Yesterday a small group of us UEPers piled in a van and drove over to Amherst for a symposium called "Regional Green Infrastructure and Landscape Urbanism: New Directions for Planning."  It was a collaboration between the Tufts, Harvard, MIT and UMass Amherst planning programs.  I think we all really enjoyed the talks by Peter Lowitt and UMass profs Elisabeth Hamin and Jack Ahern.  Also, the appetizers were fantastic.

After the talks, UEP prof Justin Hollander asked the audience to consider the implications of the current economic troubles on the prospects of green infrastructure in the near future. This is something that I've seen a lot of chatter about lately.  There seem to be two general schools of thought on this.  One says that a bad economy will make it harder for us to make policy and planning decisions that are good for the envorinment; this is what recent articles in Time and the Wall Street Journal seem to suggest. 

The other school says that the stumbling economy -- the rising price of oil over the long term, the credit crunch, and all the rest -- present a great opportunity to remodel our economy and come out with something a lot healthier for all of us; this is suggested in pieces by The Architect's Newspaper and AlterNet.  It's also strongly advocated by people like Van Jones, who spoke at Tufts this past Earth Day, and Bill McKibben, who I saw speak in Jamaica Plain shortly thereafter.

Both in their talks and in response to Justin's question, Peter Lowitt and Jack Ahern argued that green infrastructure such as green roofs and the use of watersheds to treat waste water often actually save money -- the trick is that you usually have to look long-term, which is not always easy for people (or municipalities) to do.  Which is obviously encouraging, but it poses another question: So, why aren't these things done more often?

It made me think of the book I'm reading in my spare time (Ha!  "Spare time" -- more like "random minutes on the train when I don't feel like working through my zillion pages of weekly class readings") -- George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant!  It's been sitting on my bookshelf since it came out just before the '04 elections, and I finally pulled it out because I'm starting to realize just how much the frustrations we run into in the world of planning and policy might be due (at least in part) to failures of language, framing, and connecting issues to common values. 

I'm sure a lot of you have a lot more expertise on this stuff than I do.  But it seems to me it's probably something that we need to get better at.

(Oh, by the way...Obama to create an Office of Urban Policy!)