Eric Sanderson, Bill Solecki, Owen Gutfreund on “Terra Nova, the world beyond cars, oil and suburbs”

The next administration will face great challenges in addressing continued global climate change and its effects. In his upcoming book Terra Nova, The New World after Oil, Cars and Suburbs (to be published in 2013 by Abrams) Eric Sanderson, author of the best-selling book Manahatta: A Natural History of New York, argues that America’s addiction to oil and the lack of a policy of energy independence is actually destroying our way of life.  Sanderson writes, “The oil-cars-suburbs complex is so well-constructed, so resilient to reproof, so tightly bound up with our economy and way of life, that we do not even notice much of what is right and good in our lives we give up to curse through the traffic on the way to work.”  Sanderson’s solution focuses on four inter-linked and phased-in policy initiatives toward rethinking our energy consumption and the environmental toll of our car-dependent lifestyles. William Solecki, Director of The CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, will moderate a conversation on the future of our energy and environmental policy with Sanderson and Owen Gutfreund, Associate Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter and author of Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (Oxford University Press).