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  • From: Misha Gale-Sinex <mgs2369@attbi.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Permaculture and Politics
  • Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 15:10:31 -0800

Greetings, Gene...and interesting to hear from you.

I'm working with the campaign to develop the platform for Sustainability in
the City of Knoxville. We are deeply committed to sustainability issues
such as clean air, clean water, waste reduction and recycling, improvement
of riparian zones, building soil health, increasing biomass and
biodiversity, urban forests and reafforestation, smartgrowth, sprawl
elimination, and urban permaculture to name a few.

We suffer from poor air quality due to automobiles in a sprawl county, plus
thermal inversion against the Great Smokey Mountains and huge amounts from
coal-fired power plants west and from the Ohio valley. Our downtown is on
the verge of a renaissance but still looks dead from many angles. The
county bleeding edge is sprawling but that is mostly outside the city
limits.

As part of our efforts to articulate the platform in both long form (for
the website under development) and short (for the bumpersticker crowd),
we're researching what other cities may have done, or at least what they're
thinking. We're also interested in what the think tanks and academics
think and recommend. Because many of these problems originate out in the
county or larger region, we're also looking for ways a city government can
partner with, support, or otherwise plug into and participate into larger
regional efforts so we're seen as a model city in, if nothing else, at
least spirit.

I'm taking the lead in contacting folks who we know of that might have
valuable input into these questions and thought of all y'all.
Is there anything y'all can share? Is there anyone else y'all can think of
that might have some valuable input?

Check out the Center for the Rocky Mountain West, particularly the work of its founder and director, Daniel Kemmis.

http://www.crmw.org
http://www.crmw.org/Staff.asp?p=DanielKemmis

Daniel has a lot of insight into the issue of urban renaissance in mountain-proximate communities, both as the former mayor of Missoula, MT, and a renowned scholar of urban policy.

I haven't talked to him since I left Redefining Progress early last year, but my recollection is that he worked with a lot of the problems you discuss. He's hugely busy...but a delightful and gracious man. I always found him quite pragmatic, as well as capable of big-picture thinking, and his winning manner is a joy to be around.

See CRMW's Regional Economic Assessment Database, among other things.


peace
mish





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