Dug up from the vaults! I just came across this piece I’d spoken, then jotted down a couple of years ago.  I figured it might be appropriate to pop up here,  since nothing else is going up this week. While I’d roll these concepts out differently now, it’s still fun to see how some of us in the Detroit scene were rolling out these ideas only a couple of years ago — and now to see how dramatically the national conversation about Detroit has changed. What seemed pie-in-the-sky only two years ago is not being seriously discussed around the globe. How quickly things can change. Anyway, here’s the piece:

This is a paraphrase transcript (written after the fact) of a brief talk that I gave in Ann Arbor as part of the Sustainability Salon series at the Crazy Wisdom Bookstore in April, 2008. I liked how it came together and so I wanted to capture the thoughts in written form. I believe this is a pretty accurate representation of what was said – and I think I squeezed it all into a 12 minutes introduction, which is surely a sign that I could have another career as an auctioneer. That’s partly why I wanted to try getting it down into written form where there’s more room for absorption and debate. Thanks for letting me share it with you.

Good evening, everybody, and thank you for having me here. It’s an honor to get to be up here with the rest of the panel and to share this time with all of you here. Sustainability is a topic that I’m passionate about, and I’m honored to have this chance to join you in discussion about it.

I live in the nuts and bolts of green buildings and sustainable development on a daily basis, and I talk to people about the practical things they can do to green their buildings. But today, I’m going to step back a little bit and share some of my views on the bigger picture. I’m hopeful that this will help us in our discussion about how we collectively tackle sustainable development.

I think there are primarily two major tasks ahead of us today in the world of sustainable development. The first is to take all the good work happening around green development and expand it. The truth is that a tremendous amount of good work is happening around these topics, and we just need to grow it in a BIG way – on steroids! We know what the things are that we need to do, we just need to do a lot more of them. That’s a big part of our task, and bravo to moving it forward.

The second task is that we have to solve the impossible problems. Because there are certain things that we haven’t figured out how to do yet. We need to find the answers to those things, and that’s what I want to focus on tonight. Besides, it’ll be fun. So this is our second task: to solve the impossible. As an example, I’d like to offer some of the work that I do, and talk about why I think Detroit can save the world.     [laughter]

Hey folks, just a heads up that Powering the Nation just posted a guest blog I did for them on the future of energy. Yep, that’s me on the list, right above John Kerry.

Here’s the list of guest editorials:
http://unc.news21.com/index.php/opinions.html

And here’s a direct link to my full article:
http://unc.news21.com/index.php/opinions/277-the-energy-challenge-act-today-shape-tomorrow.html

photo by max greenberg

Do you know the difference between Hell and Harmless? Most people have a clear-cut sense of the difference in at least one place: Casinos. Hell is having poorly defined boundaries in a place designed to take your money. You can go in, play some games, maybe even win a few, boost your confidence, and try for more. You can come really close to winning big. Close enough that you’ll come back at it sure that you’re on the trail for success. For many people, this is an intoxicating recipe that can lead to bad choices. And for the addictive personality that is driven by an unchecked need, this setting can lead to disaster. Hell. Each step of the way may seem like an okay choice, a risk, but a calculated risk (that wasn’t really calculated) that never seems quite catastrophic.

Harmless isn’t actually that hard. I have friends who’ll go to a casino and consider it an evening’s entertainment. They’re clear that it’s entertainment and not really expect to make money off of it. Still, knowing the powerful pull of the win, they’ve got a very simple guideline. They’ve got what I call Casino Rules. You set a clear limit. After that limit you stop. You can stay and play all night if you want to, but you walk in the door with a set amount of cash, and that’s your limit. If you have wins, and are making money, you can play all night. Or you can play small and stretch it out. Or you can quit while ahead. But if you use up what you walked in with, then you’ve hit the limit. And you stop. No borrowing from friends, run to the bank, or visit to the ATM. It’s a simple rule, and it’s effective.

Casino Rules can apply to any potentially risky behavior that may have gradual steps of loss. Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, gradual steps make it difficult to see the big picture and how far you’ve come from your starting point, or when you’ve gone over the edge into danger. This is a common problem with addictions of all sorts. It’s also a problem with economic risk-taking of various kinds from investing to entrepreneurial get-rich-quick schemes. The power of graduated steps to keep us in the present and lose sight of the whole path can be very useful when pursuing a positive goal that’s hard to achieve. For example, dieters often do well to just focus on losing 5-10 pounds at a time, since the task of losing 40 would be too overwhelming.  But if the path is one of damage and hurt, then the same principle is dangerous. Limits to the losses you’ll suffer must be clearly set at the beginning of the road – before you’re too far along the path and only seeing each gradual step in front of you. Thus the Casino Rules.

