Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Moderator: My great pleasure to introduce to everyone President Crow. It’s unusual to have the president of a large university speak to an undergraduate classroom, and really an honor to have Dr. Crow here today. His presence illustrates his concern for students at ASU, as well as sustainability. Being a sustainability major myself, as many of us are, it’s a privilege to have the person who established a school of sustainability here to speak with us today. Thanks to President Crow’s leadership, there are now five degree programs here in the School of Sustainability: two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees, and a PhD.

Outside School of Sustainability, ASC is also known for its innovation and entrepreneurship. Under President Crow, we’ve added 10 to 15 transdisciplinary programs to the university. Most importantly, President Crow recognizes the growing challenges in society today. Under ASU’s progressive curriculum, he uses the university as a change agent for the betterment of the future. Today, he will speak to us about urban sustainability. Dr. Crow, you’ll have 45 minutes. After that, you’ll have to answer to a panel of students. We’re going to grill you with some tough questions, so I hope you’re ready.

President Crow: Okay, thanks.

Audience:[Applause]

President Crow: Okay, can everybody hear me all right? We’re gonna start by talking about: Why is the building of sustainable cities such an important topic? Why is it that it’s worthy of a class, bringing in all of you, from different backgrounds and different disciplines and different trajectories?

Who knows the name of the species that you are an individual member of? Homo sapiens; Homo sapiens, and you’re from the genus H O M O, where there are Homo habilis and Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. The genus that you’re a part of, that you’re the product of an evolutionary process, has been around for how long? A long time; round numbers, let’s say—I wrote this down, just to get this right—83,000 generations; roughly 83,000 generations. Our species, which everyone in this room is a member of, we’ve been around for 160,000 years or so, and that equates, on about a 30-year generational cycle, to 5,300 generations. The species that you have been biologically derived from, 5,300 generations. How many thinks that’s a lot? It is a lot, but you could fit 5,300 people into a big—the lower level of Wells Fargo holds about 6,000 people. 6,000 individuals; 5,300 generations as a species.

Only in the last eight of those generations—only eight—have we reached a point where we actually have crawled out of the intellectual abyss, and begun in the phrase—and I wrote this down—of Immanuel Kant, a famous European philosopher who said that, as he was describing a period in human history called “the Enlightenment,” which was a period of intensive scientific discovery, the emergence of the scientific method, the emergence of the linkage of the scientific method to the way that we design things, the way that we are able to create things and move things forward in different ways. Professor Kant, eight generations ago said—he called the Enlightenment, “mankind’s final coming of age”; the final coming of age. He said, “The emancipation of human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.”

The emancipation of human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error; 5,292 generations of our species, ignorance and error. Eight generations ago, he believed that we had reached a point where we could begin to think about moving away from that. Now, what else was going on in that particular era of the Enlightenment, the mid to late 18th century?

Audience: Industrial Revolution?

President Crow: The what?

Audience: Industrial Revolution.

President Crow: The Industrial Revolution was underway, the concept of advanced capitalism, the concept of markets, the emergence of an organized democratic republic, in a place later called the United States of America. Simultaneously, with Kant’s conceptualization of this movement away from the human consciousness of ignorance and error, we saw two things begin to emerge, two founding ideas. All of you live in, and some of you grew up in, the United States, which is, at its root, a democratic republic operating in a capitalistic system, so it’s, therefore, an economic democracy; a very complex thing, economic democracy.

The two founding documents of this economic democracy that we’re a part of, which are products of the Enlightenment, this first engagement in reconceptualizing and rethinking what the world might be, after thousands of generations of lives that were brutal and brief. The two crowing documents on which this republic, that you’re either a citizen of or a part of by being here, were founded, were the Constitution of the United States, derived in the Summer of 1787, in Philadelphia, and the basic concept of the invisible hand that Adam Smith conceptualized and articulated in his writings in 1776, from The Wealth Of Nations.

Let’s take those two ideas, this notion of the Constitution, which designed the way that this republic works, which guarantees the liberties and rights of its individual citizens, at least in an ideal sense, which we’ve struggled with since its writing to implement, and this concept of the invisible hand, that somehow the forces of the market and trade, and free and open expression of trade, is a way in which people can move forward with their individual wellbeing, accumulating into a group wellbeing, accumulating into a positive outcome.

Now, who’s read, The Wealth of Nations, or studied any parts of it? Any of you guys? Constitution? How many of you have—I know you’ve all looked at that, or most of you have looked at that. What do either document have to say about sustainability, the environment, the relationship between man and nature? Anybody wanna take a guess? The answer’s nothing. The founding documents on which our present civilization is based, at least Western civilization, the founding documents, the design of capitalism as embodied by Adam Smith, the founding documents of the ideals of the United States—the Constitution is an ideal. It’s not where you are. It’s where you’d like to be. Neither document gives any consideration to the relationship between man or humankind and the environment. None; not mentioned; not discussed.

What Kant called the Enlightenment, I, actually, called the limited Enlightenment, the less than fully exposed Enlightenment, the less than complete Enlightenment, or what I would also call—which would be fair, in the context of thousands of generations, cuz we’re only talking about eight generations ago—the beginning of the Enlightenment; the beginning of the Enlightenment. Here we sit, April of 2012. What’s happened since the Enlightenment? Unequivocally, six generations of unmitigated exploitation, particularly, in the West—unmitigated.

