Several of my favorites have included his essays on “Central Park South: New York Selects a Design for Governor’s Island” and “The Spire of Dublin: A Modern Monument That Points Up What’s Wrong With the World Trade Center Memorial.” Unlike his other pieces, his latest slide-show essay, “If You Build It: Two Visions of the Ideal City Rise in the Persian Gulf,” was his first that left me disappointed.

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In many ways, Shinhyocheon is just a typical suburb. It’s in Nam-gu, on the southern outskirts of Gwangju, one of South Korea’s biggest cities. In fact, if you don’t look closely, the Shinhyocheon solar village is easy to miss. Of the 1.4 million people living in Gwangju, most have never heard of it. Local taxi drivers wrinkle their brows and shrug; even the tourist information center in downtown Gwangju has trouble finding it on the map.

But for those who know it, Shinhyocheon deserves a place in energy history. In 2004, it became South Korea’s first solar village – a neighborhood of 64 solar powered houses where residents enjoy cheap, clean energy. The solar panels in this neighborhood generate over 115 MW of energy in a year. For each resident, that translates into an annual savings of around $589 USD, or a total of $37,700 for all 64 houses combined.

Inspired by Shinhyocheon’s success, the local government is planning to expand the number of solar houses in Nam-gu by adding 340 new sun-powered residential buildings.

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The future city, Dongtan, is growing out of an island at the mouth of the Yangtze River Delta. The unique Ecocity being built on the island is also a creative way to protect the island’s ecologically sensitive wetland environment from China’s fast-paced development.

What will life in China’s first ecocity look like?

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Having just heard from Keith Rockmael at San Francisco’s Ecocity World Summit 2008, we decided to take a closer look at ecocities, starting with the question “what makes an ecocity?”

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The speakers ranged from keynote speaker Jaimie Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba Brazil co-founder of the IPPUC, Parris Glendending (Former Governor of Maryland and President of Smart Growth Leadership Institute and Janet Larsen, Director of Research for the Earth Policy Institute and advocate for Lestor Brown’s Plan B. Larsen mentioned how Plan A refers to as “business as usual” and most of us can see that that plan isn’t working. Plan B doesn’t just refer to the U.S. Countries like Algeria who depend on their oil revenue can see the oil-less future and continue to create solar and thermal alternatives to power their future. Imagine an oil country funding alt energy sources.

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But at what cost? Solving the converging crises of climate change and peak oil, not to mention a plethora of others, would be an exceedingly difficult nut to crack even if we had full knowledge and information. Unfortunately, cracking this nut is probably impossible with our current level of thinking and understanding. We cannot hope to apply the necessary systemic thinking to our converging crises, because no one has a full view of the system. What we can’t see, we can’t consciously change.

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I am attending the conference and I will post interesting information throughout the week about the sessions I attend. Last night (April 21st), Gary Braasch, photographer and author of Earth Under Fire, How Global Warming is Changing the World, presented “his past and present record of climate change around the world with emphasis on

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From http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=76003

Klare points out that China will soon have the world’s largest fleet of automobiles - in decade or so - as they are following our model of auto-centric development. He had hoped that China would leapfrog oil to more sustainable mobility solutions but that is not happening.

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I wasn’t sure what I was going to write tonight. A few minutes ago I found myself reading the book review section of the Chronicle. The article “Gender Identity and Phantom Genitalalia” initially caught my attention and ended with a great quote from V.S. Ramachandran, a neurologist and psychologist at UC San Diego and a leading authority on phantom limb sensations, who says it has long been known that some people who are born without arms have vivid phantom arms.

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We’ll start with today’s posts, but if you would like to see the full range of stories, people and multimedia we have gathered around the Ecocity topic, visit the main site at www. ecocitymedia.org.

Be well!

Cleveland, Ohio doesn't get a lot of respect. It's been the butt of countless jokes, an environmental scapegoat, the "City whose river caught on fire," and a symbol for the declining cities of the "Rust Belt" of the American midwest.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't a green heart in the Cleveland area. Even a city in the middle of the rust belt can be a center for "Think Globally - Act Locally." In fact, I've recently found that the Cleveland area has a vibrant local/regional blog at Green City Blue Lake, covering the local and regional scene from a green perspective. GCBL arose out of an earlier site called EcoCity Cleveland, which remains online as an archive with a wealth of information still available in its pages, but is no longer actively supported.

Recent content on the Green City Blue Lake site ranges from articles about alternative energy policy to articles about local wildlife to a recent decision by county commissioners to demolish an existing landmark office tower rather than rehabilitating it.

It's an excellent example of a regional interest blog. GCBL aims to be a hub for sustainability with a broad list of objectives including creating a regional agenda for sustainability, focusing on "11 areas of practice – water, energy, economy and sustainable business, regional food systems, land and conservation, transportation, green building and neighborhood development, health, arts, education, and spirit." The site also seeks to "Promote a positive GreenCityBlueLake identity for Cleveland and the region — a new image that will make the outside world see us differently and will make us break out of our tired, Rust-Belt mindsets and imagine new futures."

Even though the preceeding EcoCity Cleveland site, which led to GCBL, is no longer actively being updated, it still also contains a wealth of good information. Some of it is local, but much of it is widely applicable, and it is another resource that ought to be bookmarked.

The only thing I could think of to ask for is a link to other, similar regional blogs (such as one closer to my own community) or a clearinghouse site that could direct people to appropriately local blogs for their particular regional interests. I'm not aware of anything of its kind in my area, but I'm going to start looking. I'd also be very interested in gathering a list of regional interest blogs (post 'em in the comments below, if you like). Some of this might be less interesting to you if you don't live in Cleveland, or if you don't live in a region that is similar to the Cleveland area. But even if you are in a completely different part of the country (or outside the US entirely), I think this is still a good example to look at to see how a regional blog might be organized.

Let's see if a network of these sites can be organized. Rather than coming from a top-down organization, if local, regional blogs like this include links to other blogs with a similar approach, the connections will grow and it will be possible to find regional information on sustainability across the country.