On Tuesday, March 10, Mossback columnist and Crosscut contributor Knute Berger is giving a reading of his new book Pugetopolis at Kirkland’s Parkplace Books. The reading starts at 7 and it’s free.

On Thursday, March 12, The Seattle Great City Initiative and GGLO are hosting a free brown bag lunch to talk about ID Vision 2030, a plan to guide growth in the International District. Tom Im, a community organizer and planner for InterIm Community Development Association, will lead the discussion. The brown bag is from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. at GGLO at 1301 First Ave in Suite 301. Enter through the door about a quarter of the way down Harbor Steps, on the north side.

On Friday, March 13,  a CityClub lunchtime seminar will take up “Tough Times in the Livable City,” with a panel discussing what the downturn means for livability and sustainability, “and how we can best use the present moment to prepare for a positive future.” The program runs from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. at Rainier Square in the 3rd Floor Atrium at 1333 Fifth Avenue. Tickets are $20 for members and $30 for everybody else.

Since you’re already mulling, maybe you’d like to write a 50-word response to the question “What is Livability and what can Seattle do to acheive it?” This is the third in the series of 50-worders, after affordability and sustainability, running on the DJC editorial page and in the blog. It’s been a fun conversation so far, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the final installment.  Send submissions my way by March 19.

By Andy Soden, Golf Director, Seattle Parks and Recreation

Based on my spell check, even Microsoft does not fully recognize the concept of sustainability. To begin this exercise, we all would have to agree the impacts and effects that we’re having on our planet, our countries our communities and children are not only profound but far-reaching.

Each and every one of us needs to buy in and get in the role and responsibility to sustain and do it together, a feat easier said than accomplished.

A better reason?

I find it interesting that so quickly after gas prices lowered again, the legions of people who were suddenly riding the bus and the train to Seattle are right back in their cars. Why? They can.

Please let me and other city staffers here in Seattle know what we can do to partner and raise the level of awareness surrounding this issue. Our new Park Superintendent Tim Gallagher is there, I can assure you, and supports all the things we are doing in Parks to raise the bar on this topic.

We’re celebrating Earth Day, March 21, next month at the golf courses in the city to engage our loyal golfers and customers in the leadership role Parks and Recreation is taking to reduce the luxury consumption and use of potable water, fertilizer and pesticides here in the urban environment.

Parks is also rolling out the Green Golfer program this year, which is part of the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program’s Community Outreach component for golf courses. We’ve been participating in this 6-stage process towards Certification for about five years.

These are exciting times, and call for extraordinary and unique efforts towards sustaining our environment, economy, communities and future. Keeping in mind that we’re doing this for our children and their future, we feel that to get there, we’ll need to do it one thing at a time.

For Seattle to become sustainable, it will have to take advantage of the environment we inherited. Preserving open space and protecting the Sound are paramount to a livable and lasting city. The new waterfront will be our next big test. Finding a way to blend the needs of the people with the needs of environment, that’s what will make Seattle sustainable. It’s not a choice between a vibrant urban experience or nature — it’s having both!

Charles Anderson, Charles Anderson Landscape Architects

Sustainability means creating healthy built environments as a means to supporting the larger ecosystems that provide clean water, air and soil for all of us. A collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to designing, building and maintaining buildings is critical to the overall health of the environment.

Yancy Wright, Sellen Construction

We achieve sustainability by fostering long-term cultural, economic, environmental and social health and vitality — by putting all those things together for our future and remembering it is a continuing endeavor, not an end point. That means involving all of our communities in the work, and ensuring that everyone contributes, and everyone benefits.

Richard Conlin, Seattle City Council President

Sustainability requires a vision of where we want to go, and an adaptive strategy to get there in a way that is just for all people and the planet. Seattle needs strong public and private leadership to articulate the vision and inspire all of us to walk in that direction.

Joel Sisolak, Cascadia Region Green Building Council

Seattle must be seen as part of the bioregion and global biosphere. The path to urban sustainability lies in achieving ecological balance integrated with social, economic and environmental regeneration. We will need to retool the urban infrastructure to significantly reduce waste and over-consumption, become less auto-dependent and more walkable.

Peter Steinbrueck, Steinbrueck Urban Strategies

Seattle should broaden the sustainability focus from LEED to SEED: Social Economic and Environmental Design. Environmental responsibility is not a stand-alone issue. Economic equity and social justice are equally essential to creating sustainable communities. If Seattle can achieve this union, we will be the sustainability visionaries we claim to be.

Owen Richards, Owen Richards Architects

Sustainability in Seattle (the cynical version): A term used by politicians and the mostly-white upper class for public appearance or as a business choice, while not actually contributing to sustainability on a broad scale. Real Sustainability: A movement where sustainable actions are an EASY choice and are undertaken by all walks of life, not just the elite.

