This mayor puts the “Conserve” back in Conservative

Indianan Jim Brainard has been making the post-partisan case for building sustainable, resilient cities for more than 20 years. As a self-identified conservative Republican who not only believes in climate science but has made it his personal mission to incorporate sustainable urban planning and climate resilience into his vision for Carmel, Brainard has become a symbol of what post-partisan climate leadership can and should look like.

The Party Analogy

My approach, as always, is to try and understand the way past societies prospered despite being comprised of flawed humans—people with all the same shortcomings we have today. When we do that, one thing we quickly realize is that the Traditional Development approach – the way we built cities for thousands of years prior to the past century– was a good party, while our modern approach, what we call the Suburban Experiment, is a really bad party.