The Urban Green Revolution

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The accords are voluntary but include firm targets -- like increasing renewable energy use to 10 percent within seven years, and reducing per capita water consumption by 10 percent by 2015. Generation Earth, a nonprofit group that worked with ICLEI and U.N. officials to organize the summit, will regularly grade each city's effort to meet the accords. "There is tremendous power in targets and timetables," says summit co-convener Randy Hayes, director of sustainability for Oakland under mayor Jerry Brown. "Even if the same person isn't there, if you set a goal of 10 percent renewable power within seven years, you can check and see if they've achieved it."

Though the accords brought the mayors together, the summit's most important function was as a forum for trading ideas. "We wanted to create a safe space for the mayors to compare notes about what works in other cities, beyond the borders of their own countries," said Parin Shah, one of the U.N. summit's organizers. Indeed, how often does the mayor of tiny New Paltz, New York, get a chance to discuss recycling programs with the mayor of Kampala, Uganda?

While the mayors were meeting, more than 200 events took place that week throughout San Francisco -- dozens of panels and lectures, an energy-efficient technology fair, a documentary film series, art projects in local schools, and a green cities expo with hundreds of exhibitors.

Ironically, as San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom shuttled from event to event throughout the week -- including a ceremony at which the group SustainLane (www.sustainlane.com) named San Francisco America's most sustainable city -- he encountered demonstrators. Some were protesting a proposed transit rate hike and others were criticizing him for delaying the promised shutdown of two dirty diesel-burning electric power plants in Bayview-Hunter's Point, one of the city's poorest, most polluted neighborhoods.

In fact, environmental justice became a dominant theme at the summit. Calling for an end to "environmental racism," Oakland activist Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, pointed out that the predominantly black neighborhood of West Oakland had seven times the asthma rate of California at large. "That's an environmental issue," he said. At a panel on green jobs, Jones implored the mayors to steer sustainable economic development toward such communities. "The people who have suffered the most from the oil-dependent economy should be the first to benefit from the green economy," he said.

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