Fall 2013 Sales Kit

Sales Information Sheet Foreclosing the Future The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction Bruce Rich Hardcover

ISBN 9781610911849

Price $35.00

Discount IPT*

Pub Month Sept 2013

Ebook

9781610914932

$24.99

IPT*

Sept 2013

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 6x9 Pages: 344 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy/Environmental Policy POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy/Environmental Policy

*Trade discount until six months after publication date, then short discount Competing Titles The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press, 2006) ISBN: 978-0143036791 Bookscan: 3788. The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and Their Borrowers, Ngaire Woods (Cornell University Press, 2007) ISBN: 978-0801474200 Bookscan: 853. Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO, Richard Peet (Zed Books, 2007) ISBN: 978-1848132528 Bookscan: 539 Previous Works Mortgaging the Earth (Beacon, 1994) ISBN: 978-0807047071 Bookscan: 419 To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from India (Beacon, 2010) ISBN: 978-0807006139 Bookscan: 225

Sales Handle The shocking story of the world's most influential development institution Description World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has vowed that his institution will fight poverty and climate change, a claim that World Bank presidents have made for two decades. But if worldwide protests and reams of damning internal reports are any indication, it is doing just the opposite. By funding development projects and programs that warm the planet and destroy critical natural resources on which the poor depend, the Bank has been hurting the very people it claims to serve. What explains this blatant contradiction?

If anyone has the answer, it is arguably Bruce Rich—a lawyer and expert in public international finance who has for the last three decades studied the Bank’s institutional contortions, the real-world consequences of its lending, and the politics of the global environmental crisis. What emerges from the bureaucratic dust is a disturbing and gripping story of corruption, larger-than-life personalities, perverse incentives, and institutional amnesia. The World Bank is the Vatican of development finance, and its dysfunction plays out as a reflection of the political hypocrisies and failures of governance of its 188 member countries.

Foreclosing the Future shows how the Bank’s failure to address the challenges of the 21st century has implications for everyone in an increasingly interdependent world. Rich depicts how the World Bank is a microcosm of global political and economic trends—powerful forces that threaten both environmental and social ruin.

Selling Points • Author's track record as an authority on The World Bank; includes information previously only published in obscure reports about how the World Bank is violating its own policies • Broad audience of readers interested in both environmental issues and international development • Timeliness of book given the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and the 20th anniversary of the Rio Summit

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii Acronyms xv Chapter 1. Tiger Talk

1

Chapter 2. Present at the Creation

17

Chapter 3. “I Can Change the Approval Culture to an Effectiveness Culture” 34 Chapter 4. High Risk, High Reward

57

Chapter 5. The Logic Was Textbook Perfect Chapter 6. Backwards into the Future

79

95

Chapter 7. The Brief, Broken Presidency of Paul Wolfowitz Chapter 8. The Carbon Caravan

138

Chapter 9. A Market Like No Other

159

Chapter 10. Financializing Development Chapter 11. Dying for Growth

114

177

202

Chapter 12. What Does It Take?

220

Notes 241 Index 291

v

Rich_FM.indd v

4/26/13 10:27 AM

P R E FAC E

A Future in Foreclosure

I

n 2000 a dedicated physician working to promote public health for the poor in developing countries condemned the World Bank for promoting “corporate-led economic globalization” that “not only failed to improve living standards and health outcomes among the poor, but also . . . inflicted additional suffering on disenfranchised and vulnerable populations.” He recounted his own experience in a Latin American country where the World Bank subsidized huge multinational mining and oil investments while encouraging the weakening of environmental laws that “led to significant ecological degradation from deforestation, oil spills, and poisoned waterways.”

These words were written by Dr. Jim Yong Kim, who assumed the presidency of the World Bank on July 1, 2012.

Kim’s words in 2000 (in a book he co-edited, Dying for Growth, a macabre pun on what the World Bank model of growth was doing to the poor) were all the more disquieting in that they came the better part of a decade after the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the landmark United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. In Rio, in one of the largest diplomatic gatherings in history, 118 heads of state and numerous international development institutions such as the World Bank made wide-ranging pledges and commitments to address global environmental issues while helping the poor.

More than 20 years after Rio ’92 and 13 years after Dr. Kim’s warnings about the effects of distorted economic globalization, scientific evidence is growing that the global economy has put the entire global climate system at risk, as well as the planetary web of biodiversity and life forms. Species are dying at an alarming and accelerating rate. Economically caused global warming is already undermining the benign, stable climate conditions that have enabled the rise of human civilizations over the past 7,000 years. The inability of our institutions to address these trends is rooted in a continuing vii

Rich_FM.indd vii

4/26/13 10:27 AM

viii

Preface

worldwide failure of governments and of markets to deal with the impacts of human activity on the natural world.

The World Bank Group is a microcosm of this breakdown. The Bank’s failures to confront the environmental challenges of economic development illuminate the political failures and hypocrisies of most of the governments of its members. The Bank is to blame, but its member governments are even more so.

This book builds on an earlier analysis I published nearly two decades ago, Mortgaging the Earth, which identified many of the persistent institutional and political pathologies that undermine the Bank’s effectiveness.

Since then, unfortunately, the environmentally unsustainable development that the Bank has continued to finance is contributing to a global ecological debt that now is foreclosing on the future of human societies.

The world urgently needs global governance at the very moment when it is failing. The World Bank Group has a unique wealth of experience that could help build governance at the local, national, and international levels, if only the Bank would learn from its experience rather than flee from it.

Quite a few years ago, an internal review of the Bank’s operations described the problem as unfounded institutional optimism based on pervasive institutional amnesia. In a world desperately in need of global environmental leadership, the Bank could and should play a more positive role.

The Role of the World Bank Group In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the World Bank is no longer as financially influential as it once was. The growth of international private-sector finance, and of global public lending institutions in newly industrializing nations such as China and Brazil, mean that the Bank has now become just one financial player among others.

But the Bank remains critically important. It continues to put itself forth as an intellectual and policy leader for economic development in the United Nations system and in the global economy at large. The Rio Earth Summit chose the Bank to administer a new fund to finance environmental projects—the Global Environment Facility. After Rio the Bank and other development institutions did try to incorporate environmental concerns more fully into their decision making. More recently, the richer countries chose the World Bank to administer most of the new funds they have contributed to address climate change in developing nations. Still more important for the global environment than these new funds is the ecological impact of

Rich_FM.indd viii

4/26/13 10:27 AM

Preface

ix

the activities financed by the Bank Group’s core lending and finance, which has averaged around $57 billion annually in recent years.

Since the early 1990s the World Bank has also played no small role in promoting a one-sided economic globalization that has liberalized markets and unleashed capital flows. It has done so without effective regulation at either the national or international level to counteract environmental and social abuses unleashed by these flows. Of course, the Bank has been just one player, albeit an influential one, in promoting this agenda, together with the finance ministries of many industrialized countries, led by the United States, as well as private international banks and multinational corporations.

One particularly corrosive effect of this globalization agenda has been a disproportionate growth of corruption in developing nations, resulting in massive outflows of stolen funds from even the poorest countries, laundered through proliferating international tax havens. This corruption is undermining not just the Bank’s environmental performance, but international development efforts across the board.

When one examines the failures to conserve ecosystems, or to mitigate the environmental impacts of development, one finds that failed governance at all levels is almost invariably at the root. The Bank itself is a prime example. Many of its problems are associated with a dysfunctional institutional culture in which the relentless pressure to move money out the door, even in violation of the Bank’s own polices and rules, often overrides all other considerations. What is remarkable about this “loan approval culture” is how well documented it has been for decades through reams of internal Bank reports, and how little the Bank’s management, and member-country governments, whether donors like the United States and other industrialized nations, or developing country borrowers, have done to effectively change it.

A Brief Note on Methodology and a Short Outline Much of the analysis in Foreclosing the Future relies on internal Bank studies, particularly those of the Bank’s operations evaluation staff. Some former high-ranking Bank professionals have criticized these analyses as lacking independence and watering down, or even misrepresenting, how bad things really are. Bank management, on the other hand, has often responded that these internal evaluations are too one-sidedly critical of the Bank’s actual performance. In the final analysis, the studies provide an unparalleled

Rich_FM.indd ix

4/26/13 10:27 AM

x

Preface

insight into deep-seated, continuing institutional problems that undermine, and at times cripple, the Bank’s effectiveness. I have also relied on numerous external studies and reviews, the analyses of nongovernmental organizations, reports and hearings of the U.S. Congress and federal government, and of other governments, as well as press accounts of various Bank controversies. The book’s approach is roughly chronological, though some chapters bring together in one place issues that have been important over the past two decades; for example, chapters 8 and 9 address climate and energy.

The first two chapters introduce the World Bank, describing why it is important for anyone concerned with the fate of the global environment and the future of economic development, and identifying a number of major themes of the book. Following the 1992 Earth Summit, the Bank strove to improve its environmental performance and to increase lending for environmental projects. But at the same time internal Bank evaluations revealed a record of poor results and continual failure to mainstream environmental concerns into its operations.

Chapters 3 through 6 examine the momentous debates over environment and development, and well-publicized efforts to reform the Bank, under the presidency of James Wolfensohn from 1995 through 2005. In the face of growing controversies over World Bank financing of large dam, mining, and oil projects, Wolfensohn convened unprecedented reviews involving the Bank, industry, civil society, and borrowing governments in an attempt to reach consensus on both the Bank’s future role in supporting such activities and on good practice for any future investment. Unfortunately, Bank management and borrowing governments rejected many of the recommendations presented in these reviews. The Bank continued its financing of ecologically destructive and socially disruptive large infrastructure and extractive industries and had little to show for its attempts to improve their environmental and social performance. The Bank’s efforts to promote conservation and better management of forests also failed in the face of weak governance and much stronger global market forces that reward short-term deforestation.

Wolfensohn was the first World Bank president to publicly raise the issue of massive corruption of Bank lending, but his efforts to control this corruption on the part of borrowing governments and corporations proved ineffective. During Wolfensohn’s tenure, the Bank also increasingly subsidized private-sector investment through its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). As his second term drew to an

Rich_FM.indd x

4/26/13 10:27 AM

Preface

xi

end, the pushback from Bank management and borrowing governments against the Bank’s environmental standards and policies grew. There was even resistance to stronger fiduciary safeguards to prevent funds from being stolen.

Chapter 7 describes the brief and tumultuous tenure of Paul Wolfowitz from 2005 through 2007. Wolfowitz’s efforts to crack down on corruption were met with strong opposition by the Bank’s member countries. Controversy over Bank finance of large dams continued, and evidence of how corruption totally undermined Bank development goals became more public in a series of hearings before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Wolfowitz was forced to resign in disgrace because of alleged favoritism shown to a female Bank staffer who was his romantic partner.

Chapters 8 and 9 examine the Bank’s role in climate and energy finance, arguably the most critical and intractable development issue facing the Bank and the world at large as global warming accelerates. The Bank’s contradictions and failures in this area mirror those of its member countries as well as the failure of the international system to address the climate impacts of economic growth.

Chapter 10 examines the tenure of Robert Zoellick from 2007 through June 2012, which was characterized by an accelerated move away from lending for specific investment projects to large loans to governments, government agencies, and private financial institutions for budget support or for general investment programs. Bank environmental and social safeguards did not apply as strongly to such loans, which reinforced the “loan approval culture” that had undermined the quality of Bank operations for decades. Zoellick gave still greater priority to the operations of the International Finance Corporation, despite both its appalling record in continuing to finance environmentally and socially destructive extractive industries, and internal evaluations that found that the vast majority of IFC finance had no focus on poverty alleviation—supposedly the World Bank Group’s core mission.

Chapters 11 and 12 describe the advent of the Bank’s current president, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, and the disconnect between, on the one hand, his enthusiastic commitments to “end poverty” and to increase the Bank’s focus on fighting global warming, and, on the other hand, the Bank’s deep-seated institutional problems. These problems continue to undermine the Bank’s purported goals through the pressure to lend and the growing marginalization of the Bank’s hard-won environmental and social safeguards and standards. Kim, who little more than a decade before vehemently criticized

Rich_FM.indd xi

4/26/13 10:27 AM

xii

Preface

the Bank and the IFC, reaffirmed the IFC as a model for the rest of the Bank despite its track record of even greater environmental and social failure than the affiliates of the Bank that lend to governments. If the Bank is to play a more positive role it must focus on improved governance in its borrowers and itself—starting with finally changing the incentives in its own internal culture to focus less on moving money out the door and more on developmental and environmental quality.

The issues, the project examples, and the policy conflicts we find in the World Bank reflect a wider battle going on throughout the world, a battle for the kind of global society that future generations will inhabit. The basic question is whether worldwide economic activity can be embedded in rules and standards that can be agreed on and enforced. A global economy calls for a global project of justice. What we call environmental sustainability is an integral part of this project of justice, ensuring a world not just for future human generations, but for the other living things with which we share this small planet. If they are in danger, then so are we.

Rich_FM.indd xii

4/26/13 10:27 AM

Sales Information Sheet Food, Genes, and Culture

Trim Size: 5.5x8.25 Pages: 244 Copyright: 2013

Eating Right for Your Origins Gary Paul Nabhan Paperback Ebook

ISBN 9781610914925 9781610914932

Price $19.99 $19.99

Fall 2013

Discount IPT IPT

Pub Month Sept 2013 Sept 2013

Bookstore Categories HEALTH & FITNESS / Nutrition HEALTH & FITNESS / Nutrition

Competing Titles The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health, T Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell (BenBella Books, 2006) ISBN: 978-1932100662 Bookscan: 510,472. In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2009) ISBN: 978-0143114963 Bookscan: 372,911.

Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health, William Davis (Rodale, 2011) ISBN: 9781609611545 Bookscan: 350,536 Previous Works Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food (Norton, 2009) ISBN: 978-0393335057 Bookscan: 1978.

Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Niklay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine (Island Press, 2011) ISBN: 978-1610910033 Bookscan: 466P, 2349 C Warehouse: 1346 P, 5783 C. Desert Terroir: Exploring the Unique Flavors and Sundry Places of the Borderlands (University of Texas Press, 2011) ISBN: 978-0292725898 Bookscan: 193. Renewing America's Food Traditions : Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods, with Deborah Madison (Chelsea Green, 2008) ISBN: 9781933392899 Bookscan: 2570. Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves: An American Naturalist in Italy (Penguin, 1994) ISBN: 978-0140239720 Bookscan: 1258. Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story (Counterpoint, 1998) ISBN: 978-1887178969 Bookscan: 844. Why Some Like It Hot (Island Press, 2004) ISBN: 9781559634663 Bookscan: 1493 P, 1813 C Warehouse: 3575 P, 7424 C

Sales Handle An eye-opening exploration of the connections between diet and ancestry.

Description Vegan, low fat, low carb, slow carb: Every diet seems to promise a one-size-fits-all solution to health. But they ignore the diversity of human genes and how they interact with what we eat.

In Food, Genes, and Culture, renowned ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan shows why the perfect diet for one person could be disastrous for another. If your ancestors were herders in Northern Europe, milk might well provide you with important nutrients, whereas if you’re Native American, you have a higher likelihood of lactose intolerance. If your roots lie in the Greek islands, the acclaimed Mediterranean diet might save your heart; if not, all that olive oil could just give you stomach cramps.

Nabhan traces food traditions around the world, from Bali to Mexico, uncovering the links between ancestry and individual responses to food. The implications go well beyond personal taste. Today’s widespread mismatch between diet and genes is leading to serious health conditions, including a dramatic growth over the last 50 years in auto-immune and inflammatory diseases.

Readers will not only learn why diabetes is running rampant among indigenous peoples and heart disease has risen among those of northern European descent, but may find the path to their own perfect diet.

Selling Points • Increased public interest in ancestral eating, including the popular Paleo diet • Timeliness, with new developments in nutritional epigenetics • Established reputation of the author • Track record of the first edition of the book, Why Some Like it Hot

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Sailing Through Histories Encoded In Our Bodies Chapter 2. Searching For The Ancestral Diet Did Mitochondrial Eve And Java Man Feast On The Same Foods?

Chapter 3. Finding A Bean For Your Genes And A Buffer Against Malaria Chapter 4. The Shaping And Shipping Away Of Mediterranean Cuisines Chapter 5. Discovering Why Some Don’t Like It Hot Is It A Matter Of Taste?

Chapter 6. Dealing With Migration Headaches Should We Change Places, Diets, Or Genes?

Chapter 7. Rooting Out The Causes Of Disease Why Diabetes Is So Common Among DesertDwellers Chapter 8. Reconnecting The Health Of The People With The Health Of The Land How Hawaiians Are Curing Themselves

Sources Index

New Foreword by Gary Paul Nabhan, Kellogg Endowed Chair in Food and Water Security for the Borderlands, University of Arizona

If there is a moral to this story, it is that we ignore the interactions among our genes, our ancestral and contemporary diets, and our environments (including their myriad microbes) at our own peril. But if there is hope in this same story, it is that once we open our eyes, mouths, and taste buds to these fascinating interactions, our world will be made richer and many problems can be averted.

What kinds of problems? For starters, the human suffering triggered by the onset of diabetes, heart disease, food allergies, and many forms of diet-driven inflammation. Over the long haul, we also need to check the decline of biodiversity which will impoverish us all, but particularly that of the place-based microbes in our food systems, from the bacteria in our garden’s soils to those in our guts.

These diseases and degradations affect the quality of life of billions of people, yet they are often mislabeled if not misdiagnosed and attributed to the wrong causes. Take adult-onset or non-insulin dependent diabetes, for example, which medical researchers have treated either as a genetically determined disease or a nutritional “disease of Western civilization,” rather than as the result of mismatches between genes, environment, and diet. Since the first edition of this book was published, the number of Americans living with diabetes has grown to an estimated 22.3 million—about 7% of the U.S. population. That marks an increase of nearly five million or 22 percent from 2007 to 2012 and, according to the American Diabetes Association, translates to $245 billion of medical costs. If no change in our perspective on this disease occurs by 2030, Americans might pay as much as $1.3 trillion annually for its treatment. Already, the collateral

damage generated by our unhealthy food system means that one in every four dollars spent on hospital care in America is spent on diabetes, and one in every ten dollars spent on health care in general is spent on this same disease of gene-food-environment dysfunctions. What if just $50 million a year were dedicated to redesigning the food production, processing and preparation system that is making our citizens sick in the first place?

But just why have we witnessed such astronomical growth in diabetes and other diseases during our own lifetimes? While many have suspected that there is a tangible link between this disease and nutrition, we have not yet dealt with its root causes. As a result, 95% percent of U.S. cases of diabetes are clearly triggered by diet changes that result in the non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) form of this disease. Most experts point to the rise in consumption of high-fructose sugars, but what’s painfully absent from the discussion is the connection between health and food, mediated by our genes, culture, and environment. Most geneticists once understood that any expression of certain diseases in plants or animals resulted from at least three factors: genes, environment, and gene-environment interactions. Today we can also include the epigenetic consequences of microbial (biotic) and climatic (abiotic) influences.

Where I live in Arizona, among many diverse Native and Hispanic American populations that suffer the highest incidences of diabetes anywhere in the country, we are headed toward a nutritional cliff that is also a “true� fiscal cliff . Diabetes care in my state has jumped from $.5 billion in 1995 to $3 billion in 2005, to at least $4.4 billion by the end of 2013. To put that in perspective, for every $20 dollars of food grown in Arizona, at least one dollar goes to treating diabetes sufferers.

If diabetes were the only problem, perhaps such bad news could be swept under the rug.

But instead, Americans are now suffering from what Moises Velasquez-Manoff has called an

epidemic of absence that can explain most of the meteoric rises not only in adult-onset diabetes, but in allergies, auto-immune diseases, and inflammatory diseases such as colitis that have occurred over the last half century. Yet the well-documented interactions among human genes, gut microbes, place-based foods, and diseases have barely changed the way most Americans think about our food choices. Sadly, even influential American food writers such as Michael Pollan and Marian Nestle fail to feature topics such as dietary diversity and human genetic diversity in their prescriptive “food rules;” for them, it is enough merely to get Americans to count “good” and “bad” calories, let alone worry about the food-microbe-gene interactions which affect how most of us respond to those calories.

Societies outside North America and Western Europe appear more cognizant of the connections between food, cultural heritage, and place than we are. The release of the first edition of this book stimulated far more public discussion abroad than in the U.S. In Italy, it was

discussed in more than fifty papers, on several television stations, and in Slow Food circles. In Mexico, the national Fondo de Cultura Económica selected it in 2006 as the book on science and society from elsewhere in the world to be translated into Spanish. The difference in reception says less about the book itself than about its readers: in Italy and Mexico, most residents both emotionally identify with and intellectually understand deeply historic food traditions. In much of the United States, our citizenry has become so placeless that I once heard a young Slow Food USA employee ask whether we even had “heritage foods” linked to our own landscapes and communities in North America! And since in America, many consider ourselves “mutts” or genetic hybrids of mixed ancestry, few fathom that our own unique sets of genes may be interacting with particular foods *(or the lack of them) in ways which profoundly influence health.

Yet important research is being done both inside the U.S. and abroad in the fields now known as nutritional epigenetics, evolutionary gastronomy, and ecological genetics. Tufts University researchers Sang-Woon Choi* and Simonetta Friso have called epigentics, in particular, “the new bridge between nutrition and health.” Epigenetics has been described as the heritability of gene expression that can result from environmental or nutritional influences that do not actually alter DNA sequences or genomic structures. In improving nutrition, Choi and Friso contend that epigenetics can be exceptionally useful, because the right nutrients and microbially-enhanced probiotic foods can dramatically influence epigenetic phenomena and trigger the expression of genes at the transcriptional level.

The idea that eating nutritionally and culturally-appropriate foods can reset our genes toward wellness is being aggressively explored by a growing number of nutritional epigeneticists all around the world. Since the publication of the first edition, numerous community health programs among Hispanic and Native Americans are “getting back to their food roots,” as Rebecca Wiggins-Reinhard of Somos La Semilla Food Center calls these grassroots but culturally- and scientifically-informed initiatives. Rebecca and I have been particularly impressed and inspired by the efforts of Rubi Orosco, a public health specialist with the nonprofit Mujer Obrera in El Paso Texas. As Rubi once explained,

“When people think about eating healthy, they often think about having to eat things that are very foreign to the way they eat now, like wheat grass or soy. In reality, we just have to look back a couple of generations, to go back to what our grandparents were doing. The food is still familiar enough, and is in our genes…”

Both conventional medical doctors and community health practices are becoming more open to the value of an evolutionary and revolutionary gastronomic approach that finds a new balance between traditional cultural knowledge and cutting-edge science. Interventions such as the BalancePoint diet of biochemist Binx Selby is but one of many indicators that we can reverse diseases such as diabetes and antherosclerosis through cuisines in harmony with our genes. It is an approach that seeks to honor the time-tried relationships between the diverse edible floras, faunas and microbial communities in our regional foodscapes and in our guts as well. But it is also an approach which humbly admits that we must seek to understand rather than ignore the relationships between biocomplexity, our own health, and that of generations to come.

Sales Information Sheet The Nature of Urban Design

Trim Size: 8.25x10 Pages: 256 Copyright: 2013

A New York City Perspective on Resilience Alexandros Washburn Hardcover

ISBN 9781610913805

Price $40.00

Discount IPT*

Fall 2013

Pub Month Oct 2013

Bookstore Categories ARCHITECTURE / Urban & Land Use Planning

*Trade discount until six months after publication date, then short discount Competing Titles Urban Design by Alex Krieger and Bill Saunders (U of MN Press, 2009) ISBN-13: 978-0816656394 Bookscan: 961.

Understanding Cities: Methods in Urban Design, by Alexander Cuthbert (Routledge, 2011), ISBN: 978-0415608244 Bookscan: 19. Urban Design: the Composition of Complexity (Routledge, 2011). ISBN: 978-0415591478 Bookscan: 111.

The Urban Design Reader by Larice and Macdonald (Routledge, 2006) ISBN: 978-0415333870 Bookscan: 1004. Urban Design Reader by Carmona and Tiesdale (Architectural Press/Elsevier, 2007) ISBN: 978-0750665315 Bookscan: 433.

Cities for People, Gehl, 9/2010 ISBN: 978-1597265737 Bookscan: 1720 Warehouse: 11,175. Urban Ecological Design, Palazzo/Steiner ISBN: 978-1597268295 Bookscan: 151 Warehouse: 658 Previous Works None

Sales Handle A beautifully illustrated exploration of urban design for more resilient, vibrant, and equitable cities Description The global shift to an urban population comes with an uncomfortable corollary. People who live in cities as they are currently designed produce more greenhouse gasses than their non-urban counterparts—as a global average about three times more. But people in cities, particularly in coastal cities, are waking up to their vulnerability as well as to their responsibility. This newly acknowledged responsibility is reflected in current trends in urban design, in newly conceived projects, plans and standards that try to make cities more resilient in the way they are designed, built and inhabited. To truly prosper, cities need to accommodate a growing number of citizens in dignity, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and still be worth living in.

In this visually rich book Alexandros Washburn redefines urban design by looking at the process and products within the context of rapid urbanization and climate change. The Nature of Urban Design uses real-life examples, drawing heavily from the New York experience, to show how to design beautiful urban spaces that achieve multiple goals and objectives—such as greater resilience, livability and equity—while addressing the political and financial challenges that can accelerate or slow implementation. With examples ranging from the High Line to the post-Sandy recovery of Red Hook, Brooklyn, The Nature of Urban Design shows how a welldesigned, well-built city can be the most efficient, equitable, safest, and enriching place on earth.

The Nature of Urban Design will inspire and inform anyone who cares about cities. It provides a framework for participating in the process of change. This includes people who want to become urban designers, particularly students and practitioners in the field of politics, finance and design who help to decide how a city will change.

Selling Points • Visually rich presentation of the power of urban design • More holistic definition of urban design that encompasses the elements necessary for success • Unique perspective on the creation of the High Line

Table of Contents Preface Introduction Chapter 1: Why Should We Care About Cities?

Chapter 2: The Process of Urban Design Chapter 3: The Products of Urban Design Chapter 4: The Process and Products of the High Line Chapter 5: Urban Design for Greater Resilience Epilogue Endnotes

Introduction The last time the mayor ordered an evacuation of my neighborhood in Brooklyn was for hurricane Irene. That was last year, and I obediently packed up and stayed with family on high ground in Manhattan while the storm passed. Now the evacuation order is for hurricane Sandy.

But this time, I am not leaving. I know it's somewhat irresponsible to stay, especially since I work for the mayor who ordered the evacuation. Since I'm the chief urban designer for New York City, I want to observe the effects of the storm and particularly the dynamics of the storm surge on streets and structures. I know enough professionally about the dangers that a storm the size of Sandy poses to the city that I should be worried.

All the coastal neighborhoods in New York City are ordered evacuated. The Far Rockaways as well as Wall Street. As long as you are coastal, in zone A, you are supposed to leave. That's over 350,000 people. My neighborhood is Red Hook, in Brooklyn, about a mile from downtown Manhattan where the East River meets upper New York harbor. They used to make ships in Red Hook, and you could say ships used to make Red Hook, too. Much of the neighborhood is built on cobblestone fill brought over as ballast in the 19th century. The neighborhood was covered in factories and warehouses, all brick, now occupied by artisans and grocers. When not flooded, it is a beautiful neighborhood, with views of the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.

When I go outside to check the level of the storm surge, if a police patrol stops me, I plan to show him my city i.d. and say that I'm conducting research. The lights are flickering, the wind is really picking up, and as I write this, I know I should probably move away from the windows in case they shatter. The guy on the first floor evacuated a long time ago. I comfort myself with the thought that I'm on the second floor. Even if the storm surge is the full eleven feet, I'm at twelve feet. Right? It's the cocktail hour, and I am having my customary martini. No sense in

curtailing my routine. High tide will be at 8pm, which is unfortunately coinciding with landfall for the hurricane, which is unfortunately coinciding with the full moon and so the storm surge is amplified by an extra high gravitational tide.

