RADIO SHOW TRANSCRIPT: 080606

Another evening downtown, another forum. This one is called "Our Transportation Future". The usual suspects are on stage: three professors and a city engineer. Smugness about our city invades the room. We have reached our goals for cars downtown, years early. The new buzz-word "eco-density" makes all the glass-walled condos sound so green. The local joke: the city has a new symbolic bird: the crane.

The mayor is pro-development. The Premier or Governor is a friend of developers. Everybody seems to feed on campaign donations from building bigger and bigger cities.

Pedestrians are still run down regularly in this model city. A two bedroom condo downtown sells for a quarter million dollars. Glossy full page advertisements show the new suave bourgeois couple luxuriating in their tiny mansions, with granite counter-tops, piled sixty stories high.

It's all set up like a magnet for the rich. Working class people can't afford anything in this planner's dream. Down below, not shown on the slides, a growing swarm of homeless people dig through the dumpsters for pop cans. I'll bet half the population is on drugs, legal or illegal, just to kill the pain. The gnawing sense of disconnection.

Everyone is part of the growth agenda. They either work for the developers, or struggle clean up their mess. The city tries to add enough bushes, and strips of grass, like billboards to remind the prisoners of by-gone nature.

Lost in a memory of real hills, with real seasons, something in me snaps. I interrupt the dream with a rude question:

[Alex's question: do we only plan for growth? Are bigger more tightly packed cities what humans really want?]

The basic answer is this: all over the world, humans are leaving villages and fields to found humungous cities. It is the greatest migration of all time, happening now. Where a movie once promised "if you build it they will come" - reality now shouts "build it or not, they are coming." Humans flock to shanty towns, to suburbs, to luxury town homes, built into brand name hotels. Even the most enlightened planners can only hope to steer the tide into something quasi-natural. Urban strategists become psychologists, trying to limit the spread of a new post-natural stress disorder syndrome.

This is Alex Smith, and you are listening to Radio Ecoshock. In this program, we'll hear at least half a dozen perspectives on the city, and alleged green development. Is global city building just a Ponzi scheme? An urban craze, another unsupportable bubble? Why does deep green critic Derrick Jensen claim cities always lead to fascism over the land?

In the background, high oil prices and limited supply are forcing the uber-realators to pause. Some academic and professional voices formerly shunned by the money-makers - are returning from exile. As we will hear, architects like Sir Norman Foster can reclaim their green beliefs. Sixties idea-man Buckminster Fuller is being recalled.

We'll hear a lot of voices in this show. You can download their complete speeches from our web site at ecoshock.org. To make it easy, find all the links from this program in the Ecoshock blog, at ecoshock.org/podcast The links will be right at the top of the entry for June 5th, 2008.

One radical city planner envisions replacing architecture with "Ecotecture." Richard Register is lately being dragged around the world, as people try to comprehend the new city.

Let's listen now, as Richard Register describes the dream, on KCSB radio, in Santa Barbara California.

[Register clip]

Richard Register's latest book is "Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance With Nature." His blog is ecocityviews.blogspot.com.

Back home from the transportation forum, I listen again. Actually, the speakers are the wrong target for my frustration and questions. They are friendly voices. Simon Fraser University Professor Anthony Perle is one to learn about. I recorded the launch of his new book, with Richard Gilbert, called "Transport Revolutions". You can download that from the transportation page of our web site, at ecoshock.org.

At the transportation forum, just as General Motors and Ford announced shut-downs of their infernal assembly plants, making climate-killing trucks and SUV's, Anthony Perle describes a different time, when car production stopped almost overnight, in the United States.

[Perle clip, car production ends.]

During the Second World War, the government and the people realized there was no time, or materials, to waste on large fancy cars. They stopped making personal vehicles, to fight Hitler's mad dream of power.

This time around, the decider-in-chief was accommodating toward the coming climate holocaust. Bush was the NASCAR president.

One of the Ford family, William Clay Ford, Jr., has objected to the giant gas guzzlers being made by his company. Perhaps he did not want the family name to be remembered as the ones who stopped the rain, the ones who brought the killer storms, the ones who melted the Arctic. But the Ford company continued to churn out oil hungry trucks and SUV's like the Expedition.

