[caption id="attachment_1944" align="alignleft" width="300"] Anil Chitrakar leading tour of Patan[/caption]Our hosts included Dr. Sudarshan Tiwari and Anusuya Joshi representing Shanta Lall Mulmi since unfortunately Shanta’s father ended up at exactly that time in a medical crisis and emergency operation to save his life, a successful...
A friend wrote recently saying she wasn’t aware of “ecovillages” that had a strong edge between higher density full community and immediately adjacent open space. Since I think the visual image of such an arrangement is so interesting and important, I’ll just record my response here.Thanks for your note and observation. I have seen some regular villages, not self-consciously ecovillages, that are extremely compact, in China in the 3 story range, in Turkey and Nepal in the six story range, with natural, grazing and/or agricultural land or waters immediately next door. City walls up against open space. There is Tori Superiori in Italy where a group of people hoping to create a self-conscious ecovillage purchased this almost single structure hyper compact small medieval village. Looks fascinating. I'd love to visit.[/caption]If we take up less room there’s room for all of us, including the other animals and the plants of this planet. There are three largest categories of shrinking back to this generosity of living: 1.) heading toward far fewer of us, leaving room for a smaller “all” of us humans, 2.) reducing the scale and impact of our agriculture system and 3.) building our cities, towns and villages literally much smaller, based on the human body’s dimensions and needs for energy, shelter and land as compared with building cities for the demands of automobiles. Get those three very large topics covered and we might just get to live here in style (if not oppulent waste) for a long, long time.[/caption]Sixty years ago it was the American rush to the suburbs financed by the national government of the USA: GI loans, deductible house interest payments at tax time and free, free at last, thank God all mighty free at last freeways. (Actually, the term was coined by Brooklyn, New York lawyer and urban planner Edward Basset in 1930 but coming on strong only during and since the 1950s.)[/caption]I used to joke about my unusual life, being a sculptor, environmental activist, development politician. I lived in a mountain village in New Mexico at 9,000 feet (back to the land!), in a studio storefront in Venice, alifornia (loved the art scene), at Paolo Soleri’s experimental town, Arcosanti, Arizona (to reshape cities around the world). Enjoyed enough drugs, sex and rock n roll that Bob Dylan could never accuse me of letting someone else get my kicks for me. (Met him, Joan Baez and Jim Morrison along the way.) I’m traveling all over the world these days to give speeches on eco-cities so we don’t wreck the planet, trying thereby to get beyond jet fuel hypocrisy to better than balanced karma.
[/caption]I went to a movie the other night and – my mistake – got there on time: I had to sit through ten minutes of ads, plus four reminders to turn your cell phone off, then previews that went on and on. What’s with this relentless over the top violence? Does everything have to be blown up, glass shattered, blood spattered? What about all those violent video games sucking up hundreds of billions of hours of humanity’s time? Couldn’t something more positive, productive, non-violent and creative hold our attention?[/caption].....That’s pronounced CAR-cen-taur-OP-olis.While I was living in Lost Angeles in the 1960s, lost in the smog, back when each breath seared your throat and lungs and hot tears rolled down your cheeks under dark mid-day skies, this European journalist came touring through town. He was writing an article about the city of car centaurs, the LA citizens that were half car and half person. “Truly said,” I said, “this here is Carcentauropolis, for sure.” It was the city to coin the term, piecing together smoke and fog. It was the city of the future with its own PR department called Hollywood, leading the charge to super mobility, the envy of the world – and the world is still dreamily following. Carcentauropolis victorious![/caption]Happy Earth Day! Here comes the oil spill! BP’s Deepwater Horizon, state of the art oil drilling platform digging into the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico 5,000 feet below explodes, killed 11 workers, burned into early morning Earth Day April 2010, toppled, sunk and released what may end up as the worst technologically caused natural disaster in American history. Blame is everywhere: BP, Transocean the owners of the drilling rig, insufficient regulation, a faulty “blowout preventer.”