Carolyn Finney, Assistant Professor/Geographer at UC Berkeley
Carolyn Finney was born in New York and grew up on an estate where her father was the caretaker and her mother the housekeeper. She pursued an acting career for eleven years in New York and Los Angeles. But a backpacking trip around the world in 1987 changed her life. She spent the next five years traveling and living in Africa and Nepal. Carolyn returned to formal education in 1994 investigating women’s issues in Kenya and women’s participation in community forestry management in Nepal. Her current research and teaching is in environmental science, policy and management and continues at Berkeley.
Throughout Earth Day Week, April 22-26, in San Francisco, the Ecocity World Summit (7th International Ecocity Conference) will convene an international community of inspired change-makers, courageous individuals addressing problems of the world’s environment with thoughtful long-range solutions that are truly sustainable, ecologically healthy and socially just. The International Ecocity Conference Series brings together the key innovators, decision makers, technologists, businesses and organizations shaping the conversation around ecological and sustainable city, town and village design, planning and development. We intend to put these issues on the economic and environmental agenda for 2008 and beyond.
Ecocity World Summit 2008 Themes:
People — population, health, equity, and access.
Nature — protecting and restoring the planet’s living systems and agricultural lands.
Sustainable Development — land use, transportation, architecture and infrastructure.
Economies & Technologies — building the supporting markets, businesses and technologies.
Incentives & Support Structures — role of government, organizations, institutions and individuals.
In the world of people attempting work to make human society more
sustainable there are two very large generally unexamined problems:
1. Making small counterproductive “improvements” without understanding the whole system – thus failing to understand the dynamics of longer range failure.
2. Failing to address the built infrastructure of city, town and village as the foundation for arrangement of many technologies, including such crucial ones as energy,transportation and food production – all severely impacted by sprawl cities.
Examples:
New Orleans people helping put people back in dangers’ way by helping rebuild in car-dependent, low-density housing below sea level surrounded by 350 miles of levees.
Alternative: Build a pedestrian streetcar city of compact diversity on artificial mounds. Such development elevated above the floods is easily accomplished physically for neighborhoods or whole cities designed around pedestrians, bicycles and streetcars but impossible in the case of car-dependent sprawl because of the massive amount of land and fill that would be required. Such elevated development on artificial mounds is done in may parts of the world, including in New Orleans at New Orleans University.
Creek fans in Berkeley preventing the opening of creeks into the foreseeable future by refusing to consider land use shifting strategies fearing any kind of serious change, even through willing seller deals, that could remove some development along creeks.
Alt.: Ecocity mapping and transfer of development rights (TDR) strategies or simply spending City money for density shifting to help transit, housing needs and open space. Such strategies are pursued in South Lake Tahoe with a TDR strategy and at Portland’s Johnson Creek with a simple city funded willing seller deal purchase strategy.
Environmentalists driving Priuses so they can continue low density living and driving.
Alt.: Weaning from cars through using transit, bicycling, moving to centers, and supporting zoning and politics for shifting cities to centers oriented development. Happens all the time with people quitting or going lite on car dependence.
Solar on houses promoting low-density living and continued paving, car use and thus more energy use.
Alt.: Solar to apartments and condos from central generating plants and the grid. Solar on buildings not close to urban or rural centers should not be encouraged as the practice encourages NOT changing the disastrous urban structure that presently exists. Solar energy utilizing power plants or “solar electric farms” in sunny locations and “wind farms” exist and should be promoted.
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Ecocities, Education | Tagged: Carolyn Finney, Ecocity World Summit | 
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Posted by andrewfletcher
that was recently signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger. 
In the world of people attempting work to make human society more
