Post Carbon Communities of Practice

Bridging the Delmar Divide and the many other perceived divides in our city and region, one network of post carbon communities of practice at a time by 2050 is easy if we try. We can transform our fragmented, sleepy river towns into a thriving united green metropolis on both sides of the river where people enjoy living in harmony with Nature and in cooperation with their neighbors, beginning with the City of St Louis modeling what's possible.

These challenges, as catastrophic as they can be for individuals, families and whole communities, are all symptoms of larger, underlying issues we need to address. Clearly, these funds should be used to get long-standing projects across the finish line that address all 25 of the survey challenges, as well as many existential threats like global warming that Alder Anne Schweitzer from the first Ward brought up at the first hearing. She was courageous enough to identify the elephant in the room. We need to include not just disaster preparedness, but how we will survive and recover from disasters, which are likely to be more severe and more frequent over time - from more severe heat waves to asthma aggravated by ground level ozone and other kinds of bad air days, as well as floods, tornadoes, straight line winds, fires and even earthquakes. We happen to be living on top of a major fault line, the New Madrid fault, which cut loose with a quake so massive on October 31st 1895 that it changed the course of the Mississippi River, causing a section of it to temporarily flow backwards for several days, and it rang church bells in Boston. Fortunately, that was long before there was much of a city here. 

We are proposing to create a new model for housing in St Louis with two prototype communities. Arizmendi Ecovillage in the 3900 and 4000 blocks of Olive Street and Westminster Place will have four cohousing communities, a total of 100 households, a dozen cooperatively-owned businesses, and is in a Qualified Census Tract and an Opportunity Zone. Hummingbird Ecovillage is in the 2700 block of Ann Avenue in the Fox Park neighborhood, will have 35 households and 7 co-cp businesses and is sandwiched between two Qualified Census Tracts.

Both have disaster recovery strategies to temporarily shelter and care for surrounding neighbors, as well as job training and development that will provide needed qualified recipients with access to long term family wage jobs and co-op ownership opportunities in our 5Rs technology divisions. The focus will be on meeting any of the 25 identified challenges that are experienced by individuals and families living in Qualified Census Tracts.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, these and future communities as part of diverse networks of post carbon communities of practice are likely to catch on quickly and will continue to expand geometrically. (see Social Tipping Dynamics for Stabilizing the Climate by 2050 and our comments on the City's Equitable Development Strategy Framework.) Both references are pertinent to this conversation because, as Lau Tzu said, "Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." It is going to take real courage to confront all the existential threats and daily challenges that we as an extended community will continue to face. That is why we are making a pitch for a "One for all and All for One" long term solution that boldly recognizes all the elephants in the room. What is wanted and needed is a comprehensive solution strategy that has the potential to ignite a movement that turns St. Louis into a united green metropolis on the Mississippi. 

At this point, there is a host of faithful supporters and potential future residents who strongly believe in this mission of bridging perceived divides by building state of the art communities of the future now and who have invested their time and money to amass the properties and design the communities. We have also been fortunate enough to have been awarded over $7M by the State in Neighborhood Preservation Act tax credits that will be available to cover a share of the construction costs, making the housing more affordable.

We would love to partner with the City to bring this project to fruition. We propose that two $5M perpetual revolving loan funds be established, as follows:

1. The Ecovillages themselves can be built out in phases with funding replenished as each cohousing community is completed and tax credit proceeds are received from the State. 
2. A second fund is needed to build the first demonstration of the Rapid Alternative Freight and Transit (RAFT) system and the first station at the Arizmendi Ecovillage that will Initially house the Museum of Transportation and Freight of the Future with a scale model for the region. This will strengthen and supplement the existing Bi-State and Metro systems, and funding for construction can most likely be secured from the freight industry at no additional risk to the City.  

We envision that this network of communities with the RAFT system could quickly touch every neighborhood, so we invite you to contact us with site proposals in your neighborhoods that are currently eyesores that you would like to see turned into oases, to serve as RAFT stations all the time, sanctuary for your neighborhood residents in the event of an emergency and good neighbors always who are absolutely committed to the success of your neighborhood, our city, the region, civilization and the planet. These revolving loan funds will help the St Louis economy grow exponentially, will encourage more and more people to live in the City of St. Louis, and will make life so much better for the people who live here. 

             The next level of human evolution will be caused in dialogue in community.

                                                      - Ken Wilbur