10 Ecological Approaches to Fulfilling Human Needs
Good solutions exist only in proof, and are not to be expected from absentee owners or absentee experts. Problems must be solved in work and in place, with particular knowledge, fidelity, and care, by people who will suffer the consequences of their mistakes. There is no theoretical or ideal practice.
—WENDELL BERRY1
THE OVERARCHING GOAL of an ecological society is to maintain the long-term health of the biosphere while equitably providing for human needs. People will eat healthy food, live in housing in well-designed cities or rural communities, breathe clean air, drink clean water, have access to good sanitation facilities, pursue health-promoting cultural, intellectual and physical activities, and develop their full potential in whatever directions they please. To provide for these needs while minimizing environmental harm, resilient and ecologically sound processes and practices will be created and maintained—for food production, energy production, water provision and conservation, the health system, transportation, and the production and distribution of housing, clothing, furniture, appliances, and so on, as well as repurposing and recycling buildings, factories, and products at the end of their useful lives.
On a global basis and within every country, a huge amount of change is needed to provide everyone with what might be considered the basic minimum of a good life. As discussed in chapter 1, billions of people are hungry or malnourished, suffer poor or no sanitation facilities, and live on a daily income of less than $2. (Even in the richest country in the world, one in five children suffers from food insecurity.) Hundreds of millions have no access to clean drinking water, needed medicines, or regular healthcare. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa have no access to electricity. Many more millions of people around the world die or have their health impaired because they are breathing polluted air.
At the same time, fewer billionaires than can fit in a van (8 people) own more wealth than the total owned by the poorer half of the world’s people. In addition to the direct indications of human need resulting from obscene disparities in wealth and resource distribution, there is a massive degradation of soil, large animals and fish stocks are being decimated, plant pollinators are threatened, and biodiversity loss and land-use changes are undermining and threatening the stability of ecosystems and ultimately our future ability to obtain sufficient food and water.
These problems cannot be solved in societies dominated by the quest for profits, with solutions proposed that are inadequate or even counterproductive. Rationality of actions is evaluated by considering what is best for business. But what if social equality and environmental considerations become our paramount concerns? Approaches that are irrational when viewed from the point of view of a capitalist economy become perfectly rational when the primary goal is the good of the biosphere and every member of our species. Viable and ecologically sound solutions are possible only when our interactions with each other and the environment are guided by what is needed for the good of all humankind and for the stability and health of the natural world.
Our purpose in this chapter is not to provide complete solutions to all the various aspects of human interaction with the rest of the natural world. Not only is this an impossible task, but doing so runs counter to a vision of society in which everyone is involved in decision making. But there are readily available realistic approaches to dealing with critical aspects of human activity such as growing food, providing renewable energy, and renovating polluted waters. These have been developed by people experimenting with new ideas and techniques, coming up with more ecologically and socially sound possibilities that provide windows into our future. We are continually learning about the world around us, and more is known every day that will help people design and use technologies appropriate to a more ecologically sound and socially just world. But the systematic implementation of ecological techniques and technologies that are already known could go a long way to regenerating a healthy environment while providing people’s needs.
Rather than the reductionist approach commonly applied to science and society, whereby only the individual parts of complicated systems are investigated, this will be a whole-system approach. A focus on individual issues in isolation can create all sorts of problems by missing the larger view of how all the parts fit together and interact. For example, in agriculture, a reductionist approach leads to simplified agricultural ecosystems with numerous environmental problems.2
What if we look at farming differently? What if we first internalize environmentalist Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, characterized by changing the “role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain members and citizens of it? It implies respect for his fellow members, and also respect for the community as such.”3 Instead of thinking of the obstacles that arise when growing crops or raising animals as individual problems, what if we consider them as symptoms of an unhealthy agricultural ecosystem? We can then develop an entirely different framework for understanding farming and evaluating other social and ecological questions.
Viewed in this way, the ethics, art, and practice of farming with the objective of feeding people healthy food can be consciously considered and agricultural ecosystems can be rationally managed in ways that are more in harmony with the rest of the natural world. This is a preventive approach to farming and food that builds ecological and social health and resilience, as opposed to the common reactive approach that waits until problems develop and then tries to deal with them individually in piecemeal fashion, relying primarily on technology and the need for profit. We still need to rely on a variety of individual practices. However, the appropriate ones can be selected for specific situations and creatively combined and modified to achieve the goal of promoting farms or other systems that mimic relatively undisturbed systems that are biologically diverse, healthy, and productive.
Such a proactive approach would also characterize healthcare, whereby we would strive to prevent disease and ailments rather than relying on treating them after the fact. Preventive approaches begin by studying the underlying systemic problem and then analyzing how to modify the system—not just an isolated individual practice or symptom—to reduce or eliminate the root causes of negative phenomena such as diabetes in humans, an insect attack on a food crop in farming, or air pollution caused by extraction, processing, and use of fossil fuels. Many of the problems that are treated as technical are in fact social. For example, African men do not have a particularly high incidence of high blood pressure, although it is a common ailment among African American men. The occurrence of high blood pressure, asthma, and other illnesses can be greatly reduced by eliminating poverty, inequality, racism, and pollution.
Hand-in-hand with preventive procedures and techniques is another critical aspect of an ecological approach to managing human interactions with the rest of the biosphere: adaptive management. This means that people need to be open to change or unanticipated conditions (including those occurring as a consequence of new practices) and adapt by changing techniques or strategies in appropriate ways—and then evaluating the results. This is not to be confused with adaptation to climate change, which is an example of a reactive approach whereby climate change is anticipated but little is done to prevent it, requiring people to “adapt.”
The ideas discussed below are not exhaustive treatments of the issues. Rather, they are presented as examples to indicate that we already know a great deal about how to live in a world without planetary degradation. People directly involved—whether they are farmers, industrial and city workers, city inhabitants, engineers and scientists, and the surrounding communities—will work out the details tailored to local conditions.
How we grow food is one of the most fundamental ways in which humans and the rest of the planet interact.4 In short, the objective is to manage the field and farm as a social-ecological whole, with the ultimate goal of building the strengths of resilient and productive ecosystems into the agricultural ecosystem.
Everything that a farmer or gardener does in the field should be aimed at accomplishing one or more of three general goals: creating habitat above and below ground that promotes the growth of healthy plants; acting to pressure organisms that harm crops (pests); and enhancing the presence and populations of beneficial organisms. Many practices have multiple effects and contribute to two or even all three general goals.
Farming practices normally have effects on conditions above-ground as well as those in the soil. However, it is helpful to discuss soil and aboveground effects separately. Here are examples of practices that build some of the strengths of relatively undisturbed healthy ecosystems into the aboveground habitat of agricultural ecosystems:
• Select varieties of crops not only for yield and taste but also for resistance to local pests and adaptation to the climatic region and soil.
• Use mixed cropping instead of a single species. Mixed cropping, or polyculture, can include multistory cropping in which grains such as corn or vegetables such as carrots are interspersed with fruit trees or berry bushes,. or growing beans, corn, and squash together, the “Three Sisters” of the Iroquois and other Native American peoples. Alternately, high-growing leguminous trees planted in sufficient numbers and arrangement will have fertilizing effects when their leaves fall, reduce wind speeds, and make fields cooler, thus helping to conserve water while not interfering with production of the annual crop grown in the field.5 Non-leguminous trees can also be grown in an agro-forestry system, producing mulch from harvested branches, wood (after trees are mature), and shade from intense sunlight. Polycropping tends to raise productivity per acre through better use of resources, lessens damage by insects and diseases, and adds organic matter and nutrients to fields.
• There are other methods that productively integrate more than one crop into agricultural fields; for example, two crops can be planted near each other—one a fast-growing species and the other one that will do most of its growing after the first crop is harvested. Another multicrop system alternates strips of grass or legume perennials with annual crops. Sometimes these strips can be feed for livestock; for example, in Africa strips of the perennial legume desmodium provide animal feed and at the same time repel corn stem borer insects. In addition, its roots emit a chemical that suppresses witchweed, a parasitic plant that can drastically reduce corn and sorghum yields.6
• Plant crops around the field (perimeter crops) that are more attractive to insect pests than the food crop growing in the middle of the field.
• Create field boundaries and zones within fields that are attractive to beneficial insects. This usually involves planting a mix of flowering plants to provide food sources (or alternate sources). It could be as few as one or two alyssum for every fifty lettuce plants, attracting “beneficial insects including hoverflies, whose larvae each chomp down as many as 150 aphids per day.”7
• Routinely use cover crops to provide multiple benefits in addition to providing habitat for beneficial insects, such as addition of nitrogen and organic matter to soil, reduction of erosion and enhancement of water infiltration into the soil, retaining nutrients in soil, and much more.8 It is possible to supply all of the nitrogen required for following crops by growing a vigorous winter legume cover crop such as crimson clover in the southern United States and hairy vetch in much of the north. In Central America, farmers use the fast-growing legume macuna to protect the soil and to provide nitrogen for the following food crop.
Building Soil Health and Resilience
Healthy soil is the basis of a healthy and productive agriculture. Indeed, healthy soil is nothing less than one of the physical foundations of an ecological society. Such soils have sufficient nutrients, contain low amounts of harmful chemicals, accept and hold plentiful amounts of water, have high biological diversity and activity, resist compaction, and produce healthy plants less harmed by insects, diseases, and weeds. Because organic matter has profound positive effects on essentially all soil properties, as discussed in chapter 3, it is at the heart of creating healthy soils. Many of the practices discussed below enhance organic matter management while others directly influence soil structure, erosion, or nutrient availability:
• Use rotations that are complex, involve plants of different families, and, if at all possible, include hay crops such as grass, clover, or alfalfa that grow for a number of years without the need to disturb the soil. This helps increase soil organic matter and nitrogen, improve soil structure, and control a variety of diseases and weeds.
• Add appropriate quantities and varieties of organic materials (animal manures, composts, tree leaves, cover crops, rotation crops) on a regular basis. Supply supplemental fertility to match nutrient availability to when crops are growing rapidly, needing more nourishment.
• Keep soil covered with living vegetation or crop residues, practices that encourage water to infiltrate into the soil instead of running off the field.
• Reduce tillage that buries residues and leaves the soil bare and more susceptible to the erosive effects of rainfall, and at the same time breaks up natural soil aggregates that are critical to infiltration, storage, and drainage of precipitation.
• Use appropriate machinery that limits soil disturbance. Like everything else in a social-ecological society, agricultural machinery will need to be radically redesigned. Currently, machinery is designed with two purposes: to increase profits by reducing the amount and skill of human labor and to maximize production in minimal time. Therefore most agricultural machinery is built to take advantage of giant fields filled with the same crop. Although large fields may still be necessary to produce staples such as wheat, rice, or potatoes, they may consist of wide strips of alternating crops rather than planted with one species. Even using multiple varieties of the same species is preferable to fields of genetically uniform plants. More specialized machinery will have to be developed and evaluated for use in smaller fields and in all fields containing a variety of crops.
• In addition to planting cover crops, using rotations with perennials, and minimizing tillage, use a variety of other practices to reduce erosion: introduce terracing, grassed waterways, and strip cropping along the contour by alternating a row crop with a hay crop; use natural or planted buffers between fields and streams.
• Rely on legume crops to provide the nitrogen needs of grain and vegetable crops and efficiently cycle nutrients from farm animal manures back to the fields.
• Human sewage freed of industrial contaminants should also be used to fertilize fields near cities and towns.
These are all key strategies and practices to create healthy agricultural ecosystems using a whole-system approach to growing annual crops. Not all will be used on every farm, but they should be considered for their appropriateness. But there is another aspect to a more integrated and sustainable farming—raising farm animals as well as perennial crops in combination with annual crops. Integrating animals and crops together on small- to medium-size farms has many advantages, such as using soil-building grass and legume pastures and hay crops in a rotation to feed cows, sheep, and goats, eliminating long-distance transport of feed to animals, and using the farm animal manure for easy nutrient cycling back onto the land.
Raising Farm Animals in Integrated Systems
Raising farm animals using industrial farming practices is cruel to the animals and damaging to human health and the environment. The capitalist imperative to raise animals as quickly as possible in order to reap the highest profits results in inhumane crowding conditions for the animals, the routine use of antibiotics and growth hormones, and feeding high-energy crops such as corn to beef cows, even though they are capable of getting their entire nutritional requirements from pastures and hay.
