Today on this glorious warm sunny day, I drove my lovely lavendar Zuma scooter to downtown San Francisco, to Grace Cathedral opposite the St. Francis Hotel on Nob Hill. The basement of Grace Cathedral has a conference Center and there is also a new conference center across the road. I had no idea until today! Both centers were the venue for the international Ecocities 2008 conference, organized by Richard Register. He had asked me to participate because of my activities at Çatalhöyük, which he wanted in the conference as an example of a sustainable city - the earliest in fact. Since I don’t believe Çatalhöyük was a city, I wasn’t very keen on participating. But as I realised he was also interested in  having me talk about what lessons can be learned from the past for modern city sustainability, then I became very interested.  

So this afternoon in the basement of Grace Cathedral, I gave a 30 minute presentation  in a little session about “lessons from history and archaeology” that consisted of me and a wonderful architect/historian from Nepal, Sudarshan Raj Tiwari. About 20-30 people were in the audience and we had some good discussions. I liked Sudarshan’s talk. Both of us had a lot to say explicitly or implicitly about entropy and the need to be vigilant and watchful for its signs and their prevention or transformation.

I have put a copy of my talk in the “Performances” part of this website