Work to promote smart growth. That’s the gist. Smart growth. As opposed to growth that is not smart. I.E. dumb, silly or foolish growth, looking backwards, or regressing. That is the heart of sustainability and where it’s taking us.

With 6+ billion people on the planet and a projected 10 billion possible by mid-century we will need plenty of growing, building, and progressing if we’re going to deal with the many issues we have now and will have in the future. If we’re going to get away from the American style of 4 extra planet living, we need to be smart about it.

We’re on the brink. Not of death and destruction, but of a new, smart revolution, and it’s feeling pretty good.

From the SmartCar to SmartTech, when Smart leads the way there sure is a nice ring to it. Because we know what stupidity does — it slows up the works. It clogs the pipes, endangers animal species, pollutes rivers and our air, sends our kids to atrocious schools, gets poisonous toys from China, turns food into fuel, builds suburbs 50 miles from anything, uses the dirtiest fossils of dead things to power our lives, and on and on. Individually, these may not seem like huge problems, but taken altogether, its a planetary emergency.

Which leads to the task at hand. We need smart ‘everything.’

Smart fuel, food, trade, environmental policies, and energy systems. Redesign the grid to make it smart. Weatherize buildings to make them smart. Build mass transit to move people in ways that are smart. One thing we even have going for us is the move to a smart government, where intelligence is an asset, and we have a president that some consider the smartest man to hold the office in quite some time.

Looking at the systems that run our lives, it is obvious that most are not the most intelligent use of time and resources. They’re designed poorly. (Think our recent grade of D- for U.S. infrastructure.) As resources become scarce, priority one will be using them wisely. And as the planetary emergency becomes even more dire than scientists predict, time will be ever more precious.

As we work to promote smart growth it’s best we also promote a total vision and intend to act upon it. Establish a path for problem solving. Work to get to Smart Everything.

Just look around, there’s plenty of places to start, so let’s get to it. Block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand. -jk-

Tags: longview, make this better, rethinking, sustainability, what next

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 6:23 am and is filed under Poster Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.