A Speech that President Bush Should Have Made
The residents of New Orleans have been through great traumatic stress and anguish due to our emergency services not being in place to rescue those who did not have the resources to leave the city before the hurricane hit land. One of the things this tragedy has proven is that Americans cities are deficient in public transportation. The 600,000 people who were unable to evacuate were the marginalized and poor, elderly and infirm. This emergency brings to light just how much the American infrastructure has failed Americans. The car culture that developed in the 20th Century has made American cities nightmares of inequality and congestion. It has contamination our air with carcinogens, and has caused us to fight wars for oil to fill up SUVs.
Our national addiction to the automobile must be stop! We can't continue to live in cities where inadequate transportation systems undermined our democracy by creating two classes of people: a deprived and the privileged class. The quest for democracy should have led us to construct a network of public transportation systems throughout our cities and towns, but our reliance on the private automobile was a conspiracy against a democratic way of life resulting in unmanageable urban sprawl and the deterioration of our railroad and streetcar systems.
It is time to begin to build a new kind of city that lives in balance with nature and frees Americans from the slavery of poverty of the automobile. In order to do this we must think in a new way, a way that is holistic and uses whole systems design to plan out the blueprints for 21 st Century ecological cities. This project will require every American's effort to embrace with all their hearts democratic values in which each American has equal assess to transportation, education, healthcare, social security, and communication technologies. Equal opportunity for all requires everyone to have equal access to the movement and channels of communication needed to realize a global democracy.
I am asking Americans to search deep without themselves for their revolutionary roots, the roots that took us to new frontiers and to invent great inventions for the benefit of humanity because building a new city is the ultimate revolution. It is a creative revolution necessary to evolve us to the next level of cosmic understanding of the forces of nature. No longer will we be able to dominate and pollute nature with our industries, but we will work in partnership with nature, always respecting and having reverence for its divine beauty and grace. It calls each one of us to use our imaginations and visualize a new life in an ecological city, an arcology, founded on the wisdom of our greatest science and art. Arcology is a container needed for us to explore new worlds in Outer Space, connecting us with the inner space of the heart, of caring for each person's unique contribution with love.
Presently, we are all refugees crying out for us to begin this evolutionary project that will change the way we live for generations for come. Such a change is a gateway to the future, and the future is now. From this day forward, we will shift our economy away from oil, gas, and petrochemical production to solar energies technologies. Nuclear power plants and weapons maintenance and manufacturing will be shut down. The way to create peace is not by preparing for war, but to build a container for peace. Cradle to Cradle design principles will be the bases of all new development. In an arcology all chemicals used to sustain us must be able to be recycled and cause no harm to our species. To mobilize for such an epic-making change requires the cooperation and understanding of each one of you. It requires us to tell a new story and to teach an earth-liberating philosophy. Visualizing and building arcology opens the way for our knowledge to build a planetary dream.
Eutopia or Oblivion?