Bill McKibben
"Beyond Natural Resources: Vision & Community"
Tuesday, April 19, 2005, 12:30 PM
BILL McKIBBEN is a prolific writer, and author of nine books,
including his bestseller, The End of Nature. A former staff writer for
the New Yorker, his work appears regularly in Harpers, the Atlantic
Monthly and the New York Review of Books. McKibben continues to
question society's path, whether is be biotechnology, resource wars,
or population growth, and advocates for simplifying our everyday
lives. McKibben also looks for hope from other paces, like the city of
Curitiba in Brazil, where urban innovation thrives.LECTURE SUMMARY
Journalist and author Bill McKibben gave the fifth presentation in the 2005 Illahee Lecture Series "How Cities Learn," beginning with an inspiring description of a “City that Works”…Curitiba, Brazil.
McKibben first stumbled into Curitiba while reporting another story, and in the course of a casual walk around town, realized that this was unlike any city he had ever visited. It felt different. It was walkable. It was green. It was gregarious.
A city of three million, in the relatively prosperous south of Brazil, Curitiba had all the problems of many developing-world cities: growing flavelas (slums), poor public transportation, chronic air pollution, grit and grime…
It also had, back in 1970, a visionary young mayor, Jaime Lerner. An architect by training and an optimist by nature, Lerner set out boldly to solve problems. He rejected a massive raised freeway (the standard traffic solution in that era). Instead he mobilized the entire municipal workforce to rip up the main thoroughfare in the central business district and replace it with a pedestrian mall. In a weekend. He created a bus system that works more like light rail, and carries more people than the New York subway system. He solved a growing disease epidemic by offering flavela-dwellers bags of food in return for bags of their garbage. By preserving riparian areas, he created enough green space to eliminate the need for engineered flood control. An added benefit of this green space: increased property values and a stronger tax base.
What can Portland learn from Curitiba? We found out when Jaime Lerner visited us for a special lecture on June 8th.
The second half of McKibben’s talk scaled up from the hopeful story of Curitiba to the sobering reality of two global trends that all cities, all places really, must address to be livable, let alone successful. The two sides of the vise: global warming and the end of oil. Both are currently on track to change our world and the way we live in it. We’ve already warmed the earth from an average of 59 to 60 degrees in the last hundred years. We’re on track to take it to an average of 65 by the year 2100. That doesn’t seem like much – the difference between a light sweater and shirtsleeve weather.
But a 65-degree average temperature will make the planet warmer than it has been during the entire 10 million years of hominid evolution. Ice will melt, sea-levels will rise, refugees will flee, and crops will fail, like scenes from a bad Hollywood movie.
On top of that, hundreds of millions of people are looking to move up to first world living standards. Not necessarily sub-zeros, Hummers, and 4,000 square foot homes. People just want refrigeration, private transportation, and a home that holds up in a tsunami. Even so, they’ll need energy for all this, and since oil production will peak before 2010, they’ll look to other sources – like coal (which is dirtier and less concentrated). This is a big problem.
McKibben conceded that despair, of course, is an understandable reaction to all the bleak news. His outlook on technological fixes was not particularly hopeful either. Why? This is because the technology mostly already exists, but we’re not using it. Rather, he sees the psychological aspect of these challenges as far more important. McKibben maintains that a society centered on the individual will have a hard time adapting to the changes in store for us. But he maintains the outlook is far from gloomy. Other industrialized countries have already made huge strides in solving over-consumption and global-warming issues. And they’re far more committed to solving these issues than the U.S., even though they’ve already taken the easiest steps.
The solution, according to McKibben, lies in our ability as communities, as regions, to come to a vision of our collective lives that inspires us, that results in a “net increase in satisfaction.” Our current consumer culture promises that satisfaction, but doesn’t deliver. Fifty years ago we consumed one third of what we do now per capita and three quarters of us claimed to be “very satisfied” with our lives. What has our tripling of consumption bought us? Today less than a third of Americans consider themselves as being "very satisfied."
McKibben concludes that as energy costs increase, cities in the coming century will become more regional in their search for resources and business. We’ll trade recipes instead of ingredients. Which cities will thrive? Those cities that have leadership in synch with community need to create a common vision for addressing global warming and the end of oil. There is much we can learn from Curitiba about vision and community, but just as much that we’ll have to invent right here in Portland.
Read Essays by Bill McKibben online:
Read an interview with Bill McKibben from his visit to Portland in the Sustainable Industries Journal!
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