New York Times. In it we would more clearly define our objectives for the public. A hand full of us stayed up quite late one night, working on the text of the ad. We wanted a bold headline covering half a page, to gain
attention. We considered Environment Day, Environmental Action Day, Ecology Day, E Day and a host of others. It is difficult to reconstruct who tossed out Earth Day during this endless exchange, but I'm close to positive it was Phil Taubman - who now works for Time Magazine. Whoever it was it was not John McConnell. Nor was it anyone who was likely to have shared McConnell's confidence (or even anyone who had ever heard of him). "About 3 in the morning, we had narrowed it down to E Day or Earth Day, and finally opted for the latter. "The two efforts were entirely without interchange. One was an international day for peace on the equinox, the other was a national day of concern during
college spring vacation. Both of them were officially called "Earth Day"; one of them made it off the ground." "P.S.," he added, "Last I heard of Phil Taubman, he was in the Boston bureau of Time, if you'd like to check further. There were only a handful of us on staff at the time. Andy Garling is now in Costa Rica; Linda Billing is working for Representative John Seiberlingh (she's not the one with the Sierra Club); most of the others I've completely lost track of. The decision was really made by Taubman and me, mainly because we stayed up latest."
Now its forty years since I first talked with Denis and forty and a half ,since John Sperling's class buried the car at San Jose State with his students. I've also notice in the paper today, Earth Day 2010, that Gaylord Nelson graduated from San Jose State in 1939 and the car burial there might well have piqued his interest in his alma mater's gutsy statement and pressed his resolve to take a more "radical" stance, stirring up the Earth Day stew for really basic thinking and action. It is now forty-five years since Paolo Soleri said cars, or more particularly cars/sprawl/paving/and cheap massive use of energy were wrecking the place. It's been about 65 years since Lewis Mumford said car would wreck the place. I've spent much of my meantime since meeting Paolo trying to communicate various refinements of how to build cities for people instead of cars. As I look back to the days of waking up to these issues, participating in Earth Day and having some of my own serendipitous world holiday thoughts and initiatives, I realize I was right on the edge of catastrophic choices and changes. I was as they say, in the heart of the beast, and the fulcrum of history, even evolution. Since the city is the largest creation of our species, it seems prescient to say the least that some of us were trying our best to wake up to what the car really meant and that cities based on their needs for land, energy and human bloody sacrifices at now over a million deaths a year were definitely a problem. We were definitely on to something.
While I was living there, Los Angeles decided to ignore the words of Soleri and other car critics like Mumford, and me with my relatively obscure voice. Los Angeles decided to fix its smog problem by fixing the car - instead of the city. The environmental movement was happy with that because environmentalists could keep driving their ever better cars in ever worse cities with a conscience as clean as the post smog device air of Los Angeles. The greatest failure of Earth Day and the environmental movement in general to date, the one that is destroying the Earth's balances more severely than anything else, can be focused down to one lesson lost on all those years: Los Angeles fixed its cars and its local air pollution problem and forty some years later delivered to the world the disasters of climate change.
Paolo Soleri and Richard on Paolo's 90th birthday party last year at Arcostani
Richard Register is President of Ecocity Builders. He can be reached at ecocity@igc.org.
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Our Mission
Ecocity Builders - What We Do
We develop and implement policy, design and educational tools and strategies to:
Build thriving urban centers based on "access by proximity," and reverse patterns of sprawl and excessive consumption
Shift policies to prioritize walking, bicycling, and transit and to reduce dependence on automobiles
Restore biodiversity in the heart of our cities, in the form of creeks, gardens, parks, farms and greenways
Look us up on
GUIDESTAR
http://www2.guidestar.org/organizations/68-0285073/ecocity-builders.aspx
GREAT NONPROFITS
http://greatnonprofits.org/reviews/profile2/ecocity-builders
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Ecocity Builders' Programs and Projects
Ecocity Theory - Leadership We
present at conferences on sustainable development, ecology,
architecture and related topics all over the world. We spoken at the "alternative events" at all the major
environmental conferences organized by the United Nation: Stockholm, Rio
de Janeiro and Johannesburg, plus Habitat II, a.k.a. "the City Summit"
in Istanbul. University classes, architectural firms and futurist
conferences, the Smithsonian Institution and National Council for
Science and the Environment, associated student body organized events at
colleges, Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, business councils, small local
creek restoration groups, city government agencies, departments and
mayors have all hosted his talks or classes. We have spoken before
transportation experts, in experimental towns like Arcosanti, Arizona,
for Curitiba's Open University for the Environment in Brazil and at
crafts schools like Haystack Mountain School of crafts and Oakland's
California College of Arts and Crafts. This is just a partial list.
Executive Director
Kirstin Miller teaches a course on ecocity development for the
University of California, Berkeley Extension in San Francisco. PublicationsEcocity Builders publishes books, articles,
editorials and a monthly newsletter, Ecocities Emerging. Our primary publication is Ecocities-Building
Cities in Balance
with Natureby Richard Register, Founder and President of Ecocity Builders. Other publications available from Richard include Ecocity Berkeley Building Cities for a
Healthy Futureand Village Wisdom/Future Cities
International Ecocity Conference Series
We are keepers of the
longest running conference series on the topic of ecocities, the
International Ecocity Conference Series, which has been held in Asia,
North America, Australia, Africa and South America.
The series began in 1990, in Berkeley, CA. The message was simple. "Cities
and towns are the largest things humans build and the way we're
building them is destroying the planet. Why not, instead, build cities
in balance with nature?" Since then the International Ecocity Conference
Series, now convened by Ecocity Builders, the organization Register
founded in 1992, has been convened in five other countries: Adelaide,
Australia, 1992; Dakar/Yoff, Senegal, 1996; Curitiba, Brazil, 2000;
Shenzhen, China, 2002; Bangalore, India, 2006; San Francisco, Calfornia,
USA, 2008; and Istanbul, Turkey, 2009.
