Plan Well or Perish
Vancouver architect Richard Balfour on readying his region for oil scarcity.
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http://thetyee.ca/Books/2008/03/27/PlanOrPerish/
By Rex Weyler
Published: March 27, 2008
TheTyee.ca

> In the post-peak-oil world, says Richard Balfour, highways crawling
> across farmland represent insanity. We should be building light rail
> transport, now, and designing neighbourhoods linked to the farmland that
> sustains them.
>
> Balfour is an architect, strategic planner, director of the Metro
> Vancouver Planning Coalition, and a member of the Vancouver Peak Oil
> Executive, a group of citizens attempting to warn politicians about the
> challenges ahead.
>
> Balfour points out that B.C. produces about 48 per cent of the food we
> consume. That's manageable when oil is cheap and we can ship food from
> the tropics. "Our food from Mexico," says Balfour "is running out of gas."
>
> Balfour and Eileen McAdam Keenan have written a "Civil Defense Manual"
> for Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, not a defense against terrorists
> but against our own consumption habits and illusions about economic
> survival. "We are already in the post-peak-oil era," says Balfour, "the
> rising price of liquid fuel will change everything. We must now learn to
> relocalize our economy or suffer the unpleasant consequences."
>
> So how does a progressive city like Vancouver prepare for a fuel-starved
> future? Not, according to Balfour, by repeating the planning mistakes of
> the oil era. "The top planners do not even have the end of cheap energy,
> global warming, or mass migration on their radar," says Balfour. "We
> cannot keep on making the same silly mistakes of the last hundred years
> and that includes most current planning and engineering in our urban
> environments."
>
> In 2005, Balfour established the Vancouver City Planning Commission
> forums with the VCPC executive. The forums included Bob Williams, Marta
> Farevaag, architect Oberto Oberti, Dr. Bill Rees from UBC (father of the
> "ecological footprint" concept) the Post-Carbon Institute, and other
> planners. Last year, Balfour and Eileen McAdam Keenan compiled their
> research into a book: Strategic Sustainable Planning: A Civil Defense
> Manual for Cultural Survival (Old City Foundation Press, 2007).
>
> The book describes how the end of cheap oil leads inevitably to the end
> of cheap food, how food shortages will erode social cohesion, and how
> unrest will limit planning options.
>
> For example, the UN attempts to feed about 70 million of the 800 million
> people living with starvation, but must cut back due to rising oil
> prices. Meanwhile, people erode 20 billion tonnes of top soil every
> year, and convert more farmland to growing biofuels, all leading to
> higher food costs.
>
> Balfour describes planning for these interlocking crises by returning to
> local economies, which he calls "relocalization." Building suburban
> bedroom communities linked to cities by petrol-guzzling roads is already
> 100-years out of date.
>
> During the last month, I met with Balfour and traded e-mails. Here are
> more of his thoughts . . .
>
> On the need for change:
>
> "We have already crossed too many important points in time where we
> could have managed a gentle change to a post oil society. We now enter a
> period of painful adjustment. The weakest links in society, the deniers,
> still wield too much influence.
>
> "When we delay the changes, our culture has less chance of survival.
> Planning for a soft landing is about working together to avoid the
> painful crash. We must accept radical change, quantum-leaps, lateral
> thinking, and shift to patterns of community, and we must do this in
> short order."
>
> On post-oil food supply:
>
> "Farmlands represent our common public asset for food security. Urban
> populations must have access to a gardening commons within walking
> distance in a very near future.
>
> "A farmer who believes he can plough 100 acres more efficiently than 10
> acres is making the assumption that he can still get diesel for his
> tractor in 10 years, that he still owns the land, or that he does not
> have to take on 100 landless refugees."
>
> On BC's Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR):
>
> "The ALR is critical to the survival of town sites and must not be
> considered for urban development, the sprawl that some newly arrived
> hired guns call 'new urbanism.' This avant-garde green language is a
> disguised robber baron plan to erode the precious public commons of the ALR.
>
> "The farmer who provides our sustenance has been marginalized and his
> land devalued. In his place, we get tasteless green strawberries with no
> food value delivered by trucks from California.
>
> "We should not only protect agricultural land and green belts, but also
> turn back the clock to the smart decisions of the 1970s. This is not
> some idealistic notion of the good old days, but an absolute necessity
> beyond our control, that we must prepare for now. Your children will
> thank you."
>
> On Vancouver's EcoDensity push:
>
> "The EcoDensity initiative is a bit of a farce because it misses out on
> the 'eco' part, but densification and a move toward sustainable forms is
> important. Our current mishmash of poor buildings and wasteful land use
> has to be reengineered in short order, before the energy is gone.
>
> "Single-family houses, high rises and lousy, leaky apartments are
> vestiges of our colonial mentality in the rain forest. The problem lies
> with Vancouverites looking at homes as investments first and community
> housing second. We have become a city of yakkers.