The founding documents outline property rights; they outline the concepts of property; they outline the concepts of individual decision-making; they outline the concepts of capitalism. I’m not arguing against either. All I know is that the product, relative to our relationship with the natural system on which we’re dependent, for the six generations following the alleged Enlightenment, have been unmitigated exploitation, unlimited population growth, unmitigated use of resources, and the development of tools, in that same timeframe, by economists immediately following Adam Smith, who developed tools of such limited utility that there’s no way for us, presently, even in the year 2012, to evaluate anything on an economic term longer than 100 years. Anybody who’s a business major in here? Okay, right there, the gray striped shirt. How do you calculate net present value? Don’t get heart palpitations. How about you? Net present value? Come on, net present value; somebody take a stab. Yes?

Audience: You take the present value of the future cash flows, then divide it by the initial investment, or subtract the initial investment, to see what’s it’s worth.

President Crow: Well, you do that, but you also have to discount the money over time.

Audience: Yeah.

President Crow: What that means, then, in discounting the money over time; to make it simple, in discounting money over time, it means you can do anything. If you can pay for the land, you can actually give it back completely destroyed, because you paid for it. If you rent the land along the river to dump your chemicals in, you can do whatever you want, because you paid for it. There’s no intergenerational mechanisms; there’s no thousand year calculation, because there’s no tool, no mechanism, nothing. I’ll come back to that, in terms of what you’re learning in this class and what you’re moving towards.

Now, remember, I said it was eight generations ago, that we began this process identified by Kant, where we actually developed consciousness—Who are we? What are we? Where are we going? How do we get there?—this concept of normative thinking. Who wants to take a stab at “normative,” what it means? This is the normal school. It doesn’t mean that.

Audience: It’s the opposite of positive economy, and it’s, sort of, where you apply economy to what can help us in the future, not what the thing can do for us now.

President Crow: Normative is very much—exactly, it’s very much about the future. Normative political philosophy is about what political ideas will help you to achieve goals or objectives that you want to achieve in the future. Normative economic theory will talk about constructing economic mechanisms relative to the future. In a sense, at the beginning of the Enlightenment, what we began to be able to do, was to think on a normative basis, through the tools, and the science, and the background, and the rigor that was allowed. Eight generations ago; that’s nothing, but, at the same time, hundreds of years. Six generations of unmitigated, without thought, exploitation, A totally unsustainable run, for six generations, as population’s going up, as cites are being built, as megacities are beginning to emerge; as the location of the cities, the dependence on water, the design of the cities, the design of the way that things operate, all conceptualized, even after the Enlightenment, in the way that they were conceptualized on this fundamental set of economic theories, and in the United States, on this fundamental set of democratic theories.

What did it produce for us? It produced for us a certain fate of unsustainability. Unsustainability. Rivers on fire in the United States, cancer rates, carcinogenic and mutagenic compounds in the food supply, Los Angeles under alert, London under alert, for air pollution that was actually killing people. I won’t walk you through because, hopefully, you’ve studied all of this, this whole notion of sort of where we’ve been and where we are. Some of the arguments that you hear, sometimes, being levied towards China by the United States are, “Please don’t do this,” and China says back, “Well, you did it. You did it. You had unmitigated exploitation, to get to where you are, so we’re gonna take a few generations of unmitigated exploitation, to get to where we need to be economically, then, we’ll think about how to do things in a different way.”

We had six generations of that, since the Enlightenment, and two generations we have had—and I’m trying to put this class and you, as students, into perspective. We’ve had two generations of beginning to rethink and expand our model; two generations. Fifty years ago, this year, a scientist who worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service of the United States and precursors of it, by the name of Rachel Carson, wrote a book. She wrote many books, but this particular book that she wrote got a lot of play. It was called, Silent Spring, and she, basically, articulated in Silent Spring—let’s see who’s read it. Who’s read Silent Spring? I don’t know, you almost raised your hand. Who read it? What did she say, “Join the United States,” whatever that says?

Audience: She said that all the advanced societies were being complicated and over-designed.

President Crow: Right, so she chemically was able to identify, through her study of wildlife, that we, through synthetic chemicals that we’d been introducing in the previous hundred years, had not been realizing that we were altering the entire food supply, the entire ecosystem, or all ecosystems, by not realizing that chemicals concentrated as they moved up the food chain. Where do we sit at the food chain level?

Audience: At the top.

President Crow: At the top of the food chain, so, therefore, we would be the biggest sufferer, or one of the biggest sufferers, and so, lo and behold, she articulated a self-defeating set of decisions that we had made. We have decided to kill ourselves chemically, through one decision here and one decision there; a decision about how to manage mosquitos, or a decision about how to chemically enhance corn production, or a decision about how to manufacture plastics, or a decision about how to manufacture in factories in Brooklyn or the Bronx or Cleveland or Cincinnati, or any of the other East Coast cities that became highly polluted, highly toxic unsustainable places.

She, 50 years ago, a generation and three-fourths ago, she and many others, began to outline that we have a big problem, and people began to get a sense that we have a big problem. Now, she was only able to do that because of the tools of the Enlightenment, as a scientist. She was able to prove that the food chain had been contaminated. How many of you are presently consuming from a highly contaminated food chain? That would be all of you. How many of you have lives that will be or have been, or your families will or have been affected by that food chain? That would be all of you.

