ABSTRACT
Recently I spent three months in Southern California, teaching at the University of California at Irvine. I shocked my students when I made the point that North America has the two most unsustainable societies on the planet (Canada and the USA) and that Southern California is the most unsustainable part of North America. The southern Californians have erected a huge metropolitan area with nearly 20 million inhabitants on a terrain of mountains and valleys that is essentially a desert and highly susceptible to earthquakes. The city must import all its water, energy, and food from elsewhere. Its transportation system depends overwhelmingly on heavy, fast, automobiles that travel on multi-lane freeways that criss-cross the area. If Southern Californians had intentionally set out to design an unsustainable society, they could hardly have exceeded the reality of today’s LA area.
