James Shelley

Vauban is a suburb of Freiburg, a university town in Germany. Vauban is unique for several reasons, one of the most notable is that it is a non-automobile community. They don’t use cars. It has been completely retrofitted for walking, bicycle use and public transit. Tony Paterson writes, “Instead of the roar of traffic, the residents listen to birdsong, children playing and the occasional jingle of a bicycle bell.”

People from urban centres buy cottages as escape routes to experience precisely that kind of environment on their two-week vacations. Vauban residents experience it all year, and it is an attractive and inspiring place to live. People who would never think of themselves as “environmentalists” actually want to live in Vauban simply because it is an atmosphere that is unlike–and better than–anything else.

So much of our environmental efforts are focused at trying to overhaul existing systems at macro levels: we demand that our federal bureaucrats curtail our collective carbon emissions; we launch national campaigns to reduce the use of plastic bags, and so on. “Environmental activism” has become synonymous with “trying to change the behavior of people who don’t want to change.” In the end, everyone just gets annoyed and pissed off with each other. Really productive.

Vauban is different. It is just one community (a suburb, actually) that now models an alternative. Instead of getting frustrated with people for their over-dependence on the automobile, we can instead point to Vauban and say, “See, there are other ways we can live that are cleaner, quieter and healthier.” It’s not about preaching against something anymore, it’s about celebrating something more beautiful. Profoundly different attitudes.

Vauban illustrates the fact that people are far more inspired by the discovery of something new than by the condemnation of their current lifestyles. I hope that militant environmentalism is nearing the end of its tenure: the world, simply, does not need any more negativity. The future is not achieved by looking in the past and kicking each other for being so stupid–it is realized by encouraging each other toward new possibilities.

The task of “environmentalism” is not to get people to give up their cars, stop drinking bottled water, carry their own shopping bags, stop using pesticide, or buy all their food at the local farmers market. No, our objective is to create ways of living that are so much more attractive than the status quo that other people would voluntarily give up these trappings of North American over-consumption just to be a part of it.

I have no illusions that the evolution of Vauban took no small degree of activism and political maneuvering. Nor am I proclaiming that Vauban is utopia. My point here is the lesson that Vauban can teach us: environmentalism is not about what we shouldn’t do, it’s about how astoundingly amazing the future could be.

Filed under: Ecology, Leadership by James | Tags: automobile > consumerism > environment > vision