The second part of Dave Roberts' interview with Alex Steffen for Grist is up today (we linked to Part One here). This one focuses on issues of sustainable urban and rural development.

Alex: One of the places we've failed the worst is providing a vision of the rural future. [...] We need to do is start imagining what a high-tech, prosperous, 21st century rural life would look like. We can't allow ourselves to treat people in rural America the way environmentalists have sometimes been guilty of treating people in the developing world, which is saying, "well, you don't have a lot right now, so you're not really causing any problems, so just stay where you are." No future that requires rural America be poor is viable to sell to the American people. It doesn't have to be that way.