Rebecca Deehr, Pedestrian Master Plan Advisory Group

Sustainability is grounded in values of stewardship, sufficiency and justice, and includes economic, environmental and community indicators of well-being. Sustainability goes beyond meeting people’s immediate physical needs to creating a just society with laws and policies that allow their needs, and the needs of all Earth’s inhabitants, to be met.

LeeAnne Beres, Earth Ministry

Sustainability is being good stewards of our environment for ourselves, for our community and for future generations. This means creating spaces that give us shelter and comfort in ways that enhance the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the earth that gives us food instead of degrading them.

Christopher Imbeau, Rafn Co.

Sustainability must include our social structures. As the health of our salmon requires sound water policy, the health of our community requires sound social policy: housing appropriate to the needs of the whole community, access to living-wage jobs, and a region-wide transportation plan that provides real options to the automobile.

Richard Bloom, Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness

Sustainability means systemic continuity; it is equilibrium, balance. In relation to the environment, sustainability suggests systems capable of continuing (though not remaining static. Change is constant) indefinitely, perpetuating life (including people). The planet will likely persist for some time; sustainability might enable humans to survive with it.

Gabriel Scheer, Re-Vision Labs, Seattle Greendrinks

They’re probably saying more taxes will make the economy worse, and asking how we could even consider such a thing, and don’t we want to be business-friendly?

They’re backwards. Saving bus service will help us IMPROVE our economy, and improve a lot of people’s lives, even if requires a tax increase.

Of course, Metro hasn’t mentioned a tax increase per se, just maintaining a similar amount of revenue via a higher rate. But it’ll be argued as such.

With decent bus service, more people can leave their cars at home, saving operation and parking costs and wear and tear, and keeping away from the financial cliff. Transit gives people the option to not have cars at all, which can make poor people middle class. Anyone need reminding on the importance of saving individuals on the brink for the good of the rest of us?

Businesses are increasingly locating where the transit is good, because transit helps them attract employees. This is a major reason most office construction and tenants stick to a few urban districts in our region, and those in other areas are asking for better transit. Even if the boss doesn’t use it, the rank and file often do. I’ve heard 60 percent of my office uses transit at least sometimes, aided by our Downtown location.

Financial benefits to the region as a whole are less immediate but even more significant. We save tax dollars in the long run because good transit lets us reduce the amount we spend on road capacity, where our wish list is in the tens of billions because road capacity is outrageously expensive. Consumers end up saving because transit can reduce the amount of parking required (or wanted) for everything we spend money on. For example, the City of Seattle has reduced parking requirements for housing in a few areas, often saving tens of thousands of dollars per unit. Why throw these advances away?

Transit helps the nation use energy and materials more efficiently, from steel and leather to gas and oil. True, our whole metro is 1 percent of the country, but we can be part of the solution. Between the materials to produce the car and the resources to operate it, even a US-made hybrid sends money overseas hand over fist. We reduced oil demand when prices rose; again, why throw that away?

It’s hard to tell where the economy will go, and where tax revenues will go. Maybe things won’t be so bad. But count me as one who’s happy to vote yes if necessary to keep our bus service…and to stay up way too late tonight to write this.

The average Northwest user is now using about 7.4 gallons a week per person, Sightline reports. That compares with the 10.2 gallons we were consuming in the year Grease came out.

Sightline’s blog has the story.

I accompanied more than 20 other architects, engineers and developers from Seattle and Portland to Cuba to see what lessons might be adaptable to our communities.

I was struck by the massive contradiction posed by a country whose people continue to overwhelmingly support a specific political agenda and leader while living within a failed economy for most of the last 50 years.

But since I am not a political or social scientist, I’ll leave that contradiction to others and focus on lessons to be learned from the decisions made by the Cuban people after the collapse of the Soviet Union — the “Special Period,” during which the country’s gross national product was reduced to 34 percent of its former self within a few weeks.

Urban farm in Havana

Numerous interesting sustainable approaches were adopted. One of the most interesting is how the country adapted to its loss of ability to trade major commodities (sugar, hardwoods, construction materials, etc.) for food products. Following a Soviet agricultural model, Cuba had ruined its farmlands with pesticides, applying more than 10 times the amount on average that our farmers do in the U.S. At the beginning of the Special Period, soils were infertile and incapable of feeding the population, and trading options were limited by the U.S. embargo. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds in the first year alone.

To combat the soil infertility, organic farming methods were adopted that are slowly repairing the land and increasing its productivity. Today, the crop yields within certain cooperatives exceed our national averages.  It’s a great model for further study.

