Vancouver’s vision for its Olympic village looks dazzling from afar, like the city itself. Up close the details get hairier.Photo: ecstaticistThe city of Vancouver, British Columbia, has a lot to brag about. It's got an enviable location, wedged between the Strait of Georgia and the snow-capped Coast Mountains. It's a perennial winner of "most livable cities" rankings, thanks in part to its parks, arts, and the Canadian social safety net. Its youthful mayor, Gregor Robertson, talks up the city as the greenest in North America and has laid out a plan to make it the most sustainable city in the world.

So you better believe the city will be showing off its environmental credentials when it hosts the 2010 Winter Olympics next February. "Greening" the Olympics has become an expectation, after all (see Turin's recycling programs and Beijing's attempt at air quality improvements). As the largest city ever to host the Winter Games, Vancouver intends to make sustainability central to its Olympic legacy.

The centerpiece of those efforts will be the athletes' village at Southeast False Creek, an 80-acre rehabbed brownfield that lies across a "false creek" from the downtown peninsula. There, a $1 billion city-within-a-city is rising in preparation for next year's Olympic and Paralympic athletes. For years the city eyed the site as a place to try out a new kind of sustainable neighborhood. Winning the Olympic bid in 2003 provided the impetus.

Artist's rendering of the Olympic village. Watch a slide show about the project.The development is distinctively European in its design, an odd influence in a city that can already feel more Asian than North American (See a slide show about the project.) Elsewhere in the city, the "Vancouverist" architectural style highlights slender towers that provide high density while preserving open view corridors (to take in the surrounding water and mountains). But at Southeast False Creek, short, squat buildings push to the edge of narrow streets and courtyards, evoking Amsterdam more than Singapore. Plazas and inner courtyards emphasize shared space, and the streetscape design draws on the Dutch concept of woonerf, a combined sidewalk/street that uses paving and landscaping to encourage walkers, cyclists, slow-moving cars, and children at play to make room for each other.

"You're creating a better community feel because you have more eyes on the street, more people with contact with the street level, and less of that height that keeps people apart from each other," said Robin Petri, the city's project engineering manager.

Southeast False Creek's 16 buildings will include market-rate and affordable housing, a senior housing center, retail shops, a grocery store, a pharmacy, and eventually an elementary school. There are enough clean energy and conservation features to make the head spin—bioswales and wetlands to treat runoff water, rainwater cisterns that irrigate green roofs and flush gray-water toilets, solar-powered trash compactors, heat drawn from sewage pipes, a radiant heating and cooling system.

The development's layout emphasizes communal space, as with this waterfront boardwalk, a nod to one of the site's past uses as a shipyard.Photo: Jonathan HiskesIf it sounds a lot like every other Cool Green Building Project, fair enough. The village is LEED-ey, with expectations that 15 of the buildings will be certified gold and one platinum, under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard. The development is also participating in the pilot LEED neighborhood program. But it's not the highest-rated LEED project—that distinction currently goes to Dockside Green in nearby Victoria, B.C.

Southeast False Creek is notable more for its size—planners predict an eventual population of more than 10,000—and for the international attention it will receive in the Olympic spotlight.

Design manager Roger Bayley summarized the hope that the village's influence in architecture and planning circles will stretch far beyond Vancouver: "I personally believe it could have a very significant influence," he said. "It's being constructed on a scale and in a timeframe that is literally unheard of, except maybe in China. And it's embracing a whole series of innovations that I think many people … will be extraordinarily impressed with."

That's one potential legacy. There's another possibility. Seven months before opening ceremonies, a string of problems nearly as numerous as the clean-tech features threatens to eclipse the project's sustainability goals.

Overshadowing and complicating every other trouble is a financing mess rooted in last fall's credit crisis and mired in the real estate ­­­slump. The project was to be the first Olympic village that was largely funded by private sources and sold as market housing (they are typically built by governments and used afterward as low-income or senior housing). The city, which owns the land, was reportedly glad to avoid the responsibility of supervising construction and financing, while still standing to turn a profit on the project. It ceded much of that work to the developer Millennium Development Corporation. But Millenium's funding mechanism collapsed last October when the New York hedge fund Fortress Investment Group pulled out of the project, leaving the city holding the tab. The city council made arrangements, first in secret and then publicly, to shore up the project with tax money—now figured at $450 million Canadian ($403 million U.S.). City leaders hope they can recover the cost when the units are sold to private buyers for use after the Olympics. Of course, that depends on the real estate market.

A woonerf, or shared-used street, in Matsumoto, Japan. Southeast False Creek will employ similar narrow, winding byways. Photo: Cheryl & RichOther setbacks: Construction lags behind schedule, pressuring workers to meet a Nov. 1 deadline, when the development company hands control of 1,100 units to Olympic organizers. In late June, reports arose of a possible mold problem because of improper pipe installation. A goal that vegetation would cover 50 percent of the project's roof space has been scrapped, reportedly because insurers worried about flooding. [Correction: Petri said the project is on track to meet this target.]

The city also scaled back the amount of low-income and middle-income housing it originally pledged to include. It will now subsidize 252 low-income units, a target that has nearly doubled in cost, from $65 million to $110 million, The Vancouver Sun reports. The city has yet to determine who will qualify and how to select tenants for the subsidized dwellings, Petri said.

British Columbia's anti-Olympic protestors have also focused some of their disapproval on the development, even though Olympic housing will occupy only 50 of Southeast False Creek's 80 acres. Much of the development will be built after the games, and of course the whole village will last far longer than its use for the games. Still, planners have battled the perception that the short-term event influenced the city's long-term plan.

"This isn't really about the Olympics," said Petri. "The Olympics just provided us with a fixed timeline and an opportunity to give it lots of attention. But this was planned way before the Olympics. Whether someone's excited about the Olympics or not is really independent from how they feel about the site."

The project’s blocky buildings achieve the same density as many of the city’s tower housing developments, according to the city's project engineering manager, Robin Petri.Photo: Jonathan HiskesIt will be interesting to see which storylines prevail when the international media trains its eye on Vancouver next winter—the financial mess, the shrinking social-housing target, the clean-energy and water-use technologies, the attempt to build not just green buildings but an entire sustainable neighborhood, or something else altogether. Organizers have begun releasing an elaborate online book on their vision for the site, in monthly segments, to help along those glowing profiles. (To be fair, the publication includes some good information, not just PR.)

Assessing the project's long-term influence will be more difficult. Locally, it may wear down some of the resistance that comes with trying to build things differently. Bayley, the lead designer, spoke this spring about seeking permits to use harvested rainwater to flush toilets.

"You'd think that would be a simple thing to do, but persuading municipal authorities was not as simple as we'd hoped," he said. "We ended up putting signs on the toilet saying 'do not drink this water.' Then they wanted it translated into dog and cat."

Petri added later, "But now they've approved it, and the next attempt at this won't be as new to them." She said the project would help permitters, contractors, engineers, landscape architects, and others who work on it become comfortable with high-efficiency techniques. From there, she hopes, they might spread throughout the building and planning trades. In other words, despite all the attention that comes with being novel, the real goal of Southeast False Creek is to help such projects become normal.

Watch a slide show about Vancouver's Olympic village at Southeast False Creek:

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British Columbia held its provincial election yesterday, with the province's carbon tax playing a big role--and coming out a big winner. Aside from the economy, probably no issue was more important than the ruling Liberal Party's climate plan, passed last summer and subsequently the opposition New Democratic Party's (NDP) centerpiece campaign issue.

A carbon tax backlash failed to unseat British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell in the province's May 12 elections.Image courtesy Liberal Party of British ColumbiaThe Liberals won, leading in some 48 district races and giving Premier Gordon Campbell a third consecutive majority government. That should ensure the survival of the carbon tax, called one of the best in the world by our partner in wonkery Alan Durning over at Sightline.

I don't know all the ins and outs of Canadian politics, where the traditionally progressive and environment-minded NDP came out against the tax, which was created by the typically right-of-center Liberals. But the Canadian press reads the election as an affirmation of the climate plan.

Says the Vancouver Sun: "Election victory gives Campbell economic, environmental mandate"

From the Toronto Globe and Mail:

It wasn't an entirely green night, as the Globe and Mail noted the B.C. Green Party won only 8 percent of the vote province-wide, less than it got in the 2005 election.

The carbon tax debate began last summer when oil prices were at a peak, which didn't help its popularity. The NDP tried to harness that frustration, saying the tax was too hard on the economically strapped poor. That strategy earned criticism from prominent green groups like the David Suzuki Foundation.

Vancouver alt-mag the Tyee spoke to David Cubberly, a regional NDP pol who disagreed with his party's strategy:

Says the Carbon Tax Center, an advocacy group:

I can't think of an American statewide (governor or otherwise) election in which a climate plan became the first or second-most important issue. That's not too say it couldn't happen soon.

--

Related: Read Grist contributor Charles Komanoff's take.

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When Premier of British Columbia Gordon Campbell asked delegates at the World Conference on Sport and the Environment whether they had flown to the Vancouver event on Monday, hundreds of hands shot up. If any of them saw the irony of reaching an environmental conference through the carbon-intensive method of jet travel, they didn’t let on.

Thomas Kineshanko, a 2008 graduate of Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, spoke up Tuesday about the dilemma at a panel on “Inspiring Youth Through Sport.”

As an 800-meter track runner, he traveled with his college team to places such as Tennessee and Fresno to compete in races that would last less than two minutes. “It finally struck me that this is kind of an absurd pastime,” he said.

He tried to lead the team in becoming carbon neutral, but it didn’t work out. He now manages his grandfather’s firm, Habitat Enterprises, helping it transition into a carbon-trading consultating firm. He’s set a personal goal of overseeing the reduction of 25 million tons of carbon emissions in his lifetime.

His musing on the problem of jet travel was one of a few back-to-earth moments the youth panel provided at the idea-heavy conference.

“I think that if young people were given the opportunity and the tools, they could do so  much,” said Theresa Seymour, 24, a member of Canada’s Sto:lo Nation. “It’s not about spoon-feeding young people with what they need to know. Because this world is becoming their very quickly.”

Seymour spoke about helping teenagers in aboriginal groups connect with their communities through traditional sports, such as dugout-canoe races. She said traditional competitions required fasting, bathing, and prayer beforehand, things that inevitably led to a broader awareness of one’s environment. 

“Because it was about your heart and your mind. It wasn’t just about one aspect of your being,” she said.

Seymour is also an up-and-coming hip-hop artist, as are two lads from Richmond, British Columbia, who won VANOC’s “u-reduce/u-produce” video storytelling contest this month. Check out this offering from 15-year-olds Darrick “D-Pain” Lee and Michael “Phat Mike” Darnel. I’m pretty sure it’s a hybrid SUV they’re using to knock SUVs and plug hybrids, despite the tricky camera work. But the video is solid. Decide for yourself:

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Near the end of the World Conference on Sport and the Environment in Vancouver yesterday, Kim Smither of marketing firm Octagon Worldwide displayed a series of photos of screaming, face-painted sports fans.

“Imagine the power you’d have if you could harness this,” she said.

Talk of “harnessing” the passion of sports showed up everywhere at the two-day conference, but Smither moved past the cliché and made a case that athletes are in a great position to promote environmentally friendly behavior—if they understand the diversity of their fans.

She walked conference delegates, including several Olympic medalists, through Octagon’s “Passion Drivers” market research, which tries to determine exactly why sports fans are moved to scream themselves hoarse, or at least plan their weekends around televised games.

The company found viewers are drawn to spectator sports for different reasons -- team loyalty, for example, or nostalgia, or gloating rights, or admiration of individual athletes, or a sense of tribal belonging.

Fan-tastic.

iStock

Octagon’s Olympic-focused research uncovered national trends. Devotion to the national team is the most important motivator for Chinese viewers. In England, nostalgia and appreciation for history and tradition provide the strongest emotional connection to the games. Canadians are driven by an affinity for their own team, for home-grown athletes, and for the cold-weather sports they consider “theirs.” Americans are exceptionally drawn to individual athletes (hence NBC’s human-interest vignettes).

If environmental groups -- and Olympians who speak on their behalf -- want the attention of viewers, understanding their different motivations is invaluable, Smither said.

“If you know why people are passionate, you can really target your message,” she said. “Sports fans are not a homogenous group. Some people are going to tune it out, but if you can find a way to speak in your audience’s language, you have a much better chance of being heard.”

Most of the self-selected respondents to Octagon’s surveys said Olympic athletes could persuade them to change their environmental athletes. Interestingly, they overwhelmingly said the messages of all athletes -- not just superstars -- mattered to them.

“I believe they hold the key to bringing sustainability to the Olympics,” Smither said of the majority of Olympians who do not win medals.

The research also found that people considered the Olympics an appropriate venue for sustainability messages. So they aren’t necessarily demanding that competitions provide an escape from social and political problems.

Anna van der Kamp, a silver medalist in rowing and project director for Clean Air Champions, a group of Canadian Olympians that promotes environmental health, led a panel responding to Octagon’s research. I asked her whether spectator sports have an escapist nature that limits the amount of social change they can promote.

If you can identify viewers that watch sports for escapist reasons (what Octagon calls “Self indulgence” and “Me time”), you can avoid them and target messages toward other groups, van der Kamp said.

The research was new to her, but she said Clean Air Champions has found its personal-health message much more successful with those already involved in athletics.

“People who are physically active, like amateur athletes, are more likely to take on new actions related to the environment,” she said. “So we seek them out.”

Other than urging athletes to step up and start endorsing environmental stuff, the Octagon presentation was more about inspiration than strategy. But it suggested sports fans might be quicker to engage in social issues than one might assume.

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Vancouverite David Suzuki and his namesake foundation surface in the U.S. news from time to time, typically through climate initiatives and ocean conservation initiatives such as its estimate of the carbon impact of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

But for our Northern neighbors, the 73-year-old Suzuki is a household name. He’s become the Canada’s preeminent environmental activist -- David Roberts likened him to the Canadian Al Gore. At this weeks’ World Conference on Sport and the Environment, I asked some youngish Canucks about his first claim to fame. They weren’t sure, they said.  He’s sort of always been around. (The often-helpful interwebs mention he was a genetist and longtime host of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s science TV series, "The Nature of Things.")

When the Vancouver Organizing Committee released a plan yesterday to make the 2010 Winter Games carbon neutral, reporters immediately turned to Suzuki and the policy wonks at his foundation for an assessment. The foundation provided the orginal forecast of the carbon impact of the 2010 Olympics –- 300,000 tons. But it hadn’t seen VANOC’s offset purchasing plan before yesterday, so it couldn’t vouch for it.

“I would plead with VANOC to please set the bar high,” said Suzuki.

He held his own news conference to announce the release of On Thin Ice, a report on the threat climate change poses to winter sports in Canada. It found that global warming could all but wipe out ice skating, cross-country skiing, and low-elevation downhill skiing by 2050 if no action is taken.

Suzuki mentioned two “iconic Canadian images” that are already endangered by climate change – polar bears and backyard skating rinks, like the one on which a young Wayne Gretzky learned to skate.

As he’s done before, Suzuki enlisted Canadian athletes to help make his case. Professional snowboarder Justin Lamoureaux, who trains in Whistler, B.C., said he’s already found his training season and availabe space shrunk by melting glaciers.

"Imagine a Canada with no pond hockey, no snow days, no skiing," he said. "No snowmen, snowballs or snow forts and less maple syrup. As much as some people dislike it, winter is Canada."

Suzuki also offered a harsh critique of the Conservative-led federal government and its lack of climate action, and of the national media’s downplaying of the climate issue in last fall’s election.

“Hundreds of thousands of Canadians are already acting at the individual level, but we need leadership at the federal level,” he said.

The foundation’s report concludes with a call for national carbon regulation.

“Canada is a northern country,” Suzuki said. “We are probably as vulnerable to the effects of greenhouse gases and global warming as any country in the world.”

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The big news of day one at the World Conference on Sport and the Environment in Vancouver, British Columbia, was the unveiling of a carbon neutrality plan for the 2010 Olympics. The rest of the day’s events were a lot like the offset plan: solid at their core and short on details.

During a keynote address, socially responsible investment executive Thomas Van Dyck managed to drop the lines, “The green tide must lift all ships,” “Green is the new green,” and “We must put the eco back in economy,” all within 30 seconds, all without a smile or a trace of irony. That’s got to be worth an award or something.

The crowd -- athletes, sports organizers, corporate sponsors, International Olympics Committee (IOC) officials and suitors from 2016 host city-finalists Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo, Rio -- seemed like they could handle a bit more than inspirational slogans. Not hating, just saying. But there was some good stuff along with the cheerleading.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson

Introduced as a guy who bicycled to work to work this morning, the boyish, charismatic 43-year-old talked up Vancouver as a cosmopolitan, exercise-loving city, where it’s only natural to unite athletics and care for the earth via a global event such as the Olympics.

Robertson mentioned biking to work, which he said taught him that his city could provide more bike-friendly commuter routes. He offered something of a challenge to his municipal colleagues: “We want to be the greenest city in the world,” he said. “Not that it should always be a competition, because there are things we can learn from each other too. But we figure we’re leading North America, which isn’t all that hard to do in terms of the environment.” Booyah! Take that, Cleveland. Also, he biked to work this morning.

Prince Albert II of Monaco

No newbie to the climate action scene, His Serene Highness Prince Albert II has traveled to both poles to observe the effects of global warming and clamor for carbon regulation. In Vancouver he showed lots of love for the host city, province, and organizing committee, along with the IOC.

"What the IOC has done, what the IOC environmental commission has done and indeed what the Olympic movement has embraced is, for me, a return to the original Olympic spirit," he said. "A philosophy of life with the goal of placing sport at the service of the harmonious development of man."

Overall, it was an everybody-on-board sort of speech: “It is no longer possible to shirk the efforts necessary to save our environment,” he said. “This fight requires absolutely everyone’s attention.”

Premier of British Columbia Gordon Campbell

The province’s leader since 2001 spoke openly and passionately about his love for wood, saying “If you’re concerned about the climate, wood is the best building material there is.

Campbell said wood conserves carbon even in lumber form, is more resilient than steel, and has 400-times better insulation than steel. He said he’s helped rewrite building codes to allow wooden buildings up to six stories high. “It’s cheaper, it’s environmentally sensible, and we’ve got lots of it,” he said.

Mountain pine beetles have killed 80 percent of inland pine forests in B.C. -- the beetle population has exploded because winters are no longer cold enough to kill most of them. The new 350,000 square-foot Olympic speed skating rink in suburban Richmond has a wooden roof, made from beetle-killed B.C. pines. Campbell considers this the sort of lemons-from-lemonade solution B.C. needs to showcase when the Games begin next February.

“We have to be willing to start with ourselves and be an example,” he said. “If no one’s willing to lead, we won’t make any progress.

“I think one of the most important things we can do is tell stories of success. Too often we just hear about what isn’t working.”

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The Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) wants make the 2010 Winter Games carbon neutral, but the plan it released Monday counts on help from the private sector to make it happen.

At the World Conference on Sport and the Environment, VANOC announced a plan to neutralize 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide, mostly through renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in British Columbia. That's the amount of emissions the February 2010 games will create, according to a preliminary carbon forecast by the David Suzuki Foundation. The forecast expects two thirds of that amount will come from air travel by spectators and participants.

Vancouver isn't the first city to attempt a carbon neutral Olympics -- Salt Lake City and Torino made similar promises. But organizers here say theirs is the broadest attempt yet. The 300,000-tons estimate includes carbon dioxide generated by pre-games construction and the 2010 Paralympic Games, to be held in Vancouver later next spring.

VANOC doesn't plan to pay for the offsets itself, CEO John Furlong said. Instead, it's counting on a corporate sponsor to step up just 10 months before the games, long after most sponsorships have been lined up. At current carbon prices of about $15 a ton, meeting the 2010 target would cost about $3.6 million ($4.5 million Canadian), said Linda Coady, vice-president of sustainability for the organizing committee.

Responsibility for executing the offset plan will be placed in the hands of the Pacific Carbon Trust, a newly created corporation that helps oversee the Province of British Columbia's carbon emissions reduction plan. Organizers said they didn't know exactly what projects those offsets would support just yet. Coady said they would likely include retrofitting buildings to run on geothermal or biomass heating instead of natural gas, for one.

Carbon offsets are frequently knocked for not actually reducing emissions (even Grist's Umbra Fisk has weighed in), and Vancouver games organizers conceded there's a big difference between high- and low-quality offsets. They promised to deliver the good kind. "We think the Pacific Carbon Trust standard is going to be one of the highest standards in the world," Coady told a group of reporters.

But the plan would not necessarily meet the internationally recognized gold standard for voluntary offsets, she said, because VANOC wanted to ensure it was weighted toward B.C. projects.

Organizers were asked if offsets are really about easing in the consciences of polluters, and Furlong responded that the offset program really "causes people to change behavior." For example, VANOC officials are traveling less to international meetings and teleconferencing instead, he said.

He promised the 2010 Games would be a shining example of environmental responsibility. "We only get one chance, one opportunity," he said. "Since we're in a part of the world that cares a lot about this, we're doing what we can."

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For the next two days I'll be reporting from Vancouver, British Columbia, where it's hard to walk two blocks without running into a construction project related to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. Eleven months from the opening ceremonies, Olympics buzz is fairly palpable, with games-related ads on the airwaves, heaps of Olympics gear for sale in souvenir shops, and construction cranes dotting the skyline.

The city gets a chance to highlight its preparations this week at the World Conference on Sport and the Environment (you know it's classy because they say sport and not sports), which will explore the roles athletics can play in addressing climate change and creating livable environments. It brings together Olympic medalists, pro and amateur sports organizers, and reps from the Olympics' heavyweight lineup of corporate sponsors. The Prince of Monaco will drop in to speak, as will leaders from the International Olympic Committee and the UN Environment Programme, the two sponsoring organizations.

There should be a good dose of overblown talk about "How Sports will Save the Earth," and I'll keep a running count of the use of the word "harness," as in "harnessing the power of sport for change." But I'm hopeful about hearing some genuinely innovative ideas too.

The conference also serves as a showcase for the environmental credentials of the Vancouver Organizing Committee, which has made sustainability a prominent part of its bid from the get-go. The 1,100-unit Olympic Village project is touted as a model of sustainable urban design, and new venues like the Richmond speed skating rink feature nifty energy and water-use elements.

Olympic preparations also include a high-impact rebuild of the Sea to Sky Highway connecting Vancouver to the ski resort Whistler, the site of many ski and sled competitions. B.C. has a feisty activist community that has already raised hell--and plans to raise more--about the highway, the loss of affordable housing, and other environmental and social impacts of the games.

I'll be looking into as much of this as I navigate this fair city, try to think metrically, and learn to keep loonies straight from my twoonies. (That's what they call money here, seriously) More to come ...

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These metropolises aren't literally the greenest places on earth -- they're not necessarily dense with foliage, for one, and some still have a long way to go down the path to sustainability. But all of the cities on this list deserve recognition for making impressive strides toward eco-friendliness, helping their many millions of residents live better, greener lives. If your favorite green city didn't make the list, tell us why it deserves recognition in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

Reykjavik, Iceland
Remember the grade-school memory device "Greenland is icy and Iceland is green"? It's truer than ever thanks to progress made by Iceland and its capital city in recent years. Reykjavik has been putting hydrogen buses on its streets, and, like the rest of the country, its heat and electricity come entirely from renewable geothermal and hydropower sources and it's determined to become fossil-fuel-free by 2050. The mayor has pledged to make Reykjavik the cleanest city in Europe. Take that, Greenland.

Portland, Oregon, U.S.
The City of Roses' approach to urban planning and outdoor spaces has often earned it a spot on lists of the greenest places to live. Portland is the first U.S. city to enact a comprehensive plan to reduce CO2 emissions and has aggressively pushed green building initiatives. It also runs a comprehensive system of light rail, buses, and bike lanes to help keep cars off the roads, and it boasts 92,000 acres of green space and more than 74 miles of hiking, running, and biking trails.

Curitiba, Brazil
With citizens riding a bus system hailed as one of the world's best and with municipal parks benefiting from the work of a flock of 30 lawn-trimming sheep, this midsized Brazilian city has become a model for other metropolises. About three-quarters of its residents rely on public transport, and the city boasts over 580 square feet of green space per inhabitant. As a result, according to one survey, 99 percent of Curitibans are happy with their hometown.

Malmö, Sweden
Known for its extensive parks and green space, Sweden's third-largest city is a model of sustainable urban development. With the goal of making Malmö an "ekostaden" (eco-city), several neighborhoods have already been transformed using innovative design and are planning to become more socially, environmentally, and economically responsive. Two words, Malmö: organic meatballs.

Vancouver, Canada
Its dramatic perch between mountains and sea makes Vancouver a natural draw for nature lovers, and its green accomplishments are nothing to scoff at either. Drawing 90 percent of its power from renewable sources, British Columbia's biggest city has been a leader in hydroelectric power and is now charting a course to use wind, solar, wave, and tidal energy to significantly reduce fossil-fuel use. The metro area boasts 200 parks and over 18 miles of waterfront, and has developed a way-forward-thinking 100-year plan for sustainability. Assuming civilization will last another 100 years? Priceless.

Copenhagen, Denmark
With a big offshore wind farm just beyond its coastline and more people on bikes than you can shake a stick at, Copenhagen is a green dream. The city christened a new metro system in 2000 to make public transit more efficient. And it recently won the European Environmental Management Award for cleaning up public waterways and implementing holistic long-term environmental planning. Plus, the pastries? Divine.

London, England
When Mayor Ken Livingstone unveiled London's Climate Change Action Plan in February, it was just the latest step in his mission to make his city the world's greenest. Under the plan, London will switch 25 percent of its power to locally generated, more-efficient sources, cut CO2 emissions by 60 percent within the next 20 years, and offer incentives to residents who improve the energy efficiency of their homes. The city has also set stiff taxes on personal transportation to limit congestion in the central city, hitting SUVs heavily and letting electric vehicles and hybrids off scot-free.

San Francisco, California, U.S.
Nearly half of all 'Friscans take public transit, walk, or bike each day, and over 17 percent of the city is devoted to parks and green space. San Francisco has also been a leader in green building, with more than 70 projects registered under the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification system. In 2001, San Francisco voters approved a $100 million bond initiative to finance solar panels, energy efficiency, and wind turbines for public facilities. The city has also banned non-recyclable plastic bags and plastic kids' toys laced with questionable chemicals. Next thing you know, they'll all be wearing flowers in their hair.

Bahía de Caráquez, Ecuador
After it suffered severe damage from natural disasters in the late 1990s, the Bahía de Caráquez government and nongovernmental organizations working in the area forged a plan to rebuild the city to be more sustainable. Declared an "Ecological City" in 1999, it has since developed programs to protect biodiversity, revegetate denuded areas, and control erosion. The city, which is marketing itself as a destination for eco-tourists, has also begun composting organic waste from public markets and households and supporting organic agriculture and aquaculture.

Sydney, Australia
The Land Down Under was the first country to put the squeeze on inefficient, old-school light bulbs, but Sydney-dwellers took things a step further in March, hosting a city-wide one-hour blackout to raise awareness about global warming. Add to that their quest for carbon neutrality, innovative food-waste disposal program, and new Green Square, and you've got a metropolis well on its way to becoming the Emerald City of the Southern Hemisphere.

Barcelona, Spain
Hailed for its pedestrian-friendliness (37 percent of all trips are taken on foot!), promotion of solar energy, and innovative parking strategies, Barcelona is creating a new vision for the future in Europe. City leaders' urban-regeneration plan also includes poverty reduction and investment in neglected areas, demonstrating a holistic view of sustainability.

Bogotá, Colombia
In a city known for crime and slums, one mayor led a crusade against cars that has helped to make Bogotá one of the most accessible and sustainable cities in the Western Hemisphere. Enrique Peñalosa, mayor from 1998 to 2001, used his time in office to create a highly efficient bus transit system, reconstruct sidewalks so pedestrians could get around safely, build more than 180 miles of bike trails, and revitalize 1,200 city green spaces. He restricted car use on city streets during rush hour, cutting peak-hour traffic 40 percent, and raised the gas tax. The city also started an annual "car-free day," and aims to eliminate personal car use during rush hour completely by 2015. Unthinkable!

Bangkok, Thailand
Once known for smokestacks, smog, and that unshakeable '80s song, Bangkok has big plans for a brighter future. City Governor Apirak Kosayodhin recently announced a five-year green strategy, which includes efforts to recycle citizens' used cooking oil to make biodiesel, reduce global-warming emissions from vehicles, and make city buildings more efficient. Bangkok has also made notable progress in tackling air pollution over the past decade. Though the city's pollution levels are still higher than some of its big-city Asian counterparts, its progress thus far is impressive.

Kampala, Uganda
This capital city is overcoming the challenges faced by many urban areas in developing countries. Originally built on seven hills, Kampala takes pride in its lush surroundings, but it is also plagued by big-city ills of poverty and pollution. Faced with the "problem" of residents farming within city limits, the city passed a set of bylaws supporting urban agriculture that revolutionized not only the local food system, but also the national one, inspiring the Ugandan government to adopt an urban-ag policy of its own. With plans to remove commuter taxis from the streets, establish a traffic-congestion fee, and introduce a comprehensive bus service, Kampala is on its way to becoming a cleaner, safer, more sustainable place to live.

Austin, Texas, U.S.
Austin is poised to become the No. 1 solar manufacturing center in the U.S., and its hometown utility, Austin Energy, has given the notion of pulling power from the sun a Texas-sized embrace. The city is on its way to meeting 20 percent of its electricity needs through the use of renewables and efficiency by 2020. Austin also devotes 15 percent of its land to parks and other open spaces, boasts 32 miles of bike trails, and has an ambitious smart-growth initiative, making it a happy green nook in what's widely perceived as a not-so-green state. To put it mildly.

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Mayor Richard M. Daley (D) is striving to make his hometown "the greenest city in America." There's lots of literal greenery: under his leadership, Chicago has planted 500,000 new trees, invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the revitalization of parks and neighborhoods, and added more than 2 million square feet of rooftop gardens, more than all other U.S. cities combined. And there's plenty of metaphorical greening too: the Windy City has built some of the most eco-friendly municipal buildings in the country, been a pioneer in municipal renewable-energy standards, provided incentives for homeowners to be more energy efficient, and helped low-income families get solar power.

Freiburg, Germany
Home to the famously car-free Vauban neighborhood and a number of eco-transit innovations, Freiburg is a tourist destination with a green soul. The city has also long embraced solar power.

Seattle, Washington, U.S.
Mayor Greg Nickels (D) has committed his city to meeting the emission-reduction goals of the Kyoto climate treaty, and inspired more than 590 other U.S. mayors to do the same. True to its name, the Emerald City is also planting trees, building green, and benefiting from biodiesel and hybrid buses.

Quebec City, Canada
Dubbed the most sustainable city in Canada by the Corporate Knights Forum, Quebec wins big points for clean water, good waste management, and bike paths aplenty. C'est magnifique!

Kate Sheppard contributed to this list.

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Two years ago, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon set out to see if it was still possible, in these hyper-globalized times, to live off food grown in your own 'hood. The pair made a pact to dine on dishes culled from within a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver, B.C., home for an entire year. Their personal experiment quickly evolved into a movement, and now Smith, a freelance journalist who writes regularly for Reader's Digest, and MacKinnon, a nonfiction author, have turned that movement into a book.

The 100-mile diet began as a way to reduce dependence on the fossil fuels sucked up by the conventional food system, which sees food travel an average of at least 1,500 miles from farm to plate. But it quickly became just as much an exploration of community, seasons, and flavor -- and a source of understanding about just how far removed we are from the food we eat.

Sure, there was the period of time before the dining duo found locally milled flour, putting them on an accidental Atkins diet. And there was that whole other chicken-and-egg question -- even if the chickens were local, was their feed? But in the end, they say, the year amounted to the most varied food-fest they'd ever had.

Their book, Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Robust Year of Eating Locally, hits U.S. shelves on April 24; it's already out in Canada, under the more direct title The 100-Mile Diet (the publishers feared it would come off as a weight-loss guide in the U.S. under that title). Grist caught up with Smith and MacKinnon by phone on the second day of their Canadian book tour.

What surprised you the most in the course of your 100-mile diet?

Smith: One surprise was things you couldn't get, which turned out to be wheat for us, but it would be different wherever you're living. I just imagined because bread and pasta are such a staple, [wheat] must be grown everywhere. But it turned out that historically it had been grown on the West Coast, but because of specialization of agriculture they decided that the prairies in the Midwest would be the wheat place, and where we [live] is the dairy place. So all of these decisions have been made, and the average person isn't aware of the effect they have on what kind of food you can get locally.

MacKinnon: I think one of the things that really surprised both of us was just how good a year of eating it ended up being. I think a lot of people, including us at the start, thought that it would be kind of boring and repetitive, and that we'd be eating the same thing day in and day out, the same short list of vegetables. But it turned out to be the most varied year of eating that either one of us has ever had.

I liked reading about the chicken dilemma, where you were going to get eggs from a local farm but realized those chickens probably ate feed bused from miles and miles away. How did you make decisions about these complex situations?

Smith: We hadn't even considered the depth of the whole chicken dilemma. So we really had to confront those issues as we went along and make decisions as they came. Some things we would reject and others we'd have to be like, "Well, if we want to eat eggs, the best ones are the ones at the UBC farm, which is biking distance from our home. The chickens were born there and raised there and they eat lots of the grass that grows there and the bugs on the ground there." We decided that we would eat those eggs, because we were informed of every aspect of the production of that food.

MacKinnon: We just tried to do the best we could.

Were there any specific moments that really told the story of how difficult it is to buy local, or how far we are removed from a local system of eating?

MacKinnon: I think fisheries were one of the more shocking areas. We live right on the ocean, and at the mouth of one of the world's great salmon-producing rivers, yet it was unbelievably difficult to find genuinely local seafood. There was this sort of dawning awareness of just how overwhelmingly fished-out some parts of the coast have become. We did eventually find one fisherman we could go to and we always knew where the stuff had come from, and knew that it had been fished in a sustainable way. But it was a pretty hard realization.

What did you find the most frustrating?

Smith: I'd say it was definitely the system itself, and realizing what the downfalls of the industrial food system really are. What really frustrated me is the labeling of food, in grocery stores. At best what they'll say is the state they're from. But if you're from, say, California or Texas, that could still be from almost 1,000 miles away. Or even with fish and seafood, it's very often not labeled at all, so people don't even have a way of finding out where it came from.

In Britain, food chains are talking about developing a food mileage labeling system. Do you guys see that as a possibility to raise more awareness?

MacKinnon: I think what we'll see over the next 10 years or so is that local food will impact the food system in the same ways that organic food has over the last 10 years or so. We've heard ideas like in the U.K., people have talked about getting grocery-store chains to set aside a portion of a store or parking lot as spaces for micro-farmers' markets. There's already talk in Vancouver about much more efficient ways to ship produce from local farms to local grocery chains. So we're right at the very beginning, but there's so much room for innovation that I don't have any doubt that five years from now it's going to be 20 times easier to eat locally.

You went into this as near-vegans, as you described it. How have your thoughts changed about conscientious or sustainable eating and what that means?

Smith: I still prefer to eat vegetarian, so this last year we planted beans in our garden, since that's something we'd had a lot of trouble finding. Now we have dry pinto beans we grew ourselves. I do occasionally eat local organic meat [now] because I have talked to the farmers and had my confidence restored in that side of the food system. I would eat that kind of meat, but I would never go to a restaurant and say, "I'll have the beef stir-fry."

MacKinnon: The most powerful thing about eating locally is just the degree of awareness that you have about the food that you're eating. If people are eating locally and sourcing food from places they have a good awareness of, they make much more sophisticated choices about the ethics of the food they're eating. We even found with some vegetable growers that they weren't necessarily organic, but when they told us exactly what they applied and when, we decided we could live with that and feel confident about the food. So, it's the same with meat. People can pick the point on the spectrum where they're comfortable or uncomfortable eating meat and dairy products.

The main criticism of this project and one of the main criticisms of the local food movement in general is that this is some sort of left-wing ideal, and isn't feasible for most people. How do you respond to that?

MacKinnon: I find that argument pretty strange. I mean, you look through most of human history, buying your food off of the land base around you has been the primary way that we've eaten. If we go back even one generation, you find that the people who were canning, doing home cooking, and growing kitchen gardens were primarily not the bourgeois. It was the everyday person. In fact, I think we should find the idea very odd that the way the average person in society should eat is buying products with a laundry list of chemicals attached to them that are coming from halfway around the world. I think we need to wake up to the idea that that model is brand-new and pretty strange when you take a look at it.

What were some of the long-distance treats you were excited to reintroduce?

MacKinnon: Oh, beer.

Smith: Less-than-glamorous things. Even rice was something we couldn't get, and that was the foundation of many former meals.

MacKinnon: It's nice to be able to have a beer and a chunk of chocolate every once in a while. Even foods that are handier, like buying dry pasta instead of having to make it from scratch every time with local flour. Things like olives, lemons, olive oil -- a little bit of those sorts of things are back in the cupboards, but the list of things that never came back is much, much longer.

What was the first meal you ate when you finished the diet?

Smith: The very first meal when officially we could have had anything we wanted, James just still made ...

MacKinnon: Potatoes and eggs.

Smith: Yeah, at home, with all the local food we already had, because that's what I wanted. But then we went out for Indian food that night.

MacKinnon: It really did start to feel like the new normal for us. So it never really ended.

It's one thing to change your personal habits or convince a few other people to change theirs. What's your thinking about how we can change the way North America as a whole, or the world, eats?

Smith: For me the most exciting thing, and it's happening on its own, is the explosion of farmers' markets. For the first time this year, Vancouver had a winter farmers' market, and they actually had to turn customers away because the space they booked wasn't large enough. So I think that's a really promising direction for local eating, because that is where shoppers can connect directly with the farmers.

MacKinnon: Eating is one area where consumer choice really does have a particularly powerful effect. I mean, as we saw with organics, a group of consumers are making different choices and are able to really drive revolutionary change throughout the food system. I think by buying locally you have that same capacity. As the demand for local food grows, it just automatically pushes the food system and the farmers to start operating in a different way. And policy and infrastructure changes follow that.

I'm not always a 100 percent believer in consumer power having the capacity to drive significant change, but this really is [an example] where that is the case.

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