David Crossley featured on cover of Change Magazine

“Catalysts of Change”

Jay Blazek Crossley, Jan 05, 10.

Change Magazine has published an article about David Crossley and Houston Tomorrow as part of a series on visionaries they are calling “Catalysts for Change.”

Visionary, Activist, Environmentalist
“In 2050, my grandson will be 41 and if he still lives in Houston he’ll be surrounded by as many as 12,000,000 people,” says David Crossley. “What will the quality of his life be? That’s the question that drives me to look for answers and bring them to citizens and decision makers here and wherever people are working on sustainability and prosperity.”

Crossley is the president of Houston Tomorrow, which he founded as the Gulf Coast Institute in 1998. “I was involved in a wide variety of environmental and social issues and I suddenly realized that all of these problems that were degrading our communities were about urban growth and nobody in Houston was studying that,” he says. “I had no training in this area, but I had been a journalist and I knew how to do research and see patterns, so I just started learning and speaking and publishing.”

Growth: Better vs. More
At that time, it was a focus on the future of his own sons, who were then 23 and 21, that pushed him to seek expertise and understanding about land use, transportation, economic development, health, safety and well being. Very early on, he came to believe that we can solve many of our problems by finding a healthier balance between “Quality of Life” and “Standard of Living” when it comes to judging the success of our society. Crossley explains the difference between the two: “Standard of living is basically about stuff and working hard to get it, while quality of life is about human thriving with vitality and contentedness. It just seems totally rational that an individual’s top priority should be the quality of his or her life followed by the quality of life of family and friends. In fact, it’s rational to want everybody to have a high quality of life.”

“For me,” Crossley says, “the biggest leap forward toward sustainable societies would be if entities in the Houston region, the US, and the world set improving the quality of life as their top priority. Job creation and economic development will follow, but it would be much
more about ‘better’ than about ‘more.’ The same distinction can be made between ‘health’ and ‘health care.’ One is an expensive, end-of-the-pipe solution and the other is a preventive, creative approach that can eliminate expensive future problems.”

Crossley arrived at his view of a healthier, more sustainable world over a long period beginning in the early 1970s when he discovered the Whole Earth Catalog. At the time, he lived on a small communal farm near Navasota, Texas, putting some of those ideas into practice. It was there that he began to get a feel for how Mother Nature really works and how human beings can prosper as her partners rather than plunderers.

For the rest of the article, please see Change Magazine for the online version or you can download the entire article and related pages as a pdf