By Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Cities program manager

(2 November 2007, Amherst, Massachusetts) The last few weeks of the Post Carbon Cities book tour have been predictably hectic -- but also full of many pleasant surprises. My next stop after Montréal was Burlington, Vermont for the CommunityMatters07 conference, an annual gathering organized by Orton Family Foundation and PlaceMatters on community-based city planning and placemaking. As with most conferences, I personally get more out of chatting with people over meals and drinks than from the scheduled sessions and presentations. CM07 was quite fruitful in this regard, as it drew not only city planners but also elected officials, city staff, academicians and even the occasional engineer.

The last night of the conference found me in a noisy pub straining to hear Portland (Maine) City Councilor Kevin Donoghue describe the disappearing pre-oil age infrastructure of his city's developing waterfront. While the Red Sox were trouncing the Rockies 7 to 3 on the bar's televisions (the World Series proved unavoidable during my week in Red Sox-crazy New England), I began to appreciate both the enormous difficulties and enormous opportunities New England faces in the post-carbon era. New England has a rich heritage of transportation and industrial infrastructure --not to mention the accompanying heritage of skills and knowledge-- that much of the rest of the United States lacks. "We should be preserving the pre-oil industrial waterfront," Kevin told me, "not destroying it to build condominiums."

Over the next few days I would come to hear how communities throughout New England are not just talking about peak oil but already preparing themselves for a world of energy and climate uncertainty. After a presentation to city staff and officials in Keene, New Hampshire (which has recently completed a pilot project with ICLEI to identify and reduce its vulnerabilities to climate change) Mayor Michael Blastos and several top staff said they were very interested in addressing peak oil in their planning. A three hour long meeting / pizza dinner with the Brattleboro (VT) Regional Peak Oil Task Force led to plans to speed up the task force schedule so it can focus sooner on developing actual recommendations.

These and other meetings led me to propose a Post Carbon Cities conference in Spring 2008 for city staff and officials in New England who are working on the peak oil / energy uncertainty problem. From Middlebury, Vermont to Providence, Rhode Island, local governments are recognizing that they need to respond now for the fundamental changes already underway in the global oil system. Getting these local leaders together will be invaluable for sharing experiences and developing a regional strategy for the post-carbon era.

We'll post more information about the Spring conference over the next few months. We'll also post videos of my presentations as we receive them (by the way, you can download a copy of my PowerPoint presentation at www.postcarboncities.net/pcc-presentations.

Next stop: New York City.

[Other blog posts on Daniel's Fall 2007 book tour:
Post Carbon Cities Fall 2007 Tour (1 of 3): Blog and Tour Launch,
Post Carbon Cities Fall 2007 Tour (3 of 3): New York, Philadelphia, Toronto.]

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