Offshoring of manufacturing has had a long run, beginning in earnest a few decades ago. But as fuel becomes remarkably more expensive (see #2,) expect this trend to begin to weaken. We’ll likely only see faint beginnings of the reversal in 2010, but look for it to pick up steam through the decade. And it will eventually play a major role in our ability to live sustainably. Here’s why: Turn your head and look around the room. Most of the things you’re looking at have traveled thousands of miles to get to you, from the point where the resources were extracted to where the parts were made to where the whole thing was assembled to where it was warehoused to the store where you bought it. Common sense tells us that being green is a pipe dream if nearly everything we touch has thousands of Embodied Miles. Jim Kunstler’s World Made by Hand and Christopher Steiner’s $20 Per Gallon each tell excellent stories that support the reality of the Offshoring Reversal.

   For several years, there has been a growing realization in some circles of the green building world that something is seriously wrong when you can get almost as many LEED credits by installing a bike rack as by preserving an entire building, and this inequity has set the preservationists against the green building industry. But until now, we haven’t had the tools to do anything about it. Now, however, a number of people are working on ways to factor in the true value of preservation, both within the US Green Building Council and elsewhere, because how can we say that we’re being green if we keep throwing buildings away? Look for several of these tools to surface in 2010 from a variety of sources.

   Gizmo Green is the idea that all we need to be green is better equipment and better materials. There are two problems: First, Gizmo Green can’t really make us sustainable because efficiency alone isn’t enough. But if it could make us green, there’s still the fact that better equipment and better materials cost more money. That’s OK when times are good and budgets are fat, but 2010 isn’t shaping up to be a fat-budget year, and the first thing to get cut out of a construction budget is usually the expensive stuff, because people almost always choose the long, slow bleeding of monthly utility bills over up-front costs. So what works? Natural green measures, like passive heating & cooling, daylighting, etc. You know, the stuff that has always worked, since long before the Thermostat Age.

   There’s a silver lining to the catastrophic effects of the Meltdown on industries and professions surrounding construction: The vast machine of developers, bankers, planners, architects, builders, and real estate agents has largely been immobilized, leaving a vacuum of building design and construction leadership, and 2010 isn’t looking much better. Pre-Meltdown, this machine paved huge swaths of the country with a carpet of suburbia, but everyone who’s still operating now is doing so at a much smaller scale. On the other hand, shelter shows such as those on HGTV have never been stronger, with regular people learning more and more about the design and construction of their own homes and shops. These two trends will combine to create a much more grassroots construction industry than we’ve seen in at least a couple generations... and that’s great for sustainability because a more grassroots construction industry is far easier to infuse with the simple wisdom of how best to build green for a region’s conditions, climate, and culture. And it’s already beginning. The New Urban Guild’s Project:SmartDwelling, for example, sets out to do exactly these things for each region of the US, as illustrated by SmartDwelling I which was published recently in the Wall Street Journal.

   The trend of food coming from further and further away will begin to reverse in 2010, as the realization spreads that local food isn’t just fresher, healthier, and better-tasting, but it’s also far more sustainable to ship food only a few miles as opposed to today’s 1,500 Mile Caesar Salad. But this won’t be your grandmother’s garden. Rather, it’ll be full-blown Agricultural Urbanism, with everything from good-neighbor Employing Farms that can nestle tightly around cities, towns, and villages, all the way down to window gardens. DPZ, arguably the biggest rock stars of planning today, is one of a number of notables working this out. And there are already neighborhoods where these ideas are being tested, such as Serenbe in Georgia, which is fairly mature, and which I described here. Sky in the Florida panhandle and Southlands near Vancouver are in the planning stage, while Schooner Bay in the Bahamas and the Town of Hampstead in Alabama are in the early phases of construction.

