by Dr. Braden Allenby, AT&T EH&S Vice President

Viewing the World Summit in Johannesburg from a safe distance, I could not help but think of Shakespeare: „full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” This is too cynical, of course, for the mere fact the summit was held is important, and that it generated so much sound and fury an indication that these issues are firmly on the global agenda, and will remain so. Any multinational firm not attempting to understand and address corporate social responsibility is indeed obsolete, and it is obvious that all governments, however unwilling, are faced with responding to the issues raised in Johannesburg.

But I couldn’t help thinking of calendars. Every year, like many others, I get a new calendar from environmental groups. These are often items of great beauty, with breathtaking wilderness scenes or photographic studies that would make Ansel Adams proud. But over the years, I have looked in vain for a calendar that celebrates the environment in which most of us spend our lives: a calendar of urban life. It doesn’t exist.

This is the great schism that sustainable development was intended to paper over, one that moderate non-governmental groups are increasingly addressing: the split between the deep greens like Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, and the social ecologists like Murray Bookchin; between the radical environmentalists and Marxist eco-socialist anarchist antiglobalizers; between the teleologies of Eden and the New Jerusalem. And it is best illustrated by the differing conceptualizations of that quintessential human product, the urban environment.

Cities, after all, arose with the first human experiment in earth systems engineering and management – agriculture – and for that very reason some deep greens view the evolution of agriculture as the beginning of The Fall, the first false step of a species removing itself from its „natural” context.

Of course, these views are not mainstream, and the spread of „sustainability” as a ubiquitous adjective – „sustainable firms,” „sustainable cities,” „sustainability science,” and the like – is powerful testament to the strong desire and pressing need to integrate the environmental dialogue into broader social and cultural streams. But it remains true that the two discourses – the environmental and the social – remain estranged at fundamental levels, with different teleologies, values, and agendas. Nowhere is this more apparent than in cities.

This is a real pity. Cities are wonderful centers of productivity and culture. Moreover, the promise of human freedom is powerful in cities: from the European medieval period, it has been true that „city air makes you free.” (It also makes you sick where electricity, sanitation, and clean water are not available; in general, today’s cities provide their services at inordinate and unnecessary environmental cost.)

It is not just that ignoring the importance of cities for our species is foolish or shortsighted. It is that, without understanding cities and how they function as economic, cultural, and information systems, as nodes for energy and material transformation, we are overlooking a critical opportunity to practice the integration of the human and natural worlds. The possibilities to play, to design spaces in new and wonderful ways, are legion and bounded only by our lack of interest and imagination.

Are you an environmentalist who cares about urban sprawl? Then your most useful tack may be to improve urban education systems. Do you head up an environmental studies department? Perhaps you should have at least one course on urban planning and management. Do you care about sustainable development? Perhaps you should learn to design modular urban sanitation and clean water systems, and information networks that enable an environmentally sound, street-safe, and attractive urban environment.

Are you a student of the environment? Perhaps you should read Jane Jacobs as well as Aldo Leopold. Are you into organic farming? Perhaps you should work to establish hundreds of rooftop gardens in big cities, and greenhouses in new office buildings.

And perhaps someday I’ll buy a Sierra Club Calendar of Sustainable City Spaces, with awe-inspiring images of Tokyo, New Delhi, Sao Paulo, and, yes, Johannesburg.