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.
-----------
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."
------------
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.
=========
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”]