From the Paolo Soleri's "map of despair," we begin to understand the need for changes in the way our societies are built. The Sierra Club approaches sprawl big time but some say they overlook comprehensive and integrated alternatives to sprawl such as maybe Paolo Soleri’s Arcology. The other environmental groups have a similar outlook. Soleri’s desire to put the Arcology ideal into practice at Arcosanti which he represent the desire “for a lean and environmental society," by embracing a design model that integrates and densifies the urban entity, maximizing the potential of the city in the form of what he calls the urban effect “which has produced civilization and that the city is the hub of human industry, inventiveness and creativity." Soleri says that the Arcology "is in clear opposition to suburban sprawl because it advocates a lean (frugal), but intense mode of life, the only one realistically implementable on planet Earth."
The suburban based auto-culture in essence negates life on Earth, because it perpetuates and promotes powerful unsustainable socioeconomic trends, which in turn advance the interests of those who have accumulated vast amounts of wealth from the peddling of highly wasteful, resource intensive industries (think the Koch Brothers and their 50 billion dollar fortune and its impact on the American Polity, economy society and environment). In understanding the importance a "lean," and sustainable mind set, we must examine the evolutionary historical dynamic and the dominant antithetical mind-set of hyper-consumption.
Soleri in the early 2000s used several School of Thought sessions to present contrasting books and schools of thought. One was Hard Green by Peter Huber and the other was Natural Capitalism by Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken. Critical of Natural Capitalism and the Green Business Movement it helped launch, he began using the term “better kind of wrongness” to describe those reform movements. He took the classical Leftist view by suggesting that their claim to be moving us to a better system under capitalism and the existing system, really only keeps us muddled in the existing way of doing thing which is fundamentally unsuitable and incompatible with the concepts of environmental sustainability.
Soleri usually uses the phrase better kind of wrongness in relation to reformist schemes to make the auto based culture more viable in a sustainable society that he feels does not meet his Reformulation model of comprehensive change. He feels that no truly “lean” system will be able to center its transport systems on the automobile. While this is true, it may be that cost effective energy efficient cars is one that we can begin to redesign modern systems that they are more compatible with environmental systems. Yet the concept of a better kind of wrongness cuts across ideological lines, is giving money to progressive groups to fight corporations in Washington.