International Ecocity Standards Project
In partnership with our international network of ecocity
colleagues and
associates, Ecocity Builders is launching the International Ecocity
Standards (IES) project to define "ecocities" by developing a set of
standards, criteria and metrics against which to evaluate and guide new
and existing cities' progress towards becoming an "ecocity."
International Ecocity Standards will evaluate different scales of
development, from the small neighborhood scale to the regional scale. The program successfully launched in 2010, with seed funding from the Helen and William Mazer Foundation and Novatek. The project team is on board, core advisors active and monthly
meetings commencing.
Heart of the City Project Featuring Center Street Plaza
Utilizing ecological rebuilding and design approaches, the
Heart of the City Project proposes to demonstrate practical,
sustainable solutions to the serious environmental and related social
challenges facing urban communities globally.
The Center Street Plaza project took a major
step forward recently when the Berkeley City Council voted 8-1 early in 2010 to
endorse the project and seek funding to complete the final design work
and implement. The project provides a multi-functional urban model
emphasizing place-making, pedestrianism, transit use, and "low-impact
design" (LID) stormwater interventions. The final design strategies, of
more than 30 initial schemes, reintroduce Strawberry Creek while
accommodating planning and code requirements, such as access for
emergency and delivery vehicles. A pedestrian plaza with porous pavers
will weave through the water features, over an underground stormwater
storage cistern. The Center Street project is one example of how
Ecocity Builders works with community partners and professionals to
build ecocity demonstration projects: pieces of the ecocity. In this
collaboration with renowned urbanist Walter Hood, we are hoping that
this work will achieve the highest level of "green" certification from
the Living Building Challenge's "Living Landscape" typology. Urban Villages ProjectThe Oakland Urban Villages Project combines science and
technology with community education, outreach and input to describe,
communicate, and achieve a shared vision for a just and sustainable
city, a model city inspired, perhaps, by the other great model city,
Curitiba, Brazil.
In Oakland, the purpose of our pilot application is to demonstrate an
ecologically, economically and culturally sustainable approach to
addressing climate change through land use and transportation planning.
The pilot proposes a regional and integrated approach to transitioning
from the current land- and energy-intensive patterns of urban sprawl and
automobile dependence, towards compact, pedestrian- and
transit-oriented communities linked by transit, trails and greenways,
and restored natural corridors. Urban Villages offer residents
convenience and cost savings, thanks to access by proximity to everyday
retail, services, jobs, transportation, and recreational needs. The
approach focuses on creating thriving local economies, decreasing the
need for commuting and for long distance transport of goods and
materials. The model can be adapted to other Bay Area cities, helping
the region reduce greenhouse gas emissions through reductions in vehicle
miles traveled and land use planning, as mandated by SB 375 and AB 32. The Village Bottoms Cultural District also serves to bridge
the half-mile distance between an adjacent, new residential development
and the nearest Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station. Marketing
materials for the new development entice buyers with easy access to
freeways and automobile-oriented commercial strips in neighboring
cities. Not only does this accelerate economic leakage, it perpetuates
undesirable climate impacts of the automobile. The Cultural District
brings in amenities, thus creating a sense of place, discouraging
driving, and bringing BART closer for all residents. The Urban Villages pilot builds on work over the past two
years with funding for Ecocity Builders from the Bay Area Air Quality
Management District, Foundation for Sustainability and Innovation, and
the Kaiser Permanente Foundation.
Ecocity Consulting Services
Examples
Gaia Building Ecocity Builders worked with
local developer Patrick Kennedy and architect Kirk Peterson to help
redesign this breakthrough mixed use building in the heart of
downtown Berkeley, California. Collaboratively we turned what was going
to be a conventional project into an award-winning example of
progressive urbanism, featuring the first live rooftop in Berkeley. The
Gaia Building was completed in 2001, and is the third tallest building
in downtown Berkeley. The next five infill projects that went up in
Berkeley all had live roofs, a tribute to Ecocity Builders' design
feature success. Cordornices Creek Daylighting
Project
Ecocity Builders served as the construction
supervising firm and volunteer coordinator throughout the project.
Volunteers and product
donations came from Urban Creek Council,
friends of five Creeks in Albany, the East Bay Conservation Corps,
AmeriCorps, the public schools and the neighborhood itself. The
result is a beautiful pocket park with a jewel of a creek flowing
through. Since the daylighting project, Ecocity Builders has
continued to gather volunteers on Sundays to care for this urban oasis.
Groups have come from around the world to study the project, learn from
it and take it back to replicate similar projects in their own cities,
towns and neighborhoods.
Sustainability Precinct Project for the British Columbia Institute of Technology
Over the course of three
days, Ecocity Builders and British Columbia Institute of Technology's
School of Construction and the Environment
convened a design charrette to explore the transition of first one
section of
the Burnaby Campus into a "living laboratory" of sustainability to be
followed
by the ecological redesign of the entire campus as the first in a
planned
system-wide (all campuses) transformation. The goal is to simultaneously
sustainably retune the Trades' educational programming as the physical
environment is redesigned - to launch a coordinated and integrated shift
to
building and teaching for maximum ecological efficiency and
livability-to
ultimately explore, define, and deploy the "science of ecocity
building."
Other Past Project Examples
The
Integral Neighborhood
Slow Street Project, Milvia Street, Berkeley
Urban Street Orchard Project, Berkeley
Greenhouse Ordinance, Berkeley
Ecocity Amendment to the City of Berkeley General Plan
Strawberry Creek Greenway Plan
Mills College Green Plan
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