"Cities Can Save the Earth"

A bicyclist friend of mine appeared the other day in a T-shirt reading, "Ask me how I lost 3,600 pounds in a day." By getting rid of his car, obviously! Cars are big and the infrastructure that provides for them is even much bigger yet. The mass/energy/spatial requirements of cars, as compared to human beings, is on the order of hundreds to one.

If one designs an infrastructure - buildings, streets and open spaces and systems for supply, recycling and disposal – to go along with one set of things that are 30 time bigger and heavier than the other, car bodies versus human bodies, very different results are likely, right?

Late though the hour may be for dealing with the triple crisis of climate, extinctions and energy, the flood of money and resources and potential it represents is colossally enormous. It's like a giant fire hose aimed in the wrong direction, accomplishing in many cases exactly the opposite of what it should do. Imagine shifting that intense stream gradually in the right direction. Little by little, then ever more quickly we'd have the transition to a kind of city that can bring CO2 in the atmosphere down to below what it was at the beginning of the industrial area. Maybe it really can.

(2006-09-14 13:10:53 SGT) [Env] Permalink

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