Humanity is facing a compounding series of crises brought on by extractive economic systems and unsustainable lifestyles: climate, housing, food security, water access, flooding, wildfires, mass extinction, war and inequality are all interrelated crises. In order to grasp the connectedness of these issues, this phenomenon has come to be known as the Polycrisis.  Each issue occupies its own silo of experts, advocates and philanthropic funding, leading to solutions that are piecemeal and insufficient to overcome the comprehensive challenges and inadequate to address the common root cause. 

We need to redesign and rebuild our communities utilizing a comprehensive sustainability plan that takes into account the entire system. Piecemeal solutions and haphazard partial reforms always come up short, while news crises unfold, because the root cause is ignored. We need to rethink systemically, redesigning the way we live.  For decades the goal of living sustainably within our ecological means to offset climate change and global warming has been approached in a fragmentary manner, without a unitary vision. Our house, Planet Earth, is on fire, yet no comprehensive model for sustainable living has been put forward. All aspects of the way we live need to be reexamined and redesigned. 

Risk categories from the polycrisis literature include: economic, environmental, geopolotical, societal, and technological crises, but these are all related. When staring into the face of the diagram above, it does not take long to see what connects wealth inequality, economic downturn and debt crisis to ecological damage and resource depletion. The history of our economic boom, built on colonial exploitation on every conintent, has left a trail of societal upheaval and socio-economic turmoil. Predatory capitalism, whose rapacious greed has impoverished nations, plundered our resources and polluted the planet, is the source of the polycrisis.

The way we live causes many of our social problems, we need to redesign our communities to be more self-sustaining.  Below is a list of social problems and the solutions that a unitary design for sustainable communities can provide.

Construction

A vision of affordable, sustainable housing for our communities can mitigate the climate crisis if we look to solve all of our problems with a unitary vision of the design model.

The principles of a holistic vision of sustainable living includes orientation to the natural phenomena and universal energies that our earth and sun offer us, using all the natural energy that is available will reduce much of the heating, cooling, and ventilating issues of our current building designs ⁷.  We need to stop using the 1950’s model of wood framed tract homes and isolated commuter suburban subdivisions.  Integrating as much waste stream management as possible for recycled building materials will reduce resource depletion.

Homelessness and affordable housing: To create affordable, sustainable housing, we advocate utilizing recycled materials for building carbon negative communities (CNC).  We can build on affordable land, such as land with limited access to overburdened public utilities, by decentralizing water and energy collection and utilizing recycled water for maintenance functions and landscaping.

Cooperative housing:  The land would be held in a community land trust to remove it from the speculative real estate market and prevent the community integrative design from being dismantled over time.

Deforestation: By utilizing recycled building materials would move away from the carbon sink destruction created by wood frame construction.  Permaculture design plans utilize an overstory of shade trees between each building to transpirate moisture and reduce heat, regrowing our forest canopy.

Plastic pollution and tire waste: Plastic pollution and waste stream diversion management are used as construction materials including aluminum can walls, plastic bricks, and used tires as building blocks for buildings retaining walls.

Water

The way that we grow and transport our food needs to be localized and diversified.  Centralizing food production as monoculture agriculture and factory farming, then transporting that food long distances, has proven to have severe consequences on the health of people, animals, depleting the soil and polluting the environment.  Permaculture design allows food production that regenerates the soil and the community.

Water Management: Watershed design and engineering and local water conservation design would include flood mitigation, rain capture, recycling of greywater, and flood diversion and retention to mitigate the growing water shortages.  Designing watersheds to safely retain water mitigates forest fires.

Flooding: The orientation to the natural phenomena and  energy includes a plan for flood patterns.  Flood retention is part of the designing process to divert flood routes to cisterns for later use.

Energy

Fossil fuel dependency: These design elements integrate decentralized energy creation from both solar and wind, including trombe walls that collect energy, thereby facilitating the transition to renewable energy sources and reducing the dependency on fossil fuels.

Energy shortages: Each building is equipped with solar and wind energy generation in a decentralized network to avoid catastrophic grid failures.

Transportation

Electrical vehicles for personal use as well as mass public transportation and industrial transport requires the installation of fast EV charging stations throughout the design.  The design of the local electrical supply should incorporate these needs.

Food

Food insecurity: Each building is designed with an internal greenhouse and external permaculture garden with high canopy shade trees and lower canopy fruit trees, with other crops interspersed, creating local food security.  Because the food is grown locally, pollution from food transportation is eliminated. Permaculture designs are regenerative, so soils are regenerated and in drought areas, water is retained and repurposed.

