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The Conversation: How do we become less dependent?
Daniel Lerch, The Sacramento Bee
With a peak oil conference in Sacramento this week and the 100th anniversary of the first mass-market automobile coming up, it's a perfect time to re-visit our relationship with that most ubiquitous icon of the American (and California) Dream: The Car.

Ford's 1908 Model T didn't just mark the start of widespread private automobile ownership. It heralded the complete restructuring of America around petroleum-powered cars and trucks. By mid-century we had discovered massive oil fields in Texas and the Middle East, and World War II had effectively modernized our industrial base. The stage was set for the true mass consumption of the car, a shift that would fundamentally change our economy, our landscape and even our culture.

These days it's pretty well accepted that we can't all drive everywhere. California was home to some of the earliest suburban sprawl, so its metropolitan areas experienced early on what happens when everyone tries to drive everywhere: unending congestion (despite more and bigger highways), more sprawl and overall greater dependence on oil...

Daniel Lerch is the author of "Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty" and a program manager at the Post Carbon Institute.
(21 September 2008)

Low-Income Housing: Another Crisis Looming?
Madison Gray , Time
Another housing crisis may be looming even as the mortgage meltdown continues and as Americans who once dreamed of home ownership see their properties foreclosed. The Housing Act of 1937, imposed in the wake of the Great Depression, and amended a number of times in the 1970s, is reaching a crossroads — and close to five million Americans who depend on subsidized public housing may soon have to figure out where and how they are going to live.

That's because under the provisions of Section 8 of the historic law a significant change will be under way in the next few years. As a result, building owners who participate in the program — receiving subsidies from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in exchange for taking in lower-income renters — will be able to opt out of those contracts. And many are thinking of doing just that. America's two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, will be severely affected as will many smaller communities...

Mitchell Joachim: Redesign Cities From Scratch
Tom Vanderbilt, Wired Magazine
Dressed in architect black and sporting dreadlocks, Mitchell Joachim isn't your average Whole Foods envirogeek. For one thing, he speaks in an intense staccato punctuated with words like peristaltic and epiphetic. And don't get him started on sustainability. "I don't like the term," he says. "It's not evocative enough. You don't want your marriage to be sustainable. You want to be evolving, nurturing, learning." Efficiency doesn't cut it, either: "It just means less bad." Even zero emissions falls short. "This table does zero damage," he says, thumping the one in his office. "No VOCs, no carbons. Whatever. It doesn't do anything positive."...

...For Joachim, reinventing the city doesn't stop at the curb; he's been reimagining just about every part of the modern urban landscape. To help cool Atlanta, Joachim suggests flooding an area of the city now filled with parking lots to create a "munificent pool"--a large pond filled with fish, plants, and algae, surrounded by trees. It would counteract the urban "heat island" effect and process gray water and sewage. The waterworks would be powered by wind turbines...
(22 September 2008)
This article has a bit of the Jetsons about it, but has some interesting ideas.-SO