The subway shut down last night. We will lose power any minute now, which will force me to leave my computer and get out pencil and paper and use a candle if I want to continue writing. In the meantime, I can check the internet. A crane is in danger of collapsing in Manhattan, 1,000 feet above midtown. The first fatality is reported in Queens. And there's a blog post about Red Hook, about how the water is seeping up Van Brunt street.

I look outside and see a trickle of water in the gutter. Nothing unusual, except that the water is flowing OUT of the gutter, and the trickle is turning rapidly into a stream. I put on my rubber boots and go downstairs. I open the door and water rushes in, dark water covered in the golden leaves of autumn. I step out into the street but realize that I better not, there's a current and as my hallway fills, the basement too must be filling and that's where the electrical panel is.

It shorts out. The lights flicker, I hear the breakers fall. Then there is an explosion outside, and the neighborhood goes dark.

Now it's all darkness, not black, but an eerie brown, and whatever light there is reflects off the water which keeps on rising. My house is leaking pretty badly now, but because I defied the evacuation order, I can put buckets under the leaks. A roof can stop a rain shower easily, but when rain is driven by high winds, it goes horizontal, and somehow it gets in.

I love New York, I love Red Hook, but I'm more than anxious now. The waters outside are rising further and moving faster. I go upstairs to look out from the roof. The wind is too strong to go out on the roof and risk being blown off. It's too dark to see what's going on in the back yard, but the street in front of me is now a full-fledged river. A neighbor left his car behind.

I measure the flood by how much of the car I can see. The wheels go under, the doors, now just a roofline. Debris is rushing by. Anyone not out or up on higher ground at this point has had it.

I am at the center of New York, surrounded by buildings, but those buildings are all separated by water. I try to think of Venice, but that's not what it feels like. The scene makes me think of buildings like boulders in a mountain river. Only a kayak would navigate these waters.

I have to trust the surge will crest, and I use what little battery is left to check the internet and the path of the storm and the timing of the tides. I think we've reached the peak. I think my house will stand.

Tomorrow and the days following will be about recovery. Wet, cold recovery. Power won’t be back for days. Much of the city will barely function.

I go to bed knowing only one thing. That tomorrow my neighbors will be out and will be talking together and helping each other. Each conversation will be a small stone resetting the foundation for our great community. We have so many families here, so many children.

Creative people who could not afford the canyons of Manhattan found space here.

Is community enough, though, against forces so large? This storm is almost a thousand miles across. Maybe we are relying too much on the resilience of our citizens and not enough on the resilience of our city. I feel that the sense of community a city inspires is strong, but I also feel that physically the city itself is weak, at least in the face of these storms. We have neglected these dangers to the city itself and left it vulnerable to these large forces. We tell ourselves that these are once-in-a-century storms, but two have come about in the space of a single year.

Maybe they were once in a century storms during the last century. This century, I think they will be far more frequent.

I go to bed knowing that if we care about cities, we have to do something. We have to change the status quo. I want my city to be safe.

Why Do We Care About Cities?

I care about my city, because I care about my neighborhood. I care about my neighborhood because I care about my family. It is a natural progression, something I've watched in my children as they have grown in age and scope. The emancipation of leaving the house to walk to school ushered in the neighborhood, but when they learned to ride the subway and conquered the city itself, they became New Yorkers above all else.

I am sure the same can be said of Parisians and Paulistas, as it is true of the citizens of almost any city in the world. We care about our own cities.

Beyond emotion, there are economic, social and cultural reasons we should all care about cities, and not just our own. For the first time in history, more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and the percentage is rising. The world depends on cities for jobs, for homes, for creative endeavor. Cities as a whole produce 80% of the world’s wealth. They are the crucible of culture, and advances in one city are transmitted and adopted in others with lightning speed. When cities improve, the world improves.

A study by McKinsey, the private sector consultants, found that global production, and hence global wealth, will be concentrated in the 600 largest and fastest growing cities in the world.

There is a notion that cities grow haphazardly. 1 There is a notion that cities are always changed by someone else. This book means to dispel these notions. Everything in a city is designed, and everyone in a city has a stake in the result.

It is the nature of urban design that we make cities in our own image, however consciously or unconsciously. We live with the results of what we make of our cities, paying for the mistakes with dystopia, enjoying the delight of getting it right.

Growth can exacerbate existing problems or it can afford an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and adapt to new conditions and make living in a city safer and more rewarding. Urban design is the art of changing cities, guiding growth to follow new patterns that better meet our challenges as well as improve our quality of life.

Suburbs Are Cities Too The world has long debated the quality of life between living in cities and living in the country.

The divide between urban and rural is an ancient one. City mouse and country mouse.

Throughout the ages, we delight in contrasting the culture of the two, from Aesop's fable to the Beverly Hillbillies. Behind the cultural images, of course, there are hard facts of the difference between urban and rural life. In China, a city dweller has more than triple the income of a rural dweller. 2 In India, urban women have almost double the rate of literacy of rural women. 3 Culturally, we highlight the virtues of rural life, but in reality the pull towards a better standard of living has been steadily towards cities. Apparently, to the consternation of Aesop's country mouse, we actually do prefer the city.

No more so than in the United States, which is the world’s most urbanized large country.

80% of United States citizens live in urbanized areas. 4 But if you asked these urbanized Americans if they lived in cities, more than half of them would say no. They would say they don't live in cities, they live in suburbs or small towns. And they would list the virtues that have been affixed to rural life as chief among their enjoyments. There is peace and quiet. There is space between houses, so much so that I know one man who moved to the suburbs because he “didn't want neighbors, he wanted to live on the frontier.� True enough, in summertime when the trees were in leaf and the hedges full, he could not see his neighbors and could nourish his frontier fantasy. He even kept a rifle at the ready.

But this suburban man did have neighbors, and he had electrical power and gas lines, a sanitary sewer and of course municipal water. Fiber optics, copper wire, cable and a cell phone tower complete his communication package. And public employees pick up his trash and guard his house while he is sleeping, albeit with his squirrel gun under his bed. He drives every day to a job downtown and is not averse to shopping and dining in the harlot-sodden metropolis he otherwise goes to great pains to distinguish himself from. And perhaps the greatest indignity of all is that the US Census bureau takes no account of his wish to live on the frontier and instead counts his suburban home as urban: part of the Metropolitan Statistical Area.

The point is, a suburb is a city. Economically, socially, infrastructurally, a suburb is simply a low-density city. And while I might caricature some if its adherents (as they might caricature latte sipping metrosexual apartment dwellers downtown), the suburb is a beloved form of city for a very large portion of the population.

The suburb in opposition to the city is a substitute for the rural vs. urban debate that was formative in America. Going back to Thomas Jefferson's vision of a nation of yeoman farmers vs. Alexander Hamilton's notion of nation of urbane bankers, city vs. suburb is an emotional, moral and political issue in the United States today as urban vs. rural was in the 19th century.

Except that everyone has already moved to cities. So in America today, suburb vs. city has taken on the political and moral overtones that rural vs. urban had in the early days of the republic.

Politics exaggerates the differences and skews decision making. A governor of New Jersey took money out of an urban transit project to link the Jersey suburbs with midtown Manhattan in order to score political points with his suburban base and redistribute the money to suburban road builders. The move resonated with suburban voters, even though in the long run, the lack of a tunnel will seriously hurt the metropolitan economy to which they are inextricably tied. Politics

is local, very local, and successful politicians learn to exploit any difference. When you step back from the rhetoric, however, and stick to the metrics, you see that suburbs are cities, too.

Cities are Vulnerable Perhaps it takes a disaster to cut through the politics and remind us that we are all in this together. The hurricane that hit New York City is the same hurricane that hit the Jersey suburbs. and now the Governors of New Jersey and New York are talking about solidarity.

Ultimately, it is the recognition that cities (which by definition include suburbs) are vulnerable that can unite us. It has happened throughout history and is only natural. Since cities are where the wealth is, cities have always been vulnerable to invasion. Since cities are where the people are, cities have always been vulnerable to the rapid spread of disease. In the past, we have always been able to cope by taking city-wide actions like building walls in 5th century Constantinople against invaders or enacting sanitary and building codes in 19th century New York against disease.

Now we are approaching a crisis of resilience in our cities. Sea levels are rising and storms are growing in intensity. What was once termed a “100 year storm� now seems like an annual occurrence. Can cities, especially coastal cities survive? I look out from my window, and I see blocks of New York City still dark, three days after the storm passed. The Times reports it may be another ten days until power is restored. The lights on the Verrazano Bridge go on only halfway across its span, a mocking sign of our disruption.

The Role of Urban Design If what cities need to do is adapt to a changing climate and mitigate their contribution to climate change, why are we talking about urban design? The future of the city lies in answering the

question “Is there a form of city that can survive the new extremes of weather, that can accommodate millions more citizens in dignity and prosperity, that can avoid contributing more to climate change, and still be worth living in?� Underlying the response is a belief that we can make the world sustainable if we make cities livable. Utopian, perhaps, but we don’t have to wait to put our idealism to the test.

For an urban designer, making cities more resilient in the face of the common challenges (such as budget constraints) and the slightly less common (such as extreme weather events), must be achieved while improving civic life. Resilience itself is not civic life. A fortress of technology that could withstand tidal waves while emitting no carbon would not be an urban design success if it embittered its residents. I believe that to improve the quality of civic life, you begin by improving the quality of public space.

Knowing what we do about the form of cities and their relation to climate change, and knowing the transformative power of urban design to change their form to meet the challenges, people who care about cities are in a position to imagine a future city that will meet our needs, if only we express them correctly. The purpose of urban design is to change the status quo in order to leave the city better than you found it.

Urban designers do not design cities; they design the tools that change cities. Those tools are the products of urban design: discrete, actionable and made to change the status quo. Those tools are rules, plans and pilot projects that transform neighborhoods. They are only urban design if they are transformative.

Urban design operates at the intersection of politics, finance and design. You can be the best designer in the world, but if you can't design under the pressure of politics and the stress of finance, you are not an urban designer.

In fact, nothing important in a city can change without an alignment of politics, finance and design. The Interstate Highway System had been authorized politically in 1938, designed at the Futurama exhibit at the World’s Fair in 1939, but construction had to wait until 1956 when a financing mechanism, the gasoline tax, was put in place. 5 In climate change mitigation, you can have a market for emissions credits, you can have a design technology for renewable energy, but if you don't have a political mandate, you will have nothing but the status quo.

Who Should Read This Book The Nature of Urban Design is written for anyone who sees the need to transform our cities.

This includes people who want to become urban designers, particularly students and practitioners in the field of politics, finance and design who help to decide how a city will change. The book is also written for those people whose lives will be changed as a result of urban design in order to give them a framework to participate in the process of change.

Many people realize a vague need for change in our cities, but they feel powerless when they are confronted by the enormous complexity, the lack of political transparency, and the high cost of even a small public project. This puts a barrier between those who change a city and those whose lives are changed. Whenever we hear of work going on in our neighborhood, we ask, “What are THEY doing now?�

I want people reading The Nature of Urban Design to realize that with a little information and the benefits of understanding the urban design framework change in cities, THEY can become WE. Then the question becomes what do WE want to change? Ordinary citizens can affect their city to a degree they may never have thought possible by becoming participants, stakeholders willing to take on a political, financial or design role in the process of urban design.

Where there currently is no bottom-up community input, we can demand it. Where there is a lack of top-down leadership at the executive level, we can replace it. The city is ours.

Whether that city becomes a just city as well as a wealthy city or a beautiful city is directly related to the degree of participation that its citizens achieve in its transformation. But what does participation mean when there are 20 million people in a city? What does participation mean when poor neighborhoods are walled off from their richer neighbors?

If urban design is such a powerful tool of transformation, why do some citizens live without toilets while their neighbors bathe in luxury swimming pools above them? I can only answer that a city is never finished, and urban designers need to work towards decreasing barriers to participation in shaping the city by increasing transparency in the urban design process. The Nature of Urban Design provides a roadmap to the urban design process to identify the maximum points of leverage at which participation is most important.

While the Nature of Urban Design delves into examples that are unique and local to cities, particularly New York City, the readership of this book is global. There is something about urban design, perhaps its preference for drawings over talk-talk that makes it ideal for communicating, no matter what your native language. I notice this with my students and apprentices at City Planning. They come from all over the world to New York, and it is sometimes hard to communicate verbally, but those differences melt away when we draw.

Urban design turns out to be a universal language, and I am proudly astounded that when we pin up our projects, we communicate with a degree of precision, creativity and enthusiasm that is the very definition of fluency.

How to Use This Book

Reading this book is only an introduction to reading something much more important: the city around you. To really learn about a city, to READ a city, you have to walk it. So take this book outside and find a beautiful public space to read it. Draw all over this book to record how people are using the space; record important dimensions (there is a scale printed on the cover) and note details.

This book describes the purpose, the people, the process, and the products of urban design and puts its power in the contemporary context of rapid urbanization in an era of climate change. It is designed to have a lot of small details branching from a few big ideas. You can simultaneously develop an overall understanding of how to change cities while delving into a particular topic that resonates with you. Use this book for participating in the transformation of your city; you can leverage your involvement by understanding the process of urban design and target your effectiveness by knowledgeably communicating with people in other fields who may share an urge to change the city. If you are an educator, use it for learning; the framework is a condensed course of study about urban design, and each topic can expand into much deeper inquiry when applied to real world challenges facing cities today. Every city, every neighborhood is different, so lessons learned from the Nature of Urban Design will never produce the same product, but they will produce the same result: change.

Use this book to understand your city. When you learn how cities change and who changes them, you will begin to notice the marks of urban design in every stone and street. You will come to understand that what matters most is how people use civic space, how they live their lives together in cities. And you will learn that decisions made long ago resonate through the built fabric of cities to influence how we and our children will live our lives.

The Nature of Urban Design is prefaced with a personal experience. It is the story of becoming an urban designer by discovering one goal: to leave the city better than we found it.

This introduction then lays out why we should care about cities, understanding that cities are great, cities are growing, but cities are vulnerable.

In the first chapter, I define cities and the urban design framework that changes them, setting the contemporary challenge of growth during climate change by considering how cities affect climate and how climate affects cities. The next chapter looks at New York in the context of this urban design challenge and offers the example of the High Line as a successful contemporary urban design response.

The third chapter outlines the purpose of urban design, the fourth the process and the fifth the products. The sixth chapter places these tools in the global context, showing that if we want to make the world sustainable, first we have to make cities livable, offering examples and metrics to guide the transformation.

If you are perfectly happy with the status quo, don't bother with this book. This book is only for people who want to improve the way we live, which is increasingly happening in cities.

I hope that if enough people read this, their eyes will be open to see how many like minded people are around them. Barriers of profession, of status, of age can melt away when a common vision becomes evident. I believe there is a broad, shared ethic of sustainability in the world that is only now awakening, experiencing the extremes of criticism and boosterism, the birth pangs of both ridicule and over-promising. This is not so different from the stage that car culture was at the World's Fair in 1939 when a Futurama model caught the attention of the population and set the stage for the massive suburbanization that begin just over a decade later. We are only at this very early stage of sustainability; our task is to turn this ethic into built works that prove to ourselves that we have the means of accomplishing—and prove to our children that we have the hopes of achieving—a lasting, just and bountiful life in cities.

1

Richard Dobbs, Sven Smit, Jaana Remes, James Manyika, Charles Roxburgh, Alejandra Restrepo, “Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities”, McKinsey Global Institute, March 2011. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/urban_world 2 http://faculty.washington.edu/karyiu/confer/sea12/papers/SC12-110%20Xue_Guo.pdf 3 Jinjun Xue, Wenshu Gao, “How Large is the Urban-Rural Income Gap in China?” http://uil.unesco.org/fileadmin/keydocuments/Literacy/LIFE/MidtermPackage/8_statistical_data_on_Literacy/4UIS_LIFE_urban_rural_graph_2011.pdf 4 Nate Berg, “U.S. Urban Population Is Up ... But What Does 'Urban' Really Mean?”, Atlantic Cities, March 26, 2012 http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urbanreally-mean/1589/ 5 http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/programadmin/interstate.cfm

Sales Information Sheet Design for an Empathic World

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 7.25x8.25 Pages: 160 Copyright: 2013

Reconnecting People, Nature, and Self Sim Van der Ryn Hardcover

ISBN 9781610914260

Price $35.00

Discount IPT*

Pub Month Oct 2013

Ebook

9781610915052

$34.99

IPT*

Oct 2013

Bookstore Categories ARCHITECTURE / Sustainability & Green Design ARCHITECTURE / Sustainability & Green Design

*Trade discount until six months after publication date, then short discount Competing Titles Design for Life ISBN: 9781586855307 Bookscan: 1189; Culture, Architecture, and Nature (forthcoming) ISBN: 9780415839679 Previous Works Ecological Design ISBN: 9781559633895 Bookscan: 2532 Warehouse: 17,320 and Ecological Design, Second Edition ISBN: 9781597261418 Bookscan: 1577 Warehouse: 3391, Design for Life ISBN: 9781586855307 Bookscan: 1189, Sustainable Communities ISBN: 978-1897408179 Bookscan: 162, The Integral Urban House ISBN: 9780871562135 Bookscan: 233

Sales Handle A reflective journey to a more ecological and humane approach to design by a luminary in the field Description Despite an uncertain economy, the market for green building is projected to grow and strengthen. The US green building market has expanded dramatically since 2008 and is projected to double in size by 2015 (from $42 billion in construction starts to $135 billion). But, says green-building pioneer Sim Van der Ryn, “greening” our buildings is not enough. He advocates for “empathic design,” in which a designer not only works in concert with nature, but with an understanding of and empathy for the end user and for oneself. It is not just one of these connections, but all three that are necessary to design for a future that is more humane, equitable, and resilient.

Van der Ryn’s lifelong focus has been in shifting the paradigm in architecture and design. Instead of thinking about design primarily in relation to the infrastructure we live in and with—everything from buildings to wireless routing—he advocates for a focus on the people who use and are affected by this infrastructure. Basic design must include a real understanding of human ecology or end-user preferences. Understanding ones motivations and spirituality, the author believes, is critical to designing with empathy for natural and human communities.

In Design for an Empathic World Van der Ryn shares his thoughts and experience about the design of our world today. With a focus on the strengths and weaknesses in our approach to the design of our communities, regions, and buildings he looks at promising trends and projects that demonstrate how we can help create a better world for others and ourselves. The journey described in Design for an Empathic World will help to inspire change and foster the collaboration and thoughtfulness necessary to achieve a more empathic future.

Selling Points • Inspiration for rethinking the way we design from one of the most influential ecological architects in the US • References to projects and programs that provide hope for more empathic design • Beautiful four-color design using author’s original watercolors

[Figure 1] Table of Contents Preface: A Journey to Connect with the Natural World Foreword Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Human-centered Design Chapter 3: Design with Nature Chapter 4: Lifetime Learning Design Chapter 5: Opportunities for Empathic Design Chapter 6: Journey to the Inner Self and the Outer World Endnotes About the Author

[Figure 4] Chapter 1: Introduction

“The salvation of the human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility.”

-Vaclav Havel

In the fall of 2008 after the beginnings of the financial meltdown on Wall Street, I started getting frantic calls and e-mails from both young and seasoned architects who’d been laid off and also a smaller number of communications from people who worked on Wall Street – mostly young but also some more senior people. I’m not sure why they contacted me – the architects might have known about me or read my books – certainly not the Wall Streeters, whom I did ask, “why are you calling me?”. Their answer was that they were referred to me by mutual friends.

My response took me back to backpacking experiences. Occasionally, when I was backpacking alone in western wilderness mountain areas, I would get lost. I had maps but GPS was yet to be invented. My first response was panic. Then I would sit down quietly and breathe slowly into my core, a place I now call “the inner self” – a sanctuary to go into when one is in difficult times. I would breathe, shut down my frantic mind and follow the wordless intuition, which emerged from deep within my core.

My reply to those who contacted me was, “When you feel lost, throw away your mental maps and find a safe place, a sanctuary within yourself where your deepest self and inner truth lives.” Some of my correspondents would stutter and end the conversation right there. Others

would ask if they could visit me at my home on the rural coast of Northern California and I met with quite a few.

I suddenly found myself acting as a Life Guide. Why was a willing to do this? I’m a member of the “Lucky Generation” born during the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties who came into the work force in the 1950s as America began a period of tremendous expansion and growth following World War II. When I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Michigan in 1958, I had lots of job offers, and not because I had been an exceptional student. Gordon Bunshaft, chief of design at Skidmore Owings and Merrill, then the top corporate firm in the country, offered me a job in New York. Touring the drafting room, I was dazed by the sight of more than a hundred men in white shirts and ties hunched over their drafting boards.

This was not for me. I flew to San Francisco and found many smaller offices that were hiring. After a few years completing my internship, I started teaching in the architecture program at the University of California Berkeley, and also started an office with a high school friend from New York, Sanford Hirshen. In my academic career, I was mentored in my work by Department Chairs and Deans who were very supportive of my interests, even though they didn’t fit into the mainstream architectural program at the time. Our young firm did significant work in low-cost and innovative housing and we had great clients.

When the calls came in from desperate young architects in 2008, I knew it was time to do what I could for other designers who did not live in a time as generous, optimistic, and supportive of innovation as my contemporaries and I had.

I feel gratitude towards an empathic older generation that nurtured and guided me as a young architect and teacher. My generation and the post World War II Baby Boomers that

followed have the opportunity to enable today’s younger generation in their lives, which are more difficult than ours were. That is a task we should be grateful to accept as our legacy to a younger generation. As we get older, we hopefully feel ourselves more deeply living the truth of our inner selves, and sharing that with a new generation is something we can give to those who will follow us.

[Figure 5] In this book, I share my thoughts and experience about the design of our world today. I focus on both the strengths and weaknesses in our approach to the design of our communities, regions, and buildings with a critical eye and suggest how we can help create a better world for others and ourselves. Mine has been a long journey. As Steve Jobs used to say, “You can’t connect the dots until afterwards”. The biggest lessons I’ve learned relate to caring for others and being true to myself. Carlos Casteneda once said, “Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't then it is of no use to us.”

My lifetime focus has been shifting the paradigm in architecture and design. We now think of design primarily in relation to the infrastructure we live in and with: buildings, transportation, automobiles and highways, trains and busses, airplanes and airports, oil and natural gas lines, electricity, water and sewer systems, phones, computers, TV and radios. There is little focus on the people who use and are affected by this infrastructure. There is still little thought given within design professions to how someone will use a space or a building. The design brief or program is generally prepared by the client and defined mostly in terms of square foot requirements for different uses. Basically, design leaves out any real understanding of human ecology or end-user preferences. How many office workers would voluntarily choose to

spend their working lives in windowless cubicles? Although it seems like common sense, the field of Post Occupancy Evaluation that I helped to found in the 1970s is still not broadly accepted. Post Occupancy Evaluation uses observation and interviews as tools to uncover how occupants actually use and respond to their designed environments they live and work in.

This disconnect from end use allows designers to design without empathy for humans, to separate the work from themselves, and still too often, to design without empathy for the natural environment. It is not just one of these connections, but all three—to self, to others, and to nature—that are necessary to design for a future that is more humane, equitable, and resilient.

At a time when the gap between the wealthy and the poor is expanding, we’re faced with the possibility of peak oil, increasing incidents of human-induced as well as natural disasters (many as a result of or exacerbated by climate change), and challenges to strong in-person community networks brought about by more time in cyberspace than public space, we need to takes steps to reconnect design to the human and natural elements that are being lost at great expense. Design is much more than ratios, regulations, and beautiful 3D models. The way we approach design has implications for human and natural networks and the future of our planet.

Integrating the design of human systems and natural systems for the benefit of humans and the living world is ecological design, an important addition to our design toolbox. (This is the topic of one of my earlier books, Ecological Design, with Stuart Cowan. 1) But including the very important integration of connection to humans (self and others), is what I am calling empathic design.

Change in our design professions and practice, and in all of our institutions will come when enough people have empathy for other people and all living forms of life. Empathy is

learned and practiced through direct experience and awareness that there is life beyond the physical material world.

A silent player in design is the structure of the human brain, which has not changed since humans joined the Earth. Our brains are wired so we can instantly respond to immediate short term threats, but not to long term threats that we cannot experience directly. Empathic design implies thinking ahead, integrating probable future risks such as oceans rising, temperatures rising, soils declining in fertility, chemical pollution of water. Empathic design should consider both the precautionary principle as well as the law of unintended consequences.

Many people are not aware they have an inner self that shelters their deepest truths. We live in a fast moving information-overload culture where people are encouraged to project their image of themselves, their persona—in the workplace and through social media.

MIT Technology Scientist Sherry Turkle’s book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other takes a hard look at how new technologies designed to bring us closer together are driving us further from each other and from ourselves. 2 We don’t find our deeper inner selves on our smart phones, texting, social networks, or in Internet conferences.

I’m not suggesting that we return to the Stone Age, but that we understand the implications of technology on design and community. New technology has provided enormous benefits to design and facilitated the creation of communities online as well as in person. But online communities and our thirst for a constant stream of information on a device should not replace human interaction. It was the mechanization of the world the separated design from its human and natural roots, and part of the reason design is now faced with a pressing need to become more humane—to become empathic.

[Figure 6] When did design enter the human story? Early humans made simple tools of stone and wood to pound plants and seeds to eat, kill game for food, skin animal hides for clothing, make fire, and paint themselves, and their caves with pictures of animals. Agriculture is the mother of architecture. Agriculture created hierarchical systems of power and control that served wealth and power, and five thousand years later, that is still architecture’s major purpose and client base.

Siegried Giedion’s monumental work, Mechanization Takes Command meticulously examines the history of mechanization and its effects. 3 He begins with designs to eliminate handcraft in building, agriculture, and home making. He recounts the development of the mass assembly line, created first to disassemble pigs and cattle, and later to assemble automobiles. The book was published in 1948, before today’s totally computerized robotic assembly lines. The larger picture we are left with is that the design of the nineteenth and twentieth century Industrial Revolution resulted in the disassembly of the living organic world and the assembly of a mechanical world.

How do reassemble or reconnect the built world to the human and natural worlds?

Change in our design professions and practice, and in all of our institutions will come when enough people have empathy for other people and all living forms of life. Empathy is learned and practiced through direct experience and awareness that there is life beyond the physical material world.

In Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, Don Juan instructs his student to move walk as long as it takes in the desert until they find their spot, the place where they feel truly at home. I used this same approach in community design projects located in natural landscapes, instructing participants to walk in silence until they found the place that felt best to them. Usually, after

some hours, we’d find people clustered in the same place – an example of discovering an empathic relation between self and place in nature.

In this book I do not address specific solutions for reforming society’s institutions. My hope is that my journey and experience can provide inspiration and a path for moving towards more empathic design.

I follow this chapter with a focus on the practice of human-centered design, which was very much in focus during the social revolution of the 1960s and since then largely neglected.

Following that, I explore design education, its strengths and weaknesses, and a call for integrating hands-on design experiences early into a child’s education. Next, I discuss naturecentered design, which is finally being welcomed as vital to responsible design today. That leads to a discussion of the possible opportunities for moving towards more empathic design. I close with a view of the journey towards one’s inner self, where we each find our deepest truth and fullest heart.

I hope that this book will inspire collaboration within and across disciplines—that it will help to foster the collaboration and thoughtfulness necessary to achieve a more empathic future.

Ernest Callenbach, the author of Ecotopia, who died in the spring of 2012, left a wise and beautiful Epistle on his computer shortly before his death. These excerpts capture the challenges and the hope for our future. “We are facing a century or more of exceedingly difficult times…We live in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet. Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the overshoot of cheap oil based consumer capitalist expansionism….How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it? Hope.

Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse‌Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival skills are cooperative, good at teamwork, altruistic, mindful of the common good...Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value.�

1

Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan, Ecological Design (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996).

2

Sherry Turkle, Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York:

Basic Books, 2012).

3

Siegried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New

York: W.W. Norton, 1969).

Sales Information Sheet River Notes

Trim Size: 5.5x8.25 Pages: 102 Copyright: 2012

A Natural and Human History of the Colorado Wade Davis Paperback Hardcover Ebook

ISBN 9781610910200 9781610913614 9781610912068

Price $14.95 $24.95 $14.99

Discount IPT IPT IPT

Fall 2013

Pub Month Oct 2013 Oct 2012 Oct 2012

Bookstore Categories NATURE / Rivers NATURE / Rivers NATURE / Rivers

Competing Titles Jonathan Waterman, Running Dry: A Journey from Source to Sea Down the Colorado River, National Geographic, 2010, $26.00, paper ISBN: 978-1426205057 Bookscan: 1634. James Lawrence Powell, Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West, University of California Press, 2011, $18.95, paper ISBN: 978-0520268029 Bookscan: 485. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Penguin, 1993, $18.00, paper ISBN: 978-0140178241 Bookscan: 75,480 Previous Works Into the Silence, Knopf, 2011, $32.50 hc. ISBN: 978-0375708152 Bookscan: 9072. Shadows in the Sun, Island Press, 2010, $21.95 pb. ISBN: 978-1597263924 Bookscan: 339 P, 251 C Warehouse: 761 P, 17, 930 C. Light at the Edge of the World, Douglas & McIntyre, 2007, $14.95 pb. ISBN: 0792264746 Bookscan: 3985. The Serpent and the Rainbow, Touchstone, 1997, $15.00 pb. ISBN: 978-0684839295 Bookscan: 27,252. River Notes (Hardcover), Island Press, 2012, $22.95. 9781610913614. Bookscan: 1569 Warehouse: 4063

Sales Handle A striking and powerful account of human exploration and the destruction of America’s most iconic river Description Plugged by no fewer than twenty-five dams, the Colorado is the world’s most regulated river drainage.

It provides most of the water supply of Las Vegas, Tucson, and San Diego, and much of the power and water of Los Angeles and Phoenix. If the river ceased flowing, it would soon be necessary to abandon many of the largest cities in the West. The Colorado is indeed a river of life, which makes it all the more tragic that when it approaches the sea, it has been reduced to a toxic trickle, its delta dry and deserted.

In a blend of history, science, and personal observation, acclaimed author Wade Davis tells the story of America’s Nile, from its legendary history to the human intervention that has left it transformed and near exhaustion. The story of the Colorado River is the human quest for progress and its inevitable if unintended effects—and an opportunity to learn from past mistakes and foster the rebirth of America’s most iconic waterway.

A beautifully told story of historical adventure and natural beauty, River Notes is a fascinating journey down the river and through mankind’s complicated and destructive relationship with one of its greatest natural resources.

Selling Points • Wade Davis is a bestselling author and acclaimed writer on environmental issues. His book Into the Silence sold more than 60,000 copies in fall 2011.

• Despite the iconic status of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon, few books have been written that incorporate its natural and human history as well as its vital role as a source of water and power in the West • Offers readers a fascinating journey down the Colorado River, guided by Davis' lyric prose and skillful narrative style

Man always kills the things he loves, and so we the pioneers, have killed our wilderness.

Some say we had to. Be that as it may.

I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.

Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map? —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

Wade Davis

 In 1922, having completed work on the first comprehensive management plan for the Grand Canyon, Aldo Leopold, along with his younger brother, set out by canoe to explore the mouth of the mighty Colorado. At the time the main flow of the Colorado reached the sea, carrying with it each year millions of tons of silt and sand and so much fresh water that the river’s influence extended some forty miles into the Gulf of California. The alluvial fan of the delta spread across two million acres, well over three thousand square miles, a vast riparian and tidal wetland the size of the state of Rhode Island. It was one of the largest desert estuaries on earth. Off shore, nutrients brought down by the river supported an astonishingly rich fishery for bagre and corvina, dolphins, and the rare and elusive vaquita porpoise, the world’s smallest marine cetacean. At the top of the food chain was the totoaba, an enormous relative of the white sea bass that grew to three hundred pounds, spawned in the brackish waters of the estuary and swarmed in the Sea of Cortez in such abundance that even fishermen blinded in old age, it was said, had no difficulty striking home their harpoons.

In contrast to the searing sands of the Sonoran Desert through which the lower Colorado flowed, and the blue and barren hills of the Sierra de los Cucapás, cradling the river valley to the north and west, the delta was lush and fertile, a “milk and honey wilderness,” as Leopold called it, of marshes and emerald ponds with cattails and wild grasses yielding to the wind, and cottonwoods, willows, 2

River Notes

and mesquite trees overhanging channels where the water ran everywhere and nowhere, as if incapable of settling upon a route to the sea. The river, wrote Leopold, “could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the gulf. So he travelled them all, and so did we. He divided and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad of it, and so were we.”

Drifting with the ebb and flow of the tides, waking by dawn to the whistles of quail roosting in the branches of mesquite trees, making camp on mudflats etched with the tracks of wild boar, yellowlegs, and jaguar, the Leopold brothers experienced the Colorado delta much as had the Spanish explorer Hernando de Alarcón, who first reached its shores in 1540. There were bobcats draped over cottonwood snags. Deer, raccoons, beavers, and coyotes, and flocks of birds so abundant they darkened the sky. Avocets and willets, mallards, widgeons, and teals, scores of cormorants, screaming gulls, and so many egrets on the wing that Leopold compared them in flight to “a premature snowstorm.” He wrote of great phalanxes of geese sideslipping toward the earth, falling like autumn leaves. On every shore he saw clapper rails and sandhill cranes, and overhead, doves and raptors scraping the sky.

It was an exquisite landscape, rich in fauna and flora, with hundreds of species of birds and rare fish, and along the mudflats, melons and wild grasses that yielded great handfuls of edible fruits and seeds. But the brothers’ sojourn in the delta was not without its challenges. The river 3

Wade Davis

was too muddy to drink, the lagoons too brackish, and every night they had to dig to find potable water. The dense and impenetrable thickets of cachinilla made movement on land almost impossible, leaving Leopold doubtful that people had ever lived in the wetlands. “The Delta having no place names,” he wrote, “we had to devise our own as we went.”

In this Leopold was quite wrong, for the marshes and lagoons of the Colorado delta had for a thousand years been home to the Cocopah Indians, who viewed themselves as the offspring of mythical gods, twins who had emerged from beneath the primordial water to create the firmament, the earth, and every living creature. In 1540 Hernando de Alarcón encountered at the mouth of the river not hundreds but thousands of men and women, who, in their rituals, he reported, revealed a deep reverence for the sun. He described the Cocopah as tall and strong, with bodies and faces adorned in paint. The men wore loincloths, the women coverings of feathers that fell back and front from the waist. Every adult man had shell ornaments hanging from the nose and ears, and deer bones suspended from bands of cordage wrapped around the arms. They gathered in great numbers, small bands of a hundred, larger assemblies of a thousand, and in one instance, as Alarcón reported, no fewer than six thousand.

To support such populations, the Cocopah grew watermelons and pumpkins, corn, beans, and squash. From the wild they feasted on fish, wood rats, beavers, raccoons, feral dogs, and cattail pollen and tule roots. In the first months of the year, with their stores of harvested 4

River Notes

food exhausted, they travelled to the high desert to gather cactus and agave. Mesquite pods, ground with a metate, yielded flour that was made into cakes or mixed with water and consumed as a drink. Their dwellings were simple structures—round domes of reeds and brush. They slept beneath blankets of rabbit skins. They moved through the marshes in dugout canoes, carved from cottonwood, or on rafts of logs bound together by ropes made from willow bark or wild grasses.

Their most elaborate rituals occurred at death. The body of the deceased was fully adorned and then cremated, along with all possessions and memories. Shelters were burned and even footprints eradicated to ensure that the spirits of the dead abandoned all attachments and were never tempted to return to the realm of the living.

The destiny of the dead was a land of plenty, not far from home—salt flats near the mouth of the river. At the funeral ceremony, the orator shaman recalled all the events in the life of the departed, as the relatives danced, moving four times around the burning pyre, wailing, sobbing, and singing the songs of death. With the body nearly consumed, the women of the family turned their backs to the flames and solemnly cut off their hair as a sign of mourning. Then, with the healing smoke of tobacco and the relief of a ritual bath, each severed all connection to the deceased, even as wood in massive amounts was added to the fire to create a light that would shine through the night and illuminate in every corner of the delta the pathways of the living.

Standing today on the banks of what was once a river, 5

Wade Davis

looking across a channel of white sand and past the scrub and scabrous vegetation that stretches across barren mudflats to the horizon, it is impossible to imagine a time when such funerary rituals could have occurred in the delta of the Colorado. As recently as the last years of the nineteenth century the wetlands produced enough wood to fuel the steamships and paddle wheelers that supplied all of the army outposts, mining camps, and ragtag settlements of the lower Colorado. Today the gallery forests of cottonwood and willow are a shadow of memory, displaced by thickets of tamarisk and arrowweed, invasive species capable of surviving in soils poisoned by salt. The emerald lagoons are long gone, as are the migratory birds that in the tens of thousands once found refuge in the wetlands. In the sea the totoaba were hunted to near extinction, four million pounds a year by the 1940s, with individual fish selling for as little as five cents, and many thousands killed only for their bladders, dried as a delicacy to be used in Chinese soups, while the carcasses were left to rot in the desert sun. Marine productivity has fallen by as much as 95 percent, and all that remains to recall the bounty of the estuary are the countless millions of shells that form the islands and beaches on the shore.

These, along with the memories of Cocopah elders still living today who can recall swimming in the lagoons as children, and gathering wild grasses and hunting deer in the twilight with their families.

“Man always kills the thing he loves,” wrote Aldo Leopold, as he recalled his time in the Colorado delta, “and so we the pioneers, have killed our wilderness.”

6

River Notes

Within twenty years of his visit, most of the wildlife had disappeared. The fishery that had fed the people of the river for generations was severely diminished, and the Cocopah population had dropped to fewer than fifteen hundred.

Just before his death in 1948 Leopold famously articulated in A Sand County Almanac a new ethic of the land, one that might embrace “an intelligent humility toward man’s place in nature” and a definition of community that would expand to include its natural capital, the water and soil, plants and animals, the very land itself.

“Do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave?,” he asked.

“Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter down river.

Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the landcommunity to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”

Unfortunately Leopold’s message came both too soon 7

Wade Davis

and too late for the delta of the Colorado, the very landscape that had in good measure inspired it. With the completion of Hoover Dam in 1935, the flow of the Colorado was dramatically reduced for six years, as the engineers allowed the reservoir dubbed Lake Mead to reach its capacity. The ecological implications of turning off a river like a tap evidently were never considered, any more than they were some thirty years later when the river’s flow was once again curtailed with the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, which shut down the river for seventeen years until Lake Powell reached its design threshold in 1980. Downstream from the reservoirs, the Colorado is fed by a number of tributaries, but these flows in turn were cut off by other diversions, such as the Imperial and Morelos Dams, which capture Mexico’s entire allotment, the last 10 percent of the river’s flow, bringing water to Tijuana and Mexicali and allowing farmers to grow alfalfa, cotton, and corn in a desert basin that receives less than three inches of rain a year.

What reaches the mudflats of the delta today is agricultural runoff, wastewater that has flowed over fields, seeped into desert soils high in mineral salts, and pooled in reservoirs and back channels exposed to the sun. What once was a majestic river that each year in flood flushed clean the delta, replenishing the land with silt and nutrients, is today a saline slurry, with a salt content so high it cannot be used to water even the most hardy of garden plants. Thus by the time water provided to ranchers and farmers in the upper Colorado basin for a mere $3.50 an acre-foot reaches the delta, it must be treated 8

River Notes

and desalinated before it can be placed on Mexican fields, increasing the costs a hundredfold.

To walk down a gravel road just south of the border town of San Luis Rio Colorado and watch what remains of the Colorado pass through rusted culverts, bringing not fertility but toxicity to the land, is to ask what on earth became of this stream so revered in the American imagination, and yet now so despoiled that it today reaches the ocean a river only in name.

9

Sales Information Sheet Seven Modern Plagues

Trim Size: 5.5x8.25 Pages: 250 Copyright: 2014

and How We Are Causing Them Mark Jerome Walters Paperback Ebook

ISBN 9781610914659 9781610914666

Price $19.99 $19.99

Fall 2013

Discount IPT IPT

Pub Month Jan 2014 Jan 2014

Bookstore Categories SCIENCE / Environmental Science SCIENCE / Environmental Science

Competing Titles The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic, Nathan Wolfe (Times Books, 2011) ISBN: 978-1250012210 Bookscan: 2160 Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, David Quammen (Norton, 2012) ISBN: 978-0393066807 Bookscan: 19,129 Previous Works Seeking the Sacred Raven (Island Press, 2006) ISBN: 978-1559630900 Bookscan: 528 Warehouse: 1431 Six Modern Plagues (Island Press, 2003) ISBN: 978-1559637145 Bookscan: 2168 P, 2038 C Warehouse: 7494 P, 8146 C

Sales Handle An arresting account of emerging disease Description Every time we sneeze, there seems to be a new form of flu: bird flu, swine flu, Spanish flu, Hong Kong flu, H5N1, and most recently, H5N7. While these diseases appear to emerge from thin air, in fact, human activity is driving them. And the problem is not just flu, but a series of rapidly evolving and dangerous modern plagues.

According to veterinarian and journalist Mark Walters, we are contributing to—if not overtly causing—some of the scariest epidemics of our time. Through human stories and cutting-edge science, Walters explores the origins of seven diseases: Mad Cow Disease, HIV/AIDS, Salmonella DT104, Lyme Disease, Hantavirus, West Nile, and new strains of flu. He shows that they originate from manipulation of the environment, from emitting carbon and clear-cutting forests to feeding naturally herbivorous cows “recycled animal protein.”

Readers will both learn how today’s plagues first developed and discover patterns that could help prevent the diseases of tomorrow.

Selling Points • Timeliness of topic as new strains of flu develop and incidents of Lyme disease and West Nile Virus increase • Successful track record with the first edition of the book, Six Modern Plagues • Combination of good storytelling with cutting-edge science

Contents Introduction 1. The Dark Side of Progress: Mad Cow Disease 2. A Chimp Called Amandine: HIV/AIDS 3. The Travels of Antibiotic Resistance: DT 104 4. Of Old Growth and Arthritis: Lyme Disease 5. A Spring to Die For: Hantavirus 6. A Virus from the Nile 7. Influenza: Awaiting the Pandemic Epilogue: SARS and Beyond Notes Acknowledgements Index

The Dark Side of Progress: Mad Cow Disease

1.

Near the village of Midhurst, West Sussex, an hour’s journey south from London through green glens and soft hills, stands a seventeenth-century brick-and-timber farmhouse surrounded by purple hydrangeas and lipstick-red geraniums that tilt in the breeze. The lichen-covered clay tile roof and weathered walls seem to have grown from the earth itself. Sprays of red and yellow flowers spill from every corner of the grounds, and wild roses climb a trellis above a gate leading down to lush pasture and an ancient stone stable. It is as if Pitsham Farm were drawn from the enchanted poetry of William Wordsworth, where “majestic herds of cattle, free / To ruminate, couched on the grassy lea.” Or so it might have seemed until, three days before Christmas in 1984, one of Peter Stent’s cows began acting strangely.

“At first we dismissed her as a cow with a bad disposition, kicking in the milking parlor and all that,” Stent told me. But when she got worse, Stent called his veterinarian, David Bee, who visited the farm.

The cow hunched her back, leading Bee to believe she might have a painful kidney ailment. More cows soon fell ill, and Bee returned several times to attempt to diagnose the ailments. The first cow grew worse, developing head tremors and an unsteady gait. In February 1985 she died. The mysterious illness continued to spread through the herd. At a loss for a diagnosis, Bee dubbed the affliction “Pitsham Farm syndrome.” Whatever the root of this malady, Bee concluded that it was attacking the brain, and he and Stent decided to ship a sick cow to the local agriculture ministry.

“I shall never forget that cow,” Stent said. “The man came with a trailer already loaded with two sheep on their way to slaughter. When we prodded the cow into the trailer, she saw the sheep; then she went berserk and killed them. I thought she was going to destroy the whole trailer. She was extremely violent.” Unfortunately, when the cow arrived at the local ministry she was killed with a gunshot to the head, which destroyed the brain and rendered it useless for analysis.

Determined to find the cause, Stent and Bee loaded up cow number 142—the tenth cow to be afflicted with the illness—and had her driven to the ministry. The head was removed intact and sent to the

1

Central Veterinary Laboratory in Weybridge, Surrey, where the brain could be examined by a pathologist.

A stocky man with gentle blue-gray eyes, Stent sat in a lawn chair at a table and paused to sip his tea. A row of royal purple foxgloves nodded in an early summer breeze from the English Channel, twenty miles away. “Spooky behavior for these kindly animals,” he recalled. “I cared about them and hated to see them sent to slaughter.”

Stent’s wife, Diana, appeared in the sunny yard and refilled our cups. A wood thrush sang three platinum notes followed by a reedy tremolo from a bush near an abandoned brick privy. Stent separated his right hand from his teacup long enough to make a short, sweeping gesture. “It’s becoming more difficult to make a living from the farm anymore. I’m fortunate indeed to have other means. The price of milk has gone so low that we can’t compete with larger operations. Now, with the Channel Tunnel open, tanker trucks bigger than my milking parlor bring cheap milk from the continent. We have 600 beef cattle, but people’s feelings have really changed about eating meat.”

Eager to give his respected veterinarian a place in our conversation, Stent called Bee on his cellular phone to arrange a meeting. We drove the backroads of the 600-acre farm past mostly empty pastures.

When we arrived at the dilapidated milking parlor, Stent leaned out the car window and pointed inside the building’s wide doorway. “I couldn’t justify modernizing the operation in light of things. Now, look in there. Those are the old feed bins. At the time, I couldn’t imagine what my cows were being fed. It’s in there we first noticed the cows acting strangely. That’s the spot where BSE began as far as the history books are concerned,” he said, using the initials for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the technical name for mad cow disease.

Bee’s clinic was in the village of Liss, a twenty-minute drive. “As if BSE weren’t enough, the foot-andmouth epidemic last year finished off a lot of farms,” Stent said as we drove along. He was referring to another highly contagious cattle disease that had recently swept through the United Kingdom. Although not dangerous to humans, it is one of the most contagious and economically devastating livestock diseases. “We didn’t get foot-and-mouth at Pitsham, but we were quarantined like farms throughout the U.K. Any farm with the disease, all the animals were burned.”

Bee greeted us in the waiting room of his clinic and ushered us into a treatment room so we could talk without interruption. A man in his late forties or early fifties, he wore wire-rimmed glasses, and his eyes shone with inquisitiveness. “Still haunts me sometimes,” he said, recalling his first encounters. “You’d never recognize it in an undisturbed grazing herd. Then I’d walk up to the fence and suddenly a cow two hundred yards away would lift its head and fix its gaze on me with an eerie hypervigilance. ‘That cow’s infected,’ I’d say to myself. If you stressed it, its symptoms could explode into kicking, tremors, aggression, a wobbly gait. An infected cow would come apart at the seams. Really spooky.”

2

The task of examining cow 142’s brain fell to Carol Richardson, a pathologist at the Surrey laboratory.

She noted a strange sponge-like appearance strikingly similar to what is found in sheep with a wellknown neurological disease called scrapie. Richardson wrote “spongiform encephalopathy” on the necropsy form and left the slide for Gerald Wells, her supervisor, to examine. Wells confirmed Richardson’s diagnosis and filed the slide.

A year later, a cow from Kent developed similar symptoms; it became clear that the disease was not limited to Stent’s farm. When this cow’s brain reached Wells’ laboratory, he discovered that it also had a spongiform encephalopathy. In 1987, fourteen months after Richardson’s diagnosis of cow 142, Wells hailed his own discovery of “a novel progressive spongiform encephalopathy in cattle” and published a paper on his finding without so much as mentioning Richardson’s diagnosis of the cow from Pitsham Farm—the first-ever documented case of mad cow disease.

Prior to Wells’ 1987 publication, several cows at a farm in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, seventy-five miles east of Pitsham Farm, had also developed a fear of walking over concrete or venturing around corners. Some hung their heads low as if exhausted. Others developed a high-stepping gait in their back legs as if walking on hot pavement. Milk production dropped. Cows fell down and couldn’t get up. The epidemic soon affected fourteen counties in southern England.

Although mad cow disease was apparently a new affliction, it belonged to a class of known brainwasting diseases called TSEs, or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. The name indicates that the diseases can be contagious and lend a spongy appearance to the brain, just as in the cow’s brain Richardson had described. The first human TSE, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), was described in the 1920s. This degenerative disease leaves its victims, in the early stages, with loss of memory, unsteady gait, muscle spasms, and jerky, trembling hand movements. Another TSE, scrapie in sheep and goats, was scientifically described in 1936, although one of its symptoms—violent scratching to the point of mutilation—had been known for centuries. About a decade later, a TSE was identified in ranch-reared minks.

In 1957, yet another human TSE, kuru, was identified in Papua New Guinea. Then, in 1967, chronic wasting disease was identified in some deer and elk in the western United States. BSE was officially added to the list of TSEs in 1987 with publication of Wells’ paper. But mad cow disease was not just another TSE: never before had the affliction expressed itself in such a widespread outbreak. By 1988 more than 2,000 cows had been stricken, and in 1992 alone more than 35,000 cases of BSE in cattle would be reported. By January 1993 almost 1,000 new cases in cows were being reported every week. “Incurable Disease Wiping Out Dairy Cows,” proclaimed a headline in London’s Sunday Telegraph in 1987: “A mystery brain disease is killing Britain’s dairy cows, and vets have no cure.” Farmers began to fear for their livelihoods and their rural traditions.

But at least they were not fearing for their own lives—not yet.

3

2.

In October 1989 a report surfaced describing a woman, believed to be at least thirty-six years old, who had been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. That disease struck, according to one study, fewer than one in every 10 million people in Britain and Wales each year, and its usual victims were middleaged or older people; the average age of victims at the onset of the disease was fifty-seven. CJD in the young—a teenager, for example—is so rare as to typically occur only once every twenty or thirty years.

Conventional wisdom held that CJD was either inherited or contracted from contaminated surgical instruments, transplants, or cadaver-derived growth hormones once used to treat dwarfism. When it was learned that the young woman had been associated with a farm where mad cow disease was present, people began to wonder whether she had contracted her disease from an infected cow. This was dismissed by a government scientific committee, however, which concluded that “the risk of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy to humans is remote.”

In August 1992 came the case of Peter Warhurst, a sixty-one-year-old dairy farmer at Meadowdew Farm in Simister, north of Manchester, who died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Warhurst had culled a “mad cow” from his herd three years before. The prestigious British medical journal Lancet described this as “the first report of CJD in an individual with direct occupational contact with a case of BSE.” Thereport said that the case was probably a chance occurrence but raised “the possibility of a causal link.” It was not a link the government wanted to hear about. Livestock is a mainstay of the United Kingdom’s economy, and the stakes were huge.

Kevin Taylor, the government’s assistant chief veterinary officer responsible for BSE control, publicly dismissed the notion of a link between mad cow disease and CJD, saying, “I don’t think that a link between this case and BSE is even conjectural.” This echoed repeated claims by British agriculture minister John Gummer that there was “no evidence anywhere in the world of BSE passing from animals to humans” and that “on the basis of all scientific evidence available, eating beef is safe.” At a boat show in Ipswich in 1989, Gummer had vouched for the safety of beef, this time in a BBC television report that showed him helping his four-year-old daughter, Cordelia, chomp down on a beef burger nearly the size of her face. “When you’ve got the clear support of the scientists who deal with these matters [and] the clear action of the government, there is no need for people to be worried,” he proclaimed, “and I can say completely honestly that I shall go on eating beef and my children will go on eating beef because there is no need to be worried.”

But new cases kept emerging. In May 1993, Duncan Templeman, a sixty-four-year-old Somerset dairy farmer, came down with CJD. There had been three cases of BSE on his farm, and he was a beef-eater.

Eight months later, in January 1994, a third dairy farmer, from Just, in Cornwall— some of whose cows had also contracted BSE—entered a hospital with loss of memory and slurred speech. The fifty- four-year-old farmer soon became mute, and he died of pneumonia some months later. The Lancet, which reported the case, concluded that “the occurrence of CJD in another dairy farmer . . . is clearly a matter of concern.”

4

Although the report emphasized that the farmer might have contracted the disease from his cows, the government’s Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee emphasized that he might not have and that the case therefore did not require “the Government to revise the measures already taken to safeguard public health against occupational and other possible routes of exposure to the BSE agent.”

But one member of the committee warned that, should a fourth case arise, the tide of probability would turn: farmers were probably catching CJD from their cows. In September 1995, a fourth ill farmer came to light. As if that weren’t convincing enough, a rash of puzzling CJD cases had begun to occur in beefeating young people not associated with farms.

In 1993 fifteen-year-old Victoria Rimmer of Connah’s Quay, Deeside, came down with CJD—the youngest reported victim in Great Britain in almost twenty-five years. Victoria had been exceptionally healthy until May 1993, when she began losing weight, developed trouble with her vision, and soon became apathetic. A brain biopsy revealed spongiform encephalopathy. Her condition deteriorated. She had fits, her body twitched uncontrollably, and she went blind. According to her mother, the British newspaper Today reported, beef burger was Vickie’s favorite food. Kenneth Calman, England’s chief medical officer, countered, “No one knows what illness she is suffering from . . . there is no evidence whatever that BSE causes CJD.” Victoria soon fell into a coma that lasted four and a half years, ending in her death.

The notion that CJD might be linked to a person’s diet was not new, and the supporting evidence was as tantalizing as it was scant. In 1984 the American Journal of Medicine reported four cases in which individuals who commonly ate animal brains—those of wild goats, squirrels, and pigs—came down with CJD. The authors concluded: “Our case, along with experimental evidence for oral transmission of Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease and other spongiform agents, support[s] the hypothesis that ingestion of the infective agent may be one natural mode of acquisition of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.”

After the identification of mad cow disease, not surprisingly, such speculation increased. In 1997 a neurologist at the University of Kentucky came across a CJD patient in Florida, a native of Kentucky who had a long history of eating squirrel brains back home—not an uncommon practice in rural parts of the state, where the brains are sometimes scrambled with eggs or put in a meat and vegetable stew called burgoo. The neurologist later discovered that all five patients of a neurology clinic in western Kentucky who were suspected of having CJD had a history of eating squirrel brains. The patients were not related, and they all lived in different towns, facts that minimized heredity or direct contact as a means of transmission. The study was widely reported in the media but criticized in the scientific community; for one thing, squirrels apparently don’t get spongiform encephalopathy.

In 1998 the Lancet reported the intriguing case of a sixty- year-old man from Italy who was admitted to the hospital with muscle contractions, an unsteady gait, visual difficulties, and problems speaking. Two weeks after admission, he became mute and couldn’t swallow, and several months later he died. The man, as far as anyone knew, had no unusual eating habits. But about the same time he was admitted to the hospital, his seven-year-old cat developed uncontrollable twitches and episodes of frenzy and hypersensitivity to touch. The cat grew progressively worse and soon was unable to walk. There was no evidence that the cat, which slept on the owner’s bed, had ever bitten him. Analysis of cells from the 5

man’s and the cat’s brains showed remarkably similar abnormalities. Either the man caught CJD from his cat, the cat caught it from the man, both were infected by a common source, coincidence led them to become infected independently, or the cases were simply misdiagnosed.

Epidemiologists rightly caution that for every victim of CJD who had eaten the brain of a wild animal, there were thousands of other people who had eaten the same thing without contracting the disease.

Such is the slippery nature of anecdotal evidence. But it is also worth noting that of the thousands of people who may have eaten BSE-infected beef, only a select few contracted the human form of mad cow disease.

By the end of 1995, ten suspected cases had been documented in young people in the United Kingdom.

Senior government officials continued to insist there was no link with beef. Even as official denials flew, several prominent scientists, including some government advisors, were preparing a paper for the Lancet that would confirm people’s worst fears—that the cow disease and the human disease were connected—by acknowledging the “possibility that [these cases were] causally linked to BSE.” Not until just before the study’s publication in the April 6, 1996, issue did the British secretary of state for health, Stephen Dorrell, admit to the House of Lords that the ten young people probably were suffering from what had become known as variant CJD, the human form of mad cow disease. Researchers soon added physical evidence to the statistical case: the agent of mad cow disease in humans was indistinguishable from the agent that caused BSE. Mad cow disease seemed like medical science fiction. One of humankind’s most ubiquitous domesticated companions, the dairy cow, widely known for its gentle nature, and a frequent subject of poetry and painting, had delivered a ferocious new disease unto its keepers. No one could say how the cows had gotten it, but speculation soon shifted to their pastured brethren the sheep. It was one more connection in a strange set of circumstances that seemed to link sheep, cows, and humans in a bizarre and unprecedented web of affliction.

3.

Scrapie, the illness of sheep and goats that can cause the animals to madly scratch themselves raw, was first clinically recognized in Great Britain in 1732. An early description from Germany describes how suffering animals “lie down, bite at their feet and legs, rub their back against posts, fail to thrive, stop feeding, and finally become lame. . . . Scrapie is incurable. . . . A shepherd must isolate such an animal from healthy stock immediately, because it is infectious and can cause serious harm in the flock.” The French term for the disease translates as the “malady of madness and convulsions.”

Not until 1936 was scrapie proven to be infectious, though its origins remained a mystery. In 1966 researchers at Hammersmith Hospital in London suggested it was no ordinary infectious agent because, whatever it was, it possessed no genetic material, or DNA. It therefore was not a living agent at all.

Researchers drew their dramatic conclusions from the fact that DNA is fragile and can usually be destroyed by ultraviolet light, heat, or chemical disinfectants. But the scrapie agent remained infectious 6

even after prolonged boiling, exposure to the extreme dry heat of sterilization, blasting with high levels of ultraviolet radiation, or even soaking in formalin and alcohol. Scrapie thus joined the strange fraternity of infectious brain-wasting diseases caused by a nonliving infectious agent. These are the perfect agents of disease: you can’t kill them because they’re already dead. But scrapie would not be the last in its class.

In 1957 American scientist D. Carleton Gajdusek and an Australian colleague began investigating kuru, the fatal neurological disease that was killing the Foré people, an ancient tribe of about 15,000 in Papua New Guinea. The victims’ brains looked so much like those of scrapie-infected sheep that in 1959 American veterinarian William Hadlow suggested the two diseases were the same. Like scrapie, kuru was infectious—in this case, it was passed through the tribe by the ritualistic eating of brains of the dead. A neuropathologist noted further that the brains of kuru victims looked a lot like those of CJD victims. If kuru looked like scrapie and CJD looked like kuru, then CJD looked like scrapie. These three brain-wasting diseases came to largely define TSEs, and for his work on kuru Gajdusek would receive the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

But “TSE” was merely a descriptive term signifying something transmissible that made the brains of its victims spongy. It revealed little about the disease-causing agents themselves. In the early 1980s Stanley B. Prusiner, at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, sought to unravel the mystery. He proposed the heretical idea, for which he would later receive the Nobel Prize, that TSEs were caused by a special protein—that is, nothing more than one of the body’s common molecular building blocks bound together in a lethal way. Unlike bacteria and viruses, these special proteins, which he called prions, do not reproduce—or at least not in the case of mad cow disease. Rather, once in the victim’s body, they force normal proteins into abnormal configurations. Prions don’t replicate; they enslave. The notion of an infectious protein was strange enough. That it could also be inherited, as some cases of CJD showed, revealed an entirely new and fearsome type of infectious disease.

Just as the brains of various TSE victims looked a lot alike, so did some of the symptoms. In fact, the human form of mad cow disease was almost indistinguishable from the better-known CJD. The most striking clinical difference between the two diseases was the age of the victims. The term “variant CJD,” or vCJD, was soon coined to reflect the finer distinctions.

The knowledge that people could get the disease from eating parts of infected cows, though a landmark discovery, was only one element of the larger story. How, in the first place, had the cows gotten it?

Scrapie-infected sheep remained the top suspect. Yet for centuries cows in England had intermingled with infected sheep, and there was not a single documented case of a cow becoming sick from scrapie.

Nor, in the more than 350 years that scrapie had been known in England, was a single case documented of a person becoming sick from the sheep disease. If mad cow disease did in fact come from sheep, why had it just recently begun showing up in cows, let alone in people?

7

Perhaps a random mutation of the scrapie agent had suddenly made it infectious for cows—and people.

Or maybe mad cow disease had nothing to do with sheep. Perhaps a protein in a cow’s brain had randomly mutated into a lethal TSE protein. Then again, conceivably mad cow disease had been around for a long time at such low frequency that it had never been detected in bovines, let alone in humans— until something happened to cause an explosive epidemic.

No one could say exactly what changes had caused the emergence of mad cow disease, but scientists soon began to wonder whether the intensive management practices in the production and husbandry of cows and sheep in the United Kingdom were responsible. Over the previous few decades, for example, as livestock production had intensified, many relatively small farms had been absorbed into huge industrial enterprises where livestock was treated like oil, natural gas, or any other commodity. The animals’ natural needs for space, proper diet, and other comforts had been overshadowed by demands for greater efficiency and profit—but at an unexpected cost.

The fact that BSE seemed to be transmitted by consumption of certain parts of infected animals would have, under natural circumstances, prevented its spread between sheep and cows for the simple reason that these placid herbivores don’t eat each other.

Or do they?

4.

Cows, sheep, and other herbivores evolved over millions of years to eat plants. Just about everything about them is geared to living in a world of greenery. Their teeth are designed for grinding tough plants, not for grabbing prey or cracking bones. Their large, padded lips help them grasp and pluck short grasses from the ground. Their broad cloven hooves help steady their weight on grass and soft earth, where lush forage is likely to be found. What’s more, the bovine digestive system is designed to extract hard-to-getat nutrients from grasses and other vegetation. Through grinding action and fermentation, their three “stomachs” break down and absorb the nutrients contained in their tough, lignin-based diet. Bacteria living in their gut are equipped to break down plant fibers. Cows, like all species, tend to function best within dietary boundaries drawn by evolution.

Violating such evolutionary boundaries can seem unnatural, if not disgusting. The term “rendering” is a euphemism for refining and repackaging animals’ blood and guts into palatable feed for livestock. For example, for decades renderers in France routinely added human excrement to the mix, creating a highprotein feed supplement that was sold to livestock producers throughout Europe—a practice not stopped until the year 2000. Ignoring natural dietary boundaries of species is more than bad manners; it can also be bad for our health.

8

In the mid-twentieth century, meat producers realized they could save money if they recycled and sold the normally discarded by-products of butchered livestock, including the intestines, bladder, udder, kidneys, spleen, stomach, heart, liver, lungs, and other organs, as well as the bones. Through the process of rendering, these leftovers could be turned back into feed for cattle, sheep, and other herbivores.

Nature’s plant-eaters could be transformed into human- made carnivores.

The problem was that high-protein diets can cause serious problems in digestive systems designed for grass and other low-protein food. But the livestock producers saw this as nature’s problem, not their own. Although cattle fed high- protein diets did routinely suffer from digestive problems, the animals usually survived to market, and, whatever the consequences for the animals, the effect on the profit margin was positive.

In the process of rendering, the use of heat, mechanical pressure, and chemical solvents reduces entrails and other organs into two basic chemical components. One product is fat, known as tallow, which is used for anything from soap manufacture and human consumption to production of animal feed and chemicals. The other product is greaves, used in fertilizer or as high-protein feed for cows, sheep, and other animals. Greaves can be further processed to yield a solid residue and small amounts of a valuable, highly purified fat used in perfumes and cosmetics. The solid residue can be ground up to produce concentrated meat and bone meal, or MBM. This is added to animal feed to boost the protein content, which can help the animals gain weight faster.

But scientists were puzzled. If rendering had caused mad cow disease, why had it not occurred forty years earlier, when rendering became a standard practice?

Although most prions survived rendering, one theory suggests that lowering the amount of heat or solvents in order to offset rising costs during the energy crisis of the 1970s allowed even greater quantities of the scrapie agent to remain intact. Therefore, more prions ended up in MBM and in the diet of cows. Or, possibly, the modified rendering process physically altered the agent, making it more infectious for cattle. But such changes in rendering during the 1970s had occurred throughout Europe, so why did mad cow disease emerge only in the United Kingdom?

The problem with the theory is that in subsequent experiments the use of solvents had little or no impact on the prion. i A unique British contribution to the emergence of mad cow disease may have been the dramatic increase in the number of sheep in the United Kingdom about the same time the disease emerged— from about 31 million sheep in 1980 to more than 44 million in 1990. This in turn meant that a greater number of scrapie-infected sheep carcasses were being sent to rendering plants—and ending up as MBM. By 1985 there were about two sheep for every cow in England, which meant that cattle in England were probably eating more scrapie-infected sheep, via MBM, than anywhere else in Europe.

Perhaps the increased number of infected sheep consumed by cows tipped the balance to an infective dose of scrapie. But meat meal and bone meal with sheep material had been flowing to the feed bins of 9

cattle in Britain for as long as 70 years. Surely if this were the route cows would have become infected before the 1980s. ii Or perhaps, some scientists theorized, the greater number of scrapie-infected sheep simply increased the probability of a random change occurring in the infective agent, thereby turning a sheep disease into a bovine and human one. But there is no evidence for this—any more than there is for mutations in cattle leading to the outbreak of BSE. “The most widely accepted hypothesis is that BSE originated in scrapie-infected sheep, but it’s still just a hypothesis,” Marcus G. Doherr of the Department of Clinical Veterinary Medicine at Switzerland’s University of Bern, told me several years ago “I don’t think that riddle will ever be completely solved.”

Wherever it started, BSE rapidly spread in the cow population via feed containing meat and bone meal of infected animals. Whether farmers knew it or not—and Peter Stent was one who didn’t—virtually all of them in the United Kingdom were feeding animal protein to their animals to make them grow faster.

Whatever the actual origin of the mad cow prion, intensive agriculture dramatically multiplied the agent and quickly sent it throughout the industrial food web. The British government’s inquiry into the epidemic concluded that “BSE developed into an epidemic as a consequence of an intensive farming practice—the recycling of animal protein in ruminant feed. This practice, unchallenged over decades, proved a recipe for disaster.” A 1988 ban on the feeding of recycled animal protein in the United Kingdom slowly stemmed the epidemic a few years later, but not before harm had been done to many humans and herds of cattle.

In January 1993, by the time the epidemic reached its peak, an estimated 1 million cows had been infected. By November 2000, cases had been confirmed in more than 35,000 herds in the United Kingdom. Cases also appeared in Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. Before long Japan and Israel had cases as well.

By early 2002, a total of 125 cases of the human form of mad cow disease had been reported worldwide: 117 in the United Kingdom, 6 in France, and 1 each in Ireland and Italy. Almost all the victims had lived in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1996, the time of the BSE outbreak. In fact, there has never been a human case in which the patient did not have a history of exposure in a country where the disease was occurring in cattle.

i Colchester, Alan C. F., and Nancy T. H. Colchester. "The Origin of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy: The Human Prion Disease Hypothesis." Lancet 366.9488 (2005): 856-861. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 Mar. 2013.

ii Colchester, Alan C. F., and Nancy T. H. Colchester. "The Origin of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy: The Human Prion Disease Hypothesis." Lancet 366.9488 (2005): 856-861. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 Mar. 2013.

10

Sales Information Sheet Tibet Wild

Trim Size: 6x9 Pages: 384 Copyright: 2012

A Naturalist’s Journeys on the Roof of the World George B. Schaller Paperback

ISBN 9781610915069

Price $19.99

Discount IPT*

Pub Month Feb 2014

Hardcover

9781610911726

$29.95

IPT

Oct 2012

Ebook

9781610912327

$19.99

IPT

Oct 2012

Fall 2013

Bookstore Categories NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection

*Trade discount until three to six months after publication date, then short discount Competing Titles Alan Rabinowitz, Life in the Valley of Death, Island, 2007, $26.00, paper ISBN: 978-1597261296 Bookscan: 2335 C, 202 P Warehouse: 4799 C, 614 P. William Stolzenburg, Where the Wild Things Were, Bloomsbury, 2009, $16.00, paper ISBN: 978-1596916241 Bookscan: 3569. Rick Ridgeway, The Big Open: On Foot Across Tibet's Chang Tang, National Geographic, 2004, $26.00, cloth ISBN: 0792265602 Bookscan: 1904 Previous Works The Year of the Gorilla ISBN: 9780226736471 Bookscan: 114, The Last Panda ISBN: 978-0226736297 Bookscan: 1484, Tibet’s Hidden Wilderness ISBN: 978-0810938939 Bookscan: 9, and The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations (National Book Award winner) ISBN: 978-0226736402 Bookscan: 640. Tibet Wild, Island Press, Hardcover ISBN: 9781610911726 Bookscan: 1552 Warehouse: 3798

Sales Handle An engaging portrait of wildlife and culture in the Tibetan wilderness from the world’s preeminent field biologist Description George Schaller has spent much of his life traversing wild and isolated places in his quest to understand and conserve threatened species—from mountain gorillas in the Virunga to snow leopards in the Himalaya.

Throughout his career, Schaller has spent more time in Tibet than anywhere else, devoting over thirty years to the region's unique wildlife, culture, and landscapes.

Tibet Wild is Schaller’s account of three decades of exploration in the remote stretches of Tibet. As human development accelerated, Schaller watched the clash between wildlife and people become more common— and more destructive. What began as a scientific endeavor became a mission: to work with local communities, regional leaders, and national governments to protect the ecological richness and culture of the Tibetan Plateau.

Whether tracking brown bears, penning fables about the tiny pika, or promoting a groundbreaking conservation preserve, Schaller has pursued his goal with persistence and good humor. Tibet Wild is an intimate journey through the wilderness of Tibet, guided by the careful gaze and unwavering passion of a lifelong naturalist.

Selling Points • An important new book from preeminent field biologist and National Book Award-winning Schaller • The first book to detail Schaller's work in Tibet and Western China, over 30 years of his career • Provides an inside look at the life and work of a field biologist in one of the most remote, wild, and magnificent regions of the world

Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 A Covenant with Chiru 15 Riddle of the Calving Ground 29 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 The Longest Walk 43 A Deadly Fashion 67 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 A Gift to the Spirit 95 Chapter 6 The Good Pika 109 Chapter 7 Chang Tang Traverse 125 Feral Naturalist 167 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Two Mountains and a River 201 Chapter 10 Into the Hidden Land 227 Chapter 11 Tibetan Wild Sheep Scandal 259 Chapter 12 Wild Icon of the Pamirs 273 Chapter 13 A Bear in the House 311 Chapter 14 The Snow Leopard 325 Selected References 357 Index 363

Introduction

F

or nearly four decades my wife, Kay, and I have lived on North America’s East Coast beside a forest of maple and pine. Our house is a converted barn once used to stall cattle and dry tobacco.

One half of the house consists of a huge, high room with the original barn beams still in place. It is our living room and the loft in it is lined with bookshelves crammed with travelogues, memoirs, histories, and expedition accounts about countries in which I have worked. But mainly it is a room of artifacts, of casual items acquired for their beauty, interest, or merely because they resonate in our hearts, each a memento of exploration and desire.

Wooden masks from the Congo and Nepal hang on a wall, as does a Masai shield of buffalo hide from Tanzania. A Dayak headhunting knife from Sarawak is suspended from a beam beside an intricately woven basket from Laos used for collecting edible plants, land crabs, and other items for a meal. A shelf holds a stone adze from Brazil, a chunk of dinosaur bone from Mongolia, and a walrus tusk from Alaska with scrimshaw of seals and a polar bear. Against a wall stands a carved wooden chest from Pakistan’s Swat Valley. A brass bucket from Afghanistan holds firewood, and there is a lamp with a bronze base from India, and a photograph of Marco Polo sheep that reminds me of my studies in Tajikistan.

Of all the countries in which I’ve worked, I spent far more years on projects in China than anywhere else. In 1980, I was invited to join a team of Chinese scientists in a four-year study of giant pandas, 1

2 Tibet Wild a venture arranged by World Wildlife Fund. After the conclusion of that project, I began field research on the high Tibetan Plateau of western China, and I continue with it still, drawn to the luminous landscape, the wildlife, and the Tibetan culture. Tibetan rugs cover the floor of our room. A large thangka, a scroll painting of Tara, the deity of loving kindness and compassion, covers part of one wall.

Seven lacquered tsampa bowls, lovely in shape and design, used for storing barley flour, cover one table. On a shelf rests a prayer wheel, a tiny temple bell with crystalline sound, a cup for butter tea, and an incense box with two carved snow lions, their turquoise manes flowing, reminding us of Tibet’s snowy mountains. A large blackand-white photograph, taken over a hundred years ago, shows the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s former home, on its hill overlooking fields and mountains beyond Lhasa.

The Tibetan Plateau has infected me, particularly the Chang Tang, the great northern plain. Chang Tang. The name enchants. It conjures a vision of totemic loneliness, of space, silence, and desolation, a place nowhere intimate—yet that is part of its beauty. Even years before my first visit, I had long wanted to explore its secrets and, intrigued by the accounts of early Western travelers, I traced and retraced their journeys with a finger on a map. The Chang Tang was forbidden to foreigners, devoid of roads, and almost uninhabited; its inaccessibility enhanced its allure. In 1984 I finally had the opportunity to penetrate its vastness, an area which covers not just the northern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region, but also western Qinghai Province, and the southern rim of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. By 2011, I had made twenty-six journeys to the Chang Tang for a total of about forty-one months, not counting wildlife surveys I’ve also made in eastern Tibet and the Pamir Mountains of southwest China.

Though drawn to remote and little-known places by inclination, I also knew that the Chang Tang in northern Tibet and other parts of the Tibetan Plateau harbored a variety of large mammals, none of them studied, their lives still a mystery.Years of political turmoil had decimated China’s wildlife, as I had noted during the panda study, and I wondered about the current status of various other species. Mainly I wondered how certain species of the Tibetan Plateau had fared.

Introduction  3 I wanted to delve into the lives of the Tibetan antelope (or chiru), the Tibetan wild ass (or kiang), the wild yak, and other members of the unique mammal community on these uplands. Initially the State Forestry Administration (called the Ministry of Forestry at the time) in Beijing suggested that I survey the distribution of snow leopard.

This I did, but soon my attention shifted to chiru. The species intrigued me with its wanderings, here today and gone tomorrow. To know about the movements of an animal is a first step in protecting it. Little did I realize how many years it would require, at what cost in comfort and funds, and how many miles of uninhabited terrain we would have to traverse to obtain even a general idea of the chiru’s migratory patterns.

I approached the project as a scientist, more specifically as a biologist focused on conservation.This involved collecting facts, many of them, because they are the only reliable tool of science, and it is upon facts that conservation must ultimately be based. I do not mistake numbers and measurements and statistical detail for meaning, but I hoped to collect enough scattered facts to discover from them certain patterns and principles which underlie the Chang Tang ecosystem. But nothing remains static, neither a wildlife population nor a culture, and I knew my efforts would represent just a moment in time, a record of something that no one has seen before and never would again. My information offers the landscape an historical baseline, drawn over a three-decade period from which others working in the future can reclaim the past and compare it to their present. Because the Tibetan Plateau is being rapidly affected by climate change, the accumulation of such basic knowledge has now become especially timely and urgent.

To learn as much as possible about chiru became a personal quest, almost an indulgence, and it gave direction and coherence to much of my work on the Tibetan Plateau. To save one of the last great migrations of a hoofed animal in Asia, surpassed in number only by the million Mongolian gazelles on the eastern steppes of Mongolia, is important for itself, as well as to China and the world.

And no one else at the time had devoted themselves to the task. By happy coincidence the chiru offered me an opportunity to explore terrain which few had ever seen and at the same time to study a

The Tibetan Plateau in China and the adjacent countries where our wildlife conservation work was done.

Introduction 5 little-known species. I am less a modern field biologist devoted to technology and statistics than a nineteenth-century naturalist who with pencil and paper describes nature in detail, though with little desire to collect specimens, as was then in vogue; instead I strive to observe species and protect them.

To become familiar with an area that is still healthy, productive, and diverse, one still unspoiled by humankind, has a special appeal. It is not a matter of surveying the last orangutans in Sarawak or searching for saola in Laos, as I have done, but of conserving vigorous populations of all animal and plant species in an ecosystem. Conservation has in recent decades focused on rain forests with their great diversity of species, whereas attention to rangelands, which cover 40 percent of the earth’s land surface, has languished.Yet rangelands too display biological treasures in beauty, variety, and uniqueness.

The Serengeti savanna or Mongolian steppe offers an unsurpassed sense of place; it invites a feeling of empathy for the landscape, including the pastoral cultures of the people who dwell there. Here in the Chang Tang was a neglected area of over 300,000 square miles, a third of them uninhabited, an area twice the size of California, or the size of France and Italy combined. Here one could address the conflicting demands of conservation, development, and the livelihood of its pastoral people, and here conservation would not need to be confined to a protected area of modest size but could involve a vast landscape, one larger than many countries. Good management options persisted and solutions to problems could be applied based on solid science, sound policy, and local support, drawing on the knowledge, interests, and participation of the area’s communities.

Changes in the Chang Tang, already under way in the 1980s when I first visited, have been accelerating with more roads, more households, more livestock, and more fences, which, together with new land-use policies, have had a major impact on the land and its wildlife. As economic conditions have improved, most families have settled into permanent houses instead of nomadic tents, and have exchanged horses for motorcycles. Livestock is often kept in fenced private plots instead of herded on communal pastures, leading to overgrazing and hindering the movement of wildlife. The conservation goal now, as before, is to manage the rangelands, livestock,

6 Tibet Wild and wildlife in dynamic stability, to maintain ecological wholeness.

Changes over recent decades have made this more difficult. My perceptions and actions have had to change as well. As the human population grows there as elsewhere, one has to confront the necessity of limits, of regulating the use of the landscape. Some parts should be wholly protected, closed to human intrusion, where plants and animals can seek their destiny. Much of the northern Chang Tang is such a place, one still mostly devoid of people, and it requires such full protection. Other parts need to be managed in cooperation with the local communities, limiting livestock to sustainable numbers, managing wildlife to reduce conflict, strictly regulating development, and the like. When I now return to the Chang Tang, I can still see the past in the present because relatively little land has so far been degraded by human action. My mission, indeed my passion, is to help the Chang Tang endure for decades and centuries to come in all its variety and beauty through careful, intelligent management.

My dream is that communities will learn to treasure and manage their environment for no reason other than to keep it healthy and beautiful. How can I graft my knowledge and feelings onto the beliefs, emotions, and traditions of others? As His Holiness the Dalai Lama said: “Ultimately, the decision to save the environment must come from the human heart.” The Buddhist religion stresses love and compassion toward all living beings, and this predisposes its followers to be receptive to an environmental message, more there than elsewhere. Humans seem to have a kind of mental glaucoma as they obsessively destroy nature, tearing it apart, even while seeing the ever-increasing damage that threatens their future. Conservation remains an ideological and psychological minefield through which everyone who hopes to preserve something must blunder. Nevertheless I see progress on the Tibetan Plateau and keep a positive spirit.

Conservation is a long journey, not a destination, something to which my years in and around the Chang Tang can attest. Chinese expeditions had done important initial work by making lists of species and plotting their distribution, but my Han Chinese and Tibetan coworkers and I came with a different agenda. We came not just to learn but also to inform and inspire, to reveal the richness

Introduction 7 of the Chang Tang and other places in this region of the world. We became witnesses who tried to alert those around us to what was being lost. We promoted the establishment of nature reserves, more accurately termed conservation areas because pastoralists with their livestock live in most of them. Much of the Chang Tang area is now officially protected in such nature reserves, a glowing achievement for China. We alerted the government to the mass slaughter of chiru for their fine wool in 1990, and this has led to much better protection of the species. Above all, the environment of the Tibetan Plateau has become a major concern of the government at all levels, of nongovernmental organizations, and of many communities. I had only a small part in this, but I have been an admiring observer, and have remained active in further conservation efforts there.

“But what has been has been, and I have had my hour,” wrote the seventeenth-century poet John Dryden. Indeed I have. But I hate to acknowledge this. I cannot resist returning to the solitude of these vast uplands. With each expedition, I slough off my past like a snake skin and live in a new moment. Marooned in mind and spirit, I have no idea when my work there will end; I continue to plan new projects. But like all good ventures it will end someday without heroics.

In recent years, I have neglected to publish much on our work.

There have been occasional scientific papers and popular articles, mostly in Chinese publications such as Acta Zoologica Sinica and China’s Tibet. My two most recent books are the popular Tibet’s Hidden Wilderness (1997) and the scientific Wildlife of the Tibetan Steppe (1998), both also available in Chinese translation. But so much has been learned since then. I have made annual trips to China, to the Chang Tang, to southeast Tibet, and to the Pamir mountains of western China and adjoining countries.

This book, built on these explorations, is part observation and part evocation. Eight of the fourteen chapters deal with the Chang Tang, a number of them devoted primarily to chiru. By the mid1990s, when I wrote my previous books, I had failed to find any calving grounds of the migratory chiru populations, a principal goal and a critical one in their conservation. Ultimately we reached two of them, and the travails of travel and the exultation of finding the

8 Tibet Wild newborns deserve accounts. In these chapters, I have tried to bring out not just the discoveries and excitements of fieldwork, but also what happens in the day-to-day course of our work. I thus emphasize some of the difficulties, of vehicles bogging down in July mud time after time and digging them out at 16,000 feet, of snowstorms in summer, of winter temperatures in a frost-encrusted tent at –30°F, and the daily tedium of moving camp for weeks on end. I could only view my Tibetan, Han, and Uygur companions on the various journeys with respect for their fortitude and dedication under such conditions.

A struggle for conservation all too often confronts greed, and so it was with the chiru, whose fine wool, when woven into shahtoosh shawls, had by the late 1980s become a fashion statement of the world’s wealthy. The slaughter of this species and its consequent decline, the developing effort to protect it, and its subsequent slow recovery, is a tale of desecration and redemption. My chapter on this shows how a species’ circumstances can almost overnight change from seeming security to being threatened with extinction. It is a lesson that nothing is ever safe, that if a country treasures something it must monitor and guard it continually.

Of the 150 or so mammal species on the Tibetan Plateau, I studied the chiru in greatest detail. I had also wanted to make more observations on the rare wild yak, the ancestor of the abundant domestic yak; to me the presence of wild yaks sanctifies the Chang Tang as wilderness. But chiru drove me on, either to places where yaks have been exterminated or to habitat unfavorable to them. I have, however, written here about three other species of the Chang Tang.The small and endearing pika, whose presence is so vital to the ecosystem yet is being widely poisoned, is the subject of one chapter. Another is on the powerful and uncommon Tibetan brown bear, which has come into increasing conflict with humans. And a third chapter is on the snow leopard, ever present but seldom revealing itself, whose enigmatic presence has haunted me over the decades.

We have also conducted wildlife surveys in the southeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau. With its maze of forested mountains and the world’s deepest canyon, eastern Tibet is wholly different from the Chang Tang, and it fascinated me by its contrasts. There I

Introduction  9 experienced the close attentions of leeches in the humid warmth and learned about the hidden land of Pemako, sacred in Buddhist geography. We trekked through the region on two lengthy trips to check on the status of wildlife and evaluate it as a possible reserve.

An uncommon animal on the Tibetan Plateau is the Tibetan argali sheep. I saw it seldom and learned little about its life but much about its death. Trophy hunters have an inane desire to kill rams with the longest possible horns, and I tell a story, in which I played but a minor part, of what happened when four American hunters returned home with their trophies: it turns into a cautionary tale, a sordid saga of sloppy science, deception, and political intrigue that damages the credibility of various persons and institutions.

The Tibetan Plateau is often considered the Roof of the World, and the Pamirs to the west are, in effect, its veranda. The precipitous terrain of the Karakoram and Kunlun Mountains between the Tibetan Plateau and the Pamirs has affected the distribution of wildlife. The snow leopard ranges throughout these mountains and Tibetan people once did, too. Kiang, chiru, and Tibetan gazelle failed to reach the Pamirs.Tibetan argali inhabit the Tibetan Plateau, whereas a unique argali subspecies, the Marco Polo sheep, lives in the Pamirs. This magnificent animal, the grandest of all wild sheep, roams across several international borders. To protect and manage it requires cooperation between Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and China, something best achieved by the creation of a four-country International Peace Park or Trans-Frontier Conservation Area. My efforts to promote this goal after working in each of the four countries, some of them politically volatile, provide me still with some useful lessons, about patience and persistence above all.

For a naturalist there is conflict between a life of comfort, companionship, and security at home, and one of hardship among mountains and plains. Observing undisturbed Marco Polo sheep fills me with delight, and waves of pleasure surge through me. Hearing that a government has protected an area that I had recommended is a

10  Tibet Wild balm to the soul, giving meaning to my life. But I renounce so much by seeking wilderness—a settled life, friends, and contact with those I love. There is usually no one other than my wife, Kay, in the field in whom I can truly confide during days of adversity. For years my family was with me in the field: first only Kay in the Congo, then also our two children in India, Tanzania, and Pakistan, and, when these had grown up, only Kay again in China and Mongolia. She was not just my coworker and one who greatly enjoyed camp life, but she also edited my manuscripts (including this one), raised our two sons, of whom I am immensely proud, and contributed in innumerable other ways. But Kay did not join me on most of the journeys described in this book, except in my heart, because her health did not permit it. I missed having her with me, always helping, encouraging, renewing my excitement in the work, and sharing memories. Love is the only bridge connecting us during lengthy separations. There is the knowledge that my return is awaited, a gift of happiness from someone who is part of myself. We each carry a different burden of hardship when separated. Nevertheless our lives keep going, round and round, together and apart, a mandala of love and compassion.

The various projects described in the chapters that follow have depended on many persons and institutions for support since the mid-1990s, and with deepest gratitude I acknowledge their generous assistance. Most are in China, the focus of this book, and I owe that nation an immense debt for hosting me so generously over the years. I particularly would like to mention the splendid cooperation of director Abu and Drolma Yangzom in the Forestry Department, Tibet Autonomous Region; of director Li Sandan and Zhang Li1 in the Forestry Department, Qinghai Province; and of director Zhu Fude and Shi Jun of the Forestry Department, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. I also refer to my work in a number of other countries, particularly those bordering China, among them Afghanistan, Tajikistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Myanmar, Mongolia,Vietnam, and Laos. I thank all countries collectively, and extend my special 1 Throughout this book, Han Chinese names are given in their traditional manner with the family name first and then the given name.

Introduction 11 appreciation to the many individuals, from herder to farmer and from government official to scientist, who so graciously extended their hospitality to us. Most of the individuals who took direct part in our journeys since the mid-1990s are mentioned in the text.

The support of three institutions has been critical. For over half a century I have been affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York; WCS also has an office in Beijing directed by Xie Yan. William Conway and John Robinson, among others at WCS, gave me the freedom to fulfill my dreams in the world’s wilderness, doing work on behalf of conservation that enriched my life. In 2008 I also joined Panthera, a nongovernmental organization devoted to the conservation of the world’s wild cats that is directed by Alan Rabinowitz, an old field colleague of mine. I have in addition an adjunct position with the Center of Nature and Society at Peking University in Beijing, which is directed by Lu Zhi. All research in China was done with the full cooperation of the State Forestry Administration in Beijing. The Tibet Plateau Institute of Biology and the Tibetan Academy of Agricultural and Animal Sciences in Lhasa also provided fruitful collaboration.

The project has in recent years depended for any success on various foundations and individual donors, and I am deeply indebted to all for their faith in our efforts. Among these are the Liz ClaiborneArt Ortenberg Foundation, the Armand Erpf Fund, the Judith McBean Foundation, the Patagonia Company, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Hoch Charitable Lead Trust, and the National Geographic Society. The European Union-China Biodiversity Programme, through the Wildlife Conservation Society, funded a project in Tibet in which I took part. Edith McBean, Anne Pattee, and Darlene Anderson, among others, also helped us generously.

Three individuals have accompanied me on several journeys, and they deserve special mention for their valuable contribution to the projects, as well as for their companionship, dedication, adaptability, and tenacity, often under most difficult conditions. Kang Aili, a coworker on six of my trips during the past decade, is affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society–China office and coordinates its field program in western China with great ability and persistence.

12 Tibet Wild Lu Zhi, director of both Peking University’s Center for Nature and Society and the Shan Shui Conservation Center, a nongovernmental organization, has with initiative and deep insight established several community conservation projects on the Tibetan Plateau.

We worked together on two trips in the Chang Tang and two in southeast Tibet, and she also supervises the Tibetan brown bear program. Beth Wald, a photographer, added outstanding value to two expeditions in Afghanistan and two in Tajikistan by documenting the mountains, wildlife, and local people in glorious detail, something that greatly helped to promote our work and raise awareness of these areas.

With exceptional editorial skill, insight, and interest, Jonathan Cobb meticulously edited the manuscript on behalf of Island Press, and I owe him a great debt of gratitude for improving it so much. I also extend my deep appreciation to Kathy Zeller for preparing the maps, and to Michael Fleming for superbly copyediting the manuscript. Most persons who contributed to my conservation efforts are mentioned in the text, but, in addition, I thank Luke Hunter, David Wattles, Rebecca Martin, Margarita Trujillo, Lisanne Petracca, Sun Shan, and Donna Xiao.

This is a personal book of science, conservation, and exploration based on my observations, experiences, and feelings. Sometimes I sound churlish and at other times exhilarated. My companions would no doubt write somewhat different accounts. But I want to stress that we worked as congenial teams. No matter what tribulations confronted us, we surmounted them and returned in good health, with solid information, and with many bonds of friendship intact.

George Schaller

Roxbury, Connecticut December 22, 2011

Sales Information Sheet Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change Peter Calthorpe

Paperback

ISBN 9781597267212

Price $30.00

Discount IPS

Pub Month June 2013

Hardcover

9781597267205

$49.95

IPS

Nov 2010

Ebook

9781610910057

$34.99

IPS

Nov 2010

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 7x10 Pages: 145 Copyright: 2010

Bookstore Categories ARCHITECTURE / Urban & Land Use Planning ARCHITECTURE / Urban & Land Use Planning ARCHITECTURE / Urban & Land Use Planning

Competing Titles Suburban Nation, Andres Duany ISBN: 978-0865477506 Bookscan: 4272 Green Metropolis, David Owen ISBN: 978-1594484841 Bookscan: 1717 Previous Works The Regional City, Island Press 2001 ISBN: 978-1559637848 Bookscan: 2890 Warehouse: 9541 The Next American Metropolis Princeton Architectural Press, 1995 ISBN: 9781878271686 Bookscan: 3867 Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Island Press, Hardcover, ISBN: 9781597267205 Bookscan: 1126 Warehouse: 3040

Sales Handle Progressive ideas on sustainable and humane built environments by a well-known thought leader Description Most take it as a given that climate change is an eminent threat and potentially catastrophic -- the science is now clear. This fact has brought the way our cities, towns, and regions shape our environmental impacts into urgent focus. Beyond renewable energy technologies and intelligent conservation, Peter Calthorpe believes that urbanism in its broadest definition must play a central role in resolving the climate change challenge. In fact, solving climate change without a more sustainable form of urbanism will be impossible. The focus of this book is specifically America’s unique opportunities and challenges regarding climate change -- partly because we represent a disproportionate share of global emissions but also because we have a special obligation for leadership and change.

Too often we see this challenge only in technical terms, within the domain of industrial efficiencies, power generation sources, or green technologies. Instead, Calthorpe attempts to paint a picture of a future that sees climate change through the lens of lifestyles, land use, urbanism, and, most significantly, the metropolitan region.

Selling Points • Author’s reputation • Topic of climate change and urban design • Examples of design related GHG reduction strategies from the state of California that the author has access to from his work with the California government • Modern graphic design and four color graphics created for the book

contents Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

Chapter 1 Urbanism and Climate Change

7

Chapter 2 The Fifty-year Experiment

25

Chapter 3 Toward a Green Urban Future

35

Chapter 4 Design for Urbanism

49

Chapter 5 The Urban Footprint

63

Chapter 6 The Urban Network

77

Chapter 7 The California Experiment

91

Chapter 8 Four American Futures

105

Chapter 9 A Sustainable Future

119

Notes

127

Index

137

I am still motivated by something Bucky Fuller, America’s iconoclastic engineer and inventor, advocated in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not his geodesic domes, dymaxion houses, or crazy three-wheeled cars, but an idea more fundamental to his thinking: whole systems design. Long before we saw a satellite view of earth, Bucky was talking about “spaceship earth”—an engineer’s metaphor for the ultimate ecological paradigm. His metaphor was complex and implied many things: that we are all in this together, that our planet is indivisible and interdependent, and that we are in charge, responsible, at the helm. We are not at the mercy of Mother Earth but occupy a place somewhere between steward and pilot. As climate change now presses down on us, this metaphor becomes even more compelling, challenging, and important.

During Bucky’s time, we were having a romance with engineering; efficiency, mass production, standardization, and specialization were the themes of the age.

It was a mechanical, cause-and-effect worldview—no complex feedback loops, no uncertainty, no ecology. In fact, half the globe—the communists—thought they could engineer the world’s social structure and economy as well as its industries. Our half believed in, as Adam Smith called it, a more mysterious “invisible hand”—perhaps a nod to a religious worldview or the humility that we could not control everything. Nevertheless, after World War II, both sides let the engineers run things, optimizing production, mass-producing everything from houses and toasters to tomatoes, and letting specialists construct vast labyrinths out of their institutional silos.

But Bucky was a different kind of engineer. He wanted to “do more with less,” to pierce through the silos. He infected us all with the notion that all things are connected, that there is no such thing as waste, and that the more comprehensive we make systems the more sustainable they are. Perhaps most important for me was his optimism—that we could design ecological solutions, that technology could be on our side, that we could think in grand terms, and that we could make “spaceship earth” work for everyone. Some of these ideas are now common clichés, and that is a good thing. Toward the end of his life, Bucky started something called the World Game.

This was an effort to engage a large number of professionals and policy makers in the challenge of devising sustainable global systems for food, water, and energy. In effect, that challenge is what we are facing now with climate change.

2 : Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change

Superficially following his lead, I built a lot of leaky domes in the 1960s—and in so doing learned the difference between symbols and reality. In the next decade, I moved on to designing passive solar buildings (really doing more with less) and what Sim Van der Ryn called sustainable communities (a first pass at whole systems design at the neighborhood level). These approaches matured into Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and New Urbanism in the 1990s, and finally to the notion of regional cities. Each step built on the previous thinking and expanded its range and impact.

In terms of the energy and climate change challenge we now face, each step revealed opportunities that could not be met at the previous scale. Efficient, climateresponsive buildings are important but miss many community-scale opportunities.

Individual communities, while offering more options for whole systems design, cannot in themselves create robust alternatives to the car nor enact large-scale strategies for farmland preservation, habitat conservation, or economic revitalization. TODs began to imply a regional framework of transit and intelligently located development but were ultimately just one dimension of a broad range of strategies needed to shape healthy regional growth. Over decades, I learned that each scale depends on the others and that only a whole systems approach, with each scale nesting into the other, can deliver the kind of transformation we now need to confront climate change. This book is, I hope, a summary and synthesis of all these lessons, a set of tools to craft a different future and the metric of just what is at stake.

Like it or not, the globe has an urban future. The world’s urban population has more than quadrupled since 1950, more than half live in urban environments for the first time, and the trend is accelerating.1 The pressing question, then, is what type of urbanism will prevail. The answer not only will define the physical nature of our communities but will prescribe our environmental footprint as well as frame our social opportunities and underwrite our economic future. Yet, urbanism is often missing from the proposed remedies for climate change, job growth, and environmental stress; it is the invisible wedge in the pie chart of green solutions.

In this book, I define the term urbanism broadly—by qualities, not quantities; by intensity, not density; by connectivity, not just location. Urbanism is always made from places that are mixed in uses, walkable, human scaled, and diverse in population; that balance cars with transit; that reinforce local history; that are adaptable; and that support a rich public life. Urbanism can come in many forms, scales, locations, and densities. Many of our traditional villages, streetcar suburbs, country towns, and historic cities are “urban” by this definition. Urbanism often resides beyond our downtowns.

While urbanism will vary by geography, culture, and economy, traditional urbanism always manifests the vitality, complexity, and intimacy that defined our finest cities and towns for centuries. By this definition suburbs can be “urban” if they are walkable and mixed use, and cities can easily be the reverse—just visit any central

Introduction : 3

city “urban renewal” district. Traditional urbanism is not just a central city location, a historic district, a downtown, or a “phase” we passed over; it is an evolving platform for our most essential needs—and at this moment in history it is fundamental to shaping a sustainable future.

The solution to the climate change and energy challenge does not necessarily pit suburb versus city; rather, it requires their reintegration into sustainable regional forms. This book is not a treatise on the problems of suburbs or the value of cities. It instead advocates that both must co-evolve into more integrated forms, establishing a seamless interface.

Certainly cities are green. On a per capita basis, they require less land, less auto travel, and less energy, and they emit less carbon. But this message may well oversimplify the complex, multilayered urban and regional strategies that are key to our future. More than stand-alone “sustainable communities” or even “green cities,” we now need “sustainable regions”—places that carefully blend a broad range of technologies, settlement patterns, and lifestyles. Only a regional plan can create a framework for communities of differing scales and intensities, for transportation choices that can significantly offset auto dependence, and for environmental systems and green technologies that function at both the large and small scales. Whole systems design functions best at the regional scale.

Unfortunately, urbanism so defined has been on the wane for the last half century. Our cities and towns have been on a high-carbon diet—and our metropolitan regions have become, in short, obese. Oil is like a high-sugar and high-starch diet for cities; it expands the waistline without nourishing strength or resilience. Urban neighborhoods are like healthy diets: they build on unique places and local history, they use natural ingredients and mix them well, they tend toward local sources, and they are lean. America’s postwar suburbs are like fast food: their history and sense of place trumped by mass production; their ingredients dominated by a few generic staples; their resources distant and large; and their infrastructure highly subsidized.

Our urban footprint—its physical size and resource demands—has expanded in unsustainable ways for too long.

As a remedy, this book will advance the following propositions. First, that urbanism—compact and walkable development—will arise naturally if the built-in bias of our current infrastructure investments, financial structures, zoning norms, and public policies is reformed. Second, that such urbanism, when mixed with simple conservation technologies, can have a major impact in reducing carbon emissions and energy demand. Third, that urbanism is the most cost-effective solution to climate change, more so than most renewable technologies. And finally, that urbanism’s many collateral benefits—economic, social, and environmental—enhance its desirability and economics. In short, urbanism is the foundation for a low-carbon future and is our least-cost option.

4 : Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change

This book specifically focuses on the United States’ unique opportunities and challenges regarding climate change. Since 1850, the United States has contributed close to 30 percent of the globe’s cumulative carbon emissions—more than any other country and more than the entire European Union.2 We represent a disproportionate share of the problem and therefore have a special obligation for leadership and change. Moreover, a U.S. solution would demonstrate a low-carbon future married to middle-class prosperity, a model of a sustainable future that affords both economic development and environmental frugality.

Too often we see this challenge only in technical terms, within the domain of industrial efficiencies, new power generation sources, or green technologies. Instead, I will attempt to paint a picture of a future that sees climate change and energy through the lens of lifestyles, land use, urbanism, and, most significantly, design of the metropolitan region.

But it is not just the threat of climate change or the depletion of energy resources that will dramatically redirect our patterns of settlement. The lines of pressure are converging from many directions: limits of environmentally rich land and clean water are being felt throughout the country; shifts in family size and workforce are changing our social structure; issues of environmental and personal health are mounting; costs of capital and time are reordering investments; and, not least, a new search for identity, community, and a sense of place is motivating many peoples’ lives. It is my thesis that a future that responds to all of these pressures will also best address the climate change crisis.

In fact, these wide-ranging environmental, social, and economic challenges should not, and realistically cannot, be resolved individually. I have always been suspicious of single-issue causes—no matter how worthy—mostly because they are often blind to both unintended consequences and important collateral benefits. Urbanism’s effects reverberate well beyond carbon emissions, and that is exactly why it can become such a powerful solution to the climate change challenge: it is propelled by many other needs. The economics of urbanism reach from simple infrastructure and energy savings to public health, affordable housing, and land conservation. In addition, it involves more qualitative outcomes that relate to social capital, economic equity, and quality of life. Perhaps the most important contribution of this book will be to quantify many of the co-benefits that complement the carbon reductions of a more sustainable urban form.

This book looks back fifty years to identify the scale and type of change we have experienced and then looks forward fifty years to a range of scenarios that bracket our urban and environmental futures. It lays out a wide range of metrics for these alternative futures, moving beyond greenhouse gas emissions to their economic, social, and environmental consequences. Out of this comparison emerges a vision for our urban future that generates a new design philosophy and a new development

Introduction : 5

paradigm. Finally, this book reports on efforts in California to limit greenhouse gas emissions systemically through land use policy, industrial standards, and technological innovation—a project called Vision California.

The great recession of 2008, and its underlying real estate meltdown, was more than just a crisis of credit structures and banking policies. It was a manifestation of a deeper reality: that many of our communities and lifestyles are unsustainable— too auto dependent, too land intensive, too isolated, and, in the end, too expensive to own and operate. Our development patterns became as toxic as the financial structures that underwrote them. In plain fact, our land use patterns were, and still remain, precariously out of sync with our most profound economic, social, and environmental needs.

6 : Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change

Sales Information Sheet Mortgaging the Earth The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development Bruce Rich Paperback

ISBN 9781610915175

Price $19.99

Discount IPS

Pub Month Sept 2013

Ebook

9781610915151

$19.99

IPS

Sept 2013

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 6x9 Pages: 390 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations/General POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations/General

Competing Titles The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press, 2006) ISBN: 978-0143036791 Bookscan: 3788 The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and Their Borrowers, Ngaire Woods (Cornell University Press, 2007) ISBN: 9780801474200 Bookscan: 853 Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO, Richard Peet (Zed Books, 2007) ISBN-13: 978-1848132528 Bookscan: 539 Previous Works To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from India (Beacon, 2010) ISBN: 978-0807006139 Bookscan: 225

Sales Handle An authoritative history of a critical period in international development Description The 1992 Rio Earth Summit was supposed to be a turning point for the World Bank. Environmental concerns would now play a major role in its lending—programs and projects would go beyond economic development to “sustainable development.” More than two decades later, efforts to green the bank seem pallid.

Bruce Rich argues that the Bank’s current institutional problems are extensions of flaws that had been present since its founding. His new book, Foreclosing the Future, tells the story of the Bank from the Rio Earth Summit to today. For readers who want the full history of the Bank’s environmental record, Rich’s acclaimed 1994 critique, Mortgaging the Earth, is an essential companion.

Called a “detailed and thought-provoking look at an important subject” by The New York Times, Mortgaging the Earth analyzes the twenty year period leading up the Rio Summit. Rich offers not only an important history but critical insights about economic development that are ever-more relevant today.

Selling Points • An important companion to Bruce Rich's new book, Foreclosing the Future • Critically acclaimed when first published in 1994. Called "a hard-hitting and authoritative work, useful and provocative" by The Christian Science Monitor and "a detailed and thought-provoking look at an important subject" by The New York Times Book Review • Widely used in courses in political science, public policy, international relations, and environmental studies

Preface 1. The Dwelling Place of the Angels 2. Decade of Debacles 3. Brave New World at Bretton Woods 4. The Faustian Paradox of Robert McNamara 5. Greens Lay Siege to the Crystal Palace 6. The Emperor’s New Clothes 7. The Castle of Contradictions 8. From Descartes to Chico Mendes: A Brief History of Modernity as Development 9. Who Shall Rule the World—and How? 10. What on Earth Is to Be Done?

Notes Index

Sales Information Sheet The Guide to Greening Cities Sadhu Aufochs Johnston, Julia Parzen, and Steven S. Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 9781610913768

Price $60.00

Discount IPS

Pub Month Sept 2013

Paperback

9781610913799

$30.00

IPS

Sept 2013

Ebook

9781610915045

$29.99

IPS

Sept 2013

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 7x10 Pages: 256 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy/Environmental Policy POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy/Environmental Policy POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy/Environmental Policy

Competing Titles Biophilic Cities, Beatley (10/10) ISBN: 978-1597267151 Bookscan: 582 Warehouse: 2018 Building an Emerald City, Athens (2009) ISBN: 978-1597265843 Bookscan: 269 Warehouse: 781 Resilient Cities, Newman (2009) ISBN: 978-1597264990 Bookscan: 1519 Warehouse: 5547 Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities, Condon (4/2010) ISBN: 978-1597266659 Bookscan: 663 Warehouse: 3208 Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Calthorpe ISBN: 978-1597267205 Bookscan: 1126 Warehouse: 3040 Previous Works None

Sales Handle A collection of practical tools, insights, and strategies from green city leaders across North America Description Superstorm Sandy sent a strong message that a new generation of urban development and infrastructure is desperately needed, and it must be designed with resilience in mind. As cities continue to face climate change impacts while growing in population, they find themselves at the center of resilience and green city solutions, yet political and budgetary obstacles threaten even the best-planned initiatives.

The Guide to Greening Cities is the first book written from the perspective of municipal leaders with successful, on-the-ground experience working to advance green city goals. Through personal reflections and interviews with leading municipal staff in cities from San Antonio to Minneapolis, the authors share lessons for cities to lead by example in their operations, create programs, implement high-priority initiatives, develop partnerships, measure progress, secure funding, and engage the community. Case studies and chapters highlight strategies for overcoming common challenges such as changes of leadership and fiscal austerity.

The book is augmented by a companion website, launching with the publication of the book, which offers video interviews of municipal leaders, additional case studies, and other resources.

Rich in insights, tools, and tricks of the trade, The Guide to Greening Cities helps professionals, policymakers, community leaders, and students understand which approaches have worked and why and demonstrates multidisciplinary solutions for creating healthy, just, and green communities.

Selling Points • Written by municipal leaders with years of experience planning and implementing successful green city projects • Information, advice, and tools gained through interviews with leading municipal staff from across North America • A companion website provides additional case studies, video interviews with municipal leaders, and other resources for professionals, policymakers, community leaders, and students

Table of Contents Preface

Foreword by Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia

Introduction: The New Urban Imperative Chapter 1: Working Within City Government: Lessons from Sadhu Johnston in Chicago and Vancouver Chapter 2: Leading from the Inside Out: Greening City Buildings and Operations Case in Point: Assessing Climate Risk and Resiliency in Flagstaff Case In Point: Greening City Fleets in Raleigh Chapter 3: Leading in the Community: Using City Assets, Policy, Partnerships, and Persuasion Case In Point: Returning to Green City Roots and Loving El Paso Case In Point: Sewer Overflows and Sustainable Infrastructure in Philadelphia Chapter 4: The Green City Leader Case-in-Point: Funding Sustainability through Savings in Asheville Case in Point: Permeable Pavement and the Green Alley Program in Chicago Chapter 5: Getting Down to Business: Budgeting, Financing and Green Economic Development Case in Point: Growing Green Businesses and Jobs in San Antonio Case In Point: Financing Affordable Housing Along Transit Lines in Denver Chapter 6: Driving Green Progress Using Indicators Case In Point: Sustainability Performance Management in Minneapolis Case in Point: Ensuring Sustainability Remains a Priority in New York City Conclusion: From Green to Resilient Cities Endnotes

Introduction: The New Urban Imperative Sitting in the back seat of a rickshaw at a complete standstill, eyes burning and ears pounding from the honking of gridlocked traffic in Mumbai or another of the world’s megacities, is an experience that certainly begs the question “Can cities be green?” How can you not worry about the future of humanity as people continue to crowd into cities with open sewers, burning garbage piles and sprawling slums? Yet amid this amazing chaos of urbanization and rapid growth there is an astonishing movement to turn cities into meccas for green living. Signs of this new form of city life can been found in the urban farms of sprawling, emptied-out Detroit, on the green roofs of Chicago where there are bee hives and prairie grasses swaying in the breeze, and in New York City’s Times Square where a plaza filled with tables, chairs and people talking and laughing has replaced a stretch of street where cars once blasted by pedestrians packed on narrow sidewalks.

This movement is transforming how our cities are run, how residents are served, and how urban economies are growing. From New York’s separated bike lanes to Austin’s electric vehicle infrastructure, and from Cleveland’s wind industry to Vancouver’s dense and transit-oriented downtown, our cities are evolving and this is — perhaps most surprising of all — an evolution that is mostly being led from within city government. The rapid change taking place in our cities isn’t without its own challenges though, as residents and businesses try to adjust to new mandates, new programs, and new ways of building and using urban infrastructure.

The hope that our cities offer for reshaping how we live and the impact we have on the planet offers us a new urban imperative, with cities leading the way in solving the global environmental, social and economic challenges of our time. The new urban imperative is that

cities must address the global environmental crisis. Cities are where the most people are living.

Cities are where the most goods are consumed and the most waste is generated, and cities are where poverty is most concentrated. Vulnerable populations living in poverty in cities are at the greatest risk as a changing climate creates havoc in fragile areas. The good news is that cities are up for the challenge. There is a new generation of city leaders who are willing to take the risks and invest the resources to create change.

While cities in the developing world are where the majority of global population growth and future environmental impact will occur, the cities of the developed world are critical at this juncture. They currently consume the majority of the world’s resources, produce the majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and they serve as models for cities throughout the world.

The new urban imperative leaves no choice — global cities must pursue green urbanism and cities of the developed world must lead this movement and share their experiences with their peers in the developing world. There are three main reasons why.

The first reason is the sheer number of people that our cities must accommodate. The second is the growing environmental crisis and the role that cities play — they are both the problem and the solution. The third is that cities are on the front lines dealing with the impacts of a changing climate, where the world’s poorest people are affected by heat waves, storms and flooding. Our climate is changing and cities are bearing the brunt of this change. As life in rural areas becomes more difficult, people with few other options for survival are making their way into cities, whether to a ghetto in Los Angeles, skid row in Vancouver, Canada, or a favela in Sao Paulo, Brazil — urban areas are on the front lines of global economic inequity as the gap between rich and poor continues to grow.

The challenges that are front and center for today’s municipal leaders include the growth in urban populations and increased need for services, the increase in homelessness and poverty, limited financial resources, breakdowns in public education, decaying infrastructure, massive amounts of garbage, increasing crime, food shortages, the global environmental crisis — all problems that are exacerbated by a changing climate. And as national governments either deny that climate change exists or become less responsive to problems due to a lack of revenue or political gridlock, residents are increasingly turning to local government to take action.

Increasingly diverse urban populations expect more from the only level of government they can actively and meaningfully participate in — often not understanding or caring whether it is the level of government that has the funding and the mandate to address their concerns.

Around the world municipal governments are grappling with the local manifestations of global issues, and, thankfully, a new generation of elected officials are tackling these challenges head-on. From Mexico City to Copenhagen, from Philadelphia to San Jose, these local leaders are recognizing that by addressing climate, waste, food, water, air, and energy issues they can improve the lives of their residents and make their cities more competitive. Often pushed by their citizens and driven by opportunity — or crisis — politicians and municipal staff are leading a global transformation of urban life the likes of which we haven’t seen since the industrial revolution.

Municipal staff, sometimes working deep within departments and agencies, are using the tools at their disposal — from regulations such as building codes to municipal assets such as city land — to support this transformation, and they are unlocking value in neglected resources. This book is about their stories, to share how they prioritize their work, measure their progress, build support within their organizations and in their communities, and how this work is paid for. In

these pages these leaders share their tips and their failures, and make specific recommendations for anyone who wants to transform their own city.

The Century of the City The first reason for the new urban imperative listed above is the explosion of urban populations and the need to accommodate this rapid increase in urban dwellers. In 2008, the world’s urban population began outpacing the rural population. While cities in North America continued their struggle to reduce urban sprawl and outmigration, cities in the developing world continued to grow, almost exponentially. With more than 3.5 billion people now living in cities, the world’s urban areas have become global engines of economic growth, and the majority of industry, commerce, innovation and creativity is occurring within them. The world’s largest cities — those with more than 1 million people — are home to just one in five of all people living on the planet, but they account for more than 50 percent of the world’s economic output. 1 According to a 2012 report by the Brookings Institution, for example, in 47 U.S. states, metropolitan areas generate the majority of state economic output. 2 Currently the global population increases by about 80 million people each year. In 1990 just 10 percent of the world’s population lived in cities 3. By 2008, the urban population had increased to more that 50 percent and it is expected to reach 60 percent by 2030.

The rate of growth in cities is four times that of rural areas, and is expected to result in an urban population of 5 billion people by 2030 4, 1.8 billion more urban dwellers than in 2005 5. In the United States 29 percent of the land mass is covered by cities, but almost 85 percent of the population lives in cities and 93 percent of the economic output 6 is produced there.

The growth in urban populations is astonishing, and it is hard to imagine how the already taxed urban infrastructure will be able to accommodate so many more people. The growth in urban populations, however, is not expected to take place evenly around the globe. UNESCO expects that 95 percent of the increase in urban populations will occur in developing countries, especially in Africa and Asia 7 , and that by 2030, 80 percent of the world’s urban dwellers will be living in cities in the developing world 8.

How can urban areas, which are already bursting at the seams, accommodate so many more people in the century ahead when housing those who have already arrived has proven to be problematic? Feeding these new residents, processing their waste, and providing them with affordable and comfortable places in which to live will truly be a challenge in coming years.

Providing for this growth without further taxing an increasingly overburdened environment and exacerbating climate change will perhaps be the greatest challenge — and opportunity for change — of our generation.

While the greatest challenges in the future will likely be in the cities of the developing world, it is the cities of North America that are most critical at this point in time. There are four main reasons why: 1) Residents of North American cities consume vastly more resources per capita than people who live in cities in the developing world, and they produce more waste and greenhouse gas emissions — which means that any improvements will be significant. 2) Cities around the world emulate North American cities, so these cities need to get it right. 3) The professionals who are working to address these challenges in North America are spending increasingly more time also working in the cities of the developing world, and they are bringing with them the lessons they have learned. 4) North American cities have more resources than most cities in the developing world, so they must do their part to solve these problems, and then

share the lessons learned with cities around the world through networks like C40, a climate leadership group of the world’s megacities.

Cities and the Global Environmental Crisis The second reason for the new urban imperative is the growing environmental crisis, which has been exacerbated by the fact that most national governments, particularly in the United States, have been loath to take action to address climate change during global economic challenges, placing the spotlight on municipalities and the role they must play. Fortunately, municipalities around the world — the “lowest” level of government — and their mayors, councils and departmental staff are stepping up to address challenges that many national governments are unable or unwilling to address.

While cities cover just a small percentage of the earth’s surface, their environmental impact is quite significant. The world’s cities account for more than 78 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions, 60 percent of residential water use, and 76 percent of industrial wood use 9. Recent analysis shows that because urban dwellers collectively consume the most resources they have a bigger ecological footprint than rural dwellers, who are generally less affluent 10. But even though cities currently use most of the world’s resources and produce most of the world’s waste and carbon emissions, they can also provide the most environmentally friendly living opportunities in the world. Their compactness, transportation options and living standards can enable low-carbon-intensity lifestyles.

It is because cities play such a significant role in the global environmental crisis that they can also play such a large role in addressing these challenges, though for the most part they have yet to live up to their potential in this regard. For example, in cities people often live in smaller

spaces, which require less energy to heat and cool. City dwellers can walk, bike, or take transit, and the distances they need to travel are often shorter than if they live in suburban or rural communities. Harvard University economics professor Ed Glaeser, writing in The New York Times about his analysis of the carbon emissions of new homes in different parts of the country, concluded that: “In almost every metropolitan area, we found the central city residents emitted less carbon than the suburban counterparts. In New York and San Francisco, the average urban family emits more than two tons less carbon annually because it drives less. In Nashville, the city-suburb carbon gap due to driving is more than three tons. After all, density is the defining characteristic of cities. All that closeness means that people need to travel shorter distances, and that shows up clearly in the data.” 11 If living in cities enables people to reduce their ecological footprint, especially when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it’s safe to say that cities are one of our most promising tools for combating the global environmental crisis. “Urbanism is the foundation for a low-carbon future and it is our least-cost option,” writes renowned urban designer Peter Calthorpe. 12 The national nonprofit Center for Neighborhood Technology has mapped the Chicago region’s greenhouse gas emissions to show that per capita GHG emissions are lowest in more densely developed areas. They found that GHG emissions in Chicago are significantly higher than suburban or rural areas outside of the city, however, on a per capita basis, people who live in denser urban environments produce fewer emissions from vehicle travel than those who live in less dense suburban neighborhoods surrounding the urban core.

[Figure Intro-1]

There is a growing recognition that urban living in developed nations is the greener option, but it’s less well-known that cities are leading this charge and delivering results in ways that national governments haven’t been able to. As of September 2011, 191 countries had signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, but few were able to reduce their 1990 levels of carbon emissions by 6 percent by 2012 as called for by the Kyoto Protocol. Even fewer have been able to achieve reductions while continuing to grow their economies.

Cities, on the other hand, are demonstrating that carbon can be lowered while economies, jobs and populations continue to grow. In North America, more than 1,200 cities have agreed to achieve carbon reductions equivalent to the reductions called for in the Kyoto Protocol. While most won’t succeed, many have begun the work necessary to reduce carbon over the long term.

Exemplars include Portland, Oregon, where emissions per person are already 10 percent below 1990 levels 13, and Vancouver, British Columbia, where emissions have fallen below 1990 levels even though the city’s population has increased by 26 percent and the number of jobs has increased 18 percent since 1990.

While most cities get very little financial support from higher levels of government — generally less then 10 cents per $1 of taxes raised — municipal governments have other tools that can be used to address these challenges, including building and zoning codes, transportation infrastructure, water delivery systems, sewer water treatment systems, waste systems, and the form of the built environment. These are all tools that can be used to help avert climate change and the global environmental crisis and at the same time result in communities that are more livable, competitive and resilient, while also helping to create jobs.

Whether green jobs are created or not, there is no doubt that billions will be spent in the upcoming decades to protect urban areas from changes in climate. It is imperative that these investments further municipal efforts to improve their environmental impacts, including reducing GHGs and energy consumption and creating natural and green spaces. By utilizing many of the strategies outlined in this book, such as green infrastructure in Philadelphia or green alleys in Chicago to manage storm events cities can be more resilient and greener.

1

Richard Florida, The Atlantic Cities, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-andeconomy/2012/04/which-us-cities-tend-be-greenest/860/ 2 Alan Berube and Carey Anne Nadeau, “Metropolitan Areas and the Next Economy: A 50-State Analysis�, Brookings Institution, February 2011 3

http://www.downtoearth.org.in/node/4295 http://www.wri.org/publication/content/8479 5 UNESCO, http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/SC/pdf/WWDR3_Facts_and_Figures .pdf 6 Richard Florida, The Atlantic Cities, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-andeconomy/2012/04/which-us-cities-tend-be-greenest/860/ 7 UNESCO, http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/SC/pdf/WWDR3_Facts_and_Figures .pdf 8 http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/water/wwap/facts-and-figures/allfacts-wwdr3/fact-30-urban-expansion/ 4

9

http://www.downtoearth.org.in/node/4295 http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/the-lorax-was-wrong-skyscrapers-are-green/.

All that closeness means that people need to travel shorter distances, and that shows up clearly in the data.

10

11 12 13

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/the-lorax-was-wrong-skyscrapers-are-green/ Calthorpe, 2011, page XXX

Rex Byrkholder, Metro Councillor, District 5, Portland Metropolitan Region, speech at Cities and Climate Change, Bogota Summit, November 20th, 2012

Sales Information Sheet How to Study Public Life

Trim Size: 8.5x10 Pages: 168 Copyright: 2013

Methods in Urban Design Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre Hardcover

ISBN 9781610914239

Price $35.00

Fall 2013

Discount IPS

Pub Month Oct 2013

Bookstore Categories ARCHITECTURE / Urban & Land Use Planning

Competing Titles Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Whyte, 1980, re-released in 2000 ISBN: 9780970632418 Bookscan: N/A, Project for Public Spaces. ISBN: 978-0970632418 Bookscan: N/A Previous Works Jan Gehl is the author of Cities for People ISBN: 978-1597265737 Bookscan: 1720 Warehouse: 11,175, Life Between Buildings ISBN: 978-1597268271 Bookscan: 483 Warehouse: 2865, New City Spaces ISBN: 978-8774072935 Bookscan: 63, and Public Spaces, Public Life ISBN: 978-8774073055 Bookscan: N/A. This is Brigitte Svarre's first book.

Sales Handle A history and guide to understanding the interaction between city life and city space Description How do we accommodate a growing urban population in a way that is sustainable, equitable, and inviting?

This question is becoming increasingly urgent to answer as we face diminishing fossil-fuel resources and the effects of a changing climate while global cities continue to compete to be the most vibrant centers of culture, knowledge, and finance.

Jan Gehl has been examining this question since the 1960s, when few urban designers or planners were thinking about designing cities for people. But given the unpredictable, complex and ephemeral nature of life in cities, how can we best design public infrastructure—vital to cities for getting for place to place, or staying in place—for human use? Studying city life and understanding the factors that encourage or discourage use is the key to designing inviting public space.

In How to Study Public Life Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre draw from their combined experience of over 50 years to provide a history of public-life study as well as methods and tools necessary to recapture city life as an important planning dimension.

This type of systematic study began in earnest in the 1960s, when several researchers and journalists on different continents criticized urban planning for having forgotten life in the city. City life studies provide knowledge about human behavior in the built environment in an attempt to put it on an equal footing with knowledge about urban elements such as buildings and transport systems. Studies can be used as input in the decision-making process, as part of overall planning, or in designing individual projects such as streets, squares or parks. The original goal is still the goal today: to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. Anyone interested in improving city life will find inspiration, tools, and examples in this invaluable guide.

Selling Points • A look at the methodology behind designing successful public spaces for people.

• An overview and history of public life studies • Beautifully designed, four-color interior to show the methods as well as the successful end product.

Preface Chapter 1: Public Space, Public Life: An Interaction Chapter 2: Who, What, Where?

Chapter 3: Plotting, Counting, Following and Other Tools Chapter 4: A Historical Perspective Chapter 5: How They Did It: Research Notes Chapter 6: Public Space, Public Life Studies in Practice Chapter 7: Public Life Studies and Policies References

Preface City life studies are straightforward. The basic idea is to walk around in city space while taking a good look. Observation is the key, and it can be done simply and cheaply. Tweaking observations into a system provides interesting information about the interaction of city life and city space.

This book is about how to study the interaction between city life and city space. This type of systematic study began in earnest in the 1960s, when several researchers and journalists on different continents criticized the urban planning of the time for having forgotten life in the city.

Transport engineers concentrated on traffic, landscape architects dealt with parks and green areas, architects designed buildings, and urban planners looked at the big picture. Design and structure got serious attention, but city life and the interaction between life and space was neglected. Was that because it wasn’t needed? Did people really just want housing and cities that worked like machines? Criticism that newly built residential areas lacked vitality did not come only from professionals. The public at large strongly criticized modern, newly built residential areas that failed to provide light, air and comfort.

The academic field encompassing city life studies, which is described in this book, tries to provide knowledge about human behavior in the built environment on an equal footing with knowledge about buildings and transport systems, for example. The original goal is still the goal today: to recapture city life as an important planning dimension.

Although the concept of city life may seem banal compared to complex transport systems, reinvigorating it is no simple task. This is true in cities where life has been threatened almost into nonexistence, as well as in cities that have an abundance of pedestrian life, but a depressed economy that prevents establishing the basic conditions for a decent walking and bicycle culture.

It takes political will and leadership to tackle the city life issue. City life studies can serve as an important tool for improving urban spaces by qualifying the goal of having more people-friendly cities. Studies can be used as input in the decision-making process, as part of overall planning, or in designing individual projects such as streets, squares or parks.

Life is unpredictable, complex and ephemeral, so how on earth can anyone plan how life will play out in cities? Well, of course, it is not possible to pre-program the interaction between city life and space in detail, but city life studies can provide a basic understanding of what works and what doesn’t and thus suggest qualified solutions.

The book is anchored in Jan Gehl’s work for almost 50 years with the interplay between city life and space. He honed his interest in the subject as a researcher and teacher at the School of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and in practice at Gehl Architects, where he is a founding partner. Thus many of the examples in the book come from Jan Gehl’s work. The book’s second author, Birgitte Svarre, received her research education at the Center for City Space Research at the School of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. The center was established in 2003 under Jan Gehl’s leadership. Birgitte Svarre has a master’s degree in modern culture and cultural communication and thus carries on the interdisciplinary tradition that is characteristic for the field of city life studies.

Our goal with this book is twofold: we want to inspire people generally to take city life seriously in all planning and building phases, and we want to provide tools and inspiration from specific examples of how city life can be studied simply and cheaply and understand how the information can be used to improve city life.

Our hope is that the book will inspire readers to go into the city and study the interaction between city space and city life in order to acquire more knowledge and qualify work with living conditions in cities. The focus of the book is not results but tools. In this context, these tools – or methods if you prefer – should not be seen as anything other than different ways of studying the interaction between city life and city space. They are offered as inspiration as well as challenge to develop them further, always adjusted to local conditions.

The first chapter gives a general introduction to city life studies. Chapter two presents a number of basic questions in the field of city life studies. Chapter three provides an overview of tools with eight ways to study the interaction of public space and public life. Chapter four summarizes the social history and academic background for city life studies. Key people and ongoing themes tie the field of city life studies together. Chapter five contains several reports from research frontlines with various views of city life studies. Early studies are emphasized, because the methods were developed in order to describe the considerations about their use and further development. Chapter six reviews examples from practice, the so-called ‘public space public life studies’ developed by Jan Gehl and later Gehl Architects and used systematically since the end of the 1960s in many different cities: large, medium, small, located north, south, east and west.

Therefore, today there is a large body of material from which to draw conclusions. Chapter seven recounts the history of the use of city life studies in Copenhagen as a political tool. In conclusion, city life studies are put into an historic, social and academic perspective – in relation to research as well as practice.

Sales Information Sheet Urban Street Design Guide National Association of City Transportation Officials

Hardcover

ISBN 9781610914949

Price $50.00

Discount IPS

Pub Month Oct 2013

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 8.25x10.75 Pages: 250 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories ARCHITECTURE / Urban & Land Use Planning

Competing Titles World Class Streets and NYC Street Design Manual (free from NYC DOT), Smart Growth Manual by Speck, Duany, and Lydon (Wiley) ISBN: 978-0071376754 Bookscan: 6434 Previous Works Urban Bikeway Design Guide by NACTO ISBN: 978-1610914369 Bookscan: 71 Warehouse: 597

Sales Handle A blueprint for sustainable urban street design Description The NACTO Urban Street Design Guide shows how streets of every size can be reimagined and reoriented to prioritize safe driving and transit, biking, walking, and public activity. Unlike older, more conservative engineering manuals, this design guide emphasizes the core principle that urban streets are public places and have a larger role to play in communities than solely being conduits for traffic.

The well-illustrated guide offers blueprints of street design from multiple perspectives, from the bird’s eye view to granular details. Case studies from around the country clearly show how to implement best practices, as well as provide guidance for customizing design applications to a city’s unique needs. Urban Street Design Guide outlines five goals and tenets of world-class street design: -Streets are public spaces. Streets play a much larger role in the public life of cities and communities than just thoroughfares for traffic.

-Great streets are great for business. Well-designed streets generate higher revenues for businesses and higher values for homeowners.

-Design for safety. Traffic engineers can and should design streets where people walking, parking, shopping, bicycling, working, and driving can cross paths safely.

-Streets can be changed. Transportation engineers can work flexibly within the building envelope of a street.

Many city streets were created in a different era and need to be reconfigured to meet new needs.

-Act now! Implement projects quickly using temporary materials to help inform public decision making.

Elaborating on these fundamental principles, the guide offers substantive direction for cities seeking to improve street design to create more inclusive, multi-modal urban environments. It is an exceptional resource for redesigning streets to serve the needs of 21st century cities, whose residents and visitors demand a variety of transportation options, safer streets, and vibrant community life.

Selling Points • A well-illustrated, practical guide to rethinking the design of urban streets • Draws upon the extensive expertise of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) which has been instrumental in synthesizing best new practices of street design from around the country • Gives city officials, transportation engineers, and others working on street design plans the tools they need to implement successful, innovative projects

Sales Information Sheet National Association of City Transportation Officials • Member Cities o Atlanta o Baltimore o Boston o Chicago o Detroit o Houston o Los Angeles o Minneapolis o New York o Philadelphia o Phoenix o Portland o San Francisco o Seattle o Washington, DC • Affiliate Members o Arlington, VA o Austin o Cambridge o Hoboken o Indianapolis o Memphis o Oakland o Ventura, CA

Fall 2013

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

Introduction a. How to Use the Guide b. Key Principles Streets a. Classification, Context, and Geometry b. Neighborhood Commercial Corridor c. Downtown One-way Street d. Downtown Commercial Corridors (One-way, Two-way) e. Residential Avenue f. Neighborhood Street g. Residential Street h. Boulevard i. Transit Corridor j. Transit Streets k. Shared Streets i. Residential Shared Street ii. Commercial Shared Street l. Alleys i. Green Alley ii. Commercial Alley Design Control Factors a. Design Speed b. Design Vehicle c. Design Hour d. Design Year e. Level of Service/Performance Measures Critical Street Design Issues a. Sidewalks i. Roadside Design/Clear Zones & Lateral Offset b. Stormwater Management/Low Impact Design i. Bioswales ii. Rain Gardens iii. Permeable Pavements c. Lane Widths d. Curb Extensions e. Speed Tables, Humps, and Cushions Interim Street Improvements a. Moving the Curb b. Parklets c. Temporary Pedestrian StreetsInterim Public Plazas Intersection Design Principles a. Intersection Design Principles

VII.

b. Major Intersections c. Intersections of Major and Minor Streets d. Minor Intersections e. Complex Intersections Critical Intersection Design Issues a. Curb Radii b. Visibility/Sight Distance c. Crosswalks & Crossings d. Traffic Signals and Operations i. Fixed Time Signals ii. Leading Pedestrian Intervals iii. Signal Cycle Lengths iv. Coordinated Signal Timing

Street Types

XX Classification, Context, and Geometry XX Neighborhood Commercial Corridor XX Downtown One-way Street XX Downtown Commercial Corridor (One-way) XX Downtown Commercial Corridor (Two-way)

XX Residential Street XX

Boulevard

XX

Transit Streets

XX

Residential Shared Street

XX

Commercial Shared Street

XX

Green Alley

XX

Commercial Alley

XX Residential Avenue XX

Neighborhood Street

1

N E I G H B O R H O O D CO M M E R CI A L CO R R I D O R

STREET T YPES

Neighborhood Commercial Corridor

Before A frequent configuration with four vehicle lanes and low to medium vehicle volumes

[4 -TO -3 ROAD DIET]

A 4-to-3 lane conversion, or road diet, can improve traffic flow and reduce conflicts with turning vehicles. The 4-lane configuration has been shown to increase rear-end and side swipe vehicle crashes and poses a higher pedestrian crash risk.V Streets designed with either two lanes or a two-way left turn lane can cut crash risk by nearly half.

Road diets increase a road’s efficiency by channeling turning vehicles out of the through lanes.vi Streets carrying up to 25,000 vehicles per day function effectively with three lanes, depending on the traffic volumes of nearby adjacent streets.vii Implementation of a road diet should consider the availability of parallel routes, the potential for mode shift, and the channelization of traffic using additional signals.viii

7

4 3

2

The red line in the 4-lane configurations shows the weaving pattern of a driver avoiding double parked vehicles and vehicles turning left and right

In a 3-lane configuration the weaving and conflicts are eliminated.

6 5 10'

1 Bicycle parking is critical to enabling cycling throughout the corridor. Bicycle corrals may be provided in the parking lane as an alternative. Accommodating shoppers arriving by bicycle has a positive economic impact on the street.iii 4

Neighborhood Commercial Corridors, or Main Streets, are a nexus of neighborhood life, with high pedestrian volumes, frequent parking turnover, key transit routes and bicyclists often vying for limited space. Main Street design should limit traffic speeds and create a narrower profile with frequent, high-quality pedestrian crossings.

In recent years, many main streets have been significantly improved through road diets, the conversion of 4 to 3 (or 6 to 5) lanes of travel with bike lanes and a center turning lane or median.

PEDESTRIANS Wide sidewalks have a positive impact on retail activity and enhance pedestrian traffic in retail areas.1 1

BICYCLES Buffered bike lanes or cycle tracks provide a safe space for bicycle traffic to access local businesses.

3

Where bus shelters are not provided, awnings may supplant them as a waiting area for transit users (See transit streets). Some cities require awnings as part of their zoning code, creating an added benefit to transit users in poor weather conditions.ii 2

Bike Boxes increase cyclist visibility and safety by allowing them to queue ahead of drivers. Bike Boxes also allow cyclists to make right or left turns easier and safer.

5

Lane width should not exceed 10 ft. One lane per direction may be 11 ft wide along bus and truck routes.

6

Road Diets rank favorably with business owners and have been demonstrated a positive or neutral impact on local business activity.IV 7

Implementation may be carried out in two phases, the first consisting solely of striping and a center turn lane and the second, adding medians and plantings to the center lane.

VEHICLES TRANSIT Vehicle Design Speeds in neighborhood commercial corridors should not exceed 25 mph.Medians and bikeways give drivers visual cues that they should slow down and expect to see pedestrians, children and bicyclists.

NEW YORK, NY

Double-parking has the potential to severely impede bus operations on narrow neighborhood corridors.

Parking management, loading zones and camera enforcement can reduce double parking.

Where streetcars service neighborhood commercial corridors and run through mixed traffic, designers should restrict left turns where possible to prevent encroachment onto the streetcar tracks, or place the left turn to the outside of the streetcar tracks.

FREIGHT Restricting or encouraging off-peak freight delivery is critical to eliminating double-parking obstructionss. Offpeak deliveries are faster and more cost-efficient and avoid obstruction of the bike lane or delays to buses and local traffic. At peak loading times, dedicated loading Zones should be provided to avoid the need for freight vehicles to double park.

A buffer accentuates the separation between drivers and cyclists and helps keep the bike lane clear.

2

3

D OW N T OW N O N E -WAY S T R E E T

STREET T YPES

Downtown One-way Street

8'

11'

10'

8'

3'

6'

20'

BUFFER

20'

Sidewalk

Parking

Bus

Car

Parking

Bike Lane

Sidewalk

9 2

VEHICLES Vehicle Speeds in urban environments should not exceed 30 mph.

25 mph is preferred on downtown oneway streets. Medians and protected bikeways give drivers visual cues that they should slow down and expect to see pedestrians, children and bicyclists.1 Traffic signal progression speeds along downtown one-way corridors should be equal to or lower than the street’s target speed.xi (See coordinated signal timing).

5

4

Lane width should not exceed 10 ft. One lane per direction may be 11 feet wide on designated transit and truck routes.

6

6 1 8

7

TRANSIT A bus bulb and shelter provide a dedicated waiting area for transit users and shortens the crossing distance for pedestrians.

7

3

On downtown streets with heavy bus traffic, a red bus-only lane may be applied at curbside. Bus-only lanes require significant enforcement and may be encroached upon by double parked cars and loading vehicles without proper enforcement.

(See transit streets).

8

Downtown streets in most American cities operate one-way in order to reduce conflicts and increase capacity. Many of these streets are under-utilized and have latent opportunities to serve as major corridors in a city's emerging bus or bike network.

PEDESTRIANS Wide sidewalks support retail activity and enhance pedestrian traffic in commercial areas.ix 1

Sidewalk cafes have the potential to increase revenues for local businesses and generate valuable street life and activity.x On streets with narrow sidewalks, parklets may be provided as an alternative.

Where bus shelters are not provided, awnings may supplant them as a waiting area for transit users (See transit streets). These provisions may be included in the local zoning code.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

Build sidewalks to match demand. In retail districts, wide sidewalks are needed to accommodate pedestrian traffic.

Where adequate space exists and bicycle traffic desires to go bidirectionally, a two-way cycle track should be considered as an alternative to a one -way cycle track. (See One-way Downtown Commercial Corridors).

2

Median Refuge Islands shorten crossing distances for pedestrians and create a more inviting place to walk. Median plantings and street trees also beautify the street. Depending on the application, refuge islands can also provide a horizontal roadway narrowing that may reduce traffic speeds.

Bicycle parking is critical to enabling cycling throughout the corridor. Bicycle corrals may be provided in the parking lane as an alternative.

5

ST. LOUIS , MO

A landscaped island adds texture and makes the crossing more comfortable

3

BICYCLES Parking-buffered one-way cycle tracks or raised cycle tracks create a buffer between the vehicle and pedestrian realm. On bus routes, one-way cycle tracks may be placed on the left side of a one-way street to avoid conflicts.

Generous sidewalks allow for multiple zones of activity and furnishing.

4

Mountable curbs may be used to accommodate larger vehicles such as fire engines or tractor-trailer trucks.

Mountable curbs are useful at corners, medians, and roundabouts (truck apron) to maintain a smaller profile but allow for the occasional larger vehicle.

Restricting or encouraging off-peak freight delivery is critical to eliminating double-parking obstructionss. Off-peak deliveries are faster and more cost-efficient and avoid obstruction of the bike lane or delays to buses and local traffic.

At peak loading times, dedicated loading Zones should be provided to avoid the need for freight vehicles to double park.

9

4

PORTL AND, OR WA SHINGTON D C

FREIGHT

5

D OW N T OW N CO M M E R CI A L CO R R I D O R : T WO -WAY

STREET T YPES

6' 3'

8'

11'

10'

8'

10'

11'

8'

Parking

Bus Only

Car

Median

Car

Bus Only

Parking

BUFFER

15'

Sidewalk

Downtown Commercial Corridors are a city’s busiest streets, with high volumes of all modes and land uses that attract people at all hours.

Narrow the overall cross-section of a downtown corridor using cycle tracks and dedicated bus lanes to promote a robust commercial, office, and retail environment and to streamline potentially dangerous conflicts between modes.

Bike Lane

3' 6'

15'

BUFFER

Downtown Commercial Corridor: Two-Way

Bike Lane

Sidewalk

3

6

8

5

7 PEDESTRIANS

4

Broad sidewalks have a positive impact on retail activity and enhance pedestrian traffic in commercial areas.i 1

2

1

Parking-buffered two-way cycle tracks or raised two-way cycle tracks create an effective division between the vehicle and pedestrian realm.

9

BICYCLES Parking-buffered one-way cycle tracks or raised cycle tracks create a safe place to bicycle and further remove vehicles from the pedestrian realm.

6

ATL ANTA , GA

Sidewalks near major destinations, such as universities, require wide sidewalks to handle high volumes of pedestrians.

Median refuge islands shorten crossing distances for pedestrians and create a more inviting place for walking, shopping, and business.

Native plantings in the median reduce impervious surface areas and manage stormwater run-off.

2

BRO OKLYN, NY

CAMBRID GE , MA

This skinny median is an uncomfortable place to wait.

Add benches to the furnishing zone.

Sidewalk cafes have the potential to increase revenues for local businesses and generate valuable street life and activity.ii 4

BRO OKLYN, NY

Striping and left turn pocket closures provide a better median refuge area.

TIBURON, CA

Landscaped medians calm steets and add greenery.

1

Provide periodic seating to ensure a high-quality active and passive pedestrian environment, especially for seniors and people with disabilities.

Where sidewalks are narrow or insufficient space exists for a sidewalk café, a parklet may be installed.

3

Where bus shelters are not 5 provided, awnings may supplant them as a waiting area for transit users (See transit streets). Some cities require awnings as part of their zoning code, creating an added benefit to transit users in poor weather conditions.iii

The cycle track intersection crossing may be raised to reinforce yielding to bicyclists crossing the intersection.

Mitigate turning conflicts and reduce overall delay using a “mixing zone” where right-turning traffic and bicyclists share space at the intersection. Where a cycle track is signalized, a bicycle signal should be provided at both the near and far side of the intersection.

7

LONG BE ACH, CA

Separate bicycle signals may be used at large intersections.

Bicycle parking is critical to enabling bicycling throughout the corridor. Bicycle corrals may be provided in the parking lane.

8

WA SHINGTON D.C.

15th Street at U Street before

KE Y WEST, FL

WA SHINGTON D.C.

Make the parking lane for both vehicles and bicycles.

Street after installation of a two-way cycle track.

2

D OW N T OW N CO M M E R CI A L CO R R I D O R : O N E -WAY

Downtown Commercial Corridor: One-Way

STREET T YPES

In the mid-twentieth century, many two-way Downtown Streets were converted to one-way operation to streamline traffic operations, reduce conflicts, and create direct access points to newly built urban freeways. Today, many of these streets operate significantly below capacity and create swaths of empty 12'

5'

8'

11'

10'

Two-way cycle tracks require special attention at intersection crossings.

Conflicts should be high-lighted using intersection crossing markings, with the application of color optional.

Bicycle Signals may need to be applied for contra-flow bicycle traffic to operate safely along the corridor.

Reduce turning conflicts by restricting right turns.

20'

Sidewalk

Two-Way Cycle Track

Parking

Bus Only

Car

Sidewalk

WA SHINGTON D.C.

Signage highlights turning conflicts at intersections.

3

14

VEHICLES Vehicle Speeds in urban environments should not exceed 30 mph. Use design to calm speeds.

Median islands and cycle tracks discourage speeding by offering visual cues to drivers that they are in an environment with children, pedestrians, and cyclists.iv 10

Curb lane widths along downtown commercial corridors should not exceed 10 feet. One lane per direction may be 11 feet wide on designated bus and truck routes. On streets where the available right-ofway may be larger than a proposed design, keep vehicle lanes narrow and expand other elements of the street such as striping buffers, bus bulbs, or medians to fit the space available.

11

BUFFER

20'

pavement in downtown areas. While many cities are converting these streets back to two-way operation, these broad rights-of-way can be narrowed using cycle tracks and transit lanes which require less cost and analysis, and optimize usage of the street as public space.

13

10 10'

12 11

Source: Susan McLaughlin, City of Seattle

13

The bus lane may be emphasized using red paint.

FREIGHT Mountable curbs may be used to accommodate larger vehicles such as fire engines or tractor-trailer trucks.

Mountable curbs are useful at corners, medians, and roundabouts to maintain a smaller profile but allow for the occasional larger vehicle.

NUGENTS CORNER, WA

Angled parking on retail corridors takes up more space but provides more customer parking

Mountable truck aprons allow larger vehicles to navigate a roundabout.

A side median refuge island and bus bulb serves as a dedicated waiting area for transit users, while shortening the crossing distance for pedestrians. This may be applied in tandem with a bus-only lane (See transit streets). Bus bulbs should be located at the far side of the intersection to encourage a safer crossing for pedestrians behind the bus. (See Crosswalks.)

12

9

Bus bulbs to the inside of bicycle lanes reduce bus-bicycle conflicts.

L AWRENCE , KS

TRANSIT

8

SE AT TLE , WA

Source: WSDOT

Restricting or encouraging off-peak freight delivery is critical to eliminating double-parking obstructionss. Off-peak deliveries are faster and more cost-efficient and avoid obstruction of the bike lane or delays to buses and local traffic.

At peak loading times, dedicated loading Zones should be provided to avoid the need for freight vehicles to double park.v 14

11

3

4

R E S I D E N T I A L B O U L E VA R D

STREET T YPES

Residential Boulevard Historic streets with broad, planted medians, especially those that are primarily residential in nature, should be designed to reflect and enhance their surrounding context.

Keep travel lanes narrow and add bikeways that take advantage of the right of way in the central median.

5

PEDESTRIANS Along ribbon sidewalks, install stormwater management features such as rain gardens and bioswales to reduce impervious surfaces and enhance the pedestrian realm.

1

3 2

16'

8'

7'

10'

8'

30'

8'

10'

7'

8'

4

16'

6 ST. LOUIS, MO

Stormwater can also be retained by creating a landscaped median.

Setback Sidewalk Parking

Car

Raised Bike Lane

Activate the central median with plantings, street trees, a central walkway, and seating. Broad residential medians can become a community focal point as well as an active space for recreation, exercise, and leisure.

Median Island

Raised Bike Lane

Car

1 10'

Sidewalk Setback Parking

2

BICYCLES

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

At Octavia Boulevard’s northern end, the median becomes well-used Patricia’s Green Park.

BOSTON, MA

Commonwealth Avenue is a classic boulevard with a linear park in its median.

Consider the installation a raised cycle track along the central median.i The raised cycle track takes advantage of the center right of way, avoids frequent conflicts with driveways and effectively expands the amount of recreational space along the corridor.

4

Give bicyclists a protected signal phase by using a bicycle signal to prevent turning conflicts in the central median and restrict vehicular left turns.

At minor crossings, use a bike box to facilitate right turns for cyclists.

VEHICLES Design Speeds in residential districts should not exceed 25 mph. Street trees along the sidewalk and central median encourage slow speeds and enhance the residential context of the neighborhood.ii

OAKL AND, CA

Old-growth trees provide shade and help calm traffic.

The bus bulb takes the place of parking along the far side of the intersection.

Lane widths on Residential Boulevards should not exceed 10 ft. Additional right of way should be allocated to the raised cycle track along the central median.

Where Residential Boulevards serve transit routes, lane widths of 11 ft. are appropriate.iii

5

Mitigate driveway conflicts and 3 increase visibility by maintaining the sidewalk through the conflict area and creating a tight curb radius for turning vehicles.

6

FREIGHT NEW YORK, NY

TRANSIT

A raised cycle track takes advantage of the central median and insulates cyclists from double parking.

QUEENS , NY

This boulevard's design reinforces the street's quiet, residential nature.

1

NEW ORLE ANS , L A

Provide bus bulbs at the near or far side of signalized intersections to ease operations and improve travel times.

Freight vehicles will occasionally need to use Residential Boulevards; accommodate the DL-23 design vehicle.

2

NEIGHBORHOOD STREET

Neighborhood Street Neighborhood streets, especially those with residential or mixed uses, are often under-utilized as spaces for leisure and play. With low-traffic volumes, these streets can combine green infrastructure and traffic calming features to ensure a high quality, safe public realm. Streets with mixed uses are commonly found in parts of cities that were built before 1930. On these streets, local businesses benefit significantly from the installation of traffic calming measures that slow thru traffic, enhancing their commercial potential as well as improving safety for everyone using the street.

PEDESTRIANS Curb extensions may be used at intersections and at midblock locations to slow drivers as they enter a neighborhood or residential environment.

STREET T YPES

15'

8'

10'

6'

8'

15'

Sidewalk

Parking

Car

Bike Lane

Parking

Sidewalk

BICYCLES Depending on the available right of way, left-side bike lanes are an effective treatment for most neighborhod streets. Where a street is constrained, designers should consider using traffic calming devices, reinforced by shared lane markings.

5

6

8

BRO OKLYN, NY

5

Mark the bike lane along the left side of the street to reduce dooring conflicts.

A neighborhood street may serve as a part of a city’s bicycle boulevard network.

7

1

4

1

3

2

A bioswale may be used in conjunction with a curb extension to improve stormwater management and beautify the street.i 2

Marked crosswalks reinforce yielding behavior at signalized intersections.

3

Raised crossings maintain low traffic speeds and reinforce the residential nature of the street.ii 4

SPOK ANE , WA

Bike boulevards prioritize bicycle travel.

On-street bicycle parking is crucial in residential areas with limited off-street bicycle storage.

6

The dimensions and usage of residential streets vary from city to city, which can result in very wide effective lane widths. Crash rates have been shown to increase as lane width increase.iv

Add traffic calming enhancements such as curb extensions, raised crosswalks, speed bumps, and chicanes to enhance the residential character of the neighborhood.

7

Time of day parking restrictions apply in most cities in order for street cleaning vehicles to access parking areas.

VEHICLES Vehicle Speed should be limited to 25 mph. In certain cases, an advisory speed limit of 15 or 20 mph may be used.iii 11' effective lane width.

NEW HAVEN, C T

Raised crossings help keep speeds low.

The parking lane may be constructed to a lower pavement standard and visually differentiated to create a narrower visual field for drivers.

8

On one-way streets, travel lanes may be especially on one-way streets, may be striped to narrow the driver’s visual field. An undifferentiated traveled way encourages higher speeds.iv

CAMBRID GE , MA

Where residential streets serve as an emergency vehicle route, speed cushions should be used in lieu of speed bumps.

TRANSIT Local buses may be accommodated at bus bulbs at the far-side of the intersection.

FREIGHT Freight traffic should be limited to local deliveries.

Design residential streets to accommodate the DL-23 design vehicle.

This raised crossing acts as a speed table.

48' effective lane width.

1

2

RESIDENTIAL STREET

Residential Street

STREET T YPES

Residential streets should provide safe and inviting places to walk and good access to local stores and schools. Design to mitigate the effects of driveway conflicts, reduce thru traffic, and maintain slow speeds conducive to traffic safety.

15'

8'

10'

6'

8'

15'

Sidewalk

Parking

Car

Bike Lane

Parking

Sidewalk

PEDESTRIANS Curb extensions may be used at intersections and mid-block to slow turning vehicles entering the neighborhood.

1

7 PORTL AND, OR

Ribbon sidewalks enhance the greenery of residential streets

4

BELLINGHAM, WA

Curb extensions increase visibility where on-street parking is present.

A bioswale may be used in conjunction with a curb extension or midblock crossing to improve stormwater management and beautify the street.

2

6

5

2

SEAT TLE , WA

1

The furnishing zones provides an opportunity for rain gardens Source: Susan McLaughlin, City of Seattle

3

At certain low-volume, uncontrolled crossings, it may be unnecessary to mark crossings. Where stop or yield control is in place, crosswalks should be marked.

Raised crossings maintain low traffic speeds and reinforce the residential character of the street.

PORTL AND, OR

Planted curb extensions slow traffic and clean stormwater.

Use pedestrian-scale lighting to ensure a safe and secure street environment.v 5

Marked crosswalks reinforce yielding behavior at signalized or stop-controlled intersections.

BICYCLES

Ribbon sidewalks open up opportunities for trees, plantings, and stormwater management treatments, such as rain gardens on the strip between the sidewalk and the curb.

Shared lane markings, augmented by traffic calming, are an appropriate treatment for many residential streets with driveways. Some residential streets may also serve as a part of a city’s bicycle boulevard network.

VEHICLES Design Speeds should be limited to 25 mph. In certain cases, an advisory speed limit of 15 or 20 mph may be used.

3

4

On one-way streets, travel lanes, especially on one-way streets, may be striped to narrow the driver’s visual field. An undifferentiated traveled way encourages higher speeds.vi

Where residential streets serve as an emergency vehicle route, speed cushions should be used in lieu of speed humps.

6

TRANSIT Driveways should be constructed 7 to minimize intrusion upon the sidewalk. Use sidewalk material across the driveway and keep the sidewalk level.vii

NEW YORK, NY

NYC DOT’s slow zone program lowers speed limits upon neighborhood request.

Local buses may be accommodated at bus bulbs at the far-side of the intersection.

FREIGHT

Add traffic calming enhancements such as curb extensions, raised crosswalks, speed bumps, and chicanes to enhance the residential character of the neighborhood.

Trucks should be limited to local deliveries.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

A chicane was added to slow speeds entering this residential block.

3

Design residential streets to accommodate the DL-23 design vehicle.

4

B O U L E VA R D

Boulevard Boulevards separate very large streets into parallel urban realms, buffering the commercial or residential street edge from the high traffic throughway by means of multi-way operations and frontage roads.

STREET T YPES

The tree canopy suspended in the median and/or frontage road reinforces a low speed traffic environment and enhances the pedestrian experience.i

20'

2

Sidewalk

PEDESTRIANS

10'

14'

Frontage Median Road

11'

10'

10'

10'

11'

Car

Car

Median

Car

Car

2

14'

10'

Median Frontage Road

20'

Sidewalk

4

PHIL ADELPHIA , PA

The frontage road creates a pedestrian-scale environment buffered from the higher speed through lanes.

Rows of trees make walking pleasant and provide shade in summer.

8 Median Refuge islands shorten 3 the pedestrian crossing distance across major roads and should be provided when crossings total more than three lanes.ii

1

6

5 3

7 BERKELE Y, CA

Frontage roads create a low-speed environment.

The frontage road can be treated similar to a shared street in certain residential environments or in cases where a lack of right of way creates conflicts between loading/doubleparked vehicles and moving traffic.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

Low-speed, low-volume frontage roads are shared by multiple users.

Activate medians through the addition of shared use paths or seating, and/or recreational activities.

1

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

The median in this four-lane crossing provides a place to wait for pedestrians who do not make it across the street in one signal cycle.

Crossing opportunities are ideally provided at intervals of 200–300 feet. Space crosswalks according to pedestrian desire lines to guarantee permeability and access.

Boulevards with large cross sections are challenging to cross in a single signal cycle. Time WALK and clearance intervals using a walking speed of 3 feet per second to ensure that pedestrians of all abilities have sufficient time to cross the street in a single cycle.iii

BICYCLES Raised crossings at the entrance to the frontage road encourage low speeds and reinforce yielding to bicyclists and pedestrians. The frontage road may be treated with bicycle-friendly speed management tools (see bicycle boulevards: speed management).

5

In certain cases, the median may serve as a shared use path. These medians require enhanced intersection treatments that mitigate conflicts with crossing and turning traffic.

BRO OKLYN, NY

The median becomes a linear park.

1

BROOKLYN, NY

High visibility bicycle facilities connecting medians reduce turning conflicts.

Route buses along the central lanes.

VEHICLES Reduce speeding in the frontage road through the addition of speed bumps or other traffic calming features such as curb extensions and textured pavements.

Boulevards provide additional parking to local businesses and residents. Back-in angled parking may be provided along the frontage road if space is available.

4

Organize slip lanes to reduce conflicts and provide turn pockets at high volume turning locations.

BERKELE Y, CA

7

A boulevard redesign should be integrated with land use planning and urban design to support a high-quality pedestrian experience.

The height and dimensions of street lighting should reflect the scale of the environment. Use shorter lampposts in the frontage road and taller lighting types in the through lanes.

The frontage road should be stop controlled, except in cases where volumes of cross traffic fail to provide sufficient gaps to pass. In such cases, require vehicles on the frontage road to turn or install a signal in conjunction with the through lanes.

6

Driveways in the frontage road should be kept to a minimum or consolidated.

Provide access from side streets to reduce conflicts.

BRONX, NY

Unwarranted left turn lanes can be closed to expand the median.

TRANSIT Transit should use a dedicated center lane or the rightmost through lane, but may also use the frontage road in limited scenarios.

Where the adjacent land use is primarily residential, it is not recommended for transit vehicles to use the frontage road.

8

FREIGHT Where access to commercial properties is required, designers should ensure that the frontage road is accessible to freight vehicles.

Alternatively, trucks may unload in a dedicated loading zone at the nearest intersection.

2

T R A N S I T CO R R I D O R

STREET T YPES

10' 4'

Transit corridors, including light rail (LRT), streetcar and bus rapid transit (BRT), promote economic development around high-quality transit service while fostering a pedestrian scale in which walking and biking actively complement public transit. As major generators of pedestrian traffic, heavy surface transit routes should be prioritized for pedestrian safety improvements in both the immediate surrounding area and major access routes within the transit access shed.

Sidewalk

Bike Parking Car

12'

12'

12'

Car

Bus Only

Bus Only

8' 3' 6'

10'

10'

Car

Car Parking Bike

25'

BUFFER

10'

BUFFER

6' 3' 8' BUFFER

25'

BUFFER

Transit Corridor

Sidewalk

6

5 4 2

3 1

PEDESTRIANS Pedestrian crossing distances should be kept to a minimum using median refuge islands. Median refuge islands shorten the distance to transit stations and create a safe place to wait for buses and trains.

If two-phase crossings are utilized, shorter signal cycle lengths should be used to avoid safety risks posed by non-compliance.

1

Transit Corridor retrofits should be coordinated with land use changes to maximize a corridor’s economic growth potential. Setback guidelines and other land use regulations should be tailored to create an pedestrian scale environment.iv On sidewalks with generous widths, consider a double row of trees.

2

Median islands break up long crossings.

3

Enforcement measures should be put in place to discourage encroaching vehicles from using the dedicated bus lanes.v In some cases, BRT lanes may serve as a route for emergency vehicle traffic.

Boulevards with large cross sections are challenging to cross in a single signal cycle. Time WALK and clearance intervals using a walking speed of 3.5 feet per second to ensure that pedestrians of all abilities have sufficient time to cross the street in a single cycle.iii

Transit Signal Priority gives buses and light rail more green time and should be used as part of BRT or LRT operations (See transit streets).vii viii A side-running BRT or Light Rail system may be preferable when adjacent land uses are heavily weighted towards one side of the corridor.ix

TRANSIT BICYCLES

EUGENE , OR

VEHICLES

A one-way cycle track on both 3 sides of the corridor decreases the pedestrian crossing distance and reinforces the combination of bicycle and transit usage. A center-running one-way or two-cycle track may be preferable in some cases to reduce the dangers of turning conflicts in combination with transit.

Corridors with high transit traffic where double-parking and local traffic pose obstacles to effective transit may warrant the implementation of a dedicated BRT or LRT travel lane. BRT decreases conflicts between buses and through traffic on heavy bus routes, can speed bus travel times and reinforce the desirability of transit as a transportation option.

4

If center-running light rail or streetcar is used in place of BRT, the streetcar should ideally be access restricted to avoid competition with local traffic and significant delays.

The design of a transit stop is an opportunity to reinforce the speed and desirability of the system.

Shelters and stations should be built to accommodate the typical number of waiting passengers at the peak hour.

6

FREIGHT

LOS ANGELES , CA

BOSTON, MA

This BRT system runs through a central median.

Pair curbside bus lanes with strict enforcement to deter double parking.

Off-board fare collection speeds up buses and reduces wait time for passengers.

5

Mountable median refuge islands should be provided in cases where the rear wheels of trucks may cause difficulties for turning freight traffic.x Loading zones should be provided near the intersection in the floating parking lane to discourage double parking.

4

Sales Information Sheet Completing Our Streets The Transition to Safe and Inclusive Transportation Networks Barbara McCann Hardcover Paperback Ebook

ISBN 9781610914307 9781610914314 9781610914321

Price $55.00 $28.00 $27.99

Discount IPS IPS IPS

Pub Month Oct 2013 Oct 2013 Oct 2013

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 6x9 Pages: 224 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories TRANSPORTATION / General TRANSPORTATION / General TRANSPORTATION / General

Competing Titles PAS reports, city Complete Street guides (Chicago and LA County notably) Bookscan: N/A Human Transit, Jarrett Walker ISBN: 9781597269728 Bookscan: 1020 Warehouse: 3035 Previous Works Measuring the Health Effects of Sprawl, Complete Streets: Best Policy and Implementation Practice (PAS report) ISBN: 9781932364835 Bookscan: 66, Sprawl Costs (co-author) ISBN: 9781559635301 Bookscan: 697 Warehouse: 2314 and The Option of Urbanism by Chris Leinberger (editor) ISBN: 9781597261364 Bookscan: 2503 C, 1615 P Warehouse: 4499 C, 2648 P.

Sales Handle An inspiring and practical guide to planning, promoting, and implementing safe and inclusive street projects Description Across the country, communities are embracing a new and safer way to build streets for everyone—even as they struggle to change decades of rules, practice, and politics that prioritize cars. They have discovered that changing the design of a single street is not enough: they must upend the way transportation agencies operate. Completing Our Streets begins with the story of how the complete streets movement united bicycle riders, transportation practitioners and agencies, public health leaders, older Americans, and smart growth advocates to dramatically re-frame the discussion of transportation safety. Next, it explores why the transportation field has been so resistant to change—and how the movement has broken through to create a new multi-modal approach.

In Completing Our Streets, Barbara McCann, founder of the National Complete Streets Coalition, explains that the movement is not about street design. Instead, practitioners and activists have changed the way projects are built by focusing on three strategies: reframe the conversation; build a broad base of political support; and provide a clear path to a multi-modal process. McCann shares stories of practitioners in cities and towns from Charlotte, North Carolina to Colorado Springs, Colorado who have embraced these strategies to fundamentally change the way transportation projects are chosen, planned, and built.

The complete streets movement is based around a simple idea: streets should be safe for people of all ages and abilities, whether they are walking, driving, bicycling, or taking the bus. Completing Our Streets gives practitioners and activists the strategies, tools, and inspiration needed to translate this idea into real and lasting change in their communities.

Selling Points • Practical information for practitioners and activists who want to influence the way transportation projects are conceived, designed, and built • Accessible and inspiring account of the complete streets movement from one of its founders • Case studies from a diverse range of cities and towns across the United States, including many smaller communities in middle America that are often overlooked

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Why We Build Incomplete Streets Chapter 2: How the Complete Streets Movement Succeeds Chapter 3: Closing the Gap between Policy and Practice Chapter 4: Process over Projects: Changing how Decisions are Made Chapter 5: Looking for Every Opportunity Chapter 6: Practitioners as Champions Chapter 7: Answering a Loaded Question: How Much do Complete Streets Cost?

Chapter 8: The Balancing Act: Setting Priorities for Different Users Chapter 9: Expanding Complete Streets Appendix A: Case Study Finder Appendix B: Complete Streets Resources Endnotes Selected Bibliography Index

[Opener: Fig Intro-1]

Introduction As I was working on this book, I took a break to make a presentation at a pedestrian safety meeting held at a branch of the Montgomery County Public Library in Germantown, Maryland, just north of Washington, DC. Two girls, children of one of the organizers, were eagerly passing around “pedestrian” gingerbread cookies, as about 50 people gathered on the cold winter afternoon. But despite the refreshments, attendees found little to celebrate. The meeting was called shortly after two residents, one a high-school student, had been killed while walking in what is known as the “upcounty,” the northern section of Montgomery County where decades of agriculture are giving way to spread-out , automobile-oriented development.

A good part of the afternoon was spent discussing design solutions for an unmarked crosswalk on Stringtown Road, a new four-lane road designed to funnel interstate traffic to the new development in Clarksburg. A father begged for a marked crosswalk to help his children and other kids living in new homes reach Clarksburg Elementary School, right across the new road. He brought photographs of women and children crossing at a T-intersection, marked only by curb cuts and a narrow median the county had installed when the road was built. County officials said a signal and crosswalk must wait years, until completion of the cross-street brings more traffic. They fear that simply painting a crosswalk will give the kids a false sense of security. One county official said she had good news for attendees: in the future, the County would stop installing curb cuts that would raise expectations prematurely.

As attendees debated potential solutions, I couldn’t help thinking that the issue was one of priorities. The school has been in this location since 1909. Planners should have been aware that children would move into the new homes built within sight of the school. If their safety had been given priority in the planning phase, the County could have left the traffic heading to Interstate 270 on its original route, on Clarksburg road on the far side of the school. The new road could have been smaller, with fewer cars. If

1

safe access had been prioritized during the design phase, the County could have incorporated a safe crossing while building the road. Now, the traffic-centered priorities that guided those decisions have made it much harder to achieve pedestrian safety: the needs of a dozen children are in direct conflict with the needs of hundreds of commuters – commuters who have no choice but to drive.

This story is repeated all across the United States. Go to a multi-lane road in a suburb in just about any state. One look tells you that people who are not in cars shouldn’t be there. A second look tells you that they are – because they’ve tramped a visible trail in the grass. It probably won’t be long before you spot people waiting by a bus stop or running across the street during a break in traffic. You might even see someone riding a bike, hugging the curb while passing drivers honk.

The complete streets movement arose to change the priorities of the transportation system that produced these roads. A broad coalition of bicycle riders, transportation practitioners, public health leaders, older Americans, smart growth advocates, real estate agents and more came together to insist that we begin to build streets that are safe for everyone. We formed the National Complete Streets Coalition in the early 2000s to push for passage of Complete Streets policies. The policies, in the form of laws, resolutions, or internal agency directives, commit states, cities and towns to building all future road projects to safely accommodate everyone using them. The movement took off: since 2005, more than half the states and close to 500 local jurisdictions have adopted Complete Streets policies.1 Many of the communities that have made this commitment are going on to study the long-standing gaps in their transportation network, rework their decision-making processes, write new guidance, and educate transportation professionals and citizens alike in the new approach to making transportation investments.

From the state of North Carolina to the city of Chicago and from Edmonds, Washington to Lee County, Florida, they are beginning to routinely build their roads differently: they integrate carefully engineered sidewalks, safer crossings, bicycle lanes, new types of intersections, traffic calming, and features that speed buses to their destinations. 2 The Complete Streets movement has helped bring about a tremendous burst of activity and change in the way roads are planned, funded, designed, and built. But it is far from the first to point out 2

that roads should be safe for everyone traveling along them, or to argue for more transportation choices.

Road safety campaigns go back to the dawn of the automobile age; bicycle riders and transit boosters have been pushing for multi-modal accommodation since the 1970s. And in part, this movement is driven by changing American attitudes: a recent nationwide public opinion poll found that 63 percent of Americans would like to address traffic congestion by improving public transportation and designing communities for easier walking and bicycling. 3 America’s supposed love affair with the car is giving way to a romance with smart phones, which are more easily operated on the bus or streetcar. In the US and around the world, young people are delaying getting their licenses and are driving less. The growing ranks of older adults want greater access to public transportation. Indeed, demographic trends show a certain inevitability in the desire to transition to less car-dependent lifestyles. 4 More citizens and their elected officials are using bicycles, public transportation, and their feet to get around, and they are working for change.

The Complete Streets Change Model These trends are helping fuel the Complete Streets movement, but it continues to spread because it brings something new to the table, but not what many people think. Sure, the catchy name is helpful.

But beyond the name, the movement found three keys to unlocking change in transportation practice – and none of them has much to do with safer road design. In brief, the strategies aim to reframe the conversation about transportation in a simple and powerful way; build a broad base of political support for completing the streets; and provide a clear path to follow in transitioning to a multi-modal process.

The lack of a design focus may be a surprise to anyone who is following the raft of exciting new street design guidelines, manuals, books, and individual projects that are getting deserved attention in transportation circles these days. A new design paradigm is clearly taking shape, one that envisions a more connected, inviting, and sustainable urban fabric. Much of the discussion in transportation circles surrounds more clearly defining this paradigm, arguing for shorter blocks, a clearer relationship between the street and surrounding buildings, and innovative treatments that slow traffic and better protect 3

pedestrians and people on bikes while giving priority to public transportation. Many people assume that the complete streets movement is just another voice in this chorus; I’ve been asked many times to provide the ideal cross-section for a complete street.

But defining the problem as a design issue – in a field already tightly bound by technical specifications – has obscured the other ingredients necessary to move a system fixated on providing for a single mode. Engineers and architects alike have been churning out innovative new design ideas for several decades, but they have only recently begun to gain traction. And in too many cities, tremendous effort has been put into promising new design solutions that have been applied to road projects a few times – and then have just sputtered and faded away.

The Complete Streets movement takes a step back and defines the problem differently. In our view, the primary problem is a political and cultural one. If transportation agencies are hewing to outdated design standards, still solving the problem of building roads for automobile speed and capacity, then the solution is for community leaders to be very clear that they now have a different problem for transportation professionals to solve. The day-to-day decisions made by practitioners may seem technical, but they are driven by an underlying political decision and by the priorities and values of the community. A Complete Streets policy initiative provides the clear direction to begin to change those decisions. The Complete Streets movement is succeeding not because it lays out a compelling design paradigm (it doesn’t have one), but because it uses the three key strategies to help change the way transportation projects are chosen, planned, and built. Most of this book elaborates on how practitioners all over the country are successfully using these strategies to change their agencies, their roads and their communities. Only by following these actions can places truly put new design ideas to use, persistently and consistently.

Map of the Book

4

This book tells a story of change, and imbeds tips, insights, and tools about the process of converting a community’s transportation investments to ensure safe streets for everyone.

In Chapter 1, I’ll examine the factors that explain why the US transportation planning and construction system has been historically resistant to changing its singular focus on providing for automobile travel – as well as how those dynamics are now changing. Chapter 2 elaborates on how the complete streets movement approached this intractable system and found a way to change it, using the three key strategies. The chapter tells the story of the initial success to the Complete Streets movement in engaging thousands of people in the transportation policy process and giving reformers a new point of leverage.

But it turns out that adopting a policy is not even half of the effort required. The rest of the book is devoted to what happens after a policy has passed, and tells the stories of many professionals – planners, engineers, landscape architects, and others – who have brought policies from paper into practice.

This focus is necessary because in too many communities, after leaders or elected officials have adopted a policy, nothing happens. The exact nature of this gap between policy and implementation is the subject of Chapter 3. In some places, practitioners don’t view their jobs any differently, and roads go on being built as before. In others, tremendous effort goes into writing new street design standards, but they result in only minor changes – a sidewalk here, a bike lane there. This chapter will help readers understand why communities get stuck – and goes on to explain why the best strategy for getting them unstuck involves reframing the way agencies view and approach the mission of making streets safe.

Lasting and fundamental change will come only by if a policy inspires a transportation agency to reorient its work – change its systems – to fully and consistently consider the safety of all users.

Changing the systems inside of agencies is the topic of Chapter 4. It divides the task into four steps to achieve full implementation: changing decision-making processes, updating design guidance, providing training and education, and finding new ways to measure success. It tells the stories of planners, engineers, landscape architects, politicians and other complete streets advocates who have successfully 5

gotten beyond project-by-project battles to lead their agencies in changing their decision-making systems.

The sum of their experiences begins to provide a clear path for others to follow in converting their own systems to complete streets.

Chapter 5 explores the many and varied opportunities to begin changing systems to build complete streets. The application of these four steps will differ in communities of different sizes and types. At a large state agency, the challenge lies in getting the new approach down into the districts; in a city, it may be in getting departments to talk to each other. Growing cities will spend more time working with private developers, while older communities can focus their work on changing their current streets.

Most of the chapter demonstrates that some of the most effective implementation strategies lie not in big capital improvement projects, but in the most mundane repair projects and in the details of development codes. It explains the advantages of bringing about change not through big signature projects, but through small, gradual improvements.

Many complete streets proponents have discovered that changing their institutions isn’t a straightforward fix. They realize that making the transformation requires political savvy, relationshipbuilding skills, and inspired communication between practitioners, elected officials, residents, business leaders, and many other stakeholders – in short, the ‘building support’ strategy of the complete streets movement. In Chapter 6, practitioners tell stories of how they have used these skills to build new alliances and change practice.

Complete streets proponents need tools to help them answer the most common but also the most complicated question about this initiative: how much will it cost? Chapter 7 provides four answers to this question, clarifying that the first issue is dispelling many misconceptions about what a complete streets commitment will mean. It includes examples of some of the creative and convincing ways that jurisdictions have documented the larger benefits they are gaining by building streets for everyone.

Chapter 8 is also aimed at providing tools for those who now find themselves working every day to strike a new balance between automobiles and other modes. This balance means setting new priorities in the allocation of space and resources. This chapter discusses the political and practical ramifications of 6

those decisions – and shares techniques that some communities are using to help them make those allocations in a fair way that helps meet broader community goals. [The final section] of this chapter looks at how complete streets intersects with other movements – and asks whether the concept needs to be updated in light of the rapid evolution of thinking about how we build sustainable communities for the next century.

This book uses many examples from places and people across the country that are intended to illustrate the principles under discussion. They are not intended as prescriptions to follow or even necessarily as best practices. I return to the same places several times to help readers understand the variety of activities underway. Although the book does not include full case studies, you can find a list of such profiles in Appendix A. That list includes places mentioned in the book as well as some of the many communities that informed the conclusions in this book, but which I did not have the space to name. I’m sorry I was unable to write about every place taking an innovative approach (but that’s a nice problem to have).

Some places pursuing complete streets taking baby steps while others are striding toward a totally new approach – and there is something to learn at both ends of the spectrum. Most of the ideas I present are not visionary. We already have plenty of visionary thinking to draw on. Instead, I am seeking to help practitioners and advocates move toward completing their streets, and I hope I have conveyed the process of discovery that I and others went through in unlocking the keys to change. In Rochester, Minnesota and Seattle, Washington, the discovery came while reading through every planning document they had – and then systematically realigning them all to a complete streets vision. In Salt Lake City, it was the revelation that the city could quickly install many miles of bike lanes – if they worked with the right department at the right time. For the State of New Jersey, it was realizing they needed to give engineers the permission to put down their manuals and look at every street in a new way. For me, it was listening to everyone’s stories – and understanding the power of getting the right people in the room.

Complete Streets policies won’t instantly end needless pedestrian deaths or create multi-modal nirvana. But over time, they will transform the systems that keep creating difficult safety problems like 7

Stringtown Road. And my hope is that this book will help jurisdictions take the idea of safe streets for all from paper into everyday practice.

1

Complete Streets Atlas,” http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets/changing-policy/completestreets-atlas. Check this map to see the current status of policy adoption across the United States.

2 “Complete Streets Newsletter,” http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets/newsletter The evidence of Complete Streets activity across the country is easy to follow in the National Complete Streets Coalition’s monthly e-newsletter.

3 “Key Findings from National Survey on Transportation Options,” Natural Resources Defense Council, August 3, 2012. http://docs.nrdc.org/energy/files/ene_12090401a.pdf 4 Arthur C. Nelson, Reshaping Metropolitan America: Development Trends and Opportunities to 2030. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2013, 33-46.

8

Sales Information Sheet The World’s Water Volume 8

Trim Size: 8.5x11 Pages: 420 Copyright: 2013

The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources Peter H. Gleick Hardcover Paperback Ebook

ISBN 9781610914819 9781610914826 9781610914833

Price $70.00 $35.00 $34.99

Discount IPS IPS IPS

Pub Month Dec 2013 Dec 2013 Dec 2013

Fall 2013

Bookstore Categories SCIENCE / Environmental Science SCIENCE / Environmental Science SCIENCE / Environmental Science

Competing Titles The Atlas of Water, Second Edition: Mapping the World's Most Critical Resource, Maggie Black, Jannet King (University of California Press, 2009) ISBN: 978-0520259348 Bookscan: 2334 Introduction to Water Resources and Environmental Issues, Karrie Lynn Pennington and Thomas Cech (Cambridge University Press; 2010) ISBN: 978-0521869881 Bookscan: 254 Previous Works The World's Water Volume 7 (ISBN: 978-1597269995) Bookscan: 516 Warehouse: 1690, 2008-2009 (ISBN: 9781597265058) Bookscan: 1074 Warehouse: 3328, 2006-2007 (ISBN: 9781597261067) Bookscan: 947 Warehouse: 3172, 2004-2005 (ISBN: 978159635363), 2002-2003 (ISBN: 9781559639491), 2000-2001 (ISBN: 9781559637923), 1998-1999 (ISBN: 9781559635929)

Sales Handle An unmatched reference on water issues Description Island Press has been publishing the biennial The World’s Water series since 1998. In that time, it has become an institution of the water field. The Journal of the American Water Resources Association sums it up well: “The series continues to be an invaluable collection of all kinds of water-related material, ranging from concise, stand-alone chapters on important topics to numerous sections of data…a ‘must have’ for anyone interested in the water resource field.”

The latest book will include chapters on particularly timely subjects, including fracking and emerging contaminants.

Selling Points • Prestige and authority of Peter Gleick and the Pacific Institute • Established reputation of The World's Water series • Growing public attention to water shortages • Growing political debate over fracking

The World’s Water, Volume 8 Peter Gleick with Newsha Ajami Juliet Christian-Smith Heather Cooley Kristina Donnelly Julian Fulton Mai-Lan Ha Matthew Heberger Eli Moore Jason Morrison Stewart Orr Peter Schulte Veena Srinivasan Topics Hydraulic Fracturing (Heather Cooley, Kristina Donnelly) Corporate Water Engagement (Jason Morrison, Peter Schulte, Stewart Orr) Water Footprints (Julian Fulton, Heather Cooley, Peter Gleick) Sustainable Water Jobs (Eli Moore) Global Water Governance (Heather Cooley, Newsha Ajami, Jason Morrison, Veena Srinivasan, Kristina Donnelly, Juliet Christian-Smith) Key Issues for Seawater Desalination in California: Cost and Financing (Heather Cooley, Newsha Ajami) Zombie Water Projects (Peter Gleick, Kristina Donnelly, Matthew Heberger)

In Briefs Water Conflict Chronology (Peter Gleick and Matthew Heberger) Red-Sea/Dead-Sea update (Kristina Donnelly) The Syria Conflict and the Role of Water (Peter Gleick) Data

Sales Information Sheet

Fall 2013

National Climate Assessment Regional Technical Inputs Series ISBN Price Discount Climate Change and Pacific Islands: Indicators and Impacts Paperback 9781610914277 $39.99 IPS Ebook 9781610914598 $39.99 Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilities Paperback 9781610914338 $39.99

Pub Month

Sales

Feb 2013

Bookscan: 4 Warehouse: 91

IPS

May 2013

IPS

Feb 2013

Ebook 9781610914604 $39.99 IPS Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwest United States Paperback 9781610914468 Pre-orders $39.99, IPS $49.99 May 9 Ebook 9781610914840 Pre-orders $39.99, IPS $49.99 May 9 Oceans and Marine Resources in a Changing Climate Paperback 9781610914345 $39.99 IPS Ebook 9781610914802 $39.99 IPS Climate of the Southeast United States Paperback 9781610914390 $39.99 IPS Ebook 9781610915090 $39.99 IPS Climate Change in the Midwest Paperback 9781610914291 $39.99 IPS Ebook 9781610915113 $39.99 IPS Climate Change in the Northeast Paperback 9781610915137 $39.99 IPS Ebook 9781610915144 $39.99 IPS Climate Change in the Northwest Paperback 9781610914284 $39.99 IPS Ebook 9781610915120 $39.99 IPS Great Plains Regional Technical Input Report Paperback 9781610914352 $39.99 IPS Ebook 9781610915106 $39.99 IPS

May 2013 May 2013

Bookscan: 11 Warehouse: 338

Warehouse: 221

May 2013

June 2013 June 2013 Aug 2013 Aug 2013 Aug 2013 Aug 2013 Aug 2013 Aug 2013 Aug 2013 Aug 2013 Aug 2013 Aug 2013

Competing Titles Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change; Its Likelihood, Character and Significance, Frances Moore (Editor), John C. Topping (Editor), Michael C. MacCracken (Editor) Earthscan Publications Ltd. (January 2008). ISBN: 978-1844074785 Bookscan: 116. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-0521880107 Bookscan: 40 Previous Works None

Sales Handle The definitive reports on the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity of the United States Description

Sales Information Sheet

Fall 2013

Developed to inform the 2013 National Climate Assessment, this series comprises nine regional reports that highlight past climate trends, projected climate change and vulnerabilities, and impacts to specific sectors.

The state of the art information in each report comes from a broad range of experts in academia, private industry, state and local governments, NGOs, professional societies, and impacted communities. These reports also include case studies on topics such as adaptive capacity; climate change effects on freshwater availability and quality; regional and community economies; urbanization, transportation, and infrastructure vulnerabilities; ecosystem services; and agriculture sustainability.

Selling Points • Essential guidance for decision-makers seeking to better understand how climate variability and change impact each region and its communities • Rich in science and case studies, these reports set the stage for making the necessary preparations for climate change • Definitive regional input reports to the 2013 National Climate Assessment • Critical, state-of-the-art information from a broad range of climate change experts in academia, private industry, state and local governments, NGOs, professional societies, and impacted communities

Sales Information Sheet

Fall 2013

Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwest United States A Report Prepared for the National Climate Assessment Edited by Gregg Garfin Paperback

ISBN 9781610914468

Price Pre-orders $39.99, $49.99 May 9

Discount IPS

Pub Month May 2013

Ebook

9781610914840

Pre-orders $39.99, $49.99 May 9

IPS

May 2013

Trim Size: 8x10 Pages: 509 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories SCIENCE /Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology SCIENCE /Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology

Competing Titles Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change; Its Likelihood, Character and Significance, Frances Moore (Editor), John C. Topping (Editor), Michael C. MacCracken (Editor) Earthscan Publications Ltd. (January 2008). ISBN: 978-1844074785 Bookscan: 116. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-0521880107 Bookscan: 40 Previous Works None

Sales Handle The definitive report on the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity for the southwest United States Description Prepared for the 2013 National Climate Assessment and a landmark study in terms of its breadth and depth of coverage, this report blends the contributions of 120 experts in climate science, economics, ecology, engineering, geography, hydrology, planning, resources management, and other disciplines to provide the most comprehensive, and understandable, analysis to date about climate and its effects on the people and landscapes of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah—including the U.S.-Mexico border region and the lands of Native Nations.

What is the climate of the Southwest like today? What has it been like in the past, and how is it projected to change over the 21st century? How will that affect water resources, ecosystems, agricultural production, energy supply and delivery, transportation, human health, and a host of other areas? How vulnerable is the region to climate change? What else do we need to know about it, and how can we limit its adverse effects?

In addressing these and other questions, the book offers decision makers and stakeholders a substantial basis from which to make informed choices that will affect the well-being of the region’s inhabitants in the decades to come.

Selling Points • Essential guidance for decision-makers seeking to better understand how climate variability and change impact the Southwest region of the United States and its communities • The definitive input report on climate change in the Southwest region for the 2013 National Climate Assessment • Critical state of the art information from a broad range of climate change experts in academia, private industry, state and local governments, NGOs, professional societies, and impacted communities

Sales Information Sheet Oceans and Marine Resources in a Changing Climate A Technical Input to the 2013 National Climate Assessment Edited by Roger Griffis and Jennifer Howard Paperback

ISBN 9781610914345

Price $39.99

Discount IPS

Pub Month June 2013

Ebook

9781610914802

$39.99

IPS

June 2013

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 8x10 Pages: 288 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories SCIENCE / Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology SCIENCE / Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology

Competing Titles Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change; Its Likelihood, Character and Significance, Frances Moore (Editor), John C. Topping (Editor), Michael C. MacCracken (Editor) Earthscan Publications Ltd. (January 2008). ISBN: 978-1844074785 Bookscan: 116. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-0521880107 Bookscan: 40 Previous Works None

Sales Handle The definitive report on the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity for the oceans and marine systems of the United States Description U.S. marine ecosystems and services are increasingly at risk from climate change and other human pressures.

A wealth of information documents strong linkages between the planet’s climate and ocean systems as well as changes in the climate system that can produce dramatic changes in the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of ocean ecosystems on a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Conversely, relatively little information shows how these climate-driven changes in ocean ecosystems may impact ocean services and uses, although it is predicted that the vulnerability of ocean-dependent users, communities, and economies increases in a changing climate.

This report was produced by a team of experts as a contribution to the third National Climate Assessment (NCA), conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The report provides an assessment of scientific knowledge of the current and projected impacts of climate change and ocean acidification on the physical, chemical, and biological components and human uses of marine ecosystems under U.S. jurisdiction. It also provides assessment of the international implications for the U.S. due to climate impacts on ocean ecosystems and of efforts to prepare for and adapt to climate and acidification impacts on ocean ecosystems.

Selling Points • An essential guidance for decision-makers seeking to better understand how climate variability and change impact our oceans and marine resources • Rich in science and case studies, this report sets the stage for making the necessary preparations for climate change • The definitive input report on climate change for oceans of the 2013 National Climate Assessment • Critical, state-of-the-art information from a broad range of climate change experts in academia, private industry, state and local governments, NGOs, professional societies, and impacted communities

Sales Information Sheet Climate of the Southeast United States Variability, Change, Impacts, and Vulnerability Edited by Keith Ingram Paperback

ISBN 9781610914390

Price $39.99

Discount IPS

Pub Month Aug 2013

Ebook

9781610915090

$39.99

IPS

Aug 2013

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 8x10 Pages: 224 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories SCIENCE /Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology SCIENCE /Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology

Competing Titles Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change; Its Likelihood, Character and Significance, Frances Moore (Editor), John C. Topping (Editor), Michael C. MacCracken (Editor) Earthscan Publications Ltd. (January 2008). ISBN: 978-1844074785 Bookscan: 116. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-0521880107 Bookscan: 40 Previous Works None

Sales Handle The definitive report on the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity for the southeastern United States Description Assessment of Climate Change in the Southeast, one of a series of regional reports prepared for the 2013 National Climate Assessment, is a landmark study in terms of its breadth and depth of coverage. The report blends the contributions of experts in climate science, economics, ecology, engineering, geography, hydrology, planning, resource management, and other disciplines to provide the most comprehensive and understandable analysis to date about climate and its effects on the people and landscapes of the eleven states east of the Mississippi River, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. What is the climate of the region like today? What has it been like in the past, and how is it projected to change over the 21st century? How will that affect water resources, ecosystems, agricultural production, energy supply and delivery, transportation, human health, and a host of other areas? How vulnerable is the region to climate change? What else do we need to know about it, and how can we limit its adverse effects? This report offers decision makers and stakeholders a substantial basis from which to make informed choices that will affect the well-being of the region’s inhabitants in the decades to come.

Selling Points • An essential guidance for decision-makers seeking to better understand how climate variability and change impact the southeast region and its communities • Rich in science and case studies, this report sets the stage for making the necessary preparations for climate change • The definitive input report on climate change in the southeast region of the 2013 National Climate Assessment • Critical, state-of-the-art information from a broad range of climate change experts in academia, private industry, state and local governments, NGOs, professional societies, and impacted communities

Sales Information Sheet Climate Change in the Midwest A Synthesis Report for the National Climate Assessment Edited by Julie A. Winkler Paperback

ISBN 9781610914291

Price $39.99

Discount IPS

Pub Month Aug 2013

Ebook

9781610915113

$39.99

IPS

Aug 2013

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 8x10 Pages: 224 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories SCIENCE /Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology SCIENCE /Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology

Competing Titles Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change; Its Likelihood, Character and Significance, Frances Moore (Editor), John C. Topping (Editor), Michael C. MacCracken (Editor) Earthscan Publications Ltd. (January 2008). ISBN: 978-1844074785 Bookscan: 116. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-0521880107 Bookscan: 40 Previous Works None

Sales Handle The definitive report on the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity for the midwestern United States Description Assessment of Climate Change in the Midwest, one of a series of regional reports prepared for the 2013 National Climate Assessment, is a landmark study in terms of its breadth and depth of coverage. The report blends the contributions of experts in climate science, economics, ecology, engineering, geography, hydrology, planning, resource management, and other disciplines to provide the most comprehensive and understandable analysis to date about climate and its effects on the people and landscapes of the eight states in the region. What is the climate of the Midwest like today? What has it been like in the past, and how is it projected to change over the 21st century? How will that affect water resources, ecosystems, agricultural production, energy supply and delivery, transportation, human health, and a host of other areas? How vulnerable is the region to climate change? What else do we need to know about it, and how can we limit its adverse effects? This report offers decision makers and stakeholders a substantial basis from which to make informed choices that will affect the well-being of the region’s inhabitants in the decades to come.

Selling Points • An essential guidance for decision-makers seeking to better understand how climate variability and change impact the midwest region and its communities • Rich in science and case studies, this report sets the stage for making the necessary preparations for climate change • The definitive input report on climate change in the midwest region of the 2013 National Climate Assessment • Critical state of the art information from a broad range of climate change experts in academia, private industry, state and local governments, NGOs, professional societies, and impacted communities

Sales Information Sheet Climate Change in the Northeast

Fall 2013

Trim Size: 8x10 Pages: 224 Copyright: 2013

A Sourcebook Edited by Radley Horton Paperback

ISBN 9781610915137

Price $39.99

Discount IPS

Pub Month Aug 2013

Ebook

9781610915144

$39.99

IPS

Aug 2013

Bookstore Categories SCIENCE /Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology SCIENCE /Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology

Competing Titles Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change; Its Likelihood, Character and Significance, Frances Moore (Editor), John C. Topping (Editor), Michael C. MacCracken (Editor) Earthscan Publications Ltd. (January 2008). ISBN: 978-1844074785 Bookscan: 116. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-0521880107 Bookscan: 40 Previous Works None

Sales Handle The definitive report on the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity for the northeastern United States Description Assessment of Climate Change in the Northeast, one of a series of regional reports prepared for the 2013 National Climate Assessment, is a landmark study in terms of its breadth and depth of coverage. The report blends the contributions of experts in climate science, economics, ecology, engineering, geography, hydrology, planning, resource management, and other disciplines to provide the most comprehensive and understandable analysis to date about climate and its effects on the people and landscapes of the region, encompassing New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Chesapeake Bay Area, and Appalachia. What is the climate like today? What has it been like in the past, and how is it projected to change over the 21st century? How will that affect water resources, ecosystems, agricultural production, energy supply and delivery, transportation, human health, and a host of other areas? How vulnerable is the region to climate change? What else do we need to know about it, and how can we limit its adverse effects? This report offers decision makers and stakeholders a substantial basis from which to make informed choices that will affect the well-being of the region’s inhabitants in the decades to come.

Selling Points • An essential guidance for decision-makers seeking to better understand how climate variability and change impact the northeast region and its communities • Rich in science and case studies, this report sets the stage for making the necessary preparations for climate change • The definitive input report on climate change in the northeast region of the 2013 National Climate Assessment • Critical, state-of-the-art information from a broad range of climate change experts in academia, private industry, state and local governments, NGOs, professional societies, and impacted communities

Sales Information Sheet Climate Change in the Northwest Implications for Our Landscapes, Waters, and Communities Edited by Philip Mote Paperback

ISBN 9781610914284

Price $39.99

Discount IPS

Pub Month Aug 2013

Ebook

9781610915120

$39.99

IPS

Aug 2013

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 8x10 Pages: 224 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories SCIENCE /Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology SCIENCE /Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology

Competing Titles Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change; Its Likelihood, Character and Significance, Frances Moore (Editor), John C. Topping (Editor), Michael C. MacCracken (Editor) Earthscan Publications Ltd. (January 2008). ISBN: 978-1844074785 Bookscan: 116. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-0521880107 Bookscan: 40 Previous Works None

Sales Handle The definitive report on the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity for the northwestern United States Description Assessment of Climate Change in the Northwest, one of a series of regional reports prepared for the 2013 National Climate Assessment, is a landmark study in terms of its breadth and depth of coverage. The report blends the contributions of experts in climate science, economics, ecology, engineering, geography, hydrology, planning, resource management, and other disciplines to provide the most comprehensive and understandable analysis to date about climate and its effects on the people and landscapes of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. What is the climate of the Northwest like today? What has it been like in the past, and how is it projected to change over the 21st century? How will that affect water resources, ecosystems, agricultural production, energy supply and delivery, transportation, human health, and a host of other areas? How vulnerable is the region to climate change? What else do we need to know about it, and how can we limit its adverse effects? This report offers decision makers and stakeholders a substantial basis from which to make informed choices that will affect the well-being of the region’s inhabitants in the decades to come.

Selling Points • An essential guidance for decision-makers seeking to better understand how climate variability and change impact the northwest region and its communities • Rich in science and case studies, this report sets the stage for making the necessary preparations for climate change • The definitive input report on climate change in the northwest region of the 2013 National Climate Assessment • Critical, state-of-the-art information from a broad range of climate change experts in academia, private industry, state and local governments, NGOs, professional societies, and impacted communities

Sales Information Sheet Great Plains Regional Technical Input Report Edited by Dennis Ojima

Paperback

ISBN 9781610914352

Price $39.99

Discount IPS

Pub Month Oct 2013

Ebook

9781610915106

$39.99

IPS

Oct 2013

Fall 2013 Trim Size: 8x10 Pages: 224 Copyright: 2013

Bookstore Categories SCIENCE / Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology SCIENCE / Earth Sciences/Meteorology & Climatology

Competing Titles Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change; Its Likelihood, Character and Significance, Frances Moore (Editor), John C. Topping (Editor), Michael C. MacCracken (Editor) Earthscan Publications Ltd. (January 2008). ISBN: 978-1844074785 Bookscan: 116. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. ISBN: 978-0521880107 Bookscan: 40 Previous Works None

Sales Handle The definitive report on the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity for the Great Plains states Description Assessment of Climate Change in the Great Plains, one of a series of regional reports prepared for the 2013 National Climate Assessment, is a landmark study in terms of its breadth and depth of coverage. The report blends the contributions of experts in climate science, economics, ecology, engineering, geography, hydrology, planning, resource management, and other disciplines to provide the most comprehensive and understandable analysis to date about climate and its effects on the people and landscapes of the eight states that make up the region. What is the climate like today? What has it been like in the past, and how is it projected to change over the 21st century? How will that affect water resources, ecosystems, agricultural production, energy supply and delivery, transportation, human health, and a host of other areas? How vulnerable is the region to climate change? What else do we need to know about it, and how can we limit its adverse effects? This report offers decision makers and stakeholders a substantial basis from which to make informed choices that will affect the well-being of the region’s inhabitants in the decades to come.

Selling Points • An essential guidance for decision-makers seeking to better understand how climate variability and change impact the Great Plains region and its communities • Rich in science and case studies, this report sets the stage for making the necessary preparations for climate change • The definitive input report on climate change in the Great Plains region of the 2013 National Climate Assessment • Critical, state-of-the-art information from a broad range of climate change experts in academia, private industry, state and local governments, NGOs, professional societies, and impacted communities