Unless you have been living in a cave in Tora Bora, you have read and heard the words “sustainability” and “sustainable development” a lot in the popular media. The words are put before you in magazine articles, television interviews or conference flyers daily.

So what is “sustainable development” and where did it come from? Did Al Gore invent it? Well, all evidence to the contrary, Al was a little late to the sustainability party. His 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance” and the subsequent Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” were only about 35 years after the fact.

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Ballot initiatives for laws that consider a downzoning a partial taking if it hurts property values, along with new barriers to land acquisition through eminent domain, will be the unraveling of the environmental and land use planning gains made in the United States in the 20th century. writes Richard Carson.

Every once in a while a state voter initiative catches people's attention, and it takes the center stage nationally. Examples include creating term limits, setting property tax caps, and banning same-sex marriages. The next big trend is all about property rights, and it is well under way in 23 states.

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A convergence of renewed interest in urban downtowns, attractive retail rents, and the popularity of do-it-yourself home improvement and interior decorating could result in downtown being tomorrow's hot "furniture row," writes Michael Stumpf.

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Got a minute, pilgrim? I'd like to talk with you a little bit about statistics. You already know, of course, that they are the bane of intelligent discourse, but it's useful to reflect on just how baneful they really are. It was a line on a radio broadcast that caught me up.

When I first heard it nothing special registered. I thought it was peculiar, but I was busy with something else, so the moment passed. The next time I heard it, I was not otherwise engaged , and it struck me as being one of the more ludicrous statements I had ever heard coming from the radio. And that is saying a lot because the radio delivers drivel with the regularity of a chiming grandfather's clock. Have you listened to "talk radio" lately?

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The very idea of being a member of the Planning Profession and of a jury in a high profile murder trial is a frightening one. For openers, you don't for more than five seconds have any confidence that the court system is going to protect your anonymity. And you know that there are wild eyed Pro and Con people "out there" with assault weapons who are going to kill you when the trial is over -unless you come up "hung" - no decision.

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Surely someone has, by now, written a PhD Dissertation on the subject of the Migratory Patterns of the Snowbird. If so, however, I haven't seen it, although I confess to not having searched very far. Snowbirds, as you know, are those of the human specie who have the wherewithal and the inclination to flee the ice and snow of their northern nesting places to take up temporary residence in warmer climes. When migrating, they travel in caravans, not gypsy caravans, Dodge and Plymouth Caravans - towing their Jaguars.

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Memories are made of ribonucleic acid and protein synthesis operating with undamaged temporal lobes and hippocampi in both hemispheres of the brain. And I haven't the faintest idea what that means - I read it somewhere.

We've all read enough to know that things can get awfully complicated whenever you deal with a function of the brain; and there are many books and much important research all geared to learning more about that function we call memory. But for most of us the important thing about memory is whether we can remember what we want to remember and forget what we want to forget.

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What we perceive in City Planning today seems to take ages to happen. And it is even further from our reality to consider history in other terms. But it might be interesting to relate another time to our own struggles.

Before 1750, in the New World, only France remained to challenge British dominion. And France's presence was formidable, with explorations and settlements from Quebec to New Orleans, claiming lands both east and west of the Mississippi, from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. The claims were challenged, and for seven years the French and British-Indian War raged (1756-1763). At its conclusion, Britain won all of Canada, and all of the interior lands east of the Mississippi River.

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At the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, in the suburbs of Tucson, there are at least two hundred volunteers who devote a day or more per week helping visitors understand, better, what they are seeing as they go from one end to another of these magical paths. There must be another seventy five volunteers who work with staff, helping them unravel the mysterious tangles of the many life forms extant. And all of these volunteers work free of any charge for their time.

But it isn’t the museum volunteer who attracts our attention. Nor are we concerned with the definition of duties. Our focus is on the individual member of the planning commission, who gives of his personal time at no charge.

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Life in our land seems to have turned vaporific or vagabondish. Anything but real. And we can examine this by taking a quick look at a couple of squints and squats that are not normally examined together.

Take, for example, American Inventions.

Thomas Alva Edison did not invent the light bulb. In 1844, three years before Edison was born, Jean Foucault made an arc light strong enough to illuminate Place de la Concorde in Paris. And Robert Fulton did not invent the first steamboat. These ships had been running on the Potomac River and the Delaware River twenty years before Fulton built his ship - which was never called the Clermont.

And, take American Concoctions.

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