Casino players and stock market investors all have clear guidelines that they use for setting these limits. So why don’t we, as a nation of petroleum consumers, have a similar rule? Michigan’s had enough trouble the past few years. But now we’ve been hit with the worst oil spill in our history with approximately 1 million gallons released into the Kalamazoo River, on a pipeline that had been cited for poor maintenance earlier this year. So far, the oil hasn’t hit Lake Michigan, and EPA predicts that it won’t, but the very thought is quite chilling. The Great Lakes are the largest liquid repository of freshwater on the planet.

We cannot just take each accident at a time. We must use Casino Rules. We must set a limit with a fresh perspective. When is it enough to be beyond reasonable risk? If we address each crisis by itself, we may never make a solid long-term decision. If we’d set such a limit in 2009, the gulf spill would likely have surpassed it already. Instead, we focus on the crisis and the clean-up. Then do the same in West Michigan. And do the same off the coast of California. And do the same off the coast of Massachusetts. And in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. And in Florida, Texas and more. The list is already longer than you think, just in 2010.

We need  (as a state or a region or a nation or a world) to set a limit. Where’s the threshold? How much oil will spill before we collectively agree to change our reliance on it? We must set the limit, and we must set it now before we end up in an addicts anonymous chair, introducing ourselves and telling the story of how we wrecked our lives and betrayed our children to a silent, empty room.

Cities are where it’s at. Or at least, it’s where we’re at. Collectively, as a species, we’re majority city dwellers. Over half of us humans are urbanites. Cities may also be where it’s at for saving the environment. Cities allow people to reduce their footprint more than rural or suburban living do for most people living in industrialized nations.

David Owen, author of Green Metropolis (great cover design by the way), decries the notion that cities represent the antithesis of environmental living – and the impulse to move toward nature in order save it. This isn’t news to any New Urbanists out there, but it’s still a deeply ingrained cultural notion for most of us: that cities represent the anti-thesis of a lived in respect for and in honor of nature. The book’s a fun read (I’ll admit I’m only part way through it), but two ideas in particular struck me.

Making green space can ruin your city

The first notable idea Owen lays out is that the environmental strategies that many urban enviros push will be a net-loss for the greening of cities. Specifically, he cites urban agriculture and tree-planting as a problem. In a nutshell: these strategies become infused with a general push for more green space, which in turn reduces density, increases walking distances and contributes to the sprawling infrastructure that makes auto-free living and multi-unit dwellings disappear.

As Detroit rises as a leader of the urban ag. movement for the nation, this warning bears a prominent place. Obviously, for Detroit, it’s a matter of making use of otherwise “blighted” spaces. But we must carry this reminder forward as we consider how to integrate green space in Detroit. It affirms that what we should be shooting for is not complete integration of green space into all portions of the city as much as focusing on creating dense urban clusters surrounded by green space. However, the organic development of space use makes this goal almost impossible to achieve well without very aggressive zoning.

While the right-sizing conversation floats forward in Detroit, this level of aggressive zoning is not currently on the table. While I agree that we have to have a graduated approach to this effort, and I’m dubious about top-down planning that thinks it can predict where everything should happen, unless we set the patterns and filters for creating the infrastructure to create actual density and keep it from sprawling into our green space, then our potential glory will pass us by.

Also, we must be aware of this difference of context when offering up Detroit’s solutions to other cities. Our context of extensive existing green space is different from most other urban centers.

Just to be fair, Owen is not anti-tree. He notes:

Planting tree along city streets, always a popular initiative, has high environmental utility, but not for the reasons that people assume: trees are ecologically important in dense urban areas not because they provide temporary repositories for atmospheric carbon–the usual argument for planting more of them–but because their presence along sidewalks makes city dwellers more cheerful about dwelling in cities.

However, the production and transport of food is one of our largest contributors to green house gases and other environmental degradation. Urban agriculture lends itself particularly well to providing organic, local, vegetable-based diets. As such, if properly integrated with urban density, it can still be a key solution for how cities and other communities address environmental issues.

Reducing crime to cut Green House Gases

Owen’s second striking notion is the need to focus on reducing crime and improving schools is a top environmental priority. These are key factors in determining whether people live in cities or not, and since dense cities offer lifestyles with smaller carbon footprints then getting people to live in them becomes an environmental priority.

His point is solid. City life is good both reducing green house gases, and for preserving true rural and wilderness green spaces (and all their accompanying benefits, social, environmental, and otherwise). So getting people into cities is a good environmental goal.

