“Once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.” — Thomas De Quincey, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”
The question has become commonplace in published interviews with authors and other bookish people. I think I just read the best answer yet given to that question:
Book that changed your life:
Introduction to Computer Data Processing, Third Edition, 1984. If this textbook had not so clearly described how god-awfully boring a career in information technology was, I may have made some early career decisions that were even worse than the ones I did make.
Credit to William Gurstelle, interviewed in Shelf Awareness and quoted at the NewSouth Books blog.
Well, you can’t accuse Birmingham’s green builders and architects of thinking small. They’ve proposed coming up with a new standard for cities, which they call the Birmingham Charter. And to convince the world that it will work, they want to transform greater Birmingham into a model of sustainable living.
I went to the Green Resource Center last night to find out more. The place was packed, and some latecomers stood outside in the stairwell listening.
James Smith, CEO of Green Building Focus, gave an enthusiastic, rambling address about the Charter, punctuated by video excerpts from architect Karan Grover’s dramatic multimedia presentation at the July conference on green building here in our fair city. The scope of this conference went well beyond nuts-and-bolts topics for builders. It was visionary, arguing for an entirely new philosophy for building cities and living on the earth.
This conference, we’re told, was supposed to take place in Atlanta, that international city just east of here. But Scott Walton and other local green designers made the case that Birmingham is ready not only to host meetings, but to be a living laboratory for sustainability. Community gardens and “urban farms” have taken off in a big way, and there is a little known but thriving community of architects and builders committed to green techniques. Then there is Alabama’s biodiversity, with the greatest variety of ecosystems of any U.S. state except California. Anyway, somehow or other they made the case, and the conference was held here, with two more annual meetings to come.
Karan Grover is a trail-blazer in green architecture, and it was his suggestion to draw up the Birmingham Charter, a new blueprint for urban design. To architects and planners, the parallel to the Athens Charter of 1933 is obvious, but for the rest of us, here’s a quick history.
Plan A
Seems that in 1933 a group of noted architects were on a steamship bound for Greece when they got to talking about urban planning. They decided that modern cities ought to adhere to modern principles, and they wrote down a list of 95 guidelines for a “functional city.” On arrival in Athens, they published these 95 rules as the “Athens Charter,” a document that is so influential that it defines the basic premises of city planners, public works departments, zoning boards, developers — you name it.
Trouble is, the Athens Charter no longer works. It prescribes separate zones of activity (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.) linked by transportation arteries — a model for a world in which industry is filthy and energy is cheap. A world we will never see again.
In the United States, Athens thinking has produced traffic congestion, automobile dependence, and urban blight in places where residents don’t have reliable transportation. Outside the U.S., where urban development has proceeded in even more haphazard ways, tanker trucks and donkey carts must share the same narrow arteries, and slums consist of tar-paper housing. Yet we keep adding urban spaces: According to Smith, an urban space the size of Birmingham (about 100,000 people) is built every two weeks.
How long can we sustain that? Obviously we can’t. The human population is expected to increase by 1 billion within 25 years. If we adhere to Athens standards, we will bring about the painful, lingering death of cities.
Time for Plan B
That’s “B” as in “Birmingham Charter.” Think of it as a replacement for the Athens Charter: a new blueprint for the modern, functional city. This time the core principle will be sustainability, not separation. And the document will be accessible: “Sustainability for Dummies,” Smith called it. A how-to guide for public officials, business executives, plant managers, neighborhood activists. Something to help them make smart decisions.
Not that this document has been written yet. Smith and his colleagues reject the idea of having a few well-educated rich guys get together for drinks and to bash out an instruction book for the world. The Athens Charter approach is outmoded in more ways than one.
For one thing, the Birmingham Charter will rest on sustainability, and you can’t achieve that by cookie-cutter means. The first step is to know your environment, both urban and natural. If your city is baking in the desert, lying in a smog-capped bowl in the mountains, or perched on the tip of a glorified sandbar, you won’t learn about your environment by reading a paper written in Alabama. But what the Birmingham Charter can do is give you guidance and encouragement to discover the place where you are.
