Do Sustainable Cities Have a Future?

[marmar]

from the American Prospect, via AlterNet:


Do Sustainable Cities Have a Future?
By Neil Peirce, The American Prospect. Posted February 21, 2007.

Smart growth is newly fashionable. But what will it take to turn fashion into national policy?

This article is reprinted from the American Prospect.

A "green revolution" is burgeoning in America's cities and towns.

And it's a surprise. Six years ago, as we exited an economically exuberant but perilously polluting 20th century, the idea would have seemed chimerical. True, by the 1990s we'd begun to talk about community and global sustainability; President Clinton even appointed a White House council on the topic. But the conversation proved to be a tad ahead of its time. It exhibited little of the intensity with which the green ideal is today being talked up, and in some places, truly implemented.

A set of mix-and-match developments explain the change. Foremost and scariest among them is the mounting scientific evidence of fast-advancing, potentially cataclysmic global climate change. Then there is the growing realization of oil's short-term future in the dangerous world that September 11 dramatized.

Among the results are heightened interest in hybrid cars and renewed focus on wind farms, solar energy, biofuels, and other renewables; a burgeoning "smart-growth" movement in our states and regions; worry on the health front about sedentary lifestyles, obesity, loss of natural connections; green roofs and strong revival of urban parks; and breakthroughs to pinpoint waste and pollution in our great infrastructure systems, enabled by more sophisticated geographic information system (GIS) technology.

If the new, green, urban alchemy has an epicenter, it's Chicago. Once the embodiment of smoky factories and belching locomotives, the erstwhile City of the Big Shoulders has led the new green wave with beds of flowers and blossoming pots hung from new downtown street lamps. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/47728/

[unpossibles]

1. K&R n/t

[piedmont]

2. Well, UNsustainable ones certainly don't

It's a tautology that something that's NOT sustainable can't be sustained-- therefore the resistence to sustainability efforts must be coming from people who believe that our society is sustainable already. I'm not sure what the hell they're smoking.

[Porcupine]

3. Well, first show us one and we can talk about it. nt.

.

[ramapo]

4. Exactly

There certainly is no city remotely close to being sustainable. I doubt if there are any small towns or villages that might be classified as such. The country, oops I mean the world, is speeding in the opposite direction.

[GliderGuider]

5. Well, here are five axioms of sustainability

1. (Tainter’s Axiom): Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.

2. (Bartlett’s Axiom): Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

3. To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of natural replenishment.

4. To be sustainable, the use of non-renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is declining, and the rate of decline must be greater than or equal to the rate of depletion.

5. Sustainability requires that substances introduced into the environment from human activities be minimized and rendered harmless to biosphere functions.

Do we think there is a single city on the planet that meets these criteria?

(Thanks to Richard Heinberg for these axioms.)

[Porcupine]

6. Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, Troy, Pompei......

http://www.jorgetutor.com/libia/sabratha2/sabratha8.htm

You get the idea.