But Owen, like so many other analysts, fails to take into account the effects of a life separated from nature. He brings up the concept of “nature deficit disorder”, but also suggests that nature-based recreation is more damaging to the environment than playing video games. Still, people tend not to value the natural world if they do not interact with it. And studies have shown the multiple benefits of nature-based play spaces for kids and adults. This needn’t run counter to Owen’s pro-city stance. Rather, it reinforces the need for development that make it easier to access natural areas from dense urban zones. Again, Detroit’s right-sizing model could create a template for urban development which doesn’t yet exist in this country.

And clearly more progressive activists who get all excited about solar panels and urban gardens need to tackle these key urban-improvement issues of improving schools and reducing crime. Fortunately, those ideas don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Chicago studied the effects of their decades old tree-planting efforts and found that crime rates were lower in neighborhoods with trees. And the literature on biophilia suggests that integrating gardens and other nature experiences can be one important lever in improving educational settings, brain development, etc.

Owen’s point, while valid, nonetheless misses the motivational import of creating a sense of progress and not simply creating remedial improvements. Crime and education are foundational points. When we neglect them, we undermine all “visionary” efforts. But a foundation is insufficient to build a temple. For the environmental movement to stay strong, thrive and continue to guide us toward wiser choices, it must address our basic foundations, but it must also address our highest aspirations in art, innovation, spiritual growth, political frontiers and more.

In fact, I would argue that this is part of why the sustainability movement offers so much success: the solutions that can both address a progressive and visionary edge while also addressing core, foundational needs will be the most successful. Those solutions will survive memetic evolution. Owen’s text is a useful reminder of these often unaddressed foundational issues. Let’s keep filtering for the solutions that are visionary and foundational in order to build greater success for our communities.

image from themotorlesscity.com

The nation’s been watching the “right-sizing” discussions around Detroit, and appropriately so. This is one of the areas where Detroit is living up to it’s potential as a laboratory for the 21st century. Which experiments work and which fail may help shape national dialogue. One big threat of failure is still looming in this area, but I have a solution to propose. First some more background.

Here in the city, the debates have been very contentious. There is a palpable fear on the ground. Concerns about eminent domain are widespread, with memories of Poletown still fresh. Some of these fears seem founded, while others fly wildly off into irrationality. These latter fears fuel a lot of speculation and spread like wildfire, and they are sometimes as understandable for a population that has felt out of control for so long as they are regrettable.

The Danger

One big concern has been that the Mayor’s office will simply take a map of Detroit, get a big red marker and start circling some areas for investment, while crossing off others for abandonment. It’s a realistic concern for a common political approach. Fortunately, the Community Development Advocates of Detroit’s Neighborhood Revitalization Strategic Framework seems to be catching on as a solid alternative proposal for how to approach this issue. This community based approach is crucial for two reasons:

1) even if it results in the same end decisions it will come with community buy-in and support. This is not mere glossy marketing. It’s important for people to have had a chance to think through the options themselves and get a say in the results. Even if the results end up the same. And they might! But they also might not, which is part of the importance of this step.

2) The community knows more about the city than the city government can. This is a big city. There’s lots going on it, and the Mayor’s office runs the risk of obliterating great developments, projects, community resources, etc. if it doesn’t use a system that allows the residents to weigh in on this decision. Those very same development, projects, community resources, etc. are a key piece of knowledge in prioritizing what happens where in the ongoing strategizing for the city’s future.

It looks like the plan from CDAD is gaining ground and being considered. If it is followed, it will help address many of the worst risks of the “right-sizing” strategy. Still, the fear that grabs hold of people’s heart and digs their heels in is the idea of losing their homes or being relocated. This fear strikes deep into issues of personal control and even to the heart of the myth of the American Dream.

It always struck me as highly unlikely that any one in the right mind would possibly propose moving anyone. Stopping services like garbage pickup and frequent police patrolling to certain areas of the city, yes. Perhaps stopping streetlighting or even paved road maintenance. These are urban amenities, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me to cut financial losses and not provide those assets for people who wish to stay in areas of the city that are increasingly rural when no city could realistically support those services for such spread out areas.

The Water Problem

Then a story by Noah Ovshinsky on WDET opened up another can of worms: water. The Detroit water infrastructure is aging. It’s in need of repair and upgrading, which is an expensive undertaking. Other cities are facing this same problem – this is not unique to Detroit.  But with a shrunken population and a need to invest in building vibrant, functional urban pockets within the city, it doesn’t make sense to maintain, much less upgrade, the water infrastructure for the remaining open spaces. And thus, this becomes a large reason why people think that eminent domain might be invoked to move people from these spots.

Such a move would be a nightmare. It shouldn’t happen. And it doesn’t have to.