>
> "The EcoDensity plan proposes arterial redevelopment and urban villages
> that should have happened a hundred years ago. We have little time to
> correct a century of bad planning. If we don't clean house soon,
> radically, nature will clean house for us."
>
> On Vancouver's expansion:
>
> "We're building on the flatland that we will need for food in the near
> future. Green regions are not just negative space left over after
> planning the urban area, but the vital part that provides life. Urban
> areas have social limits. Two smaller communities separated by
> productive green land creates positive social benefits over sprawl.
>
> "If the mistakes proposed for Maple Ridge, destroying ALR land, are
> allowed to become reality, it will bode poorly for the rest of Metro
> Vancouver that would soon regret this criminal dismemberment of the ALR.
>
> "B.C. is mountainous, so we should learn how to take proper urban
> development to the hills. Thorn Hill is one of the best sites in BC to
> demonstrate this, an area of poor soils but otherwise a classic site for
> a stand-alone sustainable town on a gentle south slope. Thorn Hill could
> be a demonstration for true smart growth for a post oil economy."
>
> On the end of suburbia:
>
> "Over-inflated false economies like oil-subsidized, single-family
> subdivisions are at risk most of all. To sustain our communities and
> heal the planet, we have to throw out the oil era planning and
> engineering documents and start over.
>
> "The old land management plans of the Wacky Bennett era paved over green
> space as described by former Minister of Municipal Affairs, Dan
> Campbell, who envisioned, 'Some day soon, it will all be paved from
> Vancouver to Hope.' His heirs are trying to speak green while still
> plotting for 1950s-style suburban sprawl.
>
> "Any suburb or city artificially propped up is toast. We're building
> highways to a future oblivion. Green fingers of land must penetrate town
> sites to make them sustainable when there is no gas for cars or for
> shipping food from Mexico."
>
> On the speed of change:
>
> "The green baby steps we now proclaim as progress are too little, too
> late. What sense does it make to give a green award to a building where
> everyone has to drive to get there? The longer this emergency is
> ignored, the worse the crash will be."
>
> On new economics:
>
> "The cheap energy era allowed us a veneer of civilization in which
> people collected money for doing nothing of significance for the real
> betterment of society. We count useless products and the war as positive
> GNP. This practice suggests a sick society. Mother Earth is keeping
> another set of books, however, and the two forms of accounting are not
> reconcilable.
>
> "The 'grow, grow, grow' planning folks have an Achilles heel. Each
> growth scenario relies on key resources that are running out. The
> shortages will depress expected growth. In most cases, the dream of
> finding alternatives is wishful thinking.
>
> "The practice of creating more palaces of temporary bliss, where we
> breed more consumers to perpetuate the paving of the planet, has to
> collapse."
>
> On nuclear power as a solution:
>
> "We have only 85 years uranium resources at current consumption. If
> there is a huge ramp up of nuclear, the supply life of uranium will be
> shorter than the design term of the new facilities built to use it. And
> still we have not dealt with the issues of disaster insurance, waste
> disposal, and weapons proliferation."
>
> On saving soil or selling lawns by the yard:
>
> "Last year, Scientific American and New Scientist investigated "soil
> mining," the use of corn and soya for biofuels. There is nothing left to
> return nutrients for sustainable yields. We do the same thing in the
> Fraser Valley for growing lawns, which we waste gas on to mow. The sod
> farms on class one soils roll up a crop of sod every few months, taking
> with them a whole layer of the best agricultural soils. In some places,
> the sod farms are over a meter below the fields around them."
>
> On relocalization:
>
> "The rising outrage against big governments and big corporations making
> unhealthy decisions 'for us' is a healthy sign of repossessing our life
> and survival. Relocalization is a rediscovery of how to do things for
> ourselves. We must quickly re-learn forgotten skills. This is not a
> small task, but a great challenge.
>
> "We cannot force relocalization. It will happen as a survival shift,
> like the Victory gardens of World War II. Six years ago, when I
> suggested relocalizing sewage treatment to a community level, the
> engineers laughed. Then they discovered the cost to replace the big pipe
> systems that were breaking down. Now the talk is about local treatment.
> It means using the edges of schools and community centres to recreate
> wetlands for purifying water."
>
> On life after peak oil:
>
> "Price escalations will not wait until the world's oil tank is empty,
> but will appear earlier, at the last quarter-tank mark. We are there.
>
> "The oil era globalization monoliths are not people, nor community, nor
> essential to our survival. Safeway, Save-On-Foods, and Wal-Mart rely on
> cheap liquid fuel and cannot keep breathing in the same way beyond the
> next few years. Chains like Wal-Mart destroy local mom and pop community
> businesses, the very institutions we'll need to survive."