permaculture

[eric + michiko <emstorm@metro.net>]

Marsha wrote in response to Thilo and Russ:
> > The fact in Australia, as elsewhere, is that more and more
> > people are living in cities and, if the cities canot be made sustainable,
> > then it is questionable that the rest of the country can be made
sustainable.
> 
> We might get into some interesting analyses of city functioning if we go
deeper > into this..
> 
> The next step would be to create a VISION ( thank you Michael Patterson!),
> a positive view of their city, rather  than a negative one where one only 
> focusses on what is wrong or lacking.  Better to focus on what is there in
> potential...


Can you tell me more about Michael Patterson's book?  It sounds like
something I need to read.

At the risk of sounding negative, can cities really become sustainable.
I'd be very interested to hear sustainable visions of cities.  My
conclusion after getting a feel for what "sustainable" means is that they
could not be.  By "cities" or "urban areas" I assume we are talking about
dense consentrations of humans to the point where the land needed to
support them is not nearby (within walking distance or other sustainable
transport) but at best adjacent to the urban area.  Once the scale is
ruduced to a large town or very small city (<100,000 people?), I can see
how it might work.

I thought Michael Smith's article in the recent Permaculture Activist
brought up a good point.  Sustainable is a minimun, not an optimum.  He
used the term "regenerative" to refer to a step beyond sustaiable where we
are actually increasing the health of the ecosystem we are working with.

If cities can be sustainable, can they be regenerative, too?  Can they be
ethical, when one sees humans as just one of the myriad species on the
planet?  If so, I'll have to (get to!) do some major adjusting of my
visions of the future.

If cities can not be sustianable, they still need to be improved and worked
on during a transition to better systems.  Therefore urban permacutlure may
still be very valuable.  But the goal might change from making "good
cities" to transforming cities into something that can be sustainable, or
even regenerative.

Eric Storm