Many people talk of sustainability and have been for over 20 years now. My experiences with green thinking start with my mother who was an environmentalist in Missouri speaking about the need for higher levels of recycling and organic farming. It was from that influence that I began looking into environmentalism and sustainability at an early age. In college I studied political science but also had an interest biology, geography, engineering and philosophy. Serendipity entered my life as I began exploring information very much by intuition. It was during these times that I explored deeper layers of green philosophy or deep ecology as it is commonly called yet hardly or even rarely understood in this age of so called green biz. Of course thats only sensible as the implications of Ted Trainer and his Abandon Affluent thesis are antithetical to consumer culture and the people that control it. Yet it was during this time in my life that foundations were laid for my understanding of why a green ethos and understanding deeply rooted in ecology and human behavior is vital to any real attempt to reform or remake society in the vision of a more idealistic mold. For example the British coal Economist EF Schumacher was reflecting more than just liberalism or the Left when put forward a vision of “Economics as if people mattered.” He understand that any large scale approach to solving problems must scale out from the grassroots through what he termed appropriate technologies. He termed it Human Scale.
In the race to modernize and develop as modern industrial nation states we humans totally and wholehearted abandoned the primary tenet of the Greeks which was they held the human scale aspect of the Polis or City State as sacred in their system. So its only understandable that Marxism and Neomarxism would embrace this idea of alienation seeing that people's needs were not really authentically considered under capitalism. And indeed in that process of alienation from their basic and authentic hierarchy of needs a Herbert Maslow put it, they actually could be manipulated to a higher degree than if those needs were met by the support structures of society. This is why of course consumerism has been designed to give lip service to community while breaking it through the creation of a synergistic system of innovations revolving around car culture.
Through my studies and experiences what I realized is that what emerged as a systematic approach to exploitation under capitalism was actually based on insecurity and fear. The capitalist is not coming from a place of greatness and abundance but rather this idea that if I don't do it first my competitor will and I will lose my base of power and wealth and become marginalized as a player in the global capitalist economy. Paolo Soleri came to my consciousness serendipitiously as I explored Neo-marxism and Green Socialism in college. I was in the library and came up his book The Omega Seed which fascinated me because it put forward many grand theories of the evolution of humanity and the Universe. While put forward from a reformist modernist perspective, it provided an alternative and unique storyline within the deep ecology community. It is notable as one that has influenced many progressives from the very birth of the environmental and sustainability movements not just in the USA but globally as well. What's most notable is that it offers a escape from consumer culture for its residents who form the active body of alumni who are living and working in the project as Arconauts. That is the challenge I would come to see in that Paolo Soleri's contradictions were transposed onto the reality of the people living there.
In all fairness the challenge of governing Arcosanti and the foundation that runs it – Cosanti Foundation – is really a hologram of the progressive movement. As someone trained in the ability to think critically and question authority I very quickly realized as a I did my workshop in 1998 that Arcosanti while a noble attempt to create a city in the image of man was not reaching the lofty goals set out by its founder in 1970 in the book City in the Image of Man. The book was quite a success in its time published by MIT Press. MIT of course during that time was influence by a similar genius and visionary Steward Brand who put out the Whole Earth Catalog. Soleri was very much in the mold of Brand, outlining this bold initiative for building cities in a totally new way.
Soleri in an attempt to build on his initial success as a architect philosopher repackaged and configured in various books and proposals over the last 40 years. None of his written works matched the success of that initial publication. Interestingly despite all the planning and comtemplate he has only had two real successful developments that could be seen as habitats. The first was Cosanti located in a exclusive suburb of Phoenix called Paradise Valley and Arcosanti about a hour north of Phoenix. Cosanti was started after Soleri trained under the intellectual father of modern suburbia – ironically enough – who had a created an outpost in Scottsdale Arizona for architectural students who wanted to train under the master. Soleri who purchased 5 acres just 20 miles from Tallesin West in 1955 that actually