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With over 50% of the world’s population now living in cities, and with that percentage increasing, along with at least another two billion people projected to be added to global population before it levels off, megacities are destined to rise to complement existing cities. Some will rise in the middle of empty open space, perhaps offshore or in a desert. Others will rise from redeveloped sections of exisiting cities. These new cities will have towers of composites and steel and pervasive photovoltaic and thermal architecture. The ocean will supply saltwater feedstock for desalinated fresh water, and all waste water will be cleaned and the surplus will be piped to neighboring arid lands, to filter into aquifers or reestablish new forests bringing back moderate and reliable rains.

Future megacities will be like spaceships – self-sufficient, recycling everything, generating surplus water & power

Megacities will be like space colonies on a new planet, completely self-sufficient, and making an imprint calculated to improve the health of the regional ecosystems. In practice that means desalinating seawater for residential and industrial use, factory farming, then cleaning and recycling all wastewater. The surplus water from megacities can be used to remoisturize the planet. The earth is dry because tropical forests are half the extent they once were, and our lakes and water tables are depleted. The water surplus from new megacities can rewater the planet.

Environmentalists decry mega-projects yet extol the megacity. New cities have to attract people, which is why cities upon terraced mountains could permit high density while preserving cool, rural ambiance. Megacities could be more people friendly if multi-family, mid-rise dwellings were designed in a terraced manner to incorporate high-ceilings and panoramic views of multi-story buildings, but with every unit on the terraced structure having a balcony and yard, and only a one story drop to the next yard. Yards would vary in size. With a residence above, below and to the side, the interior space of each residential condominium could exist beneath a roof covered with turf that would constitute the yard of the condominium above. With this design, literally every resident in a huge multistory structure would retain a connection to the land – there could be paths along the turf covering the major structural elements of the massive building, so residents could literally walk up and down on the growing turf of the roof.

Under the ground, and via massive, wide canyons into and out of terraced megastructures, personal vehicle access and parking and transit amenities can be plentiful – freight arrives via a sorting yard not dissimilar to airline luggage processing, hopefully more reliable! In comes food for the tens of thousands, out goes clean water and usable recycled materials. The future megacity can produce water and energy surpluses that are exported to the planet. They can produce virtually zero pollution, and they can house billions.

No discussion of environmental policy should ignore the inevitability of an elderly population, but they do. The interconnectedness of the size of the human population of the planet and the health of global ecosystems is apparent to all, but environmental policy debates treat the population issue as a sideshow, instead of granting it centrality.

Only then can the crucial nature of human population demographics be analysed from an environmental and a cultural perspective. And from that perspective, there are two ways that nations of the world are coping with the aging of their populations. One is to import new citizens, the other is to automate society with armies of robots. These are utterly distinct ways to demographically manage collective aging, and the only sustainable way is to automate – because as humanity achieves zero population growth, eventually every country is going to have an aging population.

In Japan, a nation fully industrialized with a formidable technological base, robots are on the verge of walking, talking, and performing basic tasks. Parallel progress is being made to render these robots lifelike. Japan is learning to emerge into the inevitable next state of humankind, because they are not importing young people. If you believe that human population is destined to level off, then you have to assume the human population will begin to age.

So how Japan copes may help us all prepare for the advancement of humanity to a new evolutionary state, where productivity from semi-autonomous robots and androids removes the need for a young workforce, or a workforce that outnumbers the retirement citizens. Environmentalists must realize that if our ecosystems benefit from a stable, sustainable quantity of human inhabitants on earth, than inevitably that population will become an elderly population. How this will work must be part of any comprehensive vision of environmentalism.

Back in 2004 it seemed like a Jerry Brown / Arnold Schwarzenegger regime in California would be an odd pairing. But why? Both are intelligent, pragmatic yet outspoken politicians. Both are lampooned; the Moonbeam, the Terminator.

Now Moonbeam and the Terminator are California’s Governor and Attorney General, not in that order. And this week, in any case, they are both fundamentally wrong on environmental policy. Bravo to any politician in Sacramento who won’t pass a budget in a year when the State is going to sue and prosecute land owners at a whole higher level.

Already favored with nonprofit status, tax-deductible contributions, and settlement payoffs, environmentalist financial interests are now beginning to get reconveyance fees. And adding to this power, our Attorney General now enacts a law to require environmental impact reports, “EIR reports,” to include global warming impact.

This law will encourage additional civil suits on landowners who just want their land to have homes built all over it and as they choose, maybe even on big lots. Every scrap of ground will become even more contested between developers and environmentalists. Only the most powerful will survive. Growth will be forced into tiny land allocations of ultra high density housing. Low density suburbs inside the infill wall will be destroyed – their lifestyle exterminated – with innoculations of ultra-high density compounds. These “smart growth” ideologues and opportunists, whichever, are facilitating the increase in California’s population to sixty million people in 20 years. Perhaps there are other options.

To estimate global warming impact in an “EIR,” even if you believe in all the current precepts of global warming law – based on science – is still impossibly subjective. Perhaps high density urbanization causes congestion, because the reality of too few roads crushes utopian fantasies that people will stop buying SCG (“smart, clean, green”) cars and using them. A low density urbanized landscape would permit wildlife and surface vegetation to thrive on the private land – costing taxpayers nothing, delivering everything. Roads would not be congested. In-turn, this land use would be cooler and less water intensive than, say, biofuel plantations, and would significantly lower overall regional surface temperatures.

In an ultra-high density urban model, there are no trees. In the Sacramento “urban services” area, for example, people now live in high density residential housing, up to 10,000 per square mile. From any practical perspective of landscaping today, high density housing permits no trees on private lots, and it gets hot inside these compounds. The farmland outside the urban service walls is also hot. This is “smart growth,” and it makes regional surface temperatures hot as hell. For the sake of the environment, we need to loosen the rules on land use, not tighten them.

So go ahead and launch your global warming impact EIR requirement, Sacramento. But unless it is turned on its head, this law will only feed consultants and lawyers, as bulldozers stay close to the compounds, and our freedoms wither in a hotter sun.