Now, what you hear people say—I guess, they call themselves realists—“Well, that’s better than the way it used to be.” There’s some validity to that, but people don’t realize—and Rachel Carson outlined it for us—it is cumulative over time; cumulative over time. 1970, something happened in the United States, by what now would be called a moderate Republican President, by the name of Richard Nixon. President Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Protection Act, which created an entity called the Environmental Protection Agency. In our zealotry to address these problems of chemical contamination and mutagenic and carcinogenic compounds and air pollution, and the effect on our life, and the unsustainability of our water, and the unsustainability of our air, and all the other things that we were doing to ourselves, a regulatory agency was put in place; a regulatory agency, called the Environmental Protection Agency.

Now, is a regulatory agency the way to change people’s behavior, to reconceptualize who we are and what we are, and how we plan and what we build, and how we design cities? The answer is, no, far from it. It’s a hammer looking for a nail; a hammer looking for a nail. Here, just in the last generation before this one; the last generation before you, we became aware of the unsustainability of our unmitigated exploitation, and we took the one step that we know how to do, which was, we decided to regulate economic decision-making to then alter environmental outcomes. We tried to do that through a democratic process of decision-making, and through that, we did see some improvements in the last 40 years. Some of us, that are the geezers in the room, like David and myself—[laughter] I don’t see any other geezers in here, just me and you, David, sorry; [laughter] born like way back before 1960.

The world actually was different, even in that time frame, from what it is now. There have been slight improvements, but no dramatic changes, and substantial conflict around the concept of regulation, as the mechanism by which we will try to produce sustainability as an outcome. How many, off the cuff, think that regulations is the way in which sustainability and the design of sustainable cities can be produced? How many of you think that that’s the way? One, two; a couple. How of many of you think it’s a way; it’s one of the things that you might do, and there’s a lot of other things that you would need to do?

All right, so here we are. We realize that it’s not enough, in spite of the improvement, so here we are, and this is really a strange thing. It’s really, to me, weird; being, sort of, I always take a look at things from a historical perspective, in everything that I do. What were the decisions we made before? What were the people that came before me? What did they do? Why did they do it? What was their reason? What was their rationality? What was the effect? What was the impact? Yet, here, giving this talk today, I realize something that’s really quite interesting, relative to you being in this class.

It turns out that the world we’re living in right now, the designed world—there’s two parts to the planet, for the most part. There’s the natural world, which we are from, which, it turns out, both gives us life and is very harsh. Humans have not always had an easy time on this planet, our species. Our species, in the last 5,300 generations have been reduced. I just talked to one of our anthropologists today, to make sure I could get this number right. We’ve been reduced to as few as 2,000 individual members in those 5,300 generations, and now, we’re more than seven billion individual members.

Somehow, we think that the things that we’ve designed, the way that we use the ocean, that cities work, the way they operate, the way we bring in and take out all of the things that we need for our survival; that, of course, is our technological foundation of adaptation to the earth’s natural systems. We think that, somehow, since we have made it this far, that the models that we have are sustainable. The models that we have are not sustainable, in their present form. There are pieces of them that are, there are aspects of them that are, but the models that we have for our cities, where we cluster ourselves, where we concentrate our technological responses to the natural environment, they’re not sustainable.

That realization is no older than your parents, and this class—how many of you were born after 1990? After 1985, but before 1990? Before 1985? Okay, so your average birthdate is somewhere around 1988 or 1989, just to put that into perspective. Having said that, little would you know that you happen to be sitting in a time and place where you, the actual people sitting in this class; you, the actual students studying the subjects in this class, or other classes that are related to this, are actually the first generation which has gotten to take on the development of a whole new way of thinking about this set of problems. That’s where we are. That’s how fast things are moving.

I wrote down that—and this is the case, and we can argue this with the student panel, if they would like—much of our designed world is not just unsustainable, in the way that it’s presently designed, the way that it presently operates. It’s actually destructive to our long-term interests; destructive, that is, it’s actually designed in a way so as not to be able to provide what we need for continued health and wellbeing, going forward into the future. Again, that’s why I put this number of generations on the table.

For the 5,000 generations that follow us—now, the second I say that, the majority of you in the room, by human nature, say, “I don’t care about those other generations. That’s too far into the future.” Most of us cannot name our great-great-grandparents. Most of us will not see our great-great-grandchildren. Most of us have no idea where we came from or where our families came from; we just don’t. Intergenerational thinking is very difficult for our species. I’m not really sure of that, but it is the case that the decisions that we’ve been making over the last eight generations have put us into a situation where we don’t have eight generations to derive new methodologies—and I’m not doom and gloom.

I’m not talking about the end of the human race, or the end of humanity, or the end of anything. I’m talking about the quality of life that you presently have achieved. Energy consumption, for instance, right now, within our urban areas, is growing at an exponential rate, but if you just took the exponential rate of growth—not even exponential. Take out exponential. Just do compounding numbers. 400 years from now, the Sun doesn’t even deliver that much energy to Earth. That’s the rate of increase. 2,000 years from now, the galaxy [laughter] doesn’t have that much energy, meaning, it’s absurd, or beyond absurd. Here we sit.

