While I have not read any of his books, I attended a talk last night by Bill McKibben, environmental writer whose books include the bestseller The End of Nature and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. The local Illahee Lecture Series sponsored his visit as a part of its How Cities Learn: Portland’s Place on Earth series. McKibben’s talk was titled “What Comes Next: Livable Cities on a Strained Planet” and I figured it was particularly relevant to my studies this term as pertaining to the City Repair capstone I’m taking.

One thing that struck me is that there was hardly anyone in the crowded venue who looked younger than 25. This isn’t the first time I’ve attended a speaking event in Portland with implications for the environmental or political future and seen an audience almost 80% comprised of people in my parents’ generation. Where are the young people whose work is cut out for them over the next few decades?

Various jottings from the lecture:

• The world is this incredibly physical place
  
• Those in poorer countries have much to teach us
  
• Young mayor of Curitiba, Brazil (model of urban planning) read Jane Jacobs and decided to (audaciously) create a pedestrian mall downtown… over a weekend
  
• When in conflict, the public transportation always wins over the car
  
• Mayor’s popularity rating was at 94% when he left office!
  
• Make a city that works and one finds ecological sustainability is what works best
  
• More green space per inhabitant than any other city on earth
  
• Local shepherd with flocks “mows” the city park lawns

• Much of the work of the next hundred years will be about scaling back what has been built up over the past hundred years (if we last that long)
  
• Global warming has been hard to “get” because it’s emotionally counter-intuitive. It was a coming-of-age moment to get that it was fact, to acknowledge a limit to growth
  
• Addressed peak oil… global warming and peak oil as twin sides of the vise
  
• Recommended The Long Emergency by Kunstler
  
• Alternative furl sources: coal - not a possibility (too dirty); hydrogen - can’t scale up in time; nuclear - too expensive to scale up; Wind, solar, cellulosic biomass - take too long to scale up
  
• Current high consumption level is this sort of “fin de siecle liquidation sale”

• One possibility, and it may be a good one, is despair(!)
  
• The average bite of food in this country travels 1500 miles before it’s on your plate
  
• It is stimulating to work with the limited seasonal crops in one’s cooking
  
• We’ve become so dependent on a fossil fuel network
  
• Cuba’s good example of localized food supply… Havana is fed largely by locally-grown food

• Biggest obstacle is psychological
  
• The hyper-individualism we take as normal is what’s in our way; it’s a sense of entitlement (we just want what we want when we want it)
  
• It seems consumption is more hard-wired than fertility; consumption’s gone up while fertility rates have gone down
  
• Most vital urban restructuring projects are that which build community
  
• A real community is that which is willing to be bored by things that interest other people - it’s the world as NOT revolving around me
  
• “The goal of the city is to make its citizens more gregarious.” - Curitiba mayor

I’m wondering if it’s workable to share visions and solutions with people without arming them first with full knowledge of the situation. McKibben seems to think that we can skip over the “scary” facts and just start sharing visions and alternatives with people. He advocates environmentalism as a side effect; claims it’s not powerful enough to take on peak oil and global warming, whereas creating community and enriching lives is.

Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 at 11:22 am.
Filed under Social/Cultural.
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