It is a fact that carbon and greenhouse gas emission levels have skyrocketed way past a point seen in the last four hundred thousand years, and it is causing global warming and climate change. It is a fact that peer-reviewed studies demonstrate that over 97% of climate scientists, and nearly 200 organizations worldwide, find human activity to cause global warming and climate change (American Association for the Advancement of Science 2009; Cook, Nuccitelli, Green, Richardson, Winkler, Painting, Way, Jacobs, and Skuce 2013; Governor’s Office for Planning and Research 2018). It is a fact that we are depleting the planet’s resources as population and consumption explode. It is a fact that we can link emerging societal problems to climate change. The ecological and environmental outcomes from human behavior could be terrifying; In the United States, the cost of weather related disasters cost $306 billion just in 2017.
Starting in 2008, we took the socio-ecological effects of human behavior as a sobering, intransigent mandate to learn all we could on how to heal this planet. For all our work with the built environment and regional planning, we push as hard as we can – sometimes to the point of confronting law – to create the healthiest, lowest energy habits and communities possible. In general, our aim is to have human existence on this planet be energy giving, not energy taking, so that we live on this precious earth as lightly as possible.
With Greek colleagues, we are currently seeking a place to literally begin again, starting from where it must start: The ecology and environment. One part of our work is to achieve renewable energy independence, such as the islands of Eigg and Texel are doing. But such technology ambitions only go so far in regenerating Greece’s capital. Ultimately, the value we seek to bring to the world is regenerating a forgotten way of life that is helpful for an emerging global era. With exploding global problems concerning resource depletion, global warming, inequality, and biosphere destruction, there is perhaps no better time to question who we want to be. In our view, the Greek region could offer invaluable guidance by examining and regenerating its roots.