tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-304525332012-02-16T11:53:41.472-08:00Writings, rants and recommendations about rebuilding a healthy relationship between cities and nature.Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.comBlogger141100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-70895900585185900852010-06-11T22:28:00.000-07:002010-06-11T22:32:50.483-07:00

Anyone visiting downtown Berkeley lately will notice the advancing demolition of the nine story slab that used to be the California Department of Health Services Building. Big machines munch into its gray concrete like steel-jawed dinosaurs ripping up clouds of dust tamped down by fountains of water. It’s quite spectacular, actually. The site’s next incarnation will be as the UC Berkeley Helios

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-16344517606227799072010-04-18T18:02:00.000-07:002010-04-19T23:15:49.820-07:00

I landed back in the Bay Area about a week ago. Five talks in Korea, one in Barcelona where I participated in a “degrowth” conference, one in Brooklyn, another in Manhattan and a final at Ecovillage at Ithaca two miles outside of Ithaca, New York. It was a tough job but somebody had to do it.Changwon, South KoreaWow! Almost a whole ecocity fractal!Out of the snow of Seoul I flew the length of

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-37345303693221312342010-01-06T14:23:00.000-08:002010-01-11T10:22:20.751-08:00

by Richard Register, President, Ecocity Builders and conference series founderThe Eighth International Ecocity Conference (Ecocity 2009) is over and so is the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. It is time for some assessments and moving on. Let’s try to make sense and progress of the United Nations event despite the general disappointment, even sense of betrayal and despite

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-32814387872594162702008-08-20T17:29:00.000-07:002008-08-20T17:32:36.777-07:00

I just can’t believe it. Are we really where I think we are? Or rather more accurately, where and when we are. I’m just sitting here with our Methuselah seedling, gift from the Champion Tree International Project, courtesy the US Forest Service three years ago.This baby tree and I share a small apartment and home office in Oakland California with two others. The Methuselah Baby is only about five

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-35457916689229738002008-06-25T21:12:00.000-07:002008-06-25T21:14:51.396-07:00

The following is a short essay written by Richard Register as the published introduction to the companion book for the “Theory and Model of International Ecological City” subconference of the “2007 China International Architecture Design & Scene Planning Exhibition and Forum on Urban Planning of Senior Government Officials” in Langfang, Hebei Province, China, June 19 and 20, 2008. The book,

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-1921286037379241902008-06-19T12:42:00.000-07:002008-06-19T12:44:21.425-07:00

Analysis, June, 2008It's the Economy, Stupid!Remember that line? The Clinton for President campaign in 1992 came up with it in their victorious race against George H. W. Bush. Simple minded as it was, it seemed to have worked.Here we are now with the largest one-day increase in oil prices in history, $10.75, and the highest closing price in history, $138.54/barrel. Also today we have reports of

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-50864132645081557552008-02-02T20:49:00.000-08:002008-02-02T20:53:57.296-08:00

In the world of people attempting work to make human society moresustainable there are two very large generally unexamined problems:1. Making small counterproductive “improvements” without understanding the whole system – thus failing to understand the dynamics of longer range failure.2. Failing to address the built infrastructure of city, town and village as the foundation for arrangement of

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-66287484390410683032007-05-29T16:15:00.000-07:002007-05-29T16:18:46.543-07:00

John King’s column on the future of downtown Berkeley (Chronicle, Tuesday May 15) represents an all too prevalent and self-righteous superiority evident in the fraternity of urban designers and the critics promoting them. They think cities have nothing to do with nature, that it’s beneath the dignity of the urban realm.Gary Larson best illustrates what I mean about. The characters in this

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-39748636107057103162007-02-23T21:18:00.000-08:002007-02-23T21:24:49.054-08:00

My friend Ken Schneider was laid to rest, more or less, yesterday. He disappeared. He drove a beat up old car deep into inaccessibility in Utah a year and three months ago. The car was found but not him. The Sheriff’s department, family and friends, dogs and helicopters couldn’t turn him up anywhere in those vast canyon lands of echoes and whispering winds. And when he disappeared he could

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-17219357208780828852007-01-06T11:29:00.000-08:002007-01-06T11:34:36.464-08:00

Some of us in the urban creeks restoration movement were treated to the first signs of the last throes of an automobile/land use fad as big as the country it transformed. Recently, (November 6,2006) members of the community activist group in Berkeley, California called Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza met with one of the representatives of the car culture that rocketed to prominence after

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-1158432944130180072006-09-16T11:54:00.000-07:002006-09-17T18:47:18.276-07:00

My Dear Blog Readers,I just learned of an article in the New York Times indirectly praising our very own Google (which I use almost every day). It has funded the Google Foundation which is now set to promote better cars. I met Larry Brilliant once upon a time in a basement in Berkeley - about 1976 - and he showed us a slide show of his work putting an end to smallpox!Fantastic! It was

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-1158031269012192522006-09-11T20:20:00.000-07:002006-09-13T18:29:46.526-07:00

Note: Delivered to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, September 7, 2006.A bicyclist friend of mine appeared the other day in a T-shirt reading, “Ask me how I lost 3,600 pounds in a day.” By getting rid of his car, obviously! I’m going to be talking about some of the big things we are going to need to change. For example, designing cities around something that weights 3,600 pounds instead of

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-1152488787067279642006-07-09T16:45:00.000-07:002006-07-15T14:24:31.976-07:00

Talk about something unpopular to talk about! Not just one but the two cornerstones of the American Dream criticized at the same time. But it's not me who is attacking them but they who are attacking us.Here's the way I slipped into that subject. My friend decided to calculate her ecological footprint both before and after she gave up her car and moved into an apartment. Before, she was

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30452533.post-1151612508518773192006-06-29T13:20:00.000-07:002006-07-03T16:01:29.376-07:00

There is Plan A, which is business as usual – humans struggling to multiply, live longer in better health world wide, some more equitably treated than others, some wildly privileged, some just plain killed because they are in the way of someone else’s idea of prospering. Plan A is failing disastrously as indicated by global heating, accelerating species extinctions and an end to cheap energy,

Building Cities in Balance with Naturehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047835996051894164noreply@blogger.com1