The Philadelphia Eco-District Framework: Redeveloping the Refinery Site
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Date: 27 August 2019
Contact: Christopher Zelov 484-554-4710, David Steinberg
856-383-5325
E-Mail: info@ecodistrictphiladelphia.org
Web: https://www.ecodistrictphiladelphia.org/
Philadelphia, PA — 27 August 2019 — The Philadelphia Eco-District Incubator, an initiative of the Knossus Project, announced today "The Philadelphia Eco-District Framework". The Framework is a way of thinking about redeveloping the PES (Philadelphia Energy Solutions) Refinery site which has recently closed due to a major explosion, fire, and bankruptcy.
Christopher Zelov, co-founder of the Philadelphia Eco-District and the Knossus Project, said "The idea of the Eco-District Framework is to engage the creative power of regenerative ecological design to summon the vision and the courage to boldly dream about how our great city of Philadelphia can lead the world in putting into practice the emerging ideas of the Long Now and Regenerative Design to show how humanity can sustainably thrive on the one and only habitable planet known to science, our home, the Earth."
Mr. Zelov, added, "More succinctly, the Eco-District Framework is A Proposed Cutting-Edge Framework in Support of Redeveloping the PES Refinery site as a Net-Positive Regenerative Design Initiative from the Long Now Perspective."
David Steinberg, an Eco-District Member and a nominee for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, imagined in October 2017 the PES refinery being closed. He realized that the post petroleum age warranted an Eco-District project to imagine reuse of the refinery lands. He said, "What if we missed a multibillion dollar opportunity and made rash decisions because of the expediency of the moment? I brought this project to the Eco-District's attention because I saw that the site, with its long history of environmental contamination in the sunset petroleum industry, presents a Golden Opportunity that will never happen again."
Mr. Steinberg continued: "There are two issues that must be addressed, regardless of how the PES Refinery site is reused:
- It is situated over the NJ Aquifer, which NJ Farmers use to irrigate their crops. We eat the food they grow, and I seriously question if we are putting poison into our bodies?
- Rising waters are coming a lot faster than we want to believe and will displace Philadelphians in low lying areas and create a rolling disaster upstream and downstream in PA, NJ and DE. We can deal with both issues, provide displaced residents with energy efficient homes, and relieve the pressure on the aquifer. The problems were created over a 150-year time period and will take decades or more to resolve. There are many challenges that need to be considered and resolved. We must think Long Term and do it right."
Mr. Zelov explained how and why the Eco-District Framework was situated in a Long Now historical context, "When William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania, he called Philadelphia a 'Greene Country Towne'. Also, our Lenni Lenape forefathers on this land understood the value of deep ecology and deep time. Just as our ancestors engaged visionary and far-reaching hopes for these lands, we ought to engage in a visionary rebirth for some of our city's most polluted lands. As Buckminster Fuller's life demonstrates, cutting edge breakthrough thinking is best developed from a meta-historical perspective: it is what empowers effective visionary thinking. Therefore, the Eco-District Framework includes the core principles of restoration and aspirational values. They empower us to rebuild the refinery site into something ennobling built on the great traditions of historical consideration grounded with our traditional values, considerate design, and the imagineering of the future."
Mr. Steinberg added, "I am grateful to be on the Eco-District team contributing ideas to help reimagine how Philadelphia can transition from the toxicity of petroleum to one of on-going human-centric ecological regeneratively with Net-Positive results to help Philadelphia continue thriving for generations to come. This kind of thinking led us to our five pillar framework."
The Eco-District Framework features five core pillars of consideration:
- Aspirational Values So People Can Live, Work, and Play There,
- Remediation: Repairing Environmental Damage,
- Restoration: Bringing the Land Back for Eco-Humanist Uses,
- Regenerativity: Creating an Environment That Gives Back More Than It Takes,
- Designing Human Settlements: Eco-District Model with a Mixed-Use Design Ethos.
Mr. Zelov emphasized, "The Long Now perspective of the Eco-District Framework with its five pillars altogether provides a vision of regenerative landscapes. I can imagine a laboratory of Landscape Architecture where local Universities and students test their ideas and learn the emerging craft of regenerative ecological design from the Long Now perspective. The key conceptual idea is to understand how life-replenishing ecosystem services provide on-going economic and spiritual dividends that when designed effectively can produce Net-Positive results for generations to come. It is a wonderful example of the multiplier effect in action. Many of these ideas come from ekistics, the science of human settlements".
Mr. Zelov added, "Regenerative landscapes provide ecosystem-based adaptation. This is a significant shift in thinking about our natural and built environments as hybrid landscapes and architectural zones of resilience."