The cost of moving someone to a new home is high. The cost of fighting a legal battle over it is also high. And that’s just the finances. The cost the culture of the community, the political process and the creative energies of the community are also very high (if harder to measure).

But Detroit can still lower it’s investments in those neighborhoods while not forcing anyone to leave. It can pay for those homes to become water self-sufficient. I call this approach Rightsizing with Rainwater.

Rightsizing with Rainwater

I recently gathered some information, available at the Go Green blog at WARM Training Center, on the cost of adding full water catchment systems to homes in similar climates. We’re a water rich region, so this isn’t as challenging as it would be in other parts of the country (another reason why Michigan’s going to be a great place to live in the 21st century). The cost of adding a full water catchment system is only about $12,000. While we might see higher costs for overflow raingardens, roof adjustments, etc., we could also see lower costs for building many of these systems at once. Let’s give ourselves some reasonable  (and possibly generous) wiggle-room and assume  $20K as a general cost placeholder.

Sewage is a bigger problem, but also surmountable. Creating the option for composting would dovetail very nicely with the move toward more agriculture in Detroit’s open spaces. Out of the box home composters cost between $1200 – $6000 for a family of 4 (Check out this great overview from the EPA). For our estimate, we should assume something on the higher end, to make certain that needs are adequately met. We don’t want to have a system that only meets 95% of the need! Therefore, let’s assume a $6,000 system.

(Another option would be building septic fields. It’s what they do in the country, and that’s some of the model we’re looking at for these areas, if the concentration of homes is low enough. Septic fields cost about $1,000 – $2,500, making this a cheaper option than the composting toilets, but it probably wouldn’t work in most settings. Homes would need about an acre to accommodate the field, and even in “rural Detroit” this is more land than most property owners are likely to own. )

So combine water catchment with composting toilets for a total cost of approximately $26,000.

All of this would cheaper than the cost of making someone move from their home when they didn’t want to. And it models better use of remaining spaces. I can easily imagine some people feeling that it’s not fair for the city to buy these expensive self-sufficiency systems for people who are being “uncooperative”, but it really is a win-win. Remember, that this would be coming at the same time as offers for assistance to move people into more functional parts of the city with the benefits of real urban density, while also severing many existing city services to the “disinvestment” areas. Most people would probably choose to relocate. But there’s no reason to force relocation at a higher financial, personal, community and political cost if it’s not necessary.

Of course, some legal barriers would have to be removed, with special codes being developed for dealing with water catchment and on-site water treatment. This is no small task. But the future will demand that we need to do these things anyway. This could become another example  where Detroit’s hardships could help pioneer a new trail for the rest of the nation. It is but one way that Detroit could become a model green city for the world.

I’ve been following the blog Gas 2.0 recentlyas I’ve been doing research on electric vehicles and alternative fuels and they do a great job of giving the latest news.

They had a recent post on how the hairs on ferns that help it shed water could be used to make boats more fuel efficient, potentially saving as much as 1% of the fuel used worldwide!

Since I know Jacob loves biomimicry, I thought he’d want to read the article so I figured I’d share it with everyone. Here’s a link to the blog post.

I never cease to love the experience of seemingly disparate interests suddenly coming together in one topic.  Shall we proceed…?

I recently had the honor of sitting at the Detroit Yacht Club (pretty!) on the lovely Belle Isle (belle, belle!) for the Free Press’s first annual Green Leaders Awards ceremony for breakfast and awards among many great people. The keynote speaker (and an honoree) was Bill Ford, Jr. of Ford Motor Company. I found him comfortably down-to-earth (as I’d heard from his employees) and genuinely comfortable with environmental issues, which was no real surprise. I liked him. However, his central message had a flaw. His essential point was: Technology is going to solve the environmental challenges ahead.

Now, there are many in the environmental world who lambaste the “technology will save us” message that Ford, Tom Friedman and many other techno-greenies advocate. Some advocate a Luddite initiative, others simply dismiss the technological fix as a morally and environmentally insufficient red herring or (at best) stop-gap. Certain nuances of that latter approach start to approximate my own opinion, but let me be clear: I also believe that technology will save us – insofar as I believe that technological development will be an essential and irreplaceable part of the solution that we must embrace and strive for in the years ahead. But I still think Ford’s basic message is off in a crucial way.

Enter the feminist writer. I’ve long been a big fan of UK author Jeanette Winterson. One of her most recent books The Stone Gods is what many would call science fiction, though that isn’t her usual genre. She herself notes:

People say to me, ‘so is the Stone Gods science fiction?’ Well, it is fiction, and it has science in it, and it is set (mostly) in the future, but the labels are meaningless.

