By Tom Braford
Aesop’s fable about the Tortoise and the Hare seems like an interesting tale for the amusement of children.
What if it actually holds the answer to a sustainable planet?
Our friends, David Lehmann and Michael Gray, think it does. They recently visited St Louis from Denver to explore how we might collaborate on transportation.
Michael, an engineer, says the tale is all about the conservation of energy. Rabbits use up lots of energy quickly, hopping and dashing from one place to another, while turtles steadily move along more or less in a straight line without wasting energy stopping and starting.
Turtles spend lots of time just sitting in the sun on a log in a pond, absorbing the solar energy to digest their food and convert it to fat batteries to sustain their metabolism while hibernating in the warm mud at the bottom of the pond during the winter.
What a great metaphor for good urban design! No wonder our Native American brothers and sisters still refer to this continent as Turtle Island.
Michael says the answer to a sustainable future is designing and developing a much more efficient urbanism starting with transportation and freight systems. I would add fully integrated community-based housing, manufacturing and agriculture.
They envision an evolving system of raised tube pod cars that shuttle people and freight non-stop from point to point.
The system will be more efficient and cost-effective if it uses Ecovillage buildings that double as stations and hubs for renewable energy, telecommunications, food and recycling.
Opportunity Zones in St Louis and across the country can now provide the capital needed to cause this breakthrough in urban efficiency and the prosperity that will bring, starting in low-to-moderate income neighborhoods, instead of coming to them last as too often has been the case in the past.
If you want to get to an abundant future first, please join us. We will be a long way down the path to prosperity when others are just waking up to the new reality of turtle efficiency.
Potluck and discussion: Saturday, August 24, at noon.
Contact: braford@sbcglobal.net
www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com