As discussed previously, in chapter 3, factory farming also causes a rift in nutrient cycling, as nutrients contained in the crops are transported long distances from where feed crops are raised to the factory farms. The large numbers of cows, combined with how they are fed and how manure is handled, have led to significant atmospheric releases of methane (CH4), a potent greenhouse gas. Beef and dairy cows are estimated to be responsible for about 30 percent of U.S. methane emissions from human activities (the rest coming from coal mines, landfills, natural gas and oil production facilities, and other sources).9 There are therefore plenty of reasons that animal agriculture as practiced by factory farms has been attacked as anti-environmental, cruel, and bad for the health of farmworkers and consumers.
However, there are good reasons to raise farm animals including ruminants as part of a diversified and integrated farming system. Animal products such as eggs, milk, and meat supply high-quality protein, and they can be part of a varied and healthy diet when eaten in moderate quantities, as they are in many parts of the world. Farm animals can and should be raised in humane ways that are also ecologically sound. This will likely mean that fewer animals will be raised, with meat becoming a much smaller part of what is now known as a Western diet, and that farm animals will be more widely dispersed over the countryside. Many synergies occur on integrated animal-crop farms, allowing better rotations with healthier crops, more flexibility in transferring nutrients around the farm, fewer crop pest problems, and improved soil health. There is a substantial ecological advantage to growing a hay crop to feed to ruminants such as cows and sheep: the practice allows for better control of annual weeds and rainfall runoff and soil erosion are reduced while infiltration of water for recharge of both surface soil and aquifers is enhanced.10 Around the world, large areas of land are not conducive to growing crops but can be used for rotational grazing. In such cases, animals don’t have to be in competition with humans for use of cropland. Pigs can utilize leftover food and crop waste for a significant portion of their diet. Controlled grazing can also help prepare land that will later be used to grow crops and help reduce future weed pressure. Pastoralism and the farming of animals in general are central parts of many cultures—and there is a lot to learn from cultures that have practiced sustainable animal husbandry on marginal land for hundreds of years.
Environmental writer and farmer Wendell Berry describes attempting to strengthen a complex system as “solving for pattern.” Berry elaborates on what happens when integrated animal-crop farms take the place of industrial-type farms in which animals are raised far away from their feed:
Perhaps it is not until health is set down as the aim that we come in sight of the third kind of solution: that which causes a ramifying series of solutions—as when meat animals are fed on the farm where the feed is raised, and where the feed is raised to be fed to the animals that are on the farm. Even so rudimentary a description implies a concern for pattern, for quality, which necessarily complicates the concern for production. The farmer has put plants and animals into a relationship of mutual dependence, and must perforce be concerned for balance or symmetry, a reciprocating connection in the pattern of the farm that is biological, not industrial, and that involves solutions to problems of fertility, soil husbandry, economics, sanitation—the whole complex of problems whose proper solutions add up to health: the health of the soil, of plants and animals, of farm and farmer, of farm family and farm community, all involved in the same inter-nested, interlocking pattern.11
There is evidence that changing to integrated animal-crop farms can have a positive effect on greenhouse gas emissions.12 On many large-scale dairy farms, manure is stored in lagoons in which the lack of oxygen stimulates methane production. But when cows spread their manure in pastures, methane production is reduced. And when they eat high-quality feeds as is common on intensively rotated pastures, cows can more efficiently convert food into usable energy for their growth, reducing methane emissions. Although cows will always emit methane-laced burbs and flatulence, raising them in an intensively managed rotational grazing system may have minimal net greenhouse gas emission because high-quality feed lowers methane emission and carbon is sequestered with the buildup of soil organic matter.13
Powering Agriculture
As we turn away from fossil fuels, one of the many challenges for society will be how best to power agricultural equipment. Food can be grown without power equipment, using just human or animal power, but this is physically demanding and has very low labor productivity. Furthermore, if animals are used for plowing or other field operations, extra land must be used to grow their food. Still, reversing the capitalist imperative to replace human labor with machines to drive down costs of production will be a general goal of society. When the purpose of agriculture is to grow nutritious food in an ecologically sustainable manner, as opposed to producing commodities to be sold for profit, farming will require more people working on farms. Farmers will work in conjunction with engineers to design and build farm machinery adapted to both the land and the people who work in partnership with it. The goal will be for the machinery to run exclusively on renewable energy instead of liquid fossil fuel or “biofuel.”
Freshwater is a renewable resource. However, in a number of regions around the world, groundwater is being contaminated or used at a faster pace than it is being replenished by rainfall. As the water table falls, deeper wells are required, using more energy to pump water to the surface.
To address imbalances created by capitalist agriculture when crops are grown in regions with insufficient rainfall, society will need to grow crops in regions with more appropriate climate and soil. For example, it makes no ecological sense to grow rice or cotton in California when there is essentially no rainfall during the growing season.
There are less ecologically destructive means of enhancing water availability in dry regions than large-scale construction projects or desalination. These can vary from dispersing small depressions throughout a field to building small ponds and appropriate-size reservoirs to store rainwater for later use. The melting of mountain glaciers in the Andes and the Himalayas, which accumulate water in cold months and slowly release it in the warmer months, is creating the need for reservoirs that can serve the same purpose. Irrigation techniques to minimize water loss, such as targeted and controlled drip irrigation systems, which reduce water use by up to 90 percent, should become widespread.
Reforestation has extensive material and spiritual benefits: climate control, habitat for wildlife and humans, medicinal plants, rubber, and wood that can be harvested selectively without damaging a forest’s integrity. By slowing down water movement over the land and encouraging water to infiltrate into soil, forested areas help recharge groundwater and springs and modulate the flow of streams and rivers. The same goal of slowing down storm flow and allowing safe groundwater recharge is also an issue in urban areas.
ENERGY GENERATION AND USE
Changing our energy system to one that supplies the needs of all people in environmentally sound ways is no trivial task and will take a significant period of time to implement—but it can be done if we devote sufficient resources. An essential part of an ecological approach will be to reduce wasteful energy use. This will involve moving away from reliance on personal automobiles; eliminating production and use of luxury products, the military, and advertising; reducing packaging; and putting an end to other detrimental forms of energy use. Waste is unnecessary in a society based on cooperation and need rather than on competition and profit. Building and retrofitting homes and workplaces to rely more on natural lighting, ventilation, and temperature modulation, replacing energy-inefficient goods with more efficient ones, and using educational programs and assistance to promote energy-saving behavior will all reduce the demand for energy.
