When someone has been working for nearly 50 years to answer a set of questions it is splendid to come across another person who has arrived at many of the same answers to those questions via a much different route.
In 1961 while standing in what we now call a Cluster (Lewisburg Square) in a place of the scale we now call a Village (Beacon Hill) in the Boston New Urban Region we were finally able to articulate questions that had bounced around in our head while growing up on a farm, in the desert and in what we now call the Northern Rocky Mountain Urban Support Region.
The complexity of the questions was magnified by studying forestry, physics, mathematics, architecture and philosophy in Montana and Hawaii and by military service and travel in most of states of the US of A.
It took until 2000, aided by more studies, teaching at three universities, extensive travel in Europe, the Carribean and North America as well as working for some very smart clients to be in a position to set down a comprehensive Conceptual Framework and the Vocabulary necessary to address these questions in The Shape of the Future.
Imagine our delight at encountering the work of Richard Register! We have not met Register and do not agree with everything he writes but we do agree on a lot. The areas of agreement range from the problems with settlement patterns that require extensive or exclusive use of Autonomobiles, to the level of energy and resource efficiency one can expect from functional human settlement patterns, to what is happening to put citizens back in jeopardy in the New Orleans New Urban Region, to what Bill Gates and Warren Buffett could better be doing with their money.
Register’s base of operation and his current hands-on projects are focused in the Community and Subregion where we went to law school so we have an appreciation for the places he is trying to make better. His work takes him around the world and his observations about the places we have also experienced are on target. His insights into those we have not yet seen are enlightening.
Where does serendipity come in? We found out about Register when we contacted a college roommate to congratulate him on being named a Professor Emeritus at the University of Montana. His daughter, Kristin Miller, works with Register in Oakland, a Zentrum in the San Francisco Bay New Urban Region. We quoted Kristin in PART I of THE PROBLEM WITH CARS. We have not met Kristin either but heard about her years ago when her father was a struggling grad student at the University of Texas. Miller and Register are hard at work getting ready to host the seventh International Ecocity Conference (www.ecocityworldsummit.org )
We will be quoting Register in PART IV of THE PROBLEM WITH CARS and will be reviewing his book “Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature.” in Chapter 16 of TRILO-G. (Back in 1973 we started planning, building and managing what became the Village scale enclave of Burke Centre with the logo “Community in Harmony with Nature.” Burke Centre is home to around 20,000 citizens living in as much harmony with nature as is possible in National Capital Subregion and stay within the regulations of Fairfax County, VDOT, et. al.)
Register’s main web site is www.ecocitybuilder.org He maintains a Blog on that site where he post his current thinking. You can learn about the Denis Hayes Paradox – “Why are environmental Organizations winning so many battles and losing the war?” and the Richard Register Pledge: “This is the last new car I will every buy.”
Ecocity Builders publishes an enewsletter. It was a “perspective” in the March – April 2008 edition titled “Enduring Civilization” that cemented my respect for Register’s thinking. He outlines four parameters and two guidelines for future action. They have the heft of Fundamental Change.
Unfortunately the enewsletter is not accessible from the web site. If you would like a copy, send me an email and I will forward it.
We are calling attention to Registers work not so much for the Denizens who post comments on Bacons Rebellion Blog but for those who follow our columns and posts and communicate with us directly. We are chagrined to say some who find our work useful refuse to post or comment on a web site that is listed in some sources as being a “right” site and has contributors who are identified as being “right of center,” libertarian or conservative.
Our view is that if those who believe that it is imperative that civilization achieve a sustainable trajectory do not stop tossing rocks at one another then an evolution toward sustainability will never happen. See “Good News: Bad Reporting” 5 March 2008.
Alas, we will probably never be friends with Register because he has centered his work around developing “Ecocities.” We have found that the word “city” is a Core Confusing Word. But then he is working on “urban Villages” so there may be hope.
OK, we will not mention Core Confusing Words when we meet Richard Register.
EMR