   I’ll warn you up front... this one is a little bit boring. It has none of the drama of the Meltdown Vacuum, nor any of the sexiness of the Return of the Garden. But it’s an essential step in building sustainable places. Sprawl not only flings suburbs all over the map, but it lays them out in such a manner that whether you want to get to the city, or whether you just want to go to the store, the office, or to school, you’ve gotta drive. And if you have to drive everywhere, sustainability is impossible. But sprawl didn’t just happen. It was planned. By devices known as Euclidean zoning ordinances. Every city has one. Until now. DPZ (yeah, them again) has worked for years to develop an alternative zoning code that reverses sprawl; it’s known as the SmartCode, and it’s based on an idea known as the Rural-Urban Transect. The Smart Growth Manual illustrates what kind of places the SmartCode produces. Their colleagues have developed similar codes, and lots of firms are geared up to implement them. And now, the cities want them. 2010 looks like it might be the year that’s the tipping point with cities choosing this very smart way to reverse the tide of sprawl and make green cities possible. Here are lists of places where SmartCodes have been adopted, are in progress, and places with other form-based codes.

  It sounds crazy, but the tough post-Meltdown economy of 2010 looks like it will finally make us buy stuff that’s better and more durable, and that just might turn the tide on a throwaway century during which pretty much nothing was designed to last. Here’s why: when cash is flowing, we can afford to throw stuff away, but when times are tight, we can’t. So although it’s more expensive to begin with, it’ll be much less costly in the long run. The Story of Stuff does a great job of showing why high consumption is unsustainable. So what’s the alternative? Using things that last for generations, rather than stuff meant to last only for a few months, weeks, or maybe even a single use. Things like reusable shopping bags are part of the story, but look for 2010 to be the year that we begin to realize that everything must be more durable... including our buildings themselves.

   The US was originally built largely by people who lived near the shop. Everyone from the President (the West Wing is part of the White House, remember?) to shopkeepers, woodworkers, blacksmiths, and even farmers, all lived very close to where they worked until trains and then cars made it possible to commute. Today, three trends are converging: Countless people have been laid off post-Meltdown, and the scarcity of jobs has many of them striking out on their own. The Internet makes working from home more feasible than at any other point in our lifetimes. And a cadre of planners and architects known as New Urbanists have been working for years to figure out how to get workplaces back into our neighborhoods so we don’t have to drive everywhere. The Live-Work Unit, designed so you can live and work on the same piece of land, is where these trends converge. Now, you can finally “make a living where you’re living.” Look for the Live-Work Unit to be a household term by the end of 2010.

   Three world-changing trends that need no introduction are converging right now, and 2010 looks like the year when most people realize we’ve got to think differently about “business as usual.” They are the Meltdown, Peak Oil, and Climate Change. The Meltdown has seared our consciousness like no economic event since the Great Depression. Peak Oil was once hotly debated, but now the evidence is mounting that we’re running out. And Climate Change is still debated, but not ignored. Any one of these three should be a warning that we need to change, but all three emerging at once make it clear that we have some serious adapting to do. There’s a lot of hand-wringing over all this, but I believe that if we take these things seriously in 2010 and adapt in an intelligent way, it could lead to the next Golden Age... something that would have been impossible in our previous sprawling, over-consuming, debt-ridden condition.

   How might we live in this next Golden Age? Our cities, towns, villages, and hamlets should be nourishable, because if you can’t eat there, you can’t live there, and accessible so you can get around in a number of ways, especially including walking and biking, which the price of gas can’t touch. They should be serviceable so you can get the basic services of life within walking distance, and the people serving you those services can afford to live nearby, too, and securable from undue fear. These things make a place sustainable. Once we’ve done that, then we need to build sustainable buildings, which are first of all lovable, because if they can’t be loved, they won’t last. If they’re lovable, then they should also be durable so they’ll endure, and flexible so they can be used for many things over the centuries. And they must be frugal, beginning with things that work naturally. What does this look like? It looks a whole lot like the New Urbanism, a movement which has been working for decades to figure these things out. A growing number of experts agree that the New Urbanism will be the most important green trend of 2010. I think they’re right... it’s about time!