Sustainable Urban Reader through pg. 58

Readings:

1.) From the reading, I learned a new term that was interesting, "growthmania".  Growthmania being the "mind-set that always puts growth in first place- the attitude that there is no such thing as enough that cannot conceive of too much of a good thing" (54).  I do that that many Americans are victims of this wish such examples of hummers, huge mansions, and having three cars for one family.  The mentality (or greed) to keep consuming is very hard to combat when we should be conserving and down sizing.

2.)  I would like some clarification on the except from the "Introduction to the limits to growth" by Meadows and how they found their conclusions.  

McHarg:
   McHarg has  a negative view of cities, describing them has gray prisons will pollution and poverty. For his point of view cities and their suburbs keep growing and expanding out ward that the countryside can no longer be found because the suburbs are becoming the countryside.  McHarg conducts a study on land usage sectioning the land into eight natural processes which perform work, or benefit man.  The eight natural processes are surface water, marches, floodplains, aquifers, aquifer recharge areas, prime agricultural land, forests and woodlands. Understanding these natural process and their location is very beneficial for city planners.  In this way we could build city features in areas that will not detriment natural processes.  If we fully understood the natural processes of floodplains for example we could a have avoided the environmental and city issues with New Orleans and Baton Rogue.  These two cities have been build very close to flood plains and even with science and engineering ingenuity there are still homes getting ruined due to floods and the environment being negatively altered from man-made dikes.
    Of the authors we have read so far I think that McHarg's are closest to Lewis Mumford.  Both authors have a negative outlook of cities and describe their problems related to the environment, wastefulness and unsustainable.

Frank:
  It was interested reading an except by Frank because he gave a different perspective from a non-capitol developing country standpoint.  Frank explains that in developing countries the main efforts of development after World Ward II, weakened ties with active capitalist involution leading to less autonomous development or industrialization.  Frank attributes the weakening ties to the metropolis-satellite chain mechanism. This metropolis-satellite chain in the world capitalist system results in increasing international inequality of incomes.

Meadows:
   Meadows conducted a study, generating a world model investigating five major trends of global concern: accelerating industrialization, raid population growth, widespread malnutrition depletion of nonrenewable resources, and deterioration of the environment.  Using these trends the model was to predict and project how these trends will effect the future.  This was the first model done on such a large scale. The world model study had three main conclusions.  First was that if growth trend remain unchanged then the limits to growth on earth will be reached within the next 100 years. Second, is that is is possible to alter the growth trends and gain a stable economic and ecological future.  The third conclusion was that the sooner people work towards stability in our population and economy the greater the changes of success.
    Meadows also did a human study on people's perspectives and concerns.  The result of the study showed that people have lot more concern for their family and local issues then for global, or future issues.  Since people are more focused on the current well-being of themselves and their family, it is hard to gain support for worldly issues such as climate change and environmental degradation.  A strategy to promote support and public concern for environmental and sustainability issues is to relate the problems to the present and how it will effect people and their families currently.

Daly:
   Daly has formulated two terms Growthmania and hyper-growthmania, to express the mind-set of people to keep wanting more and cannot conceive of too much of a good thing.  The two terms connect to the GNP people the greedy mind-set of people is fueling the GNP.
   Daly defines a steady state economy in which the total population and the stock of physical wealth are maintained constant.  We should be striving for a steady state economy because we cannot continue to grow infinitely. To reach a steady-state economy Daly proposes limits to consumption and setting maximums and minimum limits on wealth and income. The main barrier to the transformation to a steady state economy is changing the behavior and morals of our consumeristic society.