bq. the City of Berkeley… will lose one of the best opportunities anywhere for leading the world into a sane and healthy 21st Century… Why would I say something as extravagant as claiming the opportunity is one of the best in the world? Because the world is facing the largest crisis in 65 million years and if the right thing is built there, that particular development would constitute a major and early part in the solution to that crisis.

This sort of self-obsessed hyperbole [from “EcoCity Builders”:http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/about.html%5D, asserting that two acres in California are somehow vastly more crucial towards solving all the world’s problems than the 99.9999999946% of the earth’s land area around it, is one reason why I can’t see myself working in the Bay Area anytime soon. One can easily say that the Berkeley community deserves and demands an environmentally superior solution, that the world faces multiple environmental crises and that new development can help to start to address these crises, etc. However, asserting that you (and/or your pet project) are singularly tasked with changing the future of the world says more about your ego than anything else.