Healthy Eating: The robust availability of fresh healthy produce within the permaculture food forest will increase the health outcomes of the community.

Environment

Transportation pollution and commuter traffic: Readily available EV charging stations at every building coupled with remote work practices will reduce commuter pollution.

Environmental Justice: Communities of Color, especially Black and Indigenous communities, are disproportionately affected ⁸ since their communities have for long been settled in less desirable and more vulnerable locations.  Relocation of these communities must be approached from the community’s perspective, with them driving the process, in order to address their needs and develop trust ⁹.  Not only should these communities receive the first new Carbon Negative Communities, but they should also get the jobs to build them.

Wildfire mitigation: The recycled building materials are encased in earth and concrete depriving any fire of oxygen which significantly reduces fire vulnerabilities.  Substantial local water storage assists in fire mitigation ¹⁰. Transportation pollution contributes to diminishing the health and resilience of trees, thereby, in combination with drought, contributing to increase in frequency and severity of wildfires.

Work

Worker Cooperatives: We need to redesign how we work as well. Corporate policies for maximizing profit are the root cause of many of our social problems, ranging from income inequality and poverty to industrial waste disposal and resource depletion.  Small individual adjustments to our living will not mitigate climate change if we work most of our waking hours for corporations that are damaging and depleting the environment. Worker cooperatives provide local work and accommodate human needs for remote work and childcare, building stronger families and communities.  Through democratizing work, we can have business enterprises serve the needs of the many, instead of the few.

CERBAT: The Center for Environmentally Responsible Building Alternatives has a board of directors with the accumulated knowledge and determination to supply a unitary building vision and design.  Through the standard community planning process, we have been identifying community needs.  We then provide solutions and develop a feasibility study for implementing actions. This strategic planning process will develop viable and complete models of sustainable communities.

Our plan is to develop Carbon Negative Communities (CNC) with micro solar passive home subdivisions and communities using the energy efficient homes, commercial and community buildings.  We also support the creation of worker cooperatives to provide local employment to mitigate commuter traffic. Our proposal is to build model communities that solve the substantial social and environmental problems outlined above and we seek an interview to discuss our capabilities and your partnership in creating the new sustainable paradigm project.

Endnotes
1.  On August 24th, 2022, the New York Times ran an article about Managed Retreat titled “Losing Your Neighborhood to Climate Change Is Sometimes Necessary” (https://nyti.ms/3R5FGey) citing an article written by Liz Koslov “The Case for Retreat” Popular Culture 28:2 (79) 359-387, May 2016, Duke University Press, bringing retreat of communities due to climate change to the mainstream audience.
2. Liz Koslov 2016 “Because retreat arises from local efforts, it tends to be treated as an isolated, ad hoc phenomenon. Diverse communities, however, are beginning to connect with one another as they confront climate-related relocation.” “The Case for Retreat” Popular Culture 28:2 (79): 380.
3. Cater, Franklyn, and Robert Benincasa. 2014. “Map: FEMA Is Buying Out Flood-Prone Homes, But Not Where You Might Expect.”
4. Raymond Zhong. The Coming California Megastorm https://nyti.ms/3SK7Ihf 8/12/2022 New York Times.
5. New Framework for US Leadership on Climate Migration E Yayboke, T Houser, J Staguhn, T Salma – 2020
6. Koslov concludes “To bring together collective movements in the context of climate change under the term retreat suggests that the time has come to retreat not only from particular places but also from particular ways of life that are likewise proving unsustainable.” Liz Koslov “The Case for Retreat” Popular Culture 28:2 (79): 381.
7. Jack Ehrhardt 2002 “The Art of Natural Building” Design Construction Resources, Earthships: An Ecocentric Model. Joseph Kenedy ,Michael Smith, Catherine Wanek, Editors; New Society Publishers. Pages 154-157.
8. Idowu Ajibade, Meghan Sullivan, Chris Lower, Lizzie Yarina, Allie Reilly. 2022 “Are managed retreat programs successful and just? A global mapping of success typologies, justice dimensions, and trade-offs.“ Global Environmental Change 76 (2022) 102576. “We argue that by centering intersectional justice as the axis around which relocation is planned, retreat can become a strategy for redressing past inequities while laying a foundation for multiple futures that elevates the voices of marginalized groups and communities who are most affected by climate change.“
9. Nathan Jessee 2022 Reshaping Louisiana’s coastal frontier: managed retreat as colonial decontextualization. Princeton University, USA.
10. How architects made California’s Getty Museum fireproof: Suppressing sparks isn’t easy in wildfire-prone Los Angeles. https://www.popsci.com/getty-museum-fireproof/