Uncategorized

18 Nov Historic Ecocity Breakthroughs

by Richard RegisterI’ve lately struck up an e-mail correspondence with Shin-pei Tsay, friend and colleague of Deborah Gordon author of Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability, co-authored by Daniel Sperling with introduction by Arnold Schwarzenegger, my very own former governor who I met at a breakfast place in 1971 on Venice Beach a couple hundred feet from “Muscle Beach” where he was working out at the time, pre-movie star days. Shin-pei is presently Director of Research and Development for a start-up nonprofit in New York City called TransitCenter, Inc. that deals with public transportation related issues. We had been talking about major changes in cities and habits and attitudes toward them. She signed off a couple days ago like this: “Let me know if you have any breakthroughs from the 70s through the 80s.” That got me thinking and I came up with some from ecocity perspectives, but leading into other “breakthroughs” sliding into more modern times, post 2000. But first…There are the changes, not exactly breakthroughs, but good signs nonetheless and it’s educational to think about them some, cheer ourselves up some after thinking about climate change, species dying out, economic and social problem, the Middle East, etc. and on and on. I’ll come up with some of those, illustrated, the assess what I think, if not breakthrough, are important steps or stones – milestones – along a way toward ecocity improvement.Mariposa Grove De-pavingMany of you know that “depaving” has been a preferred activity of Ecocity Builders from the start. My own first depaving project was for the San Diego Ecology Centre in 1973 when the group hired me to organize Earth Day events of a wide variety. That first depaving project was at the Campus Lutheran Center, hosted by the enthusiastic and imaginative Jim Nessheim, still there in San Diego. The project tore up about six parking places he courageously donated to the cause and put in a Native American food garden featuring corn, beans and squash: corn as a pole for the beans to climb, beans for fixing nitrogen in the soil and all three including the squash soaking up the nutrients providing a pretty balanced set of vegetables, plus it got stunning coverage in the local media.

13 Oct 24 Years of Ecocity Conferences

by Richard Register, Founder of the International Ecocity Conference Series and President of Ecocity Builders

First…

[caption id="attachment_3655" align="alignright" width="200"] Richard Register at Ecocity World Summit 2013[/caption]I’ll get to highlights shortly but first… Am I proud of launching the first of the International Ecocity Conferences? Well it does feel great to see that in Nantes the tradition marches on. And yes we who put on the first in the series worked fabulously hard in 1989 and l990 and had some real successes at the time – as I noticed so did Senator of the Loire Atlantique départnent and Conference Chair Ronan Dantec and Annie-Claude Thiolat, Project Manager for the Tenth International Ecocity Conference and the rest of their crew. It all took place in Nantes, France, the European Commissions’ European Green Capital 2013 and home of Ecocity 10, aka, The Nantes Ecocity World Summit. (The European Commission is, says Wikipedia, “the executive body of the European Union responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union’s treaties and day-today running of the EU.”)

01 Sep Reflecting on Ecocity Times

by Richard Register, President, Ecocity BuildersAre these ecocity times? Perhaps I should put a question mark at the end of my title. Putting forward that notion – that we might be at the dawn of ecocity times – might produce some interesting insights, maybe strategies for success.We are approaching our Tenth International Ecocity Conference to be held in Nantes, France and it is intriguing to notice how much Ecocity Builders and the whole ecocity enterprise going back several decades now has seeped into the unconsciousness of what Tielhard de Chardin called the “noosphere,” aka “noesphere.” By that the Catholic priest, philosopher and evolution theorist meant the total flux of consciousness, unconsciousness and preconsciousness, all that information plus the physical substance housing, remembering, accessing and carrying that information, which is our brains, books, phone wires and microwaves, radio sets, even our schools and cities, and etc. You could even add that the neurological material of all the other animals, their mating calls and displays, warnings of aggression, and even the rudimentary signs of some kind of awareness in plants all participate in wildly various way in the noosphere. You could think of the noosphere in brief as the planetary brain/mind. That planetary noosphere has recently been practicing the design, planning and building, in so many places around the world, bits and pieces of what an ecocity would be if… if all those pieces were drawn together and organized well into a physical new type of city. That’s why I say the ecocity features that are being built now are emerging from an unconscious place rather than a conscious one: it seem impossible for today’s noosphere to quite yet get the overall design of the whole urban system, the largest physical component of the planetary brain going about its citified business. But, ecocity neurological information flux and communications could go live and conscious any time now.[caption id="attachment_3488" align="alignnone" width="408"] From “Mannahatta – A Natural History of New York City” we see a satellite image of the greater New York metropolitan area taken in 2009. It is pretty much the same today.[/caption]