A terrific E.P.A. study highlights what I’ve long said, that urban form (compactness, housing size, walkability, transit-orientation) is the elephant in the room, when it comes to climate change.

For instance, it finds that single-family rowhouses in walkable neighborhoods use 42% less total energy than detached single-family houses in auto-dependent places.

Of course clean energy is critical; of course we want more efficient technologies; of course we need to eat less (and better) meat — climate change is a complex issue, with many solutions. But climate change is a land use problem first. Our land use underlies nearly all our other climate problems.

Changing how our cities are planned, built and run is the key to humanity’s survival. Unborn generations will care far more about that than any other thing we’re doing (with the possible exception of how we handle nuclear weapons and waste).

Cities are machines for making the future. Right now, they make a sweltering future of climate chaos and suffering. They could make a bright green future. We choose.

Up until the recent housing bust, you often heard the advice “drive until you qualify.” If you couldn’t afford as large a house as you’d like to buy in the city, you should look at surrounding suburbs, widening your search outwards until you found one far enough out on the suburban fringe to cost what a bank would loan you. The bust — which has hit outlying suburbs most devastatingly — has made this advice pretty clearly a thing of the past, and even traditional real estate agents are starting to recommend that families look at the combined cost of transportation and housing when choosing a place to live.

The opposite advice would seem to be the old adage that if you’re on a budget, you should buy the smallest house in the best neighborhood you can afford. Certainly, market analysts tell us we’re seeing a shift (especially among Millennials) away from concern with owning one’s “dream home” and towards living in one’s “dream neighborhood.” In North America, observers say, we’re definitely seeing a fast-growing locational preference for walkable urbanism, a more modest set of expectations in terms of home size and an overall shift away from home-ownership as a heavily-leveraged financial investment. People want smaller, more affordable homes in walkable neighborhoods.

Buying in a good neighborhood is probably sound advice. But there’s something bigger moving under the surface of these waters. A leading-edge set of urbanites now wants neighborhoods with “good bones” to support urban lifestyles that barely yet exist.

All good compact neighborhoods offer more ability to live a low-consumption, high-access, experience-rich and car-free life. I’m seeing evidence, though, that a non-trivial number of the best informed home buyers are looking for neighborhoods able to evolve in the face of rapid change. Places willing to adopt innovations – from increased density to district energy to elimination of parking to new transit modes — that might be opposed by NIMBYs in more established areas. They’re shopping for places where both the urban form and the community culture favor experimentation and adoption of new solutions; they’re looking for someplace they can build their own solutions and life experiments.

They’re looking, you might say, for neighborhoods that work as platforms for innovative living.

I’ve been thinking about the profound sense of disconnect many of us working on sustainability-related issues seem to be finding these days.

It’s not the disconnect we experienced 10 or 20 years ago, thankfully: it’s not the strangeness of discussing matters with people to whom it’s never even occurred that we live on a finite planet. Today, when even oil executives can talk a good game on sustainability, that sort of disconnect is (mostly) a thing of the past.

What I’m talking about is something different. It’s the surreal experience of talking to smart, informed people who are sure that a big transformation is underway across the entire globe, and yet (when asked about their own work) anticipate little change in their own industries, cities or lives.

Considered from a distance, the scope, scale and speed of change are obvious to them. But move the focus to their immediate surroundings and concerns, and the changes they expect to see are generally marginal and incremental. Few seem to have considered the possibility that things will change dramatically, quickly, across the entire economy. It’s almost like when the idea of change gets that close, the forces involved make it so big that it becomes invisible.

This is totally understandable, of course. Change that big is scary; discussing it at all risks backlash from Right Wing political elements and reactionary stakeholders; exploring it fully runs the danger of being seen as outside the “realistic” spectrum of the public debate (especially in the U.S.); addressing big change without having some strategies for anticipating and adapting to new opportunities and threats could lead to looking unprepared and adrift. There are a lot of good reasons not to see the magnitude of change bearing down on us.

I sometimes think that the task of the sustainability movement at this particular moment is to find new ways to help leaders bring the scope, scale and speed of planetary change into our discussions of daily life. Based on what I’m hearing from friends and colleagues, we have our work cut out for us.

On the other hand, the mere fact that so many brilliant people have yet to engage with the scope, scale and speed of change in their own lives, work and communities means that a huge wave of innovative solutions is still swelling in front of us. If our sense of the magnitude of the problems is out-of-scale, so is our anticipation of future innovations with which we can meet those problems.

