MY JOURNEY
I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in December l926. During summers I worked as a farmhand, factory worker, Alaska salmon fisherman, and carpenter. I studied electronics when I was inducted into the Navy and later attended the University of Wisconsin, and then the University of Colorado, where I received a B.S. in Architectural Engineering. I had been lured into architecture by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, but during a trip to Chicago I was taken by the powerful simplicity and beauty of some buildings by Mies van der Rohe. I went to study with him and city planner Ludwig Hilberseimer at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
After receiving a Masters degree, I spent a year in Europe visiting architectural masterpieces, savoring European life, and working in the architecture office of the University of Munich, and the city planning office of Frankfurt. While there, I was invited to attend one of the last meetings of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne, which was composed of important renegade architects from 1928 up to 1959. While there, I joined a group that Le Corbusier guided through his famous Marseille apartment building. I very much wanted to make the world a better, more beautiful place, adapted to the needs of modern society, and prepared myself for that. On returning to the United States I went to work in architectural offices in Milwaukee and Chicago. While in Chicago, I read Harrison Brown’s The Challenge of Man’s Future. It described the dangers of excessive population growth, food and mineral shortages, and over consumption that threatened our future. It gave me a lot to think about. Having a good imagination, I could see the massive misery people would someday face if we did not resolve these problems. I was moved. I was designing and working on exciting buildings in the Chicago architectural firm which was leading the way for all glass metallic curtain wall designs for commercial buildings. The book was unsettling - everything I was doing was environmentally wrong! I changed direction, became a committed environmental architect-planner, and married a German Opera singer. During this period, and after, I spent time teaching at five institutions of higher learning, including one in China and one in India. At the University of Michigan I developed a system for directing urban expansion away from sprawl into chains of compact, pedestrian oriented new towns connected by transportation belts. By looking at the basic question of what a city is, we can design better places to live and greatly reduce vehicle traffic, while conserving land and energy. This project led to my being hired as the master planner for an environmentally sound, socially integrated community of 80,000 to be built outside of Cincinnati. When this project had to be abandoned , I tried, without success, to develop several small eco-communities outside of Cincinnati, then with success, to develop, design, and build eco-friendly, condominiums on small empty parcels of land in central Cincinnati. When Ronald Reagan became president, and the Arab oil boycott was call off, public interest in conservation evaporated. As I recognized that my efforts, and those of others seemed to be heading toward a dead end, a question kept haunting me: “When we see that our future is seriously threatened and we know what we can do about it, why don’t we act?” Starting around 1990, I gathered all the information I could regarding this problem, and I set my mind to work on it. At that time, I had been doing considerable reading about the human brain, mind, society, governments, and politics, and saw some answers there. Thinking about this led to another abrupt change in my career. I turned to writing. After failing to obtain production funding for a television documentary, “Invisible Walls,” addressing this problem, after years of hard work, in 1998 Invisible Walls: Why we Ignore the Damage We Inflict on the Planet ... and Ourselves came out as a book . Since then I have focused my time researching and producing books and articles related to this problem of irrational inaction. For some time I had been bothered that an important innovative idea for a new academic discipline to be called “Survival Research,” developed by a political scientist friend, John H. Herz, had been largely ignored. I mailed about 50 copies of his paper to people I thought should know about it. This resulted in my being asked to edit a special issue of a journal, World Futures, devoted to this subject. Then in 2006 it came out as a book, Global Survival: The Challenge and Its Implications for Thinking and Acting, edited by Ervin Laszlo and myself. A number of forward looking thinkers contributed chapters demonstrating how many different disciplines can contribute to resolving our environmental problems. One thing that I enjoy is thinking backward and forward in time and looking at where we’ve been and were we’re going. I soon realized that facts don’t move people like a good story can. As a kid I loved to tell stories, so I blended my interests and created the world we now seem to be headed for. I described this world by means of a novel, : 2045: A Story of Our Future, published in 2009. |
