“Back to school” has never meant so much to me as now, in my near-dotage, the oldest student in any of my graduate architecture classes at the University of Texas at Austin, the one with the cane and the gray hair, the one with trifocals and an awful lot of irrelevant knowledge that I must constantly neglect to share with my fellow students for fear of having to once again watch their eyes roll back in their heads.
I am studying about how towns are built and how they can expand without self-destructing, how water resources are protected and allocated, learning new ways to build houses and neighborhoods that use less water and less energy all while creating less of an impact on the land.
The trick, of course, is how to convey this information to those who build new homes and neighborhoods, to the banks that finance these ventures, to the people who would live in them and must demand better homes, better appliances, better water systems, cleaner cars and better laws that will enable all these dreams to come true.
Yesterday, we learned about how the plan is to use our plug-in hybrid vehicles to store and then transmit to the common grid our solar-collected energy off our roofs. I learned that there are something called “T-codes” and these are gradations of proximity from the center of Austin where a household is expected to be more energy self-sufficient the further away it is from the town center.
I learned about plans to make cities completely walkable and to have vast stretches of a community where you do not need a car to get to the grocery store, to school, to work, to wherever you need for goods and services.
What is missing in many of these discussions is how difficult it is to change hearts and minds.
I know the impulse to recycle has been made almost an obsession with a lot of us in a few short years and watched as a kid as the practice of tossing trash out of one’s car went from commonplace to verboten almost overnight, thanks in no small part to Ladybird Johnson’s successful campaign to beautify America’s roadways and waterways.
“Plant a tree, a bush or a shrub”, was the call from the First Lady from Texas and it worked. Not only did we get less trash on our highways, but downtown Austin’s waterway jewel, now named for Ladybird, Town Lake, went from an overlooked riverside to a stellar recreational destination, protected forever now from private development and degradation.
People will sometimes say that “State Ways Can’t Change Folk Ways”, but I find this not to be the case. I watched as black Americans made huge strides to overcome our national legacy of discrimination, I watched as women took their rightful place alongside men in business and society. I have watched as people are time and again made aware of societal injustices or unwise practices and have changed them.
Now I want to watch as we shift our paradigm again.
I want to see Americans rise to the call of our time. I want to see Americans realize we are in an age that will make or break the ability to stop human-generated contributions to global warming.
I want to see us, as a people, alter our lifestyles and shopping trends to both recycle and to buy recycled goods, buy hybrid cars that we can run off of our solar panels.
I want to see builders build our houses where they are insulated and oriented to the sun in ways that reduce the need for heating and cooling and where our roofs collect both sunlight for electricity and rainwater for our households and our gardens.
I want to see Americans stop wasting our precious and dwindling water resources on swaths of non-native grasses and plants that would suck our aquifers dry just to recreate landscapes from other times and other places.
I want to see us make sustainable agriculture our goal, eating organic food grown closer to home, shortening the supply lines between producer and consumer.
I want to see those of us who can, and who want to, live closer to our jobs and schools or work from our homes, saving energy and time.
None of this can happen without our leaders, though, the ones who direct new ways to build our towns and who make it possible through legislation to promote alternative energy and water conservation as a concrete and achievable priority, not something exotic or too expensive to consider.
This is the time. This is our time.
This is the generation that will make it or break it for good.
We have changed before, we will change again and whether we will direct those changes and ride the crest of the wave or be tossed about beneath it is up to us.
I am sure it will be more fun to ride that wave.
susan cook
11 september 2009
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