Heating, cooling, and ventilation account for 40 to 45 percent of energy use in residential and commercial buildings. A concerted program of retrofitting existing housing stock and constructing new buildings to take advantage of local materials and climate conditions can radically reduce this percentage. Currently, buildings are constructed to require air conditioning and heating as well as extensive artificial lighting, even during daytime, yet the technology and design knowledge exist to minimize these energy needs. There are many ways in which passive design features of buildings can maintain a comfortable internal temperature and flow of fresh air.
Much of the energy currently generated is wasted in frivolous or actively detrimental ways. Though a significant amount of new energy needs will be met from freed-up capacity as a result of reductions in wasteful uses in the Global North, much more electrical generation capacity will be required in countries of the Global South. Significant investment in solar, wind, tidal, and other renewable energy sources could address this need. Discoveries and improvements are constantly occurring in the provision of renewable energy systems. Experimentation is advancing on solar (PV) roofing shingles, ways of integrating photovoltaic capacity into the sides of buildings, and even solar panels embedded in roads.14 And in rural areas, solar energy arrays and wind turbines may go together quite well with grazing farm animals. With the rapid drop in the cost of PV instillations (over 60 percent in eight years), solar energy is predicted to cost less than coal power within a decade, and is already cheaper than coal in parts of the world.15
A substantial amount of energy generated is wasted as heat and dissipated into water or the atmosphere. This means that utilizing “waste” hot water already produced rather than discharging it into the environment can lead to significant energy gains. Surplus heat produced by electricity generating stations, factories, server farms, and public transport networks can be funneled into local district energy networks to heat and cool buildings, greatly reducing waste, lowering carbon emissions and lowering fuel consumption.16 Denmark is one of the leaders in this effort, with 63 percent of homes connected to district energy networks. An indication of how much sense such systems make is that the combined heat and power stations are 70 percent efficient at conversion into usable energy as compared to only 30 percent for conventional power plants.
Minimizing the urban heat island effect, when temperatures in the city are significantly above the nonurban surrounding region by as much as 9°F, will be one of the goals of reevaluating the ratio of concrete, trees, and green space in a city. Because cities are hotter during the day and don’t cool down as much at night, more people use air conditioning in the summer months, which has the effect of raising the outdoor temperature still further. The United States isn’t one of the hottest countries, but it uses more electricity to cool buildings than all other countries combined. New research indicates that nighttime air conditioner use in some U.S. cities can add an additional 1.8°F to outdoor nighttime temperatures. In genuinely hot cities, such as Phoenix in the summer months, air conditioning can consume up to half of all the electricity on the grid.17
Switching to renewable energy will radically reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants. Solar, wind, hydro, wave, tidal, and geothermal sources can be utilized in a mix of centralized and decentralized (distributed) electricity generation.18 Distributed energy sources have the advantage of reducing the electric grid’s needed length and capacity while reducing the amount of electricity lost in long-distance transmission.
Although the intention is to move to 100 percent renewable energy throughout society as quickly as possible, and the technologies are available to take us there, at the present time there is no easy way to replace fossil fuels in air and sea transportation. Running planes on alternative forms of energy will need examining. There might even be a return to near complete reliance on sail technology for ships, which has advanced significantly in recent years. Sails, at least on smaller cargo vessels, may well have a new lease on life for ocean shipping in an era in which efficiency and speed are not of tantamount importance to the economics of the system.
We must always be mindful that each renewable technology comes with its own drawbacks and requires energy and other resources, many nonrenewable, in order to construct facilities. For example, “one 5-megawatt [wind or marine] turbine requires a ton of rare earths, the mining and refining of which will leave behind 75 cubic meters of toxic acidic waste water and one ton of radioactive sludge.”19 While less damaging ways need to be found to refine rare earth metals, these drawbacks pale beside the continued use of fossil fuels. In an ecological society, mining, treatment of mining wastes, and the recovery of materials will all be prioritized differently, with human and ecological health in first, not last, place.
Other detrimental environmental effects of renewable energy may also occur, such as bird and bat deaths at wind installations and obstructed fish migration due to hydropower dams. Ways need to be found through design and siting of facilities to minimize these effects. Large dams for hydropower are inefficient and gigantically expensive. Historically, their construction has resulted in the forcible displacement of local populations and the drowning of cultural sites and areas of natural beauty. But micro-hydropower systems from small dams to microturbines in pipes carrying water by gravity—both now in actual use—offer additional possibilities for renewable energy production.20
The biggest benefit of renewable energy is, of course, that it’s renewable. Aside from maintenance, upgrades, and eventual replacement, once wind turbines and solar panels are built, the energy is free and requires no more mining or resource use for long periods of time. If society simultaneously mines and uses materials more effectively and reclaims significantly more materials at the end of the useful life of all infrastructure, energy production and use will be a much less significant issue, not to mention far less polluting of the atmosphere and people’s bodies.
Studies have shown that it’s entirely feasible to replace electricity generation from fossil fuels, primarily coal and natural gas, with renewable sources. The sun provides over 170,000 terawatts (TW) of power to Earth each day. With this incoming energy approximately 10,000 times more than the total daily energy used by humans, there is quite a bit more solar energy that can be captured by PV systems or used to directly heat water.
Two oft-cited drawbacks to wind and solar energy are that they are intermittent and the electricity generated is difficult to store.21 The intermittency problem can be solved in a number of ways. Individual users, as well as industry will be encouraged to use the most energy when solar and wind are actively generating electricity and less during other periods of the day.22 Smart grids, whereby energy generation can flow in and out of the system from distributed power systems, and real-time energy monitoring can smooth out flow.
Considering that workdays and workweeks will be considerably shorter, it will be much easier to stagger when people work to different times of the day so as to smooth out and equalize transportation needs and energy generation. Distributed and relatively small-scale systems spread over different regions can be integrated so that the mix of different forms of energy generation complement each other and overlap. Additionally, if energy generation is combined with energy storage mechanisms, it will be more robust and reliable than conventional sources, which currently see one in three people in the United States without power at least once per year.
For example, the Niagara Falls hydropower station uses some of the energy produced at night to pump water back up to store in reservoirs, enhancing generating capacity the following day. Batteries are already being used for temporary storage on a commercial scale; companies such as J. C. Penney and Cargill charge them up during periods of the day when electricity is less expensive and draw them down when rates are high.23 The flow battery—not new, but a different technology than standard batteries—is constantly being improved and reevaluated and may provide significant storage capability for helping to smooth out intermittent renewable power generation. Although larger than the lithium-ion battery in electric cars and the lead-acid battery used to start internal combustion vehicles, flow batteries have significant advantages when used for storage connected to the electric power grid. Though flow batteries cannot provide the sudden energy surge needed to start a vehicle, they can discharge for a longer period and thus have great promise for backing up the grid and meeting capacity demands during periods of heavy electricity usage.24
One of the most efficient uses of solar energy is to heat water. The use of solar hot water installations, found on many rooftops in countries with reliable and plentiful sunshine, can produce a significant portion of needed hot water for family use as well as for a variety of industrial or agricultural uses. Solar systems—hot water heaters as well as PV cells—may be problematic in cloudy and cold regions, but the example of Germany, a country in Northern Europe not renowned for its balmy climate, is encouraging: in 2015, photovoltaic-generated electricity accounted for 7.5 percent of total electricity consumption. PV was found to supply 35 percent of momentary electricity needs on sunny weekdays and up to 50 percent on weekends and holidays.25
Society will have to decide how to provide energy for cooking and rural heating purposes. In the developed world most stoves currently use either electricity or natural gas, and many rural heating supply systems run on propane. In rural locations in the Global South with reliable solar energy, the use of outdoor solar ovens has proven successful. Electricity could be substituted for gas, but from a thermodynamic perspective it’s a poor use of such a high-grade source of energy. Decisions to do so will rest on analyses of local conditions and determination of what makes the most overall sense. However, usage of natural gas will decline significantly because gas-fired power stations will be phased out and there will be no fracking.
Fossil fuel production and consumption won’t drop to zero. For example, unless suitable substitutes are found, coal will still be needed to make steel. But fossil fuel consumption will radically decrease and CO2 emissions will fall as transportation and energy production shifts away from fossil fuels and military and many commercial uses are eliminated. Air transportation will decline as superfluous business trips are eliminated, industries are relocated to wherever negative environmental effects are lowest, and there is more reliance on locally available resources for production of goods. The need for much of the importing and exporting that is currently required to make capitalism work will be eliminated. The petrochemical industry, even though its negative aspects will be vastly reduced, will nevertheless need to continue to produce synthetic materials, reconstituted along more ecological lines. Though plastic is ubiquitous, oil for the petrochemical industry represents only 6 percent of its uses, the vast majority being reserved for refining into gasoline, diesel, kerosene, or fuel oil for transportation and heating.26
Plastic, based on petrochemicals and needing energy for production, is a useful substance in part because organisms are unable to attack it, it’s not susceptible to rust, and it’s cheap and almost infinitely malleable. Clearly, some uses of plastic make no ecological sense and plastics of all kinds litter the oceans. Virtually all plastic designed for single use will be eliminated—not just plastic bags. With plastic coming into contact with almost all food (even metal cans that contain food and drinks have epoxy liners containing plastics), plastic chemicals and their by-products—some of which are endocrine disrupters—leach into food and contaminate our bodies. Needless to say, we must find other ways to store food. One easy answer for many food storage applications is to return to glass containers as well as steel, and aluminum containers coated with nontoxic materials. Greater use of fresh produce instead of highly processed and packaged foods will have many benefits in addition to the reduction of plastic use.
On the other hand, plastic is better suited than traditional materials such as wood or metal for a host of purposes, and in many cases there is no other substitute. Plastic is superior for use in underground pipes for water infrastructure, as well as for many medical uses. We could still make nonfood containers out of plastic because it’s so lightweight, it resists chemical and biological degradation, and it can be made with many different levels of strength, flexibility, and shape. But containers would have to be returnable and reusable, recycled and reclaimed as other materials are when they have reached the end of their serviceable lifetimes.
The real problem with recycling plastics is the way profit-seeking corporations mix additives and hundreds of different substances within a given polymer, a practice that contaminates each product and makes effective separation virtually impossible. The World Economic Forum reported in 2014:
In pursuit of profitable value creation, companies have broadened the spectrum of materials used in today’s (consumer) products in myriad creative and complex ways. In the world of plastics, the number of new polymers has continued to increase in the past decades, mostly driven by new combinations of existing monomers. New additives—whether heat stabilizers, pigments, flame retardants, antimicrobials or impact modifiers—have been the main driver of major innovations in polymer materials science. This has increased materials complexity exponentially within and beyond the four major classes of polymers in use across different industries and applications today.27
Beyond the manufacture of plastics from petrochemicals, significant advances have been made in the development of bioplastics, based on renewable biomass. It might become possible to replace some useful products made with petroleum-based plastics with bioplastics, assuming we are not growing the feedstock in competition with other necessary uses of land and replicating the errors of the biofuel industry.
TRANSPORTATION
Eliminating the need for cars by most of the population through redesign of cities, the construction of light rail and tram lines, establishment of rural electric bus and van routes, and creation (or re-creation) of a convenient long-distance passenger rail network will mean a huge reduction in the global production of cars. There’s no reason trains and buses can’t be made as comfortable as cars, if not more so. So much money, time, expertise, resources, and advertising goes into cars because they are such a central commodity in the capitalist economy, marketed to epitomize individual freedom. Cars are sanctified as a status symbol for this reason, and because they are the linchpin of so much manufacturing in the oil, refining, asphalt, cement, construction, rubber, steel, and plastics industries. Their existence has made possible the large car-dependent suburbanized environments that waste so much land and energy.
When a society based on perpetual growth, where everyone is under constant stress to “get somewhere” fast, is replaced by one based on cooperation and solidarity, traveling with fellow humans will be a delight to be savored rather than a time-sink to be minimized. The manufacture and use of gasoline for automobiles consumes almost half of the 80 million barrels of oil produced globally each and every day. The vast decrease in automobile production and use would in turn feed through into reductions in the need for concrete, steel, rubber, asphalt, paint, petroleum, and plastics, even if some auto factories were converted to produce wind turbines, solar panels, buses, and trains. All short-haul flights could be replaced with train or bus travel.
REDUCING WASTE
Earlier in this chapter we discussed that waste heat can be utilized to heat and cool homes in district energy systems and how a more rational public transportation system can use fewer resources and less energy. These examples barely scratch the surface of what can be done. Many current branches of industry and commerce can and should be eliminated. Weapons manufacturers, car companies, advertising and marketing programs, the security industry, insurance and financial sectors, the prison-industrial complex, and associated capitalist enterprises geared toward socially useless production will all be shut down. These industries are not just a waste of material resources; they are equally a waste of the lives of those who work in such socially unnecessary or actively counterproductive jobs.
The switch to agroecological methods of farming would radically reduce the need for the manufacture of petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers—heavy energy consumers in modern industrial agriculture. Further agricultural waste reduction would occur with many smaller farms sharing the use of smaller scale equipment in place of individually owned equipment.
Goods that still use metal will need to be manufactured in such ways that make it relatively simple and safe to extract and recycle metals and other components. Metals are, in theory, infinitely recyclable. Dependence on reclaimed metals would therefore mean a massive reduction in new mining and refining of metal ores, which are highly energy-, water-, and chemical-intensive activities, not to mention hugely polluting and with significant health risks for the workers and nearby communities. The enormous waste of resources inherent in the practice of each family individually owning one or more cars, household appliances, power tools, and gardening equipment will be eliminated by their social provision. Rather than items like cars, power drills, and washing machines standing idle—an individual car sits unused 95 percent of the time—these articles and many more could all be provided at locations within the community, free for use as required. Even in some communities today, gardening tools can be borrowed through the public library, a practice that will be vastly enlarged in scope with the creation of an ecological society.
Instead of being designed and built for short life spans and obsolescence in order to increase profits, all products will be built to the highest degree of longevity practical, using the most energy- and resource-efficient methods and materials. All of these factors will radically reduce resource throughput while enhancing everyone’s lives. It will also mean that the labor that goes into making disposable products and is therefore currently wasted, will be put toward much more fulfilling and productive uses.
Much of household waste that currently goes into landfill can be radically reduced. Even the buried landfills will be eliminated. Today, single-sort recycling, with materials being separated for reuse at a materials recovery facility, conversion of remaining waste into electric energy by incineration, and other innovations (not without their own problems) have somewhat reduced quantities of household waste ending up in landfills; still, almost 70 percent of waste in the United States goes into landfills. (Percentages are much smaller in some European countries such as Germany, Belgium, and Austria.)28
The systematic separation of all organic waste from the waste stream will allow it to be fed to farm animals or turned into compost. Even the word waste is problematic if we reconceive of production and consumption as circular rather than linear. What is wasteful to capitalism is forgoing opportunities for making money. Conversely, what is efficient is that which maximizes profit. What is wasteful for an ecologically based and socially oriented society is for items to be needlessly discarded or for excess energy or resources to be used in their manufacture; what is efficient is that which minimizes material resources, labor, and energy inputs. The “waste” from the fabrication of an industrial product, and the product itself when it is worn out and needs to be replaced, should, where possible, become an input for another product or process. William McDonough and Michael Braungart have popularized this circular system in their book Cradle to Cradle.29 Design and production of goods and buildings need not only consider the waste occurring during the process of construction and use but also to make it as easy as possible to reuse the components in the future or convert buildings to other purposes than originally planned.
CREATING HEALTHY CITIES
For the first time in human history, more than half the global population lives in cities, many of those in slums, and that proportion continues to grow. With little or no choice, people continue to move into cities because of flight from wars, persistent droughts heightened by global climate change, rural poverty and lack of employment; the countryside is still being actively depopulated in large portions of the world because of land grabs by capitalist firms and sovereign wealth funds working hand-in-hand with corrupt local officials.30 With a less dependable climate threatening crop yields—too many hot days, droughts, and floods threatening yields—millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, more climate refugees are to be expected. Despite the rural exodus, small farms in the Global South continue to provide food for the majority of their people.
Low-density suburbs, with their strip malls and big-box stores, surround many cities, especially in the developed world, and rely almost exclusively on the ubiquitous automobile. Sixty million people in the United States live in suburbs far from their jobs, with little to no access to public transportation, creating the need to commute by automobile. In 2011, daily round-trip work commutes in the United States averaged around fifty minutes a day, while some 8 percent of the population traveled two or more hours to get to and from work.31 This represents a tremendous waste of human and other resources, especially when one takes into account the resulting traffic jams, elevated stress levels, and lack of time to spend with friends and family or in cultural activities.
One of the key elements of an ecological society is an inclusive process in which all participate in planning and making critical decisions. With regard to cities, participation in decision making cannot be limited to architects and professional city planners, but must include the people that these decisions will affect. While an ecological society will eradicate inequities in childcare responsibilities, job opportunities, and all other aspects of social life, the voice of all people, of all genders, ages, and abilities, will be essential in designing new cities and redesigning already-built cities to realize the goal of equal access and benefits for all.
Currently more than half of the world’s people do not have access to the most basic sanitation facilities.32 A future ecological society will comprehensively address sanitation for all. Addressing this urgent problem will increase the return of nutrients in human sewage to the soil, but without the contaminants from industrial production and products that are found in today’s sludges and sewage effluents.33 The world needs billions more toilets and many more sewage treatment facilities, even as we select, plan, and build better ones. The developing world can have state-of-the-art sanitation systems put in place that take into account not only people’s immediate toilet needs but also longer-term issues of how to design and treat wastewater in the most ecologically sustainable manner possible.
The redesign and provision of sanitation facilities will be easier to carry out in cities that are still coming into being in the Global South, rather than in well-established ones in the developed world. An ecological and socially progressive approach to the design and arrangements of housing, other buildings, and open space in urban environments—parks, playing fields, squares, gardens, and urban agriculture—intersects with the need for new transportation systems and new ways to produce and use energy. Water use and management are deeply connected to the above issues.
It should be noted that inclusive planning for the design and construction of large-scale infrastructure projects cuts against popular notions that small-scale, local decision making is inherently better than larger bodies of people coming together, either in person or facilitated electronically via the Internet. A huge number of people need to be involved—directly and indirectly—in making decisions that affect an entire city or region. Whenever a municipality requires a new sanitation system, who will decide how and where a sewage treatment plant will be built and to what specifications?
London, a city of 8.8 million people, has over 40,000 miles of sewage pipes, 1.2 million manholes to access the pipes, more than 500 pumping stations to move the water, and over 350 sewage treatment works.34 All of this infrastructure employs hundreds of people, and can also generate energy from the waste sludge. The planning and decision-making process currently occurs outside the purview or oversight of almost all those who use the water; in London a forprofit corporation carries it out. Better outcomes will be obtained by involving the people directly affected by any decision to transform a neighborhood or an entire city—it cannot be left to a small handful of professional administrators. When wasteful aspects of the economy are done away with, some of the time freed up from reductions in the workweek will be devoted to meeting in person, online, or through conference calls to discuss and make important decisions on long-lasting infrastructure developments.
Local residents clearly need to be involved, but so do engineers, construction workers, and administrative workers to allocate resource needs. If treated water is to go back into the local river, as is done in many places in the world, downstream users would also need to be involved, and thus decision making would spread to the surrounding communities within the watershed.
If a new rail line is planned for a city, or between cities, many people will need to be involved to decide on the location of tracks, stations, timetables, construction schedules, and funding. In addition, as we will want many more areas serviced by public transport, we will make decisions about the number of people to be trained or retrained to drive vans, buses, trains, and subways, as well as to design, operate, build, and maintain railway systems. Furthermore, the involvement of even more people will be required to decide if there are enough schools, where they should be built, their design, how many teachers need training, and so on. In this way, not only will duplication be avoided, but everyone will be involved in decisions that affect their lives.
Over the long term cities will likely be smaller than today’s megalopolises. There are currently thirty-five metropolitan areas around the world with more than 20 million people. Cities would be better dispersed over the countryside, connected by efficient means of public transportation. This would facilitate the integration of urban and rural ecosystems, including their peoples. A goal would be to design closely interacting cities, towns, and rural areas to stimulate better management of water flows and the cycling of nutrients transported to cities as food and then returned to agricultural soils. To maintain the health and productivity of soils, this would necessitate a vigorous program to keep industrial chemicals and chemicals from household products, hospitals, etc., from commingling with the waste stream that contains human bodily wastes.
In Cities for People, Jan Gehl, one of the forward-looking urban designers, suggests four social goals for cities:
• Liveliness, whereby cities are active and fun places in which to live and work.
• Visually interesting design, encouraging interactions among people and with soft edges where vegetation replaces the hard edges separating pedestrians from buildings, streets, open areas, and coastal borders.
• Safety, for people of all ages and abilities.
• Sustainability, with priority given to nonmotorized transport and human health, promoted by more walking and the absence of air pollutants.35
In an ecological society, cities will have significant amounts of open and green space dispersed throughout neighborhoods. Urban planners will need to address and reverse urban sprawl. On the other hand, new cities can be much more integrated places of food production, recreation, treatment of storm runoff (water regulation), energy generation, public transit hubs, and other work-related productive activities.
New cities could base light rail and bus transportation on a hub, spoke, and circle system (see Figure 10.1). The central urban core contains a transportation hub as well as concentrated areas of housing and workplaces. Housing will be built so that it is a relatively short walk or bike ride to a mass transit station. Areas between the spokes and circles can encompass farms and gardens as well as wetlands to accept and renovate urban and rural runoff waters as well as sewage water. Parks and gardens and other types of recreation facilities would be designed for the denser housing and workplace zones, while bike and walking paths provide easy access to the more rural areas.
Whether new intercity rail networks should be of the high-speed variety is an important question for a social-ecological society to consider. Under capitalism, faster trains facilitate the expansion of a city, eating up all the green space between the metropolis and its satellite bedroom communities. Residents of these satellite municipalities have to spend many hours commuting to jobs in areas they can’t afford to live in. Simultaneously, rural lines that branch off main commuting routes shrivel, further disconnecting smaller communities from the urban center.
The Shinkansen bullet train system in Japan was specifically designed to connect different Japanese regions to the capital, Tokyo. The result has been to turn the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area into a megalopolis of 35 million people, or 27 percent of the total Japanese population. As Philip Braso and Masako Tsubuku note, “The bullet train has sucked the country’s workforce into Tokyo, rendering an increasingly huge part of the country little more than a bedroom community for the capital.”36 At the same time, “the Shinkansen’s focus on Tokyo, and the subsequent emphasis on profitability over service, has also accelerated flight from the countryside. It’s often easier to get from a regional capital to Tokyo than to the nearest neighboring city.”37 Despite this, more Shinkansen lines, and even faster trains, are being planned.
The need for speed is a prerequisite of capitalism. The aim is always to compress time in order to facilitate ever more production, ever-faster purchasing of commodities, and ever-faster capital accumulation. But the increasing speed of trains and other forms of transportation, alongside other capitalist innovations, such as fast food and regimented production lines, all act to dehumanize and alienate humans from taking the time to enjoy the journey itself, or a meal, or their work. Drastically reducing the workweek and redesigning all aspects of work to make jobs fulfilling and useful will provide people with more free time and lessen the importance of doing things quickly. This ethos will also underpin travel.
Though improved transportation networks will aid the interconnection of all of humanity, it is debatable whether land and sea transportation will become faster; perhaps it will become slower and more pleasant. Because soaring real estate prices will no longer be a problem, people will not be forced to move out of a gentrifying urban neighborhood (as there will be no gentry) into suburbs. There will therefore be no need for far-flung workforces to commute into a central economic hub. All the issues relating to developing ecologically and socially integrated communities will remain a question for debate as to how it can best be accomplished.
Apartments, houses, and other buildings in cities will be designed to be comfortable and long-lasting, while optimizing use of natural lighting, ventilation, and heating and cooling to minimize energy use. We can learn much from the design of structures and use of local materials practiced by pre-capitalist cultures. Connecting those features to what we’ve learned about energy, heat, and ventilation from passive methods of environmental control will enable us to efficiently control temperature and humidity of indoor spaces. Naturally, cities and buildings in different climatic regions will look quite different, taking into account variations in weather patterns, temperature gradients, the angle the sun strikes Earth during winter and summer, forms and amount of precipitation, and cultural and historical factors and preferences.
Architectural design will represent the merger of older knowledge about building resilient and comfortable structures with environmental factors and technological know-how we have acquired. Plantings in cities should consist of native species that can thrive in temperatures of the region and its pattern of precipitation.
Priorities during the transition to a socially just ecological society will include building healthy and quality housing for the homeless and poorly housed as well as integrating diverse communities. In the developed countries it is quite likely that more than enough housing exists already. Homelessness in those societies is not caused by a lack of houses but by lack of money in the hands of the poor and a lack of social responsibility toward the most vulnerable. According to the 2010 government census, the United States had more than five times the number of empty residential units as homeless people.
Internationally, many low-quality houses in poor neighborhoods will need to be demolished, along with shantytowns and squatter and refugee camps and new apartments and houses in pleasant communities constructed for former slum dwellers.
Workplaces and places for provisioning people and providing for other needs—outdoor and indoor recreation facilities, cultural centers, health clinics, hospitals, dentist and optician offices, schools, and so on—will be interspersed in neighborhoods and easily accessible. In this way distinct neighborhoods will form in which people who live there will also go to school there and work in the community or nearby. If the primary goal of production is to provide for people’s needs while limiting waste and controlling pollution, then it will be a lot easier to have production facilities closer to where people live.
A significant amount of urban space will be reacquired for public use by the massive reduction and need for individual vehicles. In modern cities, storage of vehicles when not in use presents almost as large a problem as when they are being driven. One-third of the surface area of cities such as Tampa and Los Angeles are given over to non-residential parking. Even if cars run on electricity produced with renewable energy sources, the negative impacts of a car-based society are immense: the abundance of space taken up by cars when not in use; the vast acreage of impermeable concrete required for storage; and the social isolation, sense of entitlement and individualism promoted by car ownership; and the tens of thousands killed and injured every year from traffic accidents in the United States alone. Consider the data compiled by Lester Brown in 2001:
The United States, with its 214 million motor vehicles, has paved 3.9 million miles of roads, enough to circle the Earth at the equator 157 times. In addition to roads, cars require parking space. Imagine a parking lot for 214 million cars and trucks. If that is too difficult, try visualizing a parking lot for 1,000 cars and then imagine what 214,000 of these would look like.
However we visualize it, the U.S. area devoted to roads and parking lots covers an estimated 61,000 square miles, an expanse approaching the size of the 51.9 million acres that U.S. farmers planted in wheat last year.38
In existing cities these vast areas of concrete and asphalt dedicated to the parking of cars will be ripped up and converted to public green space, recreational areas, bike paths, tree plantings, and gardening and farming areas.
Transportation services will be reorganized so people can easily travel to nearby forests, mountains, rivers, farms, and beaches to appreciate and rejuvenate. “Research has shown that addition of only two trees and a patch of grass to a concrete-dominated housing project can improve health, mood and school performance.”39 Imagine the positive effect of greening all our city neighborhoods by providing open green spaces and easy access to the surrounding countryside.
One of the problems in many cities today is that their sewers receive and transmit human sewage as well as less polluted water from storm runoff. Separate city systems for storm and sewage water are rare. Facilities for treating sewage therefore become overloaded during high runoff events, frequently requiring the discharge of untreated sewage into nearby surface waters. There are two general approaches to the runoff problem: a) reducing the amount of runoff waters; and b) slowing down the flow so that less erosion occurs, particulates can settle out, and other cleansing can occur before water reaches a stream, pond, or lake. Some practices encourage both. Techniques for decreasing storm runoff include constructing green roofs; decreasing the percentage of impermeable surface area by using porous ground coverings; leaving spaces between paving stones; creating underground micro-water sinks to accept rainwater that can then infiltrate the subsoil; and creating playgrounds and public parks that can accept runoff, allowing it to percolate into permeable soils or move through wetlands, helping clean the water.
The decrease in runoff quantity and intensity needs to be paired with diversion of as much surface runoff as possible, either through dedicated sewers specifically for runoff or, better yet, channeling to nearby infiltration basins or parks containing wetlands. The development of “sponge cities” is possible, and is especially important in regions that lack sufficient water resources yet do have periods of significant amounts of precipitation. In light of climate change and sea level rise and the many cities that are built along coastal regions and at river mouths, there is a need to rebuild barrier islands, revive coastline sea grasses, mangroves, and salt marshes, and create soft edges around cities to absorb storm surges and safely blend the city with its surrounding water.
Green roofs—gardens planted on top of buildings—are relatively new. Not only do they help intercept and slow down the flow of rainfall and runoff, they also insulate buildings from extreme heat and cold, reducing energy costs. And they increase the life of roofs by protecting them from UV radiation. Other little-studied benefits are only beginning to be recognized. The diverse microbial inhabitants living there may be an “underestimated component of these biotic systems functioning to support some of the valued ecological services of green roofs.”40 There are a variety of ways to clean runoff waters and sewage effluent in order to maintain surface water quality in canals, ponds, and lakes. One of these is to use either wetlands or systems that mimic the properties of wetlands. Undisturbed wetlands are extremely efficient at cleansing water as it makes its way through the landscape. Wetlands are composed of a complex mix of interacting organisms and habitats. When constructed for the purpose of treating polluted water, as ecological design pioneer John Todd explains, “the engineering is human but the cast of creatures that actually does the work is gathered from a diversity of wild systems.” The organisms “organize themselves into new and complex living systems … a partnership between human designers and other life-forms with the objective of solving particular problems.”41 Humans have modified the ground, engineered the site, added plants and a variety of other organisms, and then let nature take its course. This concept can be applied to rehabilitation of polluted ponds and lakes, treatment of surface runoff, and renovation of sewage effluent.
There are substantial advantages to a reimagined urban space as a different type of ecosystem, rather than a degraded wasteland too densely packed with people. As cars are removed and industrial production is made more environmentally benign, with controls for gaseous, solid, and liquid wastes, the changes will result in an increase in urban space to grow food uncontaminated by toxins. Incorporating more food-growing areas into cities—including areas within dense development surrounding mass transit stops—may render rooftop food-producing gardens unnecessary, freeing up roofs as locations for solar panels. Perhaps green roofs with nonfood crops might be integrated with solar panels, maintaining their advantages of modulating water runoff and interior temperatures.
It’s worth reemphasizing the huge differences in the makeup and organization of the people who will be doing all this reimagined urban planning. Today people designing urban transformations are mostly drawn from a technocratic class of highly educated architects and engineers. They are given the task of maximizing commercial opportunities and the throughput of cars, energy, and water while keeping costs low, all in consultation with financiers and commercial real estate interests. It is highly unlikely that any of them live in or come from the neighborhood under consideration. In contrast, though there will still be experts trained in relevant fields, there may well be more local experts as well, and any decisions would be democratically arrived at and include the voices of those impacted by planning decisions. People educated using experiential methods designed to develop individuals who are more knowledgeable and well-rounded will be a vital part of the process. Furthermore, the objective will be to enhance the quality of life, which will mean enlarged green spaces, more variety in building design, and ease of transport for all members of society.
New methods, techniques, and approaches to producing the necessities of life and new ways of building or modifying cities are essential. But how will it all fit together and be organized? What are the bedrock principles and practices of social organization in an equitable ecological society? What values and ways of relating to one another and to the rest of the natural world will allow for the changes sketched above to take place? These are the subjects of the next chapter.
