Eco-Metropolis 2005
Toward a Green, Just, Joyous, Sustainable Greater NYC

Took place on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 11th and 12th

At the CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, at 34th St.)

And was a co-production of the New York Open Center,the Continuing Education & Public Programs at The Graduate Center at CUNY, and the Bioneers Conference

Eco-Metropolis Update, 8/07

The last Eco-Metropolis conference took place in November 2005. We have not produced another event since then for two main reasons.

First, a great deal about environmental politics in the New York metro region changed quite radically starting shortly after that time. Perhaps we contributed in some small way to that shift locally, or perhaps we were merely anticipating and reflecting the coming change in the larger zeitgeist, but the city government fairly suddenly became far more proactive on many environmental fronts, adopting many of the themes we highlighted at the conference, and some of the leading figures in the eco activist community who spoke at Eco-Metropolis, previously marginalized, now have at least some voice in the corridors of power.

Of course, this doesn’t at all mean that the battles are over and that we now live in a green utopia, but the political dynamics and the tenor of the public debate on environmental issues have certainly shifted. This means the role of an Eco-Metropolis Conference would have to be different than it was previously.

Before, one of its main goals was to seek to awaken certain key sectors of activist communities and of the larger citizenry to the existence of a dynamic ecosystem of green groups and projects that already existed but often flew under the radar of public awareness and often didn’t know of each other’s work. Another was to drive home the great potential to realistically “green” the city and region and radically improve people’s lives. These goals have been at least partially achieved.

So, we have decided to wait a few years to see how this all shakes out. We don’t want to just put on a conference for its own sake, but hope to put on events when we can contribute something original and significant to the culture. Because we have done this as volunteers with no budget and no remuneration, not as a job, our idea is to view the conference as a marker, and to produce one when we feel we can make a cogent, relevant “statement” that can really help nudge opinion and policy in a positive direction.

Undoubtedly, some aspects of NYC’s “formal” (i.e. government-backed) greening will succeed and some will fail; some visionary initiatives will be launched; and a great deal of “greenwashing” will also occur. There will certainly be much to critique and to appraise and new directions to propose, but, for now, we feel that we need to let the dust settle a bit, so we can get a better sense of the most productive niche for Eco-Metropolis.

Another, more practical, factor in delaying a new iteration of Eco-Metropolis, was the change of leadership at the CUNY Graduate Center . When David Levine, who ran its public programs and was a key figure in the creation of Eco-Metropolis, stepped down, we lost that venue for the conference. Raising the funds to rent a comparable site would require a major effort, which we, who all have many other responsibilities and other work, are not ready to undertake right now. It is likely we will find a way to partner with another institution that will provide us with a good site for a conference, once we are ready to put one on, but the loss of the ideal CUNY space was certainly an unfortunate development.

 

We are leaving THE FULL PROGRAM FROM ECO-METROPOLIS 2005 UP ON THIS WEBSITE so activists can use it as a resource for contacts and to study the model of the conference, if they are so inclined.

 

We will of course, keep you posted, once we decide to launch a new version of Eco-Metropolis or put on smaller, less ambitious but related events.

 

Bioneers Conferences :

Eco-Metropolis grew out of its affiliation with the Bioneers network ( www.bioneers.org ), which puts on a major conference each October in California but also serves as an umbrella to some 20 other simultaneous regional events including some on the East Coast (one in Mass. ( www.connectingforchange.org) and one in Cobleskill, NY-contact Erica Gulseth at: egulseth@hotmail.com). We strongly recommend that any of you seeking to attend other inspiring eco-themed conferences check one of these out.

To all who participated in Eco-Metropolis 2005-

THANK YOU!

We, the organizing team of Eco-Metropolis, want to offer our great thanks to all of you who so graciously gave of your scarce time and valuable energy to make the event a success. The primary reason for Eco-Metropolis' existence is to showcase the great work you all do to make our city and region more livable and fairer and to point to a more sustainable future. Seeing and hearing from all of you, who are brilliantly and tirelessly working in so many domains, was truly inspiring.

There is something powerful about having so much creativity and accumulated wisdom from a wide range of exemplary people from many different communities and areas of focus come together even briefly under one roof with a sense of broadly shared purpose.

