I'm kind of an introvert...in an extroverted way.

Part of my vision is conservation, which is defined by using enough to meet your needs.  I am going to focus that vision on a particular field: the construction industry.  According to Benyus, we should "...Build for durability, but...don't overbuild." Prior to the crash, cities were building infrastructure and plotting land as fast, or faster than developers could build on it.  This fed to the already well ingrained problem of suburbanization in America.  In some extreme cases, the cities were almost bankrupting themselves just to offer roads, sewers, and water to developments that never came.  If that isn't the definition of unsustainable, I'm not sure what is.  My plan is to rethink how we conceive and grow cities.

Step one of that plan is to lock down zoning.  No future outward growth, unless absolutely necessary.  This means moving up instead of out, closer together instead of farther apart.  Open land can and should be considered a nonrenewable resource.  Once built upon it is extremely costly to convert that land back to the open pasture it once was.  It is like what Benyus said, "Cutting into the growing stock of the forest is like damaging the goose with the golden eggs..."  If we are to continually increase our population, open land will actually need to increase!  Currently that is being met by cutting down forests for cropland, but we already know the gross effects of doing that.  What if you got a tax credit for building in the city instead of in the suburbs?  How different would our society look today.

Step two of the plan is to build better buildings, and by better, I mean more durable, long-term resource conscious buildings.  Europe is a wonderful example of this.  Many of the buildings are made of stone or brick that were built hundreds of years ago, but are still being used today.  Here in the united states, many buildings are torn down well before they are even 50 or 100 years old.  This is due to the relatively cheap construction cost, and relatively cheap replacement cost.  If we were to build out of more durable materials, they would be more expensive, and we would be less likely to tear them down.  Now, we can not convert completely to this way of building, because we should "[not] use nonrenewable resources faster than you can develop substitutes."