I have to keep saying this in case there is anyone out there that would think that I am posting a finished work here. The things I am posting from the ongoing book project are raw and totally unedited. They are not in any way finished or even close to being grammatically correct. I put them here to get your take on them. Many of you emailed me about the first stab and your comments helped a ton. Thanks so much and keep it up. After reading everything you all had to say I rewrote the opening and think I may have it better now. This is not the whole chapter but rather the opening only. I am still working out how to transition to some of the other points I made in my last go round.

Tell me what you think about it this time…

Chapter 1
Time for a Revolution

Much has been written on the topic of greening America and the need to rethink our way of life in a more sustainable less wasteful manner. We are beginning to understand change is needed and that we are going to be the generation to do it. Much needs to be done on many levels but there is one area of particular interest to me that gets far to little air time. Simply put, suburban life is unsustainable. If everyone on earth were to live in a home like the typical American we would consume 8 earths worth of resources. The system is broken and we need a better way. We need to be the ones who stand up and model not only for future generations here but also for other developing nations the right way to live. Clearly we need to redefine cities and the way we live. The problem is we are just beginning to work on it. I recently heard William McDonough the author of Cradle to Cradle speak and he said this in regards to our current direction: “If you are trying to get from Mexico to Canada and heading South, just slowing down the car will never get you there, you have to stop the car turn it around and start driving North.”

Its time for us to stop the car turn in around and start driving North. You never finish what you are not working on. Change is needed across the board but today we are going to talk about cities and how they play center stage in our effort to head the right direction. The fact of the matter is, cities are the most sustainable technology we have to date.

But cities answer another problem we have developed as well. everyone thinks that they need a big yard and big house. The problem is once everyone has that things move farther and farther apart from eachother further deepening our dependence on automobiles and the cycle continues. The more the car tightens its grip on our lifestyle the less we feel the need to build walkable human scale spaces. After a while we begun to build cities entirely devoted to the car. Making it nearly impossible not only to live without a car but also entirely inefficient to build mass transit into these spaces. We each feel that we need to much space to share anything more than the occasional park. The deeper problem is not on the sustainable land use side of things but the social impacts of living in this kind of environment.
As long as everything you do requires you to drive your car you have less and less chance of being a part of a community of people who care about you. We are truly building for ourselves separate lives where we interact more with our televisions or facebook friends than we do with our neighbors.

I once lived in a suburban home with my family for more than a year without even knowing the name of any of our neighbors. It was not that we did not try, we had at the time two small children and brought cookies over and did every other thing you do to reach out to people in a setting such as this. the problem was the place was not built to give its residents a sense of being part of something together but rather being alone together. The structure of homes with large garages and front doors set back to the side reinforces our understanding that we live here to be alone and the presence of others is merely a nuisance that must be tolerated. Socially we have built a structure of independence and personal privacy. The problem is we forgot that we need those other people outside the walls we built around our lives.

Levi