Th[e] journey may take us through suffering, difficulties, and doubts of all kinds, but they will become our greatest teachers. Through them we will … discover the inner strength and fearlessness we need to emerge from our old habits and set patterns.–Sogyal Rinpoche, Buddhist Teacher

With construction spending and housing prices up, foreclosure rates starting to level off and supersized bonuses returning to Wall Street banks, discussion about America’s Great Recession is starting to recede, giving way to pronouncements, however guarded, of recovery. Whether or not we are in fact emerging from the tumultuous economy of the past two years, with its attendant suffering, difficulties and doubts, the real question before us is, “What, exactly, are we recovering?”

The recent financial collapse, coupled with the election of the nation’s first black president and the end of the eight-year Bush era, have caused many Americans to engage in a kind of national soul-searching. They are asking basic, existential questions about the purpose of our economy and society and the values upon which they’ve been built. They’ve talked about doing more with less, placing limits on the excesses and greed of corporate America and redefining success and the American Dream.

And yet, to the extent that we appear to be judging the prospects of a recovery on the very kinds of economic indicators that got us into trouble in the first place (housing supply, housing prices and Wall Street profits, principal among them), perhaps a recovery is not what we should be shooting for. And herein lies the great challenge the events of the past couple of years have revealed.

At bottom, the economic crisis is not about subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and the avarice of investment bankers. It’s not really about the economy at all. Rather, it’s about our ability as Americans to acknowledge our mistakes and to commit to correcting them. It’s about our capacity to move beyond entrenched mental models and behaviors and to engage reality on its own terms. It’s a crisis of culture.

Appropriately, so much of this crisis has played out on our landscape, literally. The real estate boom of the past decade, the latest chapter in the two centuries’ old spread of the population across the continent and the Great Recession’s prime protagonist, fueled a relentless pattern of sprawl–low-density, auto-dependent development–and expansion. From the square footage of the average single-family home and the building envelope of big-box stores to vehicle miles traveled and rates of land consumption, everything ballooned. But as the financial collapse proved, such growth was not sustainable.

Settlement patterns are powerful proxies for our cultural attitudes and belief systems. By reading the patterns, by reading the landscape, we can observe clues about what we, as a nation, believe in. Low-density settlement, big buildings and cars and highways: these are among our cardinal credos, steeped in Jefferson’s agrarian vision, committed to the notion that “bigger is better and safer” and shaped by the compelling car-romance motifs of Madison Avenue.

Interestingly, there are signs that our land use patterns might be changing as a result of the current crisis. Though not touted as indicators of a recovery, these signs suggest that, at least in terms of development patterns, we are starting to learn from our past mistakes.

For example, take the City of Boston’s proposed bike sharing program, the largest of its kind in the U.S. Modeled after similar programs in Paris and Copenhagen, Boston’s proposal is evidence that municipalities are starting to take seriously the idea that urban mobility doesn’t begin and end with the automobile. Meanwhile, at the regional scale, New England’s governors met recently to discuss a high-speed rail network linking the region’s six states and Canada, again borrowing from the European model. There’s even talk of a bullet train from Boston to Montreal.

Perhaps most impressive, if not surprising, is what’s happening in Washington, where the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is in the process of launching a new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities. Equal parts housing, transportation, land use and energy, the new program seeks for the first time to join these discrete policy areas in one, unified strategy for making U.S. cities more livable, affordable and climate-friendly, bucking the trend of the last 50 years of metropolitan development.

A new pattern might be emerging, but it’s too early to say. What is clear is that to break our set patterns, we will need to be bold, knowing that old habits die hard. In this sense, what we should be aiming for is not so much a recovery as a discovery–of innovative ways of building and developing, of time-tested models from other places, like Europe and Japan, where transit, density and mixed use development have been the rule, not the exception and, at last, of our own inner-strength and fearlessness, born of today’s adversity.

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BOULDER, Colo. — For those concerned with sustainability, some big things are on the way from Washington. There’s the distribution of the $787 billion economic stimulus package for public works infrastructure. The reauthorization of federal transportation funding, which could finally shift significant funds from highways to transit. The Obama administration’s ambitious clean-energy plans, and its interest in a cap-and-trade system to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

We haven’t been used to such heavy lifting from the federal government. For years, the action has been at the local level, in metropolitan regions that have been engines of innovation focused on green, compact, transit-oriented settlement. In fact, during the final stages of the Bush administration and into these first days for President Obama, the bottom-up dynamic has led to a kind of Sustainability 2.0.

Consider the innovative practices of two Denver-based developers, Urban Villages and Zocolo Community Development. They’re building mixed-use, walkable, dense infill development that is integrated with transportation and open space, with all buildings constructed to last 100 years, powered by state-of-the-art heating and cooling systems–solar, radiant, thermal–that will use 80 percent less energy than the typical building today.

Efficient urban residences rely on location–the city–to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, so much so that the LEED standards for green building are already seen as out of date.

“LEED was a good start. But we need a whole new scorecard,” said Grant McCargo, president of Urban Villages. “I don’t get credit for embodied energy. I’m penalized for retrofitting in LoDo (Denver’s Lower Downtown district) because I can’t collect rainwater. That’s absurd.”

McCargo was among the leaders in urban development and climate change gathered for ELEVATE 09, a symposium the University of Colorado hopes to put on every year. The goal–to take advantage of the forward-thinking development practices percolating in the Denver-Boulder-Fort Collins corridor. The idea is to gather mile-high, and take the discussion of sustainability to the next level.

While early green efforts had a trial-and-error quality, the latest exhibit a get-down-to-business sharpening of focus. One strong new trend: a real wariness of greenwashing, and the need to analyze initiatives to test not for good intentions, but for impact.

Local policies such as plastic bag bans, restricting lawn watering and tree-planting must be evaluated to judge their actual outcomes in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the quality of city life, said Judy Layzer from the urban planning program at MIT. Otherwise, “it’s just so much easier to do ‘sustainability lite’,” she said.

Metropolitan regions also need to be guided through the maze of grants, rebates and tax credits available for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. In the midst of the current economic tumult, green leases and green loan documents will become central to development financing, requiring sure-footed modeling that shows the savings of going green over the long term.

Another challenge: green affordable housing. Low- and moderate-income families can’t shoulder the burden of re-engineering our energy use and built environment. The Congressional Budget Office says that policies that reduce emissions by 15 percent would impose a $750 to $950 a year increase on families in the bottom 20 percent of the income spectrum. “We simply can’t continue to make green buildings only for the wealthy,” said Trisha Miller of Green Communities at Enterprise Community Partners.

And yet another: the barriers that stand in the way of sustainability. “It’s not the tools–we have those and we know what works–it’s implementation,” said Peter Pollock, the former Boulder city planner, and now a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a co-sponsor of the conference. Success requires regional collaboration, strengthening federal-state-local connections, confronting the problems of the local collection of sales and property tax revenue, and reforming zoning, which in most communities is outdated and needs to be fixed.

John Cleveland, co-founder of the Innovation Network for Communities, said that green initiatives are only now on the verge of scaling up. “I don’t know of a (fully) sustainable community anywhere in America,” he said. “Mother Nature doesn’t give a rip about relative progress; she needs hard targets, and if they are missed, there are going to be some very violent corrections.”

Currently it’s more in fashion to talk more about cost savings, security from volatility, quality of life, and economic development than climate change, he said. “The problem is, when you start talking like that, you lose all rigor.”

With the economy disintegrating, and the impacts of climate change advancing beyond all predictions, the imperative for new policy directions has never been clearer. Local innovations have been fruitful, but we need rigor more than ever now.

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Comment by David Crossley of Houston Tomorrow