Recently, I’ve been getting asked what I think about the idea of “the death of distance.” The death of distance is a buzzphrase for the idea that as oil production peaks and energy (especially the fuels needed for motorized boats, planes, cars and trucks) gets more expensive, we’ll all be retreating into smaller and smaller geographies. Peak oil, the thinking might be summed up, will make our worlds smaller.

This seems to me to misunderstand some key facts about the physical world.

The first is simple physics: the amount of energy used to transport something is based on the mass of the thing and the speed of the movement, as well as how long you move it. Simply put, moving something heavy slowly takes far less energy than moving it at higher speeds. The faster you go, the more energy-intensive the acceleration (which is why lower speed limits for cars save so much gas).

The second misunderstanding here, it seems to me, is about energy substitution. It’s not that substituting other forms of energy for oil is impossible — for instance, people sailed the world thousands of years before the invention of the steam engine — it’s that the energy available in these other forms is often less “dense,” which means it’s harder to gather the energy to move heavy things quickly. You can sail a ship slowly using wind; to drive it forward at a good clip, you need coal or (better yet) oil.

So, in the future, it’ll likely get much more expensive to move big, heavy things at high speeds over long distances. But not everything we ship is heavy, and not everything we move needs to go fast.

Moving more slowly doesn’t mean you never ship anything. Many commodity goods, for instance, can travel quite slowly and still be valuable. Ancient Rome, for instance, maintained a thriving trade in grain with Egypt. Overnight shipping may soon be a thing of the past, but global trade isn’t going anywhere.

Other items don’t weigh much, and so don’t take much more energy to ship more quickly; and of course, much trade is now essentially dematerialized. Software, news, entertainment, design — all are traded in digital form. And the increased cost of energy for these transactions is pretty marginal compared to their value. Even if energy cost 10x as much, the price of downloading a song wouldn’t need to rise much. Even the computer we listen to that song on isn’t nearly as “energy price sensitive” as say, your average lawnmower or home gym. Information will still flow in a world with expensive energy.

What this all means is that what we’re really about to experience is what I call “the death of speed.”

The death of speed will have profound impacts on our cities and suburbs, on whole industries, on a variety of retail models, even on our diets. It will change the landscapes of our lives. But it won’t leave us living in the small towns of the past.

UPDATE: Got an interesting question, asking why the death of speed wouldn’t lead to a more agrarian future of small towns, self-sufficiency? It’s a good question, and one I’ll explore in more detail soon, but the short reply is this: moving food makes up a minuscule portion of most developed nations’ energy footprints.

Particularly in places like North America, Australia and New Zealand, the biggest direct impact will almost certainly be that car-travel (and thus, also, auto-oriented businesses and sprawling suburban lifestyles) will become much more expensive. The best solution to this problem is simply building communities where more things are close by and walkable. Density-done-right saves energy in all sorts of ways I’ve written about in the past and will explore again soon. The death of speed will spur the rise of compact communities.

The future of green is orange: within the 600 pages of the new Worldchanging book, you’ll find the global sustainability movement redefined.

This is a time for thinking in terms of scope, scale and speed. Consequently, we’ve taken out almost all the guides to small steps, better shopping and behavior change. We’ve added hundreds of new and updated entries on building a bright green future, from the very basic systems of life all the way up to planetary thinking. Though it is a revised edition of our first book, Worldchanging 2.0 is so substantially reworked that it might as well be thought of as an entirely different book.

Worldchanging 2.0 is an urban book, focusing on cities and the systems we need to change to make them carbon-neutral, zero-waste, walkable and equitable engines of prosperity. It’s an ambitious book, full of the kinds of bold thinking we need to engage with to build a truly bright green future: climate foresight and planetary thinking; sustainable design innovations and passivhaus buildings; walksheds, ubiquitous technology and sharing systems; biomimicry and green chemistry; adaptive re-use and rugged green infrastructure; telling the backstories of the things we buy, making transparent the functioning of our governments and rebuilding the ruins of the unsustainable. On a planet hurtling towards not only a population of 9 billion people, almost all living in or around cities, facing a massive ecological crisis and an unfaltering technological revolution, ideas like the ones in Worldchanging are no longer just provocative, they’re essential. Worldchanging is a guide to building (and living in) bright green cities. Now, not in some distant, perfect future.

The new Worldchanging features a foreword by green jobs pioneer Van Jones, an introduction by 350 founder Bill McKibben and entries by scores of Worldchanging’s insightful thinkers, journalists and designers. It is optimistic, clear-headed, solutions-oriented; both visionary and practical.

Worldchanging 2.0 is the definitive result of seven years of global solutions-based journalism. It’s a wild, ambitious, imperfect and energetic book, and the best summation of the Worldchanging project we knew how to create. And though Stefan Sagmeister’s new design is gorgeous, we hope the ideas inside are what make this a book you read and return to and use to drive your own creativity and solutions.

Worldchanging may not change your life, but it may change how you design your future.

Worldchanging hits the shelves in the U.S., U.K. and Canada March 1st. It is already available for discount pre-order at Powell’s, Barnes and Noble, Borders and Amazon.

As with our last book, we’re depending on word of mouth and reader recommendations to spread the word — if anything, the fact that Worldchanging is now closed and the promotions effort is all-volunteer makes your support even more critical. So we hope that you’ll share this news with others (blog it, tweet it ( @AlexSteffen for regular updates), join the Worldchanging Facebook group, or just tell your friends you’re excited to read it). Once you’ve had a chance to read the book, we’d appreciate your positive reviews on all these sites, as well, of course.

Let’s change the world.

((crossposted from Worldchanging.com))

Landscape Urbanism is, as Wikipedia puts it, “a theory of urbanism arguing that landscape architecture, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.” It was formed very directed as a critique of New Urbanism, in an attempt to wrest back a place of central relevance for thinking about landscape and land form in urban debates. Or, as others have put it, New Urbanism says it’s where you put the houses that matters, Landscape Urbanism says it’s what you put around them.

I think that any attempt to see the systems around us more clearly adds value. That said, one of our biggest problems is that in the developed world (but most especially in North America) we have a tendency to mistake the wrapping for the mechanism. We tend to think too much about how a place looks and feels, and far too little about what actually drives the systems within it.

American cities, especially, are the apices of vast networks of material and energy flows that reach literally around the entire planet. The impacts of our every day lives radiate out in all directions, from the atmosphere to the ocean depths, from distant forests to melting ice caps. Those impacts are planetary, gigantic in aggregate and unsustainable in nearly every particular. Most of those impacts we will never see. And the biggest impacts of all are generated by our auto-dependence, our over-consumption, our sprawling land-use and our bloated and poorly designed homes.

Walkability, transit-orientation and green building all reduce those invisible impacts. In discussing these, New Urbanism is excellent. The problem I have with New Urbanism is a lack of ambition — something that feels like an unwillingness to face the actual scope, scale and speed of the changes we need, and to really push the boundaries of urban form. Too much New Urbanist rhetoric feels to me to be locked in a debate from the 80s that assumes suburbanization is the norm, is here to stay and needs only modification.

If we take planetary boundaries seriously, we need to be reducing the unseen impacts of our lives by something like 95% in the next couple decades. That’s a big task, and it’s made more important by the economic and social vulnerability built into our current systems and their reliance on long, complicated supply chains, limited nonrenewable resources and a stable climate.

Bright green cities — able to offer prosperity with 5% of the impact using far more rugged systems — will not be had by tinkering. We need serious changes in land use, big investments in infrastructure, new innovations in design and technology, and new approaches to how urban life is lived. We simply can’t get there with home retrofits, electric cars and backyard gardening. The physics don’t pencil.

Some of changes needed will take, I believe, weaving biomimetic systems into the city: making our infrastructure and places work in such a way that they demand less from nature. But we’re never going to make car-dependent suburban sprawl sustainable through changes in landscape: the amount of good we can do within the boundaries of those places will never eliminate, much less make up for, the damage done elsewhere to support them. No amount of permaculture in the backyard will fix the melting of the ice caps caused by a lifetime of driving and dwelling in extremely inefficient low-density systems.

The future of cities, I think, involves high-density, high-innovation cities meshed through with extranatural systems, systems that reduce the need for inputs and decrease the toxicity and wastefulness of outputs, helping to stabilize natural systems around cities. Those systems and the landscapes they define may look nothing like natural rivers, forests, farms — but that’s okay.

Because one of the biggest problems with urban debates these days — and it’s a problem I fear Landscape Urbanism contributes to, rather than addresses — is that we continue to mistake that which looks green for that which is sustainable. We dress up disastrous land-use and voraciously wasteful urban systems in gardens and greenery, and end up with a Potemkin sustainability.

New Urbanism, more hardcore urbanists have long charged, can end up being just “sprawl in drag.” Landscape Urbanism, unless it addresses the physics of underlying systems (transportation, housing, manufacturing), threatens to be just “sprawl in a pretty green dress”.

I’d like to see a whole different approach, one which starts from the scope, scale and speed of the changes we know we need to make, and backcasts from that transformation as the basis of any sound urban thinking. Planetary urbanism.

That’s a task that will take all the smarts we have, in every discipline.