In this generation, we’re doing two things that the previous 5,300 generations couldn’t do, and you all are a part of it, those of you that are in the School of Sustainability, or those of you that are taking courses like this sustainable city design course; those of you that are involved in all aspects of the university. We’re doing two things—and I’m gonna sort of look at these carefully, and look at my notes, to make sure you get these right—make sure I get them right, also.

For the first time, ever, we’re actually evolving sustainability as a value-laden science. Most science, chemistry, physics, it is valued lists. It is without moral basis. Molecules are molecules, and chemists study molecules to make new molecules that they think we need. Physicists study energy to understand how it works. There is no value assigned to either matter or energy. Sustainability, as a value oriented science, is an attempt to integrate that which we have learned in the Enlightenment, about how to carry out science, how to figure out how nature works, how to adapt from what we understand about how nature works and to construct what we call the design science, what we need to design, so that we can adapt to nature.

Without an adaptation to nature, we do not survive. Everyone in here, I can see all your adaptations on your bodies: your clothing; your eyewear; your footwear. All of you are consuming technologies every day. Who ate any object of a fruit or a vegetable today? Dairy products, anybody? Meat, of any type? All of those? Those are all engineered technologies. None of them occur, as you consume them, in nature; none of them. They are all highly engineered. They are all products of this design that we have constructed. Here we sit, in this generation, creating sustainability as a core value and a value-laden science.

Now, what’s difficult about sustainability, as a core value, is how do you get consensus around that? While we don’t have consensus yet, in our society, we’re moving toward it. It doesn’t mean we all agree, because we never do agree on everything, and we never will. Why would we? There’s too many ways to do things. What would be the issues with a value-laden science, that would make sustainable science and the building of a sustainable city different than, let’s say, chemistry? Who’s a philosophy major, anybody? Nobody? Political science major? Way there in the back, what’s the difference between a value-laden science and non-value-laden science? Take a stab at it.

Audience: A value-laden science and a non-value?

President Crow: Yeah, like chemistry; you’re just studying molecules.

Audience: Yeah.

President Crow: Versus, let’s say, sustainable science, where you’re trying to engineer a particular response, for a particular outcome, for a particular purpose. Now, some people just call all of that engineering, but, just, what would come to mind? What would be something difficult with a value-laden science?

Audience: Like the issue of morality?

President Crow: Yeah, it has to do with, how do you define it, and who’s values?

Audience: Yeah.

President Crow: Right; exactly, and so, it goes to this question of, “What’s moral? What’s not moral?” Exactly. Somebody else raised their hand. Who was it?

Audience: Just, it’s more subjective.

President Crow: It’s more subjective, exactly, so it’s subject to individual interpretation, as opposed to raw, cardinal facts. Raw cardinal fact says, the atomic weight of oxygen is what? Sixteen; so that’s a cardinal fact, that the atomic weight of oxygen, as far as we know, wherever we find oxygen, will always be the same, exactly. You were gonna say something?

Audience: I was just gonna say, it’s what you said earlier, by the normative means.

President Crow: The normative science, yes; it’s about thinking about what you want science to accomplish, and then, the second thing that we’re doing—and this is really an important concept, because this is really what this class is about. This is really what you’re working on. We’re moving to innovate from and with nature as the guide, as opposed to nature being the thing to be exploited; using nature as the guide. How many of our cities are heavily designed around nature inspired conceptualizations, versus how many of our cities are just, basically, no longer buffalo skin, fire in the teepee huts; just replaced by bricks and wood and steel, but the same idea? Meaning, what we’re trying to do is to stay warm, stay cool, stay dry, keep our food ready to be consumed, and be able to move around on roads that aren’t muddy.

How many of you think we have designed cities that are reflective of nature’s inspiration? Can anybody name such a place? How many of you think that, basically, we’re still designing cities that take advantage of whatever works? “If I can dig black stuff up out of the earth, and light it on fire to produce electricity, so that I can have lights, and there’s a side effect that’s in the atmosphere, that’s not so good, well, maybe; so be it.”

How does nature perform work and produce energy? Does it burn things? No, it has very, very elegant mechanisms; very, very elegant tools, using natural systems that have evolved over billions of years. This notion of, somehow, moving to innovate from and with nature as the guide, rather than moving to innovate, exploiting nature at every possible chance; what’s the result? The result is, that those of you sitting in this room, taking this class, are representative of a tiny, tiny, tiny, small fraction of the people of your species, all seven billion of them, who are now taking on the weight of trying to find a way to rethink our way out of thousands of generations of ignorance.

Now, don’t get me wrong. We’re sitting here, and we’re in an air-conditioned space, and we have electric lights, and we have food to eat, and our families are, for the most part, well off, certainly by comparison to other families in other parts of the planet. We have medicine. We have all kinds of things. Are things being provided to you in a way that you know for certain—and maybe you don’t care, because many people don’t, because it’s not in our species’ context to think this way—that all will be well, 100 generations from now, or all will be well five generations from now, or three generations from now? How many of you think all will be well five generations from now, 150 years from now? All will be well; that is, things will be better than they are right now. Who thinks that? Come on; I mean, I think that, cuz we’re gonna figure this stuff out. How many of you think, maybe, not the case? Yeah, so most of you think, maybe, not the case.

