Major green innovators will advance community sustainability at CNU seminar

im Van der Ryn,  Paul Hawken,  Jerry Brown, Peter Calthorpe, and Stewart Brand to appear at September event

A “dream team” of of experts envisioning and encouraging community-wide sustainability would likely start with architect Sim Van der Ryn, the “father of sustainable communities,” and include the colleagues with whom he has associated closely in the thirty three years since he was named California’s state architect under then-Governor Jerry Brown. These partners include CNU co-founder Peter Calthorpe, author and social entrepreneur Paul Hawken, Whole Earth Catalog creator and pioneering online community founder Stewart Brand, author and scenario planner Peter Schwartz, and Brown himself, now California’s attorney general and a champion of legal actions that ensure development and transportation projects in the state don’t disregard the state’s Climate Solutions Act.
Many ideas now enshrined in green institutions like the LEED ratings systems for building and neighborhood development got their introduction and first serious try-out through the efforts of this group, starting in Sacramento in the mid-1970s. If there are household names in the sustainability movement, these experts are at or near the top of the list.  And on September 26, CNU will unite them on the same stage for a rare event, a one-day seminar on the past and future of sustainable communities. The conference, Sustainable Communities 2008, will be held at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco and will also honor Van der Ryn with a CNU Athena Award, which is given to those design and development leaders who laid the groundwork for the New Urbanism movement. Visit cnu.org/sustainablecommunities08 to learn more and register.
Today’s crises involving rising energy prices and the climate impact of automobile-dependent, industrialized economies closely parallel those that sparked the sustainability innovation centered around Brown’s gubernatorial administration. The oil embargo in 1973 showed U.S. dependence on foreign oil could be crippling and that conservation and more efficient living offered the most reliable and lasting relief. “The environmental movement began to integrate its traditional ideas of conservation with differing ways of ‘living lightly on the land’ and the idea of sustainable communities emerged,” recalls Calthorpe.  “Complementary concerns included the nature of our food and farming systems, the chemistry of our waste and water systems, our modes of transportation. In sum, the kind of communities we built.  Energy was just the tip of the iceberg — then and now. Out of this came Sim Van der Ryn’s notion of ‘Sustainable Communities,’ a concept still at the center of much needed standards for change.”
Seeing these challenges with a whole systems approach was at the core of the design revolution Sim and his peers initiated. Calthorpe and Van der Ryn advanced this approach in their seminal book Sustainable Communities in 1986, to which Hawken contributed a prescient chapter on how the shift to “information economies” would prove disruptive but eventually enable less energy-intensive living.  Although Van der Ryn is best known for “pioneering concepts now taken for granted, from solar roof panels to rainwater catchment systems,” as the New York Times reported in 2005, in book form and beyond, Sustainable Communities also became a portal through which environmentalists learned the environmental benefits of walkable mixed-use urban fabric (and some other experimental suburban forms) — along with the ability of traditional urban form to accommodate passive solar and other re-emerging green techniques.
As ecological and economic challenges mount, the solutions initiated by Sim Van der Ryn become more relevant. “He is the Albus Dumbledore of green architecture,” wrote Patricia Leigh Brown in the New York Times. “Long before the Prius hit the road and sustainability became the buzzword du jour, there was Sim Van der Ryn … the intrepid pioneer of the eco-frontier.”
“With the disappearance of cheap fuel, the interest in environmental sustainability is expanding again beyond green technology in the narrow sense to the encompassing role community design plays in determining our environmental impact,” says CNU CEO John Norquist. “It’s a pivotal time to have six of the top environmental thinkers in the world exploring the relevance of sustainable communities to the defining challlenges of our time.” To register, visit cnu.org/sustainablecommunities08.