General Motors did not act to save the planet, or even to limit the flow of American jobs and money going overseas. Faced with scientific evidence of the greatest tragedy to threaten all life on the planet, a threat making Hitler look like a pipsqueak, General Motors responded bravely with.... The Hummer. On June 3rd, as customers deserted company gas guzzlers, GM announced it will close four truck plants. GM may sell the Hummer brand, or end production.

[wild cheering] [clip of the Gubernator Arnie Schwarzenegger saying: “All right bravo! One more car destroyed!”]

The Hummer. The end of a brazen symbol of climate-hating bravado. The car that says "I just don't care about our children's future." Make your own bumper stickers, people, and slap them on those gas-guzzling tanks: "I am killing the world."

GM reconsiders fuel efficiency just five or ten years too late, to save either the company's reputation, or the planet. Apparently, the greedy only react when their own clothes are on fire.

Professor Perle does have one example of a way out. While General Motors famously killed their own working electric car, Israel is working on a new transportation model.

[Perle electric car clip]

Regular Ecoshock listeners know that a whole crowd of people like Richard Heinberg, Julian Darley, and James Howard Kunstler, have been predicting an end to suburbia, as the era of cheap oil winds down. You can find Kunstler's first speech as a visiting scholar in the Radio Ecoshock shows for [dates] on our web site.

Likely you can guess how far-flung suburbs, with long commutes, feed greenhouse gases relentlessly into the sky. But did you know they also make people fat?

At the same forum in Vancouver, Professor Lawrence Frank, known to all as Larry, explained both the global warming and the new data on compact cities versus suburban obesity. Here is just a few short minutes from that talk, a quick shot taken from fast-moving slides, and years of published papers.

[Larry Frank on obesity and global warming]

The speeches of Larry Frank and Anthony Perle are available from our website, on the transportation page.

Here in Vancouver, Mayor Sam Sullivan has a new word for cramming people in as tightly as possible. In June 2006, Sullivan, flanked by some environmentalists and academics, launched a city planning approach called "EcoDensity." Then this business Mayor patented the term in his own name. Ecodensity aims to protect the local and global environment by creating tight, high population areas. With homes, shops, and work within walking or biking distance, car travel and emissions will be reduced. Allegedly the building spree of taller buildings, with smaller spaces will make housing more affordable, although there is no sign of that yet in Vancouver.

Sullivan is pushing this pro-development EcoDensity idea as a way to fight climate change. Predictably, residents of many neighborhoods have created a Coalition Against Eco-Density and For Livability. They want a Charter of Neighbourhood Rights to fight off mass rezoning for developers, and to protect existing neighborhoods.

Should all cities look like Manhattan? Will that save the climate?

Is that what humans need?

Coming up, I want to introduce another architect, our featured speaker for next week's show. Dr. Guido Wimmers brings some of the best low-energy building solutions, straight from Germany and Austria.

But first, let's join Sir Norman Foster, as he speaks to the Digital Life Design conference in Munich, January 2007. [www.dld-conference.com] This is one of the grand old men of building with natural light, to illuminate not just the insides of buildings, but people's spirits. I have recorded about ten minutes from that speech - and I urge you to go to TED - Technology, Entertainment and Design - at ted.com - to view the whole video, free. Then you will see the striking beauty of the buildings created or led by Norman Foster. Again, find that link in my blog at ecoshock.org/podcast [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/174]

[Foster clip]

Do you notice something ajar in Foster's ending though? While he championed the new green architecture, Foster ends with the grand scheme, projected as the world's largest building, now developing in China. What is it? A gargantuan airport - hangers for the oil-fuelled planes that will seed the sky with our destruction. Design for a future nightmare.

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An article in the Guardian newspaper, May 31st 2008, says that greenwash about supposedly eco-friendly buildings is blocking real progress. A report by The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment in the UK finds "green gadgets" are blocking real progress. The review of over 700 big construction projects going last two years found less than 10 actually focusing on sustainability. The CABE report names Sir Norman Foster's projects as part of the problem.