Eight generations of unmitigated exploitation, and now, we have but two or three generations to set a new course. This whole notion of sustainable cities, even Rachel Carson, with all of her genius, all of her enlightenment, probably couldn’t have conceived at the time, the notion of conceptualizing a sustainable city; the design of a sustainable city; a class filled with hundreds of students focusing on the idea of a sustainable city. What do we need, if, in fact, we’re going to build sustainable cities?

The first thing that we need to understand is that the trajectory that we have been on is not sustainable. If it was sustainable, the Grand Banks—it’s not about a city per se, but it’s about the cumulative consumption of cities. The Grand Banks fishing area in the North Atlantic, which is no longer productive—no longer productive—would still be productive, but we didn’t figure that out. We just decided to deplete it. Your body would not be filled with, on average, hundreds of carcinogenic compounds, that we produced and then interjected into you, as a part of the food chain that you participate in. We would have thought of some other way.

What do we need? We need innovations, at every level, and innovations are not about technology only. We need new philosophies. For instance, the philosophy of science says, today, that science can remain amoral, that science should be amoral. There are some that believe that that is an incomplete conceptualization of science, that you may want to save the science that has a normative purpose, beyond just knowing how nature works, that the enlightenment of science for the sake of science is insufficient. Science for the sake of what? Science for what objective? It might be cool to build ray guns that could kill millions of people with their use, but is that what we should be doing? I’m just trying to give you a stark example.

New economics—who’s an economics major? Who’s taken undergraduate economics? All right, I’m gonna take you—no, behind her, in the pink shirt. You took microeconomics or macroeconomics? Did you take evolutionary economics? You learned about supply and demand, and you learned about how price is set, and you learned about markets, right? You learned about how to determine elasticity, as a concept. You learned, probably, about trade and how markets work, right? All those kinds of things. Well, who thinks that set of tools, in economics, is adequate to the complexity of a seven billion global population, operating in an unsustainable way, where no natural resources have any value greater than 100 years into the future? Who thinks that toolkit is up to the task?

Well, let’s back up a little bit. Who thinks that we make decisions now that will have consequences, for the decisions that we make now, that are economically justifiable, more than 100 years in the future? Who thinks we make decisions like that now? Yeah, we do every day. For instance, “Let’s go all nuclear, and we’re gonna bury that waste over here, and that waste containment facility needs to be able to contain that nuclear waste for 10,000 years.” Somebody name an object built by a human 10,000 years ago, that’s larger than the palm of my hand. What, Stonehenge, 10,000 years ago? I don’t think so. What? Pyramids? You guys need to read more history. Those aren’t 10,000 years old. David, 10,000 years? There aren’t any. There aren’t any, but, “No, we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna build these things that’s gonna hold this nuclear radioactive material for 10,000 years. We’re gonna be able to pay for all that right now.” You were gonna say something about economics, that one in the blue shirt? No? What?

Audience: Yeah, some of the tools might be useful in the future.

President Crow: What? I’m not saying that they’re all dead or no good, but name the ones that are good.

Audience: I think, monetizing ecosystems. I don’t wanna talk when you’re talking.

President Crow: Okay. [Laughter] All right, monetizing, so, ecosystem services and the evaluation of ecosystem services, and so forth. We need new tools. We need to modify our tools. We’re gonna need new concepts. We’re gonna need new concepts about change, new concepts about intergenerational decision-making. We plant these cities, and then, later, we’re surprised when they’re wiped from the face of the Earth. New Orleans was badly damaged in 2005, by Hurricane Katrina. Will it ever be damaged again? Almost certainly. It happens to be where those hurricanes go. It happens to be at the mouth of a river, in such and such a place. How do we deal with all of that? New models; new economics; new philosophy; new energy systems—new energy systems.

I know I’m down to four minutes. Where’s my—where’d she go? There she is. How much energy is delivered by the Sun to the planet Earth’s surface, on a daily basis, compared to what we consume? A tiny fraction of what is delivered, we actually consume; a tiny fraction of what’s delivered. What do we do with what’s delivered from the Sun? We haven’t figured that out yet. We decided it was easier and cheaper—and I’m not talking about solar power, and the simplicity of solar arrays, and things like that. We just decided that it was simpler to go out back and dig holes and light it on fire.

We’re like up two steps from wood, and we derive our energy system from a fantastically inefficient set of mechanisms, where we boil water, from either coal or nuclear power, to do what? To turn metal blades, that then generate electricity, that we then distribute with unbelievable decreases in efficiency—unbelievable—but it works, and so we said, “Oh, halleluiah, let’s go with this,” even though we now know that the photons delivered from the Sun are thousands of times greater than what we need for all of the energy consumption needs on the planet. You gonna wake your buddy up, there, sitting next to you? There you go.

New ways of teaching; new ways of teaching. Are we teaching about sustainability as a value? Well, we’re starting to. Students that are younger than you, based on survey data that I’ve seen, have a very intense view about some issues associated with sustainability, so new ways of teaching. Then, let’s come lastly to new cities; new cities. Who’s built a net zero city, that consumes and re-consumes everything that it uses? For instance, what we’re presently filling landfills with, is an unbelievably valuable energy source, an unbelievably valuable source of metals and plastics and glass. It’s unbelievable, and we’re beginning to figure these things out, but who’s designed a net zero city?

President Crow: German?