I can’t see the point of labeling a book like a pre-packed supermarket meal. There are books worth reading and books not worth reading. That’s all.

And because of this book, she was featured last fall on a BBC art critique TV show to talk about the rise of geek culture, along with movie director Kevin Smith and comedian-geek Natalie Haynes. At one point they got into a divisive discussion about the problems (or not) with violence in much of comic-book culture (see the video below).

Winterson’s basic point (just about the comic Kick-Ass, now a major motion picture) was this:

…the thing is just full of the worst kind of dripping violence, which is a kind of adrenaline injection which means you’ll utterly dead to life in its subtlety, its complexity, its possibilities of expansion of relationships. This is the kind of thing that’s the product of human emptiness

To which Kevin Smith replied: “I thought it was just a comic book.” Smith and Haynes argued that this was just the culture of the medium and that the presence of a hard fighting young girl was progress. This is another debate that has raged in other places.  (Comics-god Scott McCloud points out that at least this particular conversation was a sign of progress for comics evolution).

But Winterson’s point, I believe, drives at something else. Specifically, that we must overcome the disconnects between actual life and all of the adrenaline pumping pretty things we’re presented with in today’s media. And this is what brings me back to Bill Ford.

Technology may do wonders for us in the future years. I think we’re going to see an exciting explosion of innovation and entrepreneurial successes in the realm of green technologies. As stated above, I think some of these innovations will be necessary for us to get to a tenable solution for the ecological crises that face us.

But technology does not appear from nowhere. Technology will not save us. People will. People will drive the vision and leadership to develop useful technologies (and the many social solutions we’ll need) to save ourselves.  Without people making choices, changing policies and doing the work to make those solutions emerge, then they won’t. If we keep our focus on the technology without remembering where it comes from (as well as who it’s to serve) then we run the risk of assuming that it will just emerge, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. If that were so, we would have had major solar technology breakthroughs back in the 80s regardless of the fact that Reagan slashed funding for it.

Technology can seem out of single-human grasp, but the maker movement is reclaiming the human hand in techno-crafting,  and we would all do well to remember the necessity of focusing on people (and our ability to understand nature, as well) as the developers of the solutions that can save us.

It’s a truism: American megacapitalism sucks because it cannot plan for the long term. Without any ability to look behind the next quarterly report, the thinking goes, we lack the benefits of a long range planning horizons that accrue to, say, Japan, or perhaps Oxford University. (Sadly for all those who have retold this hoary old tale, BTW, someone has debunked it on Snopes. Oh well.

In any case, it’s such a firm bit of received wisdom that who can doubt it? Nevertheless, I was intrigued by a bit of radiojournalism that suggested that some of the Catholic Church’s appalling response to pedophilia can be explained by the notion that the Pope is taking the long view. He simply doesn’t care about this month’s polls. His institution has been around for centuries, and he expects it to be around for centuries more…so, who cares about the opinions du jour? You’ll be dead, and the institutional memory will outlive you.

Taking this to back to the topic of corporations, maybe we should be glad they care about how public outcry affects this quarter’s stock price. Imagine if they didn’t, and took the long view, and whatever they thought they could weather in the long term, they simply ignored! The corporation has every reason to expect to outlive you and me so in some sense we should count ourselves as damn lucky we can get them to listen to us at all.

That is, until we finally get the corporate death penalty…but don’t hold your breath.

Our own Jacob Corvidae  is being honored with two different awards for Earth Day this year the Detroit FreePress Awards and the Michigan Earthday Expo awards.

The Freep says:

Its leadership is important because of its close affinity with small, fragile communities across Detroit. Where government has been tedious and bureaucratic, where private companies have been inconsistent and distant, WARM has been accessible and relevant.

And don’t miss the slideshow in the FreePress article.

Rock on Jacob!

Don’t miss it! This awesome event is going on all week (Earth Week) to encourage kids to turn off the electronics and go outside during the week. And it’s based on the great song by (my dear sweet friend) Amy Martin, sung by Ani Difranco and backed the Biomimicry Institute. How cool can you get?

There’s a free activities workbook you can download. You can listen to the song. You can join up with other kids around the country. It’s great – and you can find it all here.

My daughter got all excited at the beginning of 2010 because she realized that this was the year named in the song (which she was already a big fan of).

The whole CD is great, and not only has some of Amy’s best and funnest songwriting, but also features Bruce Cockburn, Dar Williams, Erin McKeown, Laura Love, and others.  Buy it for every cool teacher or kid you know and ask your local kid stores to carry it. The website also has free teacher resources, etc.

Rock it on, spread the news and sign up now!