This is from the introduction by Richard Register, to a special issue (July 2010) dedicated to ecocities by Ecocity Builders magazine:

Richard Register:

“We already have environmental economists, ecological economists, bioecological economists and so on, described in various places as “fields of academic research.” Why then have they failed to focus clearly on what we need to build just plain physically and why have they failed to identify the
largest thing humans build – cities – as the foundation for solving many of our most intractable environmental and societal problems? Why has concern for “sustainable development” barely scratched the surface of ecocity design, planning and development, much less identified urban layout and design as the key factors in facilitating or working against a wide range of technologies and lifestyles?

Perhaps the entire enterprise to date has been a little too academic and separate from the world of real steel, stone and mortar, energy, food and transport. Perhaps even ecologically conscientious economics needs a good dose not just of math, physics and ecology but also engineering, architecture, industrial design, technological development and business administration and, not to leave out, the development incentives and disincentives of zoning and codes, taxes and politics. Physicists and students of aerodynamics are not enough to build airplanes – you need those other guys too.

Where it starts in terms of the conditions we find ourselves in, on this planet at least, is with the massive flow of solar energy into our physical economy, mainly through plants, chlorophyll and soil at about 2.5% energy conversion efficiency, through 80% efficient passive heating and about 20% efficient solar electricity, all available with some serious investment. The sun’s been with us a long time so we have two basic energy resources of enormous scale, one is the energy flow of solar income and the other is solar energy savings in the form of the fossil fuels. Solar income energy is a pretty benign source and fossil fuels are tricky as we are beginning to see with the Gulf Oil Spill, climate change and other disasters that range from the catastrophic to apocalyptic. There’s a big hint here for a transition in thinking starting with physical economics: invest in solar and its derivative: wind; begin disinvesting in fossil fuels at the same time.

Another very large consideration is the mineral and metals savings account of the planet. If we don’t recycle these they will become ever more scarce through rusting and frittering away in small item dispersion lost to any economically viable recovery in the longer range future. In practical terms that means we need to build a physical environment, mainly our cities, to run on about 1/10th the energy and 1/5th the land, which is proposed by a discipline closer to science than today’s economics, that of ecological city and town design and planning. A super efficient built environment, the collective home the vast majority of us live in, also makes assiduous recycling possible.

The largest physical thing to consider is the built environment. What is it we actually build and what does that determine in terms of technologies and lifestyles? We should know we are in trouble when Brazil plows under virgin forests for ethanol road fuel, when India manufactures and promotes the cheap car called the Nano for its 1.2 billion people
hurtling about enclosed in false security while 100,000 are killed in car accidents every year there as the Nano leaves the starting gate, when the Russian Government announces it has purchased 2.5 million acres of land to turn into car-dependent scattered development and when a Chinese gentleman sharing a cab with me in Beijing in his country of almost 1.4 billion people said, “Well if I can’t have a car how can I get a wife?” Those four countries together represent 2.7 billion people hankering to live the car-city lifestyle of Americans when there are 9 times as many of them on the Earth as Americans. And Americans are trying to figure out how to have better cars rather than figure out that the car is part of a whole system like any other living complex organism and better cars promote more sprawl and dependence on cheap energy – which is going away as we begin pursuing
this new idea of an economics rooted in physical realities.

Another very large factor passed over by the nervous is graduated income and property taxes. It is scientifically obvious that you have to go where the ore is to get copper, where the sun, wind or fossil fuels are to get energy in serious quantity. Similarly, following recent courageous suggestions by Jeffrey Sachs in the July 2010 Scientific American and recent comments by Hillary Clinton of all people, not known as a major economics theorist, you have to turn to taxing the rich – seriously. Not the middle class and the poor but the rich. The rich have convinced the poor and middle class to think “more taxes” means them. Smart trick, but that’s not the idea here: graduated income tax with the rich paying their share of what society and environment helped them make. That’s where the stored wealth to build a better world is and physical economics, if not today’s mainstream economists, would identify and prioritize that very genuine resource instantly.

What would the tax money be invested in? As placed in high priority above, befitting the enormous scale of the enterprise, reshaping cities as ecocities, cities for people not cars, and getting on with renewable energy development along with the radical energy conservation of ecocities.”