Audience: Well, nobody has yet, but there’s people that are trying; the Germans, others; people in the United Arab Emirates, with Masdar City, and other places that are under conceptual design; new cities that are being built in China; places that are being conceptualized as neighborhoods, in Mexico and the United States. Whole new designs, where you reconceptualize the whole industrial ecology, but, most importantly, for you all, is this conceptualization that, I think, would be the beginning of a new kind of enlightenment, eight generations into the Enlightenment; an enlightenment where what we design is built on the premise and the assumption that it has to be adaptive and resilient, rather than rigid and hard.

We design our cities right now as rigid, hard structures. They are conceptualized to be protective, rather than adaptive. They’re conceptualized to be fixed, rather than resilient. They are still, basically, castles or fortresses, conditioned to provide protection from the environment, rather than, in a sense, to take advantage of the environment. Often, when you hear people talk about things, in the way that I’m talking about them, what they say is that, “We can’t figure out how to do it economically, because these methodologies are the least expensive.”

Here you all sit, in the generation that you’re in, as the first generation of 5,300 generations of your own species actually capable of having this conversation, actually capable of actually going out and expanding on the enlightenment, actually capable of conceptualizing a sustainable city, whether you’re going to be in city planning, or running school boards, or in business, or running businesses, or running museums, or whatever it is that you’re doing—or just raising you families or just living in these cities—whatever it is that you’re doing. Most of us either live in now, or will live in, cities, and if we don’t live in the cites, we live in the places supporting the cities.

It really is the case that this is the first generation—you all—actually capable of conceptualizing how to build a sustainable city and how to advance it, so the weight is on you. The weight is on you, and it’s a weight that you should happily take, because it will provide economic opportunity, change opportunity, opportunities for success, but more importantly, opportunities for you and your families, and your children and your grandchildren and their children, to actually get onto a sustainable path, which is something that we’re not on. Thank you.

Audience: [Applause]

Moderator: Thank you, President Crow, that was inspirational. Now, I’d like to introduce you to the panel of students, who will interrogate you thoroughly.

President Crow: Okay.

Moderator: Panel, go ahead and tell Dr. Crow your names, and then you can start your questions.

Kevin: Hi, Dr. Crow. As I mentioned on our way over, my name is Kevin Keller. Can you all hear me back there? I am a sustainability and supply chain management student, and I’m in Barrett, and I also am the Entrepreneurship Chair at Changemaker Central. My question is, you’re asking us, as the first generation that really needs to address this issue—and I’ve also heard you speak pretty passionately about entrepreneurship as a tool and a catalyst for change. How do you see those two tools, the science of sustainable and entrepreneurship, melding to create the sort of change that you say that we need to take initially?

President Crow: Unfortunately, most people don’t realize how empowered they are, that at the end of the day, it’s about generating ideas and advancing your ideas into the economic market, into the political market, whatever market you’re advancing your ideas into, acting in entrepreneurial ways. It’s about advancing your ideas. It could be your ideas about how your company operates. It could be your ideas about what you do in my family. It could be your ideas about the city that you’re a deputy assistant city manager of, or whatever it is that you ultimately do or ultimately become. It’s about your ability to advance ideas in an entrepreneurial kind of way. Entrepreneurial means you have an idea that’s better than what exists now. You’ve gotta convince other people to be able to take that idea. You’ve gotta attracted other people to the idea to advance the idea. Ultimately, you have to attract to it either economic capital or political capital, and then, advance that idea, so these things all come together, because that’s how things work. I see this as a way.

Now, by the way, most of you have ideas, but you don’t advance them, for whatever reason. I talked to a lot of students. They have wonderful ideas, brilliant ideas, fantastic ideas, and they feel inhibited from advancing their ideas. I don’t know why, because each of us unique. Each of us has our own experience, our own angle, our own way. Each of you interpreted what I said somewhat differently. Each of you would derive somewhat different ideas from that, and so, it really is the case that the way for things to get better, or the way for things to be fixed, or the way for things to be improved, is to advance your ideas.

I always hope that 70 percent of my ideas, someone will listen to; 30 percent of my ideas, people think are really bad and no one listens to it. I’m shooting for 70 percent, that people listen to, and then, from that 70 percent, I hope I can get a couple of ideas that I can advance, with a lot of input and critique and so forth from others, and get other people involved in it and so forth. I think that should be the same for all of us. That’s how we should be trying to advance.

Kevin: Thank you.

Christina: Hello, Dr. Crow. My name’s Christina Wanta. I am a marketing and business sustainability major. My question for you is, what main factor do you believe caused people to wait this long to implement regulations, in terms of sustainability or designing sustainable cities, other than ignorance?

President Crow: What caused people to wait this long to use regulations as a technique to help implement sustainability? Remember, they started these regulations in 1970. I would argue—as most people in the class agree—that that’s only a piece of how you advance. Why did they wait until 1970, or in England, in the 1950’s, or in China, until the 2010’s, to advance such regulations? It’s because regulations are viewed by many as ways to slow down economic progress. Regulations are viewed by many as constraints on economic independence and economic decision-making. Many people think, “I ought to be able to strip mine whatever piece of land I can buy,” and if it, basically, chops down all the mountains in Eastern Kentucky, well, “So what? I paid for ‘em. If that then later leads to acid mine drainage, or if that later leads to runoff that then floods the communities or whatever, that’s somebody else’s problem, because I paid for it.”

What makes these things so hard is this conflict between the individual, trying to advance their economic interests, and the groups economic interests or sustainability interests or what have you. That’s what makes this so complicated. Right now, we live in a country that has a very elaborate political design for the system that we live in, but it doesn’t consider anything’s related to sustainability, and so, perhaps, it needs to be looked at. Perhaps, it needs to be thought about. Perhaps, we need to think through some of those things. I think that the main reason that things have taken so long to get to this point is that we’ve been too immature; too immature. We haven’t had the tools, the mechanisms, and we’re driven very heavily by individual economic variables.

Kara: Hello, Dr. Crow. My name is Kara. I am an urban planning major in transportation. My question is, in your opinion, how can we make the City of Phoenix transportation system more sustainable?

President Crow: How can you make the City’s—

Kara: City of Phoenix transportation system more sustainable.

President Crow: What’s interesting in a city like Phoenix, is the way that it has been structured, where it has a low population density, no massive center mass; that is, even downtown Phoenix, is low population density. There’s a job corridor between Phoenix and Tempe that has a lot of the jobs concentrated in that area. How do you make transportation more sustainable? Ultimately, at the end of the day, it goes to changing the technological platform that people have choices that they can make from.

Right now, as you make choices, each of us get—how many of you drive a car? How many drive a car every day or at least a couple of times a week? Yeah, so you’re doing that. Like myself, you’re moving around. That’s how you’re moving around, so what are your choices? Your choices are, an internal combustion engine, with a certain kind of efficiency, from a petroleum derived fuel. That’s what 99 percent of all of our cars are, and so, what we have is insufficient technological options for choices that are built around the concept of sustainability. Sustainability being, how can we lower our environmental footprint, while, at the same time, achieving our economic and personal objectives? It’s about building more alternatives.

I won’t go through the elaborate assessment of public transportation systems and so forth and so on, but it’s some combination of all of those. At the end of the day, we’ve chosen, as the fuel of choice, fossil fuels, a fuel which is costing us environmentally, costing us politically, costing us economically, costing us in national political decisions that we have to make, relative to the defense of the United States, yet we seem immobilized; immobilized from altering ourselves away from that, because that is a highly optimized technological platform, delivering to us a seemingly low-cost fuel.

What we need, is to really begin to try to understand, what’s the actual cost of how our transportation system works, and get people to understand that actual cost and start making decisions based on that, which is, again, very difficult. That goes back to one of things I talked about, which was education, and so, it’s about having better technological choices, better information, better decision-making. All those things would be a part of it.

Kara: Thank you, very much.

Jaris Williams: Good afternoon, Dr. Crow. My name is Jaris Williams.

President Crow: And you support the Detroit Tigers?

Jaris Williams: Absolutely. [Laughter]

President Crow: [Laughter] Yeah.

Jaris Williams: I’m an urban planning major. My question is related to the State of Arizona. There’s been some recent talks about possibly doing away with the term “sustainability,” and a lot of the industry here—

President Crow: How do you do away with the term “sustainability”?

Jaris Williams: Yeah, well, in the industry.

President Crow: Like, by edict or something?

Audience: [Laughter]

President Crow: A lot of people in industry don’t wanna hear the term sustainability. What they like to hear the term of is “profit.”

Jaris Williams: Yeah, and so, with that thinking—cuz there’s been a lot of resistance, especially contrary to how a lot of us, this generation of students, think about sustainability. How are we supposed to infiltrate a world that is so resistant, currently, and that are so motivated for profit, as engineers and sustainable majors and urban planning majors?

President Crow: Yeah.

Jaris Williams: How are we to infiltrate that system, with that type of—

President Crow: Well, you don’t have infiltrate. You’re already in. You don’t have to infiltrate. The way to look at this is to take the economic system that we have, to understand how it works, and to figure out how you can move towards sustainability and make money at the same time. It’s how do you develop sustainable business practices, sustainable tools, sustainable technologies, sustainable mechanisms, that allow, on various scales—and there’s lots of people trying to do this right now—ways in which capital can be aggregated, capital can be invested, capital can gain return on its investment. You use the existing system.

Short of that, or in a different methodology than that, you do what some people call the “back door approach,” where you develop the technology, you go somewhere where you can use it, you grow it in a market outside of the United States, and then you work its way back to the United States. There’s certain technologies that would be fantastically powerful in developing countries that are built around the concept of renewable energy, where there would be mechanisms to develop those technologies, deploy those technologies, prove those technologies, and work them back into the developed countries. There’s different ways to do it. You don’t have to worry about infiltrating. You have to worry about finding ideas that can beat out the other ideas.

A project that we’re working on here at ASU, with 80 companies funding us right now, is a project that’s looking to build a sustainability index, where every product sold in retail stores, like Wal-Mart and Target and Carrefour, and stores like that, when you go in to buy whatever it is—when you buy these pens over here, these expo marker pens, and you go to Office Max, or whatever—that these pens and the company that sells them will be graded by someone else, that will say, “Sustainability index, zero through ten, this is a three,” or a five or an eight, or whatever it happens to be, and you, as a consumer, will decide whether or not you want to buy those things that have the higher sustainable index or the lower sustainable index.

Now, why would these 80 companies be funding ASU and others to build this sustainable index? Because they believe that consumers want to be able to be informed to make choices. Therefore, if you’re in the pen business, and you can make a pen that’s got a sustainable index of nine, and you believe that you can sell that at the same price as this pen, and you believe that that pen that you’re selling can perform as well as this pen, there are people that believe that this is the pen with the sustainability index of nine, versus the one with the sustainability index of three, is the one that will be purchased.

The university is working on this project as a way to facilitate better information. Like the question about transportation, it’s about information. In the marketplace, how do you know the inputs to what you’re eating or drinking? You have to be informed, right? How many of you pay attention to what you’re eating or drinking, in terms of what’s in it and what’s not in it, and so forth? How many of you just eat whatever it is?

Audience: [Laughter]

President Crow: Let’s see, who eats whatever it is, by the way? Keep it up for a second. That is 95 percent male, by the way. [Laughter] No different than the way I thought, when I was that age, also. Whatever it is, just eat it, right?

Audience: [Laughter]

President Crow: It’s about, at the end of the day, sustainability and sustainable cities is about behavior. Behavior is about decisions. Decisions is about information, and so, if there is an area that probably is the most important area of research, or the most important area of focus, it’s about information, so that we can make better decisions. You wanna make a better decision. How many of you actually wanna make decisions that have something to do with sustainable decision-making? How many of you are like, “I don’t care; whatever”? You guys, raised your hand, hmm? [Laughter] Most of you, right? A couple, you’ll just take whatever comes, right? A couple of you, you wanna make decisions. Neither’s right or wrong, it’s just that most people want more information; they want more information. How many of you think the price of gas is too high? It’s the same guys that were eating all the meat.

Audience: [Laughter]

President Crow: [Laughter] No, but the price of gas is too high, right? What’s the price of gas based on? It’s based on supply and demand. It’s based on production. It’s based on technology. How many of you know what the true cost of gas is, if you include all the taxes that go to produce the supply line, for you to be able to have that gas delivered to you, from wherever it’s delivered from, or whatever? It’s a lot more than you’re actually paying at the pump. You’re paying it; you’re paying it, but how many people think that more information is better to make better decisions? How many of you think, “I’ve got way too much information?” A couple of people, “I’ve got way too much information.”

President Crow: [Laughter] No, I understand that. I understand that, but so, information is absolutely essential to this concept of sustainable cities.

Thank you.

Kevin: President Crow, I’d like to ask a follow-up question that relates to J.R.’s question about “infiltrating,” for lack of a better term.

President Crow: Yes, infiltrating.

Audience: Yes, I’m personally very passionate about applying the science of sustainable to the business arena, to try to change the way, specifically, a lot of these larger corporations are sort of the elephant in the room that—

President Crow: How did larger corporations become larger corporations? How many corporations started as big corporations?

None of them.

President Crow: How did they start? They started, usually, with one person advancing an idea, and then that person was successful or not. Like the Facebook guy that’s out there now. He bought this other company, yeah, for a billion dollars, and he’s doing this and this and this and this and this, and Microsoft was the same thing. They bought this; they bought this; they bought this. I know where you’re heading with your question there, but—

Kevin: Yeah, you’re leading me right into my question. These people had this great idea, that created all of this success for themselves and enabled them to grown.

President Crow: They started with a small corporation.

Kevin: Yeah, and this idea and this practice that they’re practicing in this certain way for a long time, has enabled them to grow and become this large, successful organization.

President Crow: Yeah.

Kevin: How do we influence these organizations to change their practice?

President Crow: You don’t influence them. You don’t have to influence anybody. You’ve gotta get more information on the table. You’ve gotta develop a better idea than the next person. You’ve gotta work harder than the next person. You’ve gotta advance your idea tirelessly, that you can hardly walk, because you’re advancing your idea with all of the energy that you have, because the people that you’re trying to compete against, that’s what they’re doing to win. That’s the way that it works. That then goes back, not the survival of the fittest, per se, but this whole notion of somehow, it’s about which ideas can you advance that are better.

You’re not a one idea person, right? You’ve got more than one idea, so, I think what people often would say is like—how many of you have started businesses? How many of you have started enterprises, business or otherwise; social enterprise, business enterprise? You take your ideas and you move them forward, either in the organization that you’re a part of or on your own, and that’s the way that it works. Somehow, I’m not saying you, but a lot of people and a lot of students, think that somehow we’re just cogs in these big machines of corporations or banks or whatever. Only if you allow yourself to be.

Kevin: You’re saying we need to, instead of trying to get these organizations that are large and already in place., instead of getting them to provide what we want from them, we create replacement organizations?

President Crow: It’s not replacement. In the United States, corporations are—a company like Blackberry—old guys carry Blackberries.

Audience:[Laughter]

President Crow: I have an iPhone 4S, also. Blackberry is a product of how many amalgamations of ideas? Dozens and dozens and dozens, and so, any major corporation is a product of the growth and development of ideas and the acquisition of those ideas in the marketplace, and so, you change a big corporation by being a small corporation that can alter the trajectory of the big corporation, or by producing a tool that the big corporation can use to make better decisions, or, even better, a tool that you can monetize, that can change the behavior of consumers, that then will change dramatically the behavior of the big corporation. Did any of you all have a follow-up question, or are we out of time?

Moderator: We’re out of time. I want to thank you, President Crow.

President Crow: All right, good; thanks.

Audience:[Applause]

Moderator: This was really inspirational. Thank you all for being here. This is the last class, so we’re really fortunate to have this inspiring speaker to be here with us today.