Matt Bell told the Guardian: ""There are some architects and developers who really get climate change, but most don't or choose not to. As a result we get a lot of greenwash, such as green gadgets and microtechnology stuck on to buildings, rather than a proper approach to sustainable design."

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Derrick Jensen, author of "Endgame" (give full title of book) says this twist is inevitable. Monster cities are never environmentally friendly. They only survive by dominating nature. Cities are by definition never self-sustaining. The citizens must drain as much as they can from the surrounding country-side, and from the rest of the natural world. When big cities are hungry, they fill needs by any means, by threats or actual use of force. Cities need armies, breed armies. That is a fact of history.

[Jensen clip]

Find more about Derrick Jensen at his website derrickjensen.org Derrick is spelled derrick.

[Song Dirty Town]

[James Howard Kunstler on City Declines]

That was James Howard Kunstler, speaking in Vancouver, January 24th, 2008. His whole two hour presentation is available from our website.

We are, you and I, also wild animals. Something in us loathes the city, even as we love it.

There is a long history of hating cities. The Romans and the Mongols destroyed them. Medieval people loved images of fallen cities with wandering sheep among the ruins. We blow them up in movies and in real wars. What a love-hate relationship!

In his book "Nuclear Fear" atomic historian Spencer Weart chronicles the long movement of intellectuals and traditionalists who have longed for an end or cities. They dream of starting over - a re-birth for troubled humanity.

Back in media land, lost among the glossy ads for condos with soaker tubs and members-only gyms, is the huge climate threat posed by energy hungry buildings.

The people doing the Architecture 2030 project took another look at buildings. Adding up the math from construction, building energy use, and maintenance, it turns out that buildings are responsible for almost half - 48 percent - of all energy consumption in the United States. And almost half of all the greenhouse gas emissions. The data came from the US Energy Administration.

Even scarier, about 76 percent of all the electricity generated in power plants is used in buildings. All that coal - or (shudder) nuclear gets wasted in buildings. Really, these energy towers and McMansions are just smokestacks, an excuse to liberate fossil carbon right into the helpless sky. Welcome to carbon city.

Part of the problem is our construction techniques. Here is Guido Wimmers explaining the concept of "heat bridges" - the way our buildings actually draw in cold during the winter, while spewing out wasted heat.

[Wimmer's clips]

That is Guido Wimmers, from his passive building workshop in Vancouver, May 24th.

[Kunstler clip - high rises doomed]

With soaring oil prices, some giant tower buildings may be approaching bankruptcy, near abandonment. It just costs too much to heat and cool these old-style monsters. This is a coming real estate collapse not yet reported. You heard it here. Some of big city buildings will be abandoned, like the crappy sub-prime housing of Cleveland.

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Tackling the problem of climate change caused by our buildings is even larger than the emissions caused by cars, trucks and planes. Yet we never hear about it.

The green building demands, the protests against skyscrapers, have not yet begun. But building protests will develop, once people realize where the carbon is coming from, and going to. If you care about the planet, will you end up protesting against cities themselves?

We have no idea what a sustainable city would look like. We have never lived in one.

Next week, on Radio Ecoshock, you and I will take step one. Dr. Guido Wimmers, formerly of Austria, now living in Vancouver, will lead us in an hour long workshop on passivhaus - the European technology of making super low-energy buildings. Houses that can be heated by your body and a few candles. Municipal buildings that barely sip on oil in winter, and don't need air-conditioning. Apartment buildings that make sense. Architecture, already here and now, that cuts energy consumption, and global warming gases, by 90 percent.

Join us next week for "Building Sanity" - the passivhaus workshop.

I am Alex Smith, inviting you to sample all our past programs, plus tons of good green audio, free from our web site at ecoshock dot org. As always, I thank you for taking an hour to care so much about our world.

Earlier you heard a clip from UNKLE's War Stories album.

We leave with the Beatles, back in a fabulous re-mix. The album is simply called "Love."

[Beatles, “Get Back”]