The Eco-District Framework is summarized in a three page document "The Philadelphia Eco-District Framework: Reimagining the Refinery Site" outlining a way of thinking about redeveloping the site. You can read the Framework document at https://www.ecodistrictphiladelphia.org/articles/Eco-DistrictFramework.pdf
Mr. Zelov added, "The Eco-District is leading the way to reimagining Philadelphia for the ecological transition. This site is particularly challenging because of the extensive toxicity that 150 years of oil refining have imposed on the land. But in my 30 years of ecological filmmaking and consulting for the Knossus Project, I have learned enough about Bio-Remediation to be confident that the 1300 acre toxic dump in South Philly can be restored to the point that it provides on-going regenerative ecological services to benefit people and nature. We ought to Bio-Remediate the site because it is economical, effective, and necessary for the future use of the land. It is also necessary because at expected rates of sea level rise, the site will soon be inundated spreading its toxicity to many other places. Our lands ought to have its important ecological functions restored: it is the legacy of land stewardship that we owe our great-grandchildren."
CJ Fearnley, co-founder of the Philadelphia Eco-District, said "I am impressed with David Steinberg's vision in initiating this project. Of course, he didn't expect that on June 21st the recent Refinery fire would lead to the sudden bankruptcy and closure of the facility. But he started work in October 2017, long before Kleinman Energy Policy Institute's Christina Simone’s September 2018 exhortation “Given the near-term potential for closure of refinery operations, stakeholders should begin exploring redevelopment options for the site”. David's leadership in anticipating this golden opportunity together with Christopher Zelov's able guidance and impressive understanding of the field of regenerative design from the Long Now perspective have produced this exciting new way to think about reimagining the refinery site."
Mr. Fearnley continued, "We should consider the situation before us from the broad perspective of energy profiles. Every historical change in humanity's energy profile has brought profound and always unexpected change. Consider the transition from human power that fueled the great era of megaliths in prehistory, to the use of draft animals that fueled urbanization in Earth's first cities some 6,000 years ago, to the era of climate change bringing free fodder to the great steppes of Asia that fueled the Mongol empire's geopolitical dominance, to the major improvements to the coach developed in Kocs, Hungary in the 1400s which revolutionized European transportation just before Europe's great awakening, to the age of industrialization and railroads fueled by coal, to the automobile and airplane era built on oil, to our current nascent post-petroleum era whose energy profile is still being invented. History teaches us that no energy profile persists and these changes can be significant. In order to meet the great challenge of our generation to navigate changes in our energy profile, we must see through many uncertainties to build the best future possible by reimagining the refinery site as a regenerative resource for our future."
Mr. Fearnley concluded, "All citizens and stakeholders in the greater Philadelphia region should study the Eco-District Framework and provide ideas for strengthening it and implementing its empowering and exalting vision."
The Eco-District maintains a web site dedicated to introducing and summarizing its initiative to Prototype the Post-Petroleum Age with the Refinery Site as an exemplar of visionary, Long Now, Net-Positive imagineering to help Philadelphia and the global community transition to the post-petroleum age. The home page for this initiative is https://www.ecodistrictphiladelphia.org/redeveloping-the-philadelphia-refinery/
About the Knossus Project
The Knossus Project is a Mid-Atlantic based research and development
firm dedicated to guiding the citizenry through the labyrinth of life by
producing custom built artifacts in the areas of Educational Film, Fine Art
Publishing, and Green Design. Over the years, the Project has produced over 15
films, 5 books, and 4+ inventions. Including the multi-award winning film
"Ecological Design: Inventing the Future" that helped launch the
mainstreaming of the Sustainability movement and has been used in classrooms
around the world. To learn more about the Knossus Project, visit http://www.geniusloci.com/indexsub.htm.
About the Philadelphia Eco-District
Incubator
The Philadelphia Eco-District Incubator undertakes several initiatives
to nurture and catalyze the Green Transition. It endeavors to plant creative
seeds to foster regenerative ecological design thinking and practice at the
neighborhood scale in the Philadelphia region. It is a grassroots,
collaborative, and participatory thinking and doing initiative focused on
making our neighborhoods flourish with Net-Positive℠
regenerative design. The initiative began in early 2016 with The Philadelphia
Eco-District Oasis, a six month design studio with the University of the Arts.
This led to an undertaking to seed Philadelphia's first Eco-District Incubator
in Philadelphia. To learn more about the Philadelphia Eco-District, visit https://www.ecodistrictphiladelphia.org/
or call Christopher Zelov 484-554-4710.