We would also like to offer our most profound gratitude to the indispensable David Levine and the CUNY Graduate Center staff for hosting, helping shape and supporting the event; our other local co-sponsoring partner, The New York Open Center for all its invaluable assistance, and our national partner, the Bioneers conference, whose model and vision we have drawn from to shape Eco-Metropolis. Others who must be mentioned are Leslie McEachern of Angelica Kitchen, who exhibited extraordinary generosity in providing the world's best vegan food for our mixer, and the NATION magazine and WBAI for helping spread the word.

We are honored to have worked with you all, and wish you all the very best in the coming year,

The Eco-Metropolis production team: J.P. Harpignies, Carrie Wykoff, Anne Hemenway, Betsy Tompkins, Diana Gilchrist, Celia Owens and Doug Motel.

THE FULL PROGRAM FROM ECO-METROPOLIS 2005 WILL STAY UP ON THIS WEBSITE until the next conference. Information about smaller events we sponsor in the interim will be posted here as they become definite.

AN ANNOUNCEMENT:

We have decided that the next full Eco-Metropolis conference will most likely take place at some point in 2007, but that we will organize some smaller events (such as evening panels, lectures and screenings) in 2006. We will, of course, let you all know about any developments.
All of the organizing group members are unpaid volunteers with other full-time jobs and responsibilities. Putting on a conference with such an elaborate program on virtually no budget requires a great deal of time and energy. A more relaxed rhythm will allow us to approach each event with more creativity and to make each even more of a special occasion. It also makes more sense in that conclaves such as Eco-Metropolis are markers of sorts, and there will be more novel initiatives and situations and new ideas and projects to highlight and discuss if we do it bi-annually rather than annually.

EVENT REVIEW:
We are in the process of digesting and reviewing what took place at the conference to determine what worked well, what needs work and what new directions might be worth attempting. One of our goals is to attempt to popularize the very concept (or "meme") of New York as a potential "Eco-Metropolis" in the hope the idea could spread "virally" and help influence a larger swath of the citizenry (and, ideally, ultimately policy makers) to have "greener" expectations, desires and demands for their city and region. That could, of course, take a while, but the feedback we have gotten suggests that the basic idea is sound--several people who were not familiar with our region's fertile eco-activist landscape but came to the event reported coming away awed, with a changed sense of what our city and region could be. But how to spread that concept to a broader public more quickly with very limited resources is definitely worth pondering.

Another of our major aspirations besides showcasing our area's "green" exemplars is that the event be useful in more concrete ways to our eco-active community and that it genuinely help foster cross-pollinations and new fertile connections. We do know of many instances in which useful information got shared and/or connections made, so that is happening to some extent, but we would like to think of more specific and tangible ways to further that goal at the conference.

It's hard to achieve the right balance when attempting to put on an event that seeks to be of interest to both the general public and to specialists in various fields, and it's understandably hard to get very busy people (who are already agreeing to appear for no remuneration) to stick around beyond their own presentations to engage in further sessions, unless there are very clear, likely positive outcomes for them and their organizations. So all this will require serious brainstorming.

Attendance:
Eco-Metropolis attracted some 450 to 475 attendees over the course of the two days, up from some 300 the year before. Many of the attendees were activists and/or professionals somehow connected to the event's themes, quite a few of them extremely accomplished and influential leaders in their domains, but there were also quite a few concerned citizens looking for more information and ways to get involved.

Youth Component:
The attendance was far better Saturday than Friday. The emphasis on youth and student events on Friday brought together some very cool, sizeable groups, including those from Rocking the Boat, SustainUS, The New York Harbor School and the United Nations School, and quite a few of the young people in these organizations put a lot of energy into the event and were a joy to work with, but we were a bit disappointed that we weren't able to attract larger numbers of young people in general as attendees, even though the whole conference was free to all youth and students. We had really hoped to expose more young people from around the city to the great work these and other groups are doing.
The fact that Friday (despite the fact that it was Veterans' day) was a school day for many educational institutions may have been one factor in the so-so attendance, but clearly our own organizational efforts, though we worked very hard on it, were obviously not sufficient or sufficiently well-directed on this front. We would also have loved to have seen more youth attendees come to attend events on both days and in general stick around to network, so there would have been more mingling of the generations. Bioneers, our role model, now has a very dynamic youth component, but it took years to get off the ground.
We do tip our hat to the extremely cool future leaders in the aforementioned groups (and others) who did show up and gave great presentations. And we did make an effort to include youthful presenters on a good number of the panels throughout the two days, and were very pleased with the results. This was our first experimental attempt at such a major emphasis on youth activism, and the results were mixed, but we are very glad we tried, and we learned a lot from the attempt.