Thanks to a Silent Partner

Today Becky Dale compiled her last daily digest of Virginia transportation/land use clips, a resource that I have leaned upon to keep track of developments across the state. I have owed much of my ability to keep tabs on obscure controversies and trends around Virginia to stories I have picked up from the email that arrives in my in-box every day.

Alas, Becky has decided that she has better things to do for the first hour or two (or more) of her mornings than scour the Internet -- unpaid -- on the behalf of others. (She also compiled a daily list of "open government" articles.) I admire her tenacity in sticking to the anonymous endeavor as long as she did. I owe her a great debt, and she has my everlasting gratitude. Whatever the Bacon's Rebellion blog has achieved over the years is due in considerable part to her efforts.

Thanks, Becky. I don't know what you're going to do with all your free time now, but I hope you enjoy it!

Life in the "Fast Lane"

Via Jim at Bearing Drift comes a most interesting blog sighting: The Fast Lane, a blog from the USDOT that features contributions from, among others Sec. Mary Peters and even a few guest posts from folks like Tim Kaine.

Sure, there's plenty of rah-rah, and I would be surprised if the Secretary, or many of the other listed contributors, actually writes her own material. But it's another transpo resource for the ever-hungry Bacon's crowd to consume (just make sure you have a few grains of salt nearby).

SERENEDIPITY

When someone has been working for nearly 50 years to answer a set of questions it is splendid to come across another person who has arrived at many of the same answers to those questions via a much different route.

In 1961 while standing in what we now call a Cluster (Lewisburg Square) in a place of the scale we now call a Village (Beacon Hill) in the Boston New Urban Region we were finally able to articulate questions that had bounced around in our head while growing up on a farm, in the desert and in what we now call the Northern Rocky Mountain Urban Support Region.

The complexity of the questions was magnified by studying forestry, physics, mathematics, architecture and philosophy in Montana and Hawaii and by military service and travel in most of states of the US of A.

It took until 2000, aided by more studies, teaching at three universities, extensive travel in Europe, the Carribean and North America as well as working for some very smart clients to be in a position to set down a comprehensive Conceptual Framework and the Vocabulary necessary to address these questions in The Shape of the Future.

Imagine our delight at encountering the work of Richard Register! We have not met Register and do not agree with everything he writes but we do agree on a lot. The areas of agreement range from the problems with settlement patterns that require extensive or exclusive use of Autonomobiles, to the level of energy and resource efficiency one can expect from functional human settlement patterns, to what is happening to put citizens back in jeopardy in the New Orleans New Urban Region, to what Bill Gates and Warren Buffett could better be doing with their money.

Register’s base of operation and his current hands-on projects are focused in the Community and Subregion where we went to law school so we have an appreciation for the places he is trying to make better. His work takes him around the world and his observations about the places we have also experienced are on target. His insights into those we have not yet seen are enlightening.

Where does serendipity come in? We found out about Register when we contacted a college roommate to congratulate him on being named a Professor Emeritus at the University of Montana. His daughter, Kristin Miller, works with Register in Oakland, a Zentrum in the San Francisco Bay New Urban Region. We quoted Kristin in PART I of THE PROBLEM WITH CARS. We have not met Kristin either but heard about her years ago when her father was a struggling grad student at the University of Texas. Miller and Register are hard at work getting ready to host the seventh International Ecocity Conference (www.ecocityworldsummit.org )

We will be quoting Register in PART IV of THE PROBLEM WITH CARS and will be reviewing his book “Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature.” in Chapter 16 of TRILO-G. (Back in 1973 we started planning, building and managing what became the Village scale enclave of Burke Centre with the logo “Community in Harmony with Nature.” Burke Centre is home to around 20,000 citizens living in as much harmony with nature as is possible in National Capital Subregion and stay within the regulations of Fairfax County, VDOT, et. al.)

Register’s main web site is www.ecocitybuilder.org He maintains a Blog on that site where he post his current thinking. You can learn about the Denis Hayes Paradox – “Why are environmental Organizations winning so many battles and losing the war?” and the Richard Register Pledge: “This is the last new car I will every buy.”

Ecocity Builders publishes an enewsletter. It was a “perspective” in the March – April 2008 edition titled “Enduring Civilization” that cemented my respect for Register’s thinking. He outlines four parameters and two guidelines for future action. They have the heft of Fundamental Change.

Unfortunately the enewsletter is not accessible from the web site. If you would like a copy, send me an email and I will forward it.

We are calling attention to Registers work not so much for the Denizens who post comments on Bacons Rebellion Blog but for those who follow our columns and posts and communicate with us directly. We are chagrined to say some who find our work useful refuse to post or comment on a web site that is listed in some sources as being a “right” site and has contributors who are identified as being “right of center,” libertarian or conservative.

Our view is that if those who believe that it is imperative that civilization achieve a sustainable trajectory do not stop tossing rocks at one another then an evolution toward sustainability will never happen. See “Good News: Bad Reporting” 5 March 2008.

Alas, we will probably never be friends with Register because he has centered his work around developing “Ecocities.” We have found that the word “city” is a Core Confusing Word. But then he is working on “urban Villages” so there may be hope.
OK, we will not mention Core Confusing Words when we meet Richard Register.

EMR

Taking a Week Off from the Rebellion

Adios, amigos, it's spring vacation here in Richmond and that means travel. First to Wilksboro, N.C., to visit my wife's grandmother and celebrate her 100th anniversary, and then to Jackson, Wy, to see my daughter and take in a little skiing. Truth be told, my wife and son will be doing the skiing. I don't ski. At my age, I figure I'm too old to learn without inevitably taking a tumble and shredding the ligaments in my knees. I might try padding around in show shoes for a while, but that's the extent of my adventurousness. Some rebel, huh?

