What if Santa Cruz became the most sustainable city on Earth?

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I have a dream that Santa Cruz could transform into the most sustainable, ecological, and regenerative city on Earth. I know that if such a transformation can happen anywhere, it could happen here. This town is the birthplace of everything from surfing and mountain biking to organic agriculture and medical marijuana to the rebellious, consciousness-shifting counterculture of the 1960s.

Innovation is in our bones. A radical ecological transformation already happened here once, and it could happen again — this time by stitching together all the “impossible” solutions that are already quietly succeeding somewhere in the world.

I learned about model sustainable cities at UC Santa Cruz, where I graduated in 2000. I’m now the founder of Climate Quilt, a new youth climate art initiative to empower young people and youth climate organizations to take climate action and initiate systems change. 

This is part of a bigger eco dream I have to make Santa Cruz into a model sustainable city. 

Lately, as the year is coming to an end, I’ve been asking myself how to turn this dream into reality. 

What would it actually look like if Santa Cruz transformed into a living lab of ecological innovation, climate action, communal regeneration and overt, unconditional love for nature and for each other? What if our little town became the model the world looks to for what works?

How would we paint this beautiful tomorrow if absolutely anything were possible?

I first asked myself these questions during my first week at UCSC, focusing on environmental studies with a wide-open sense of possibility. But decades of war, 9/11 in my home city, a global pandemic, rising authoritarianism from D.C. to Delhi to the Duma and a national gun epidemic – all have made my optimism look childish at best. 

Today we find ourselves in what feels like an “age of jade” – that is, we are jaded in our thinking about what’s possible to heal this planet. 

We’ve exceeded seven of the nine planetary boundaries. Global wildlife populations have declined by 73% since 1970. Over a third of the world’s forests have been destroyed in the past 10,000 years, most of it in the past century, with roughly 10 million hectares disappearing each year. 

While I was writing this, news broke that coral reefs have crossed a tipping point and are undergoing widespread die-off. And as the United Nations climate conference just closed, it became clear that most nations will miss their Paris Agreement pledges and that the world is headed past the 1.5 degrees Celsius climate threshold.

If the statistics are this bad, why on earth am I still so optimistic?

Because flowers often grow better out of crappy soil – particularly with the advent of compost.

Today, we’re standing on the biggest compost pile in human history. When the soil becomes this rich in failure, grief and accumulated consequence, regeneration becomes not just possible but essential. 

This isn’t a silver-bullet fantasy. Real transformation would be a patchwork quilt made from solutions that already exist, scattered across the globe. It’s a shift in lens: from “not in my backyard” to “why not in my backyard?” 

What if we believed that nothing was impossible in our own watershed or bioregion?

Open the aperture just a bit and everything becomes ripe for innovation: the roads we drive on, the sidewalks we walk on, the food we eat, the buildings we live in, the energy we use, the waste we generate. What if every surface produced or stored energy? What if extractivism became a vestigial organ of an old world, giving rise to something new? 

What if we evolved from individual acts of “reduce, reuse, recycle” into collective revival, resurgence, rebirth, renewal, resurrection, revitalization, rