Founding Statement

My blogs all begin with the premise that I am personally the main person responsible for the destruction of real wealth in the last 30 years and for the opportunity cost that entailed: denying a wonderful life to much of the human race and preserving much of our natural inheritance. Instead, immense suffering and irreversable damage have occured. I knew what to do to avoid that, and did not. My students, colleagues, and my teacher Paolo Soleri will understand this is so, though it may sound strange to others unfamiliar with the history. I promised my teacher and my community to manifest his design for the world's first sustainable compact town. This would have lead to the adoption of sustainable town building as the norm for the last 30 years, instead of collapse, out of pure competitive advantage over growth and debt. I was unable to do this for at least 3 reasons: I could not instill a sense of urgency, though this was indeed the only chance to "save mankind", just as I stated then, that would have compelled cooperation among the founders. I was ignorant of the tools of compassionate communication required to ask for what I needed others to do, and to compassionately meet the needs of my co-workers. It was more important, in the words of Marshall Rosenberg, for me to be right, than to make life wonderful. Lastly, I did not recognize the gifts of wisdom about the nature of capital investment offered to me by Richard and Nancy Gushman, Skip Sagar, Bill Graham, Desmond Miurhead, and others, blinded by ideological parochialism.
Sic transit gloria mundi. What a screwup! What to do now will be the focus of these ruminations.

I begin by giving us all empathy: we all did the best we could at the time to meet our needs based on our best current knowledge and judgement.