The General Assembly still has unresolved issues that I won't be able to comment upon, but I'm not terribly worried. For all the posturing of both sides, the budgetary issues that differentiate the Donkey Clan and Elephant clan seem pretty small. The real action will come later this year -- whenever Gov. Timothy M. Kaine decides to call a special section of the General Assembly to address the melt-down of last year's transportation funding package.

Sadly, I see little evidence that anyone has learned much of anything from this debacle. But devising a rational, user/beneficiary pays system for transportation funding is absolutely critical. The funding piece is only a partial solution to Virginia's transportation challenges -- there is no escaping the transportation-land use nexus -- but it is vital nontheless. We need to inject more money into the system, but we have to find a way to do it that doesn't perpetuate the dysfunctional human settlement patterns that are such a big part of the problem.

If structured properly, a user/beneficiary-pays system can provide financial inducements not only for people to modify their one-driver-one-car lifestyles but for developers and local government practitioners to embrace more transportation-efficient land use policies. I expect to devote close attention to this issue when I return.

Until then, I will check in sporadically as I can. Otherwise, I will leave the blog in the competent (and, hopefully, inflammatory) hands of Ed, Peter and our other contributors.

Broken Borders and Militant Jihad

Like other bloggers, Jeff Baird is a working stiff who plugs away at his job by day and pursues his blogging passion at night. But with virtually no cash -- just some help from some of his computer-geek friends -- he has produced a news-aggregation website of startling technical sophistication within just a few months. I take a special interest in Rightside News because I gave Baird, who lives in Richmond and reads Bacon's Rebellion, some advice early in his venture on how to hone his editorial focus. What he has accomplished on a shoestring is nothing short of remarkable.

As one might expect from the name of his publication, Rightside News takes a right-wing slant on the issues -- certainly more conservative than my own. Baird has a wide range of interests, which shows in his selection of articles, but his common theme is the threat to the American way of life from uncontrolled borders. Two of his three news channels are entitled, "Border & Sovereignty" and "Jihad USA." Drawing upon a wide range of Internet reporting and commentary, one channel highlights the phenomenon of illegal immigration and broken borders, while the second focuses on the spread of militant jihadism inside the United States. In both instances, Baird rounds up perspectives that you will rarely see displayed on the front page of your newspaper, much less on television (unless you watch Lou Dobbs).

Although Baird's interests are global (his third news channel is "Global Jidad"), he cannot help but be interested in how the issues play out in his own back yard, Virginia. If you'd been reading Rightside News, for instance, you could known that Esam Omeish, the militant leader of the Muslim American Society whose appointment to the Virginia Commission on Immigration sparked so much controversy, spoke at an organizing conference a week ago at the University of Toledo.

While Oneish does not preach violent jihad, there are others in Virginia who do. (See "Jihadists in our Midst.") Then there is the Jamaat ul-Fuqra ("Community of the Empoverished"), which maintains a secretive compound the back woods of Charlotte County. The Gates of Vienna blog provides one blogger's inquiries into this community that, he alleges, "refused to let its girl children go to school, and had top members arrested and convicted by the FBI for firearms violations. "

Jihad inside the United States is a realm where the Mainstream Media has proven over more than six years since 9/11 that it has little interest in pursuing. Clearly, we don't want to cast apersions on innocent Muslims living peacefully and lawfully in this country by launching witch hunts for jihadists. But on the other hand, we can't let politically correct thinking blind us to the reality that home-grown terrorist movements have taken root.

It is beyond the scope of Bacon's Rebellion to track militant jihadists. Our mission is building more prosperous, livable and sustainable regions. But Jihad inside the U.S. is read meat for Baird. If readers share Baird's concerns, I recommend Rightside News to them. Baird wants to create original content for his website, so he is looking for contributors. Anyone willing to write and do research on the topic should feel free to contact him at
jeff@rightsidenews.com.

Jon, Meet Doug

Via Jason, I see that one of Richmond's most thoughtful and entertaining bloggers, Jon Baliles, is backing away from his keyboard to take a job with the city of Richmond. Jon explains his move here:

...I have been offered and accepted a position within the Mayor's Office as a Public Information Manager.

I was not expecting such a position to be proffered and I was even less sure I would take it. It took several days of hard thinking and talking with confidants about the opportunity. Nevertheless, I determined the time was right.

Putting on a tie and shaving and riding the bus to the same office every day is something I have avoided like the plague for most of my adult life. Yet, awkwardness aside, it is now an opportunity to put forth some of the ideas I have crowed about from this perch.

It gives me the opportunity to see how the city works from the inside and bring ideas and action and a fresh perspective to the discussion and possibly reality (or the dustbin). It takes away some freedom and independence that blogging allows, but it pays a lot better than the $0 per year I have been making.

He also notes that he discussed the move with fomer Bacon's contributor Conaway Haskins (who works for some guy up north, I think).

This is an interesting move on a number of levels. While I can certainly appreciate the reluctance to wear a tie, Jon's 90 day experiment (or longer, if things work out)on the inside of the beast he has ridden so hard over the last few years will be more than just an exercise in sartorial splendor, the glories of the GRTC or how one relates to a mayor who can be...mercurial. It will also give at least one blogger a taste of what life is like on the other side of the digital fence -- selling proposals and ideas to a cautious, sometimes indifferent, and genuinely irrational public rather than critiquing them from afar. Perhaps the rest of us will be able to learn something from his efforts.

Best of luck, Jon. And remember: the only person on Doug Wilder's team is Doug Wilder.