Ecocity World Summit

Welcome to Istanbul …

By land from Asia to Europe and back, and by sea from the Eurasian continental interior and the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and World Ocean beyond, explorers of geography, humanity and nature have found Istanbul at the geographic crossroads of civilizations mixing, competing, learning from one another and ever creating new worlds from their dreams of the future.

Never has there been a time more in need of learning together. More that that, some very creative people need to be heard and heeded, people who have been studying the crossroads of cultures’ time, from Turkey’s Çatal Hoyuk, the Earth’s oldest known city, to the conditions and needs of the deep future for all life on Earth deep into her soils and embraced by her changing, heating climate. Now we need the discipline and optimism, the humility and careful attention to learn from those warning us of things to come and best lessons from the past, which is deep indeed in Istanbul. More than that we need to forge fresh creative ideas and directions to make our world civilization of art and science, humane and spiritual questing a thing to endure into the world off our children, and theirs, and theirs, and theirs.

We are now at another crossroads, between the past and the future, success and failure. With humanity’s immense population and pressure on resources, with oil, the energy source upon which society is most dependent, on the way out, with species diversity collapsing all around the planet and with climate rapidly changing in a threatening direction toward unknown outcomes, it is time to examine our options in building our global civilization and create a new one strong enough to forge success and guarantee a peaceful humanity that can endure forever.

There is another crossroads implied by our International Ecocity Conference series that started in 1990 in Berkeley, California and traveled to Adelaide, Australia, then Yoff, Senegal, and on to Curitiba, Brazil; Shenzhen, China; Bangalore, India and, in 2008, San Francisco, California. We were in those years building a tradition of building an ecologically healthy civilization. The new crossroads, the intersection of that tradition with the growing awareness of people everywhere that we finally of force need to solve a problem never before faced by humanity, the very survival of climate and life systems of the Earth, gives the Eighth International Ecocity Conference the potential for powerful and extraordinary influence on humanity’s literal building of the future.

May we do it well.
Richard Register
President, Ecocity Builders
Founder, International Ecocity Conference Series

Announcing ECOCITIES EMERGING

To support humanity's transition into the Ecozoic Era

The Ecozoic Era refers to a vision, first promoted by cosmologist Thomas Berry, of an emerging epoch when humanity lives in a mutually enriching relationship with the larger community of life systems.

Ecocities Emerging is a new initiative of the International Ecocity Conference Series and will be integrated with our current Ecocity Media site and Ecocity World Summit conference website.

Every month we'll bring you news and updates chronicling ecocities and ecocity initiatives emerging around the world.

Will we be able to make the transition in time to retain a biosphere healthy enough to regenerate living systems now under extreme stress? There is no way to be certain, but our position is that there's no time to sit around and wonder about it: now is time for action.

Thank you for all that you are doing to help accelarate progress toward a civilization in balance with living systems. Maybe one day all cities will be ecocities.

ECOCITIES EMERGING E-NEWSLETTER

ECOCITY MEDIA