Farmer's market in Havana (AP)

This policy has increased the standard of living for farmers, so many college-educated residents are now farming and the social status of the farmer has been raised to where it used to be in this country.  Maybe we should challenge government to look at increasing urban open space for not only recreation, but also for future food production?

At the start of the Special Period, Cuba faced limited access to fuel almost overnight, and the country was forced to re-think its transportation system, generating a number of creative and successful approaches. There is now a countrywide custom to “pick up your neighbor,” spreading the cost of transportation over an increased ridership. All you are required to do for a ride is walk to the curb.

We have all heard the stories about the vintage 1940s and 50s American autos roaming the street. That remains true, but how they are used is a better lesson. These cars are maintained in good condition because their gas-powered engines were replaced with diesel engines long ago. A technology invented in 1892 that is even more sustainable than the newest electric car!

The vintage car owners are self-employed, running up and down streets that radiate like the spokes of a bicycle outward from the city center. A shared trip costs a single peso (about 3 cents). In addition, there is a law that says any government vehicle driving down the street must pick up any rider for free, making all government trips more fuel efficient.

Another sustainable practice to consider is Cuba’s health care system. Even without access to the technology and pharmaceutical products available in our country, their primary and secondary care results are significantly better than ours. Why is that? Their focus is on preventive care and immediate access to health care for anyone who needs it.

From a sustainability standpoint, they focus on how to use fewer resources for more benefits. No one suggests trading our system for theirs, but we do need to make ours more sustainable in the long term, and a better market approach to preventive care is a start.

While the built environment is crumbling around them because they have no resources to repair it, Cubans have focused on improving neighborhoods with increased housing and a better sense of community. We need to realize that a sustainable lifestyle revolves around our immediate neighbors, and not a trip to the local mall.

The government has also focused on using current building stock to increase housing density rather than destroy the built environment to get increased density.

We need to take a broader look at our building codes and realize that being “sustainable” doesn’t mean having the strictest energy codes in the country, but rather the smartest. If it takes 50 years of energy savings from a new building to equal the energy lost when the former building was demolished, why do we think tearing it down is a smart and sustainable approach?

The biggest contradiction of all may be why a country that has suffered greatly over the last five decades is leading the way with what the United Nations says is probably the most sustainable economy in the world. Is there a lesson in its experiences that can be adapted to our communities so we can truly be sustainable? What do you think?

Is that enough to set us on a path for sustainability? Check out an excellent roll-call of programs and efforts getting dough at Gristmill.

People like half-measures. Public discussions of sustainability tend to reflect giving people everything they already have, but in less-wasteful formats. We hear more about hybrids than encouraging people to have fewer cars, more about responsible forestry than about using less wood, and more about recycling than about ”reducing” or “reusing.”

That’s a start, and plenty for some people, but perhaps we need to work harder on the big stuff too.

Like density. We’re improving a bit, but we still strictly limit density in this region, making it more expensive than necessary (through bonus fees, additional process, lack of sites zoned higher than what’s already there, etc.) and therefore reducing its market share, which in turn adds to sprawl. Meanwhile, denser construction brings huge efficiencies in energy, materials, and land use, due to factors such as shared walls and reduced commute distances. (Transportation is sometimes forgotten in analyses of energy use!)

The trend toward smaller homes (or plateau?) is encouraging. Smaller homes use less materials and energy to build, use less energy to heat, cool, and light (all else being equal), and don’t leave so much room to fill with unneeded stuff. The trend toward multifamily helps for similar reasons, plus multifamily residents have the option of simply deleting the astonishing array of tools and materials often kept by house residents, from paint to edgers to four kinds of shovel.

It’s great that we’re focusing on transit, because transit benefits energy use, land-use, runoff, the need for parking infrastructure, and so on compared to driving. Biking and walking are even better. Density automatically makes all of these modes more viable. Of course we still don’t put our policies where our mouth is on pedestrian issues, with many “no crossing” points even in our most urban districts, our lax oversight of speeding and red light running, and so on.

It’s disgusting what’s happening with the global warming “debate.” In fact it’s a fake debate kept alive by certain industries and those who believe them. We’re exactly where the cigarette “debate” was a couple decades ago. Scientists agree that humans are a contributor to the problem, as much as they agree about anything, except the corrupt (bought) ones and a small number of honest devil’s advocates. The cigarette deniers are now seen as having contributed to countless deaths (and they still troll online bulletin boards, denying everything!). In the coming decades the global warming deniers will be reviled in the same way for the same reason. I’ll applaud any leadership Obama might provide on this issue, and we can all act locally as well, as an industry adding to the strides we’ve made, as a region with policy, and as individuals.