Forthcoming in HopeDance magazine

By Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Institute

When I left New York City for Portland, Oregon nearly ten years ago, I was consciously turning my back on a whole region of the country that, in my eyes, didn't take sustainability seriously. With crises of climate change and energy depletion looming just over the horizon, Northeastern local and state governments seemed to me indifferent and, ultimately, impotent.

This past November I returned to the Northeast on a book tour for my new local government guidebook on peak oil and global warming: Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty. I had organized the book tour in part by announcing my availability for presentation to colleagues and local Post Carbon groups around the country working on peak oil and global warming -- and I received such a surprisingly robust response from people in New England and the mid-Atlantic that I decided to focus my first tour there, and see first-hand what had changed in my old backyard.

As it happened, my first stop was actually in Montréal; and I wrote my first blog entry of the tour at a small neighborhood pub. Sitting there, local beer in hand, it occurred to me that an old pub in one of North America's few true old Francophone cities was a surprisingly fitting place to launch this book tour. Consider some of the things we need to do to truly prepare our cities for the post carbon era:

• We need to look beyond our usual practices of city planning and city governance --which assume the unlimited and affordable availability of energy-- to find fundamentally different ways of developing and managing urban areas. (Québec is unique in the U.S. and Canada as having the only land use ownership and planning structure that is not based on English common law);
• We need to look to more human-scale forms of urban development and design than those generally found in most of the U.S. and Canada. (Old Montréal is a fine showcase of many of the urban design subtleties that make so many European cities eminently "livable");
• --- And, we especially need to look to more local sources for supplying our basic needs. (Which, in my book, includes great local beer!)

These points were some of the key themes in Post Carbon Cities, and I was also pleasantly surprised to find them embodied in many of the cities I visited on the tour. One of the best examples of this is Keene, New Hampshire, a small college town in the southwestern corner of that relatively conservative state. Keene was an early actor in responding to global warming, having joined the international Cities for Climate Protection campaign in 2000 and subsequently investing in geothermal heating for a city facility, a biodiesel system for the city fleet and a methane recovery system for the city landfill. More recently, Keene was a pilot participant in a prominent new international Climate Resilient Communities program, making the transition from simply mitigating global warming to actually preparing for those effects already unavoidable.

Keene has looked beyond the usual practices of planning and governance because of leadership coming from three distinct places: elected officials, city staff and the community. I found this to be true in many of the other forward-thinking Northeastern cities I visited, too. In Brattleboro, Vermont, citizens convinced the town council to start a task force for researching and recommending local responses to peak oil. In Boston and Cambridge in Massachusetts, the LivableStreets Alliance has been working closely with city officials and staff to fundamentally rethink transportation infrastructure so that it serves not only private automobiles but also pedestrians, bikes and public transit. As New England has proven for centuries, communities with active local political processes that involve not only elected officials but also citizens, businesses and city staff are communities with resilience. They can deal with social, economic and environmental challenges --really, their holistic sustainability challenges-- in ways that cities with fractured governmental processes cannot.

I personally think that the cities and towns of the Northeast (and of New England in particular) have two important advantages when it comes to reducing fossil fuel dependence and pursuing sustainability. Both of these advantages exist largely by virtue of the fact that many of these towns and cities developed before the era of the automobile -- that is, when they were by necessity oriented to energy sources other than gasoline and diesel fuel.

First, the Northeast has a rich heritage of transportation and industrial infrastructure from the pre-automobile era --as well as an accompanying heritage of skills and knowledge-- that much of the rest of the United States lacks. During a session on planning for the post-peak oil world at a conference in Vermont, Portland (Maine) City Councilor Kevin Donoghue lamented to me of his city, "We should be preserving our pre-oil industrial waterfront, not destroying it to build condominiums."

Second, many Northeastern settlements have a well established sense of shared public space, which is vital to the sense of community belonging and buy-in needed for a thriving local democracy. This sense of public space is not only reflected in the existence of specific community "places" like the town commons and the public market (which often don't exist west of the Appalachian mountains), but also in the human-scale design of general community "spaces" like the streets and sidewalks in these older towns. Shared public spaces and the local democracy they support are essential ingredients for creating equitable local responses to the system challenges we face in global warming and peak oil.

Towards the end of my book tour I visited New York City, reconnecting with former colleagues and meeting some of government officials, city planners and citizen activists working for sustainability in that metropolis. Sure enough, the days of apathy towards sustainability were over, with both NGOs and the city government showing national leadership with ambitious ideas such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg's high-profile and green-savvy 25 year urban environment plan, PlaNYC.

The debate about climate change is thankfully over in the United States, but awareness of peak oil and broader, deeper action towards real sustainability are not yet here. Fortunately we are seeing more and more leadership from forward-thinking cities of all sizes, like Keene and New York, or Aspen and Salt Lake City, or Sebastopol and San Francisco. And as we approach $100 a barrel oil and into another year of extreme weather, communities and governments around the country will increasingly find that planning for sustainability at the local level is no longer a West Coast fad -- it's the smart, even conservative thing to do.