Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.

The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

The fortunate and successful New Urbanists will be the ones who can find local infill projects in small towns and small cities associated with farming, water transport, (perhaps rail too) and water power. I do not believe personally that we will retrofit much of suburbia in the way many people wish we might. The capital won't be there, and I'm rather convinced that the population is headed down - though this will be a lagging effect, because even starving people have sex.

Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.

The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. When you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there.

No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it.