That’s where Birmingham itself comes into the picture. The authors of the Athens Charter only had to get off the boat and send some telegrams letting people know what a great job they’d done. That won’t suffice in this case.
Everyone knows that humanity faces overwhelming environmental dangers that we seem unable to mitigate or avoid. Sometimes it seems that every month brings news of another peril that might bring down human civilization. As someone said at last night’s meeting, all these warnings don’t encourage action; they’re more likely to encourage us to fix a drink and go to bed.*
So the Birmingham Charter won’t win widespread adoption with a repent-or-die message of prophetic doom. It won’t win acceptance by sending out press releases. And the founders decline to set themselves up as experts. As another speaker candidly admitted, the “experts” got together last month and concluded that they don’t have the answers. Meanwhile the world’s governments, after scheduling a summit on climate change this December, are losing any consensus even over what they mean by the words “climate change.” Expertise and authority are letting us down.
In this position, with the clock ticking and no big rescue plan, the vision for the Birmingham Charter is to assemble the wisdom of ordinary people. The civil rights movement in Birmingham is an inspiration for this approach. When expertise and authority don’t know how to transform an insupportable situation, or when they are hampered by private interest, there’s a lot to be said for action that’s guided by faith and courage. So the idea is for the Birmingham Charter to be a result of this kind of action.
This is where the city as a whole comes in. To change the world as dramatically as its Athens predecessor did, the Birmingham Charter needs to be proven. And the way to do that is to transform Birmingham into a model of sustainable living.
As far as we got
That’s about as far as we got in last night’s meeting. The effort, to date, has been spearheaded by passionate, creative people. James Smith lets his excitement lead him into endless digressions and anecdotes, which left him precious little time to deal with specifics that this audience could act upon. The founders’ affection for one another also tends to give the project a clubby feeling that can unwittingly exclude outsiders. For instance, the speakers were introduced only by their first names, implying that everyone present ought to know them already. If the Birmingham Charter is going to catch on beyond the walls of architecture firms, this kind of precious informality really needs to be dispensed with. I was also distracted by Smith’s negligence about leaving on time for what was supposed to be a firm appointment for a radio interview. For some reason he found it very difficult to leave, even though we weren’t keeping him. Maybe we should have felt flattered, but I was concerned for his interviewer.
I could have wished for more time for questions, as there was only time for two. The convener recognized this, and said that she would offer monthly Catalyst meetings at the Green Resource Center as a forum for continuing this discussion and answering questions.
As the meeting broke up into knots of conversation, I found someone I knew and we talked over some ideas. One of these was about Birmingham’s untapped potential as a place with global significance.
Birmingham as a model
We also talked about Birmingham’s potential as a model of sustainability. It seems that there are a few things about our city that make this promising. A quick list:
The Birmingham Charter, it seems, is two things. It’s a project to turn Birmingham into a laboratory for sustainable living, which also promises cleaner, healthier, and more genuinely prosperous living, for ourselves and for future generations. Second, it is a teaching tool for everyone, “Sustainability for Dummies,” based largely on what we learn by changing Birmingham.
Next step? I promise to keep you posted. You can also get in touch with Catalyst or just show up at the next Green Third Thursday (6 p.m. Nov. 19) at the Green Resource Center, 2564 18th St. South, Homewood.
Those of us who live here are apt to forget it, but Birmingham is a powerful symbol to people around the world. We tend to be ashamed of the ’60s legacy of “Bombingham,” but for people behind the Birmingham Charter — Karan Grover, from India, and James Smith, from South Africa — the city represents a triumph. It was in Birmingham that ordinary people, even children, united to defeat an unjust order with love.
We locals often think that our white predecessors had to be shocked out of their complacency by the 1963 bombing deaths of children at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and (what was worse, supposedly) the international attention that this brought. The cynical implication is that it was a concern for appearances that forced white Birmingham to change, or to appear to change.
Grover and Smith don’t see it that way. They give more credence to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of the classic statements of the principles of nonviolent struggle. The letter, written in response to liberal clergy who opposed further demonstrations, sets out the process by which nonviolence seeks to win the day: fact-finding, negotiation with power (a necessary step even when fruitless), self-purification, and direct action. The church bombing did not change Birmingham.* It was the disciplined, nonviolent conflict in the streets, and the crowding of the jails with peaceful people, that changed Birmingham.
King also wrote from his Birmingham cell, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” The words seem to anticipate our still-dawning awareness of the interdependence of the local with the global, of human society with the natural environment.
Refusing to acknowledge this interdependence — for example, because of one’s own relatively privileged position — is an injustice not only to one’s neighbors but to future generations. “Injustice anywhere,” King insisted, “is a threat to justice everywhere.” We can prattle endlessly about the definition of “justice” and “injustice.” But the fact is, we all knew what those words mean the moment we first read them.
The expiring world order teaches that separation is the key to stability, prosperity, and peace. We see the fruits of this well-intentioned thinking in jobless urban neighborhoods and blighted school districts with carefully monitored boundaries. (No, ma’am, you may not enroll your child from Ensley in our Mountain Brook schools.) We find it in Bosnia’s and Kosovo’s tense “ethnic enclaves,” which bring no peace. We easily recognize its excesses in pictures of the old Berlin Wall, but less easily in Israel’s new concrete “security fence,” the “Green Zone” of Baghdad, or our own country’s fencing of the border with Mexico.
Good fences make good neighbors, as the poet said, but only when the two neighbors walk the fence together, talking as equals while they replace the fallen stones. Security fences, patrolled with deadly force, are a caving in to fear and a desperate faith in managed violence. Each of these modern fences represents a failure.
Birmingham represents a triumph. In Birmingham, plain, “unqualified” people defied their shepherds and refused the prudent advice of fearful experts counseling “law and order and common sense.”2 They placed their faith in the disciplined application of love and courage. They acted out of faith, when everyone else insisted that they were being naïve, dangerous, counter-productive.
It’s true that we celebrate the legacy of the civil rights movement. We’ve raised statues and built a museum. We hold commemorative anniversary marches, which are received with formal speeches of welcome at City Hall. The former critics of nonviolent conflict, especially among the black clergy, have all recast themselves as enthusiastic supporters of Dr. King.
So there’s no question of which side was favored by history.
It was not a panacea. Birmingham is as wounded and scarred as any other modern city, and corruption is routine in both business and politics. Local leaders honor the “legacy of civil rights” as if they were carving the tombstone of nonviolent conflict. Our cynicism, which we confuse with sophistication, encourages us to give in to all this.
So the danger, for those of us who live here, is in making “the movement” tame and commonplace, even inconsequential. It was not inevitable. It did not have to turn out well. Outside forces did not shape the outcome for us. It was the faith and courage of ordinary people that won a victory in Birmingham where others have failed.
Jerusalem, the world’s most idolized city, is riven by self-righteous oppression, lies, and hatred. What if Birmingham were to step up and become the world’s spiritual capital? Seriously, does any city have a better claim?
Active spiritual truth is our city’s greatest untapped resource. Gandhi called it satyagraha. Our “foot soldiers” called it many things or nothing, they just acted on it. And MLK, while in Birmingham, added a twist to his critics’ label of “extremism.”
So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? . . . Perhaps the South, the nation, and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.3
Whatever you call it, we have enough of it to share with the world. Let’s do this.
Well, there’s no hiding from the facts. According to several members of Congress, I am a terrorist sympathizer. As an American Muslim and a member of my local Islamic society, I am ipso facto an agent of the “secret underworld that’s conspiring to Islamize America.”
You know, I had no idea. As an Anglo-American convert to Islam, one of the religion’s strongest appeals to me is its tolerance of dissent and heterodoxy. This dates back centuries before my European ancestors finally learned that divergent beliefs about God do not automagically lead to chaos, slaughter, and the murder of kings. (Wars of religion, on the other hand, often bring about the very evils they were meant to prevent, and have contributed to western Europe’s fixed idea that “organized religion” is incompatible with human liberation.)
When Western thinkers finally took up the cause of religious toleration and civic equality for non-Christians, they imagined that they had invented these ideas. We Westerners still enjoy that conceit today, unaware that the Quran stated the principle unequivocally more than a thousand years earlier: There is no compulsion in religion. (2:256)
Muslims are only human, and the history of Islamic states is not as glorious as some Arab or Turkish patriots would make it out to be. Still, it seems to me no accident that what we call the “Renaissance” began in Italy, the part of Europe that had the most routine contact with Muslims and, through them, with India and the Far East. Much more could be said on the subject, but this is only a blog post.
According to four Republicans in the House, though, I’m not being sincere in associating Islam with universal love, open-heartedness, and free inquiry into truth. I’m just feeding you a bunch of reassuring propaganda. As a Muslim in the United States, I am an enemy of the Constitution and an advocate for theocracy under a medieval law code called Sharia. By supporting CAIR (Committee on American-Islamic Relations), I am implicitly supporting a terrorist agenda that aims to cow all of you infidels into submission to my religion, which will require you to “convert or die,” or else to become second-class citizens. It’s true that you outnumber us 99-to-1, but we have an evil plan that we have all sworn to uphold. This plan is sure to succeed unless you all wise up and start jailing and deporting us.
All kidding aside — the congressional press conference promoting Paul Sperry’s new book, Muslim Mafia, quickly inspired a faxed death threat to the director of CAIR. One hopes that that is all the fallout we’ll see.
Here is Rachel Maddow’s report on what I’ll call the latest Green Scare. It’s followed by comments from Eugene Robinson (8:40):
So there you have it. In the interest of national security, I hereby confess myself a member of the “Muslim Mafia” that the honorable members of Congress are warning against. I didn’t mean any harm. Somehow I had the idea that following one’s conscience in matters of religion was laudable in a free society — not dangerous or illegal.
I’m sorry for my mistake. To make up for it, I invite all you real Americans to ask me anything you like about the Muslim plot to destroy America. I’ll do my best to get back to you with the straight dope.
After all, before you contemplate excluding American Muslims from the ambit of U.S. constitutional protections — as Paul Sperry, P. David Gaubatz, and now a few members of Congress would like to do — it would be a courtesy to talk the matter over with real live Muslims.
Attention Conservation Notice: This is about local politics in Birmingham, Alabama, but also about sustainability throughout North America.
Now that the new city council is seated, it’s high time to revisit The Dome, as we like to call it. Despite the strong case against expansion of the city’s convention complex, there is political momentum in favor of floating the bonds and summoning the bulldozers. Mayor Larry Langford actively promotes the project with pep rally techniques (banners, rallies, T-shirts) that evoke his campaign slogan, “Let’s do something!”
Many people, probably including a majority of Birmingham municipal voters, support the dome in the faith that large public works bring prosperity to a community, and that Birmingham has been too slow to perform such works. And when it comes to a project like providing reliable public transit, or passable school buildings, they are absolutely correct. Birmingham has buses that routinely break down or lack air conditioning, and its school buildings often leak, flood, or stink. Investing in projects that solved these problems would bring nothing but benefits.
But not all public works are created equal. The dome project would commit the city to invest heavily to try to compete in an over-supplied market for convention space — a market that has been steadily shrinking as businesses and large organizations cut back on air travel and turn to new networking and teleconferencing tools instead. In this environment, Birmingham’s planned dome cannot hope to compete with established facilities with a track record and plenty of empty space.
Of course, no one supports the dome for the purpose of running down Birmingham’s economy and future prospects. Some, including the professional conventioneers who run our BJCC, support the project because it’s the conventional path to achievement and recognition in their field. No matter how it turns out in the long run, they will be admired by their peers for bringing off a sizable facilities expansion.
Even dome supporters concede that the city can expect to lose money on this deal. Their fallback position is to claim that nevertheless the city as a whole will benefit from new development and expanded employment. But how will a cavernous convention hall spur the economy by standing empty most of the time? Dome supporters are reluctant to forecast how many weeks per year the dome will be fully occupied. Fewer than five weeks? Three weeks? Five days?
What if no one comes at all? This is not an improbable outcome. As large spaces go begging in Atlanta, Austin, and dozens of other cities, why should the big conventions look at Birmingham, with its broken public transit system that cannot even get visitors from the airport to the convention hotels?
Birmingham styles itself the “Magic City,” but that’s no excuse for magical thinking about our future. There is no magic in the convention business, and wishing will not make the dome a success. Our mayor likes to quote scripture, so I’ll remind him of Paul’s reflection: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 1 Cor. 3:11
I don’t suppose he’ll quote that at the next council meeting.
Birmingham’s green future
There is a positive side to this issue: In the greener economy of the immediate future, Birmingham’s relatively small convention space may very well have an advantage over the giants we’ve been so anxious to emulate. There is already strong evidence that the city is finding its niche as a green convention space.
Two media companies that promote sustainable building practices chose Birmingham for their July 2009 Green Building Focus Conference and Expo. What’s more, the conference is committed to at least two more annual meetings in Birmingham, and the conference planning organization is based here — suggesting an indefinite tenure at the BJCC, provided that we don’t screw up.
A follow-up gathering in September produced a statement of sustainable building principles called the Birmingham Charter. Besides promoting the city in its title, this document invites advocates for sustainable design, green manufacturing, and similar initiatives to help “revitalize Birmingham in a way that communities worldwide can use as a model.”
Imagine: Birmingham, Alabama, as a global center for green design. To learn more, be at the “Sustainability Salon” on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at the Green Resource Center, 2564 18th St. South in Homewood. Doors open at 6 p.m. and the program runs from 6:30 to 8:00.
The city council has taken the easy step of unanimously endorsing this initiative. Good for them. From this point, all that’s really necessary is for them to refrain from doing harm.
Launching an old-fashioned civic center expansion to serve a glutted, shrinking, petroleum-fed market — and going into debt to do so — would be a notable way to do harm. The BJCC is already prepared for a future of specialized conferences, regional gatherings, concerts, and shows. It is on course to become a national destination for green events — if we don’t screw up.
Let’s “do something” by taking responsibility for what we have. For a start, Birmingham needs a bus system that just works, and schools that newcomers will send their children to without misgivings. To get there, we need city leaders who act as adults with a vision of a better future — not as overgrown children with magical dreams.
Postscript: Langford’s bribery trial
This may seem like a cheap shot, but it is not intended that way. As Mayor Langford faces federal prosecution next week, it would certainly be a good time for him and his peers to “put away childish things.” His conduct could have serious implications for the city he leads, and for its citizens. Langford is innocent until proven guilty, but with two cronies and a fellow former county commissioner already pleading guilty and agreeing to testify against him, the prosecution’s case is formidable. I’ve worried before that if Langford winds up in jail, he won’t be able to conceive of how it happened. My prayer is that, whatever happens, our mayor does not try to punish the city for his own disillusionment. He has enough charisma to give considerable scope to his rage, if he so chose. And he is not known for hearing advice from his friends — at least not on any topic besides shopping and gambling.
P.P.S. The Birmingham Charter and green design
I hope nobody is too offended that I’ve used the word “green” without defining it. It seems clear that the word is here to stay, and its definition will remain as mutable as, say, “democracy” or “freedom.”
I’m using “green” to label scientific research and planning for a more sustainable economy — less needy and greedy, and more efficient, adaptable, and inventive. I’m less interested in “green” as a marketing keyword, political nostrum, or corporate image.
Whatever you think about global warming, or Al Gore, it’s plain that we can’t continue to live like pioneers at the edge of an inexhaustible wilderness. There’s nowhere left to move on to, and no clear streams left for our hogs and cattle to muddy. The whole world has become “back East.” We have to face it.
Anyway, here are some Birmingham-centered links on green matters:
