Green City Project interviewed Marcia McNally of Urban Ecology to learn more about their publication, Blueprint For A Sustainable Bay Area. They talked with Marcia about her favorite projects, ways we can all engage in sustainable practices, and how the Bay Area can become a more environmentally and socially just place in which to live. Wendell Berry: good neighborliness & technology Kentucky farmer, grandfather and educator Wendell Berry is a winner of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award and a Lannan Foundation Award, all for his writings. He is the author of many books, including What Are People For?, The Gift of the Good Land, The Hidden Wound, Another Turn of the Crank and The Memory of Old Jack. |
Bioregionalism Comes to Japan: An Interview with Peter Berg “What hope do we have? How should we go about it? As an activist-thinker in a situation such as talking to a university class or a group of businessmen or public policy people, I simply try to create a mental condition that will have the effect of an explosion in their brain. I could talk paradigm-talk all day, and it would bore me. I try to set off a large-scale explosion in the mind of the person or audience I’m dealing with. If I’m lucky and the explosion does occur, I don’t know where the pieces are going to settle. The reason I’m doing this is because I feel as though I’m an agent provocateur who is pursuing his own survival in a trance-driven society that wants to deprive me of any of the little measly human-natural interactive possibilities that I can experience. That really is where I’m at.” “Geography of Nowhere” Author James Howard Kunstler “What ‘makes a civil place’ is the ‘connective tissue’ of traditional town and city layouts. Instead, architects are designing buildings with little relation to nearby buildings or the street, often presenting blank, unfriendly walls, ‘terrible buildings that degrade the street...(designed as if) buildings are TVs. The only important side is the front.’ ‘The outside doesn’t matter. That is the principal idea being sent by architects to people in this country. The message this conveys to people,’ he added, ‘is they do not matter either.’” On creating a sustainable regional future A dialogue with Northwest Environment Watch founder Alan Thein Durning “Three years ago Alan Thein Durning left Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C., to return to his native place, Seattle. Durning had two prime reasons for his move. First, he sees the source of planet-transforming change coming from the roots of bioregion and community. Second, he views the Pacific Northwest as having unique potential to build a regional sustainability model of planetary significance.” Restoring Your Local Watershed: An Interview with Freeman House “Many areas of the West have already been exploited and abandoned, leaving local people to cope with the aftermath. In northern California's Mattole Valley, an eight-year-old restoration project is now beginning to pay dividends -- both for the watershed and the consciousness of the people. Freeman House, one of the prime movers of the Mattole Restoration Council, explains how they have approached such restoration and the philosophy behind their work.” Toward a Ritual, Story and Culture of Ecological Restoration: An Interview With Bill Jordan, the ‘Poet of Restoration’ By Patrick Mazza “I really do believe restoration can be the flagship of a new relationship with nature. I think that is happening. The job really is to build a culture. We are trying to build communities with cultures that are capable of negotiating that nature-culture relationship. Our culture has deficiencies in that area. It doesn’t interest me very much to say we’ve blown it. The relationship between nature and culture has always been a problem for people. It’s a problem for us and we’re thinking hard about it. I think we’re going to do something about it. Restoration provides us with an important means. We’ve been very weak at having the means to negotiate the nature-culture relationship. We haven’t had the kind of dealing with nature in the physical sense on which you have to ground a relationship. Even a generation ago a lot of people lived on farms. Before that a lot of people were fishing and hunting. We do that less now. Restoration is a way to get back in the woods, and to get back in a way in which one is a real participant in the ecology of the woods or wetlands as was a hunter or fisher or gatherer, the classic ways in which people have lived in the landscape. But the sign of the relationship has been shifted from consumption to creation. So that means there’s room for a lot of people in that landscape, the more the merrier really. Because they’re out there rebuilding it. That provides a base in experience for building a relationship. It also provides a base for the invention of rituals that we need to negotiate that nature-culture contract. That’s how you add to your culture that valence that can help you connect, so the culture becomes capable of negotiating that relationship. Restoration is a key. We’re beginning to see little subcultures that have managed to reinhabit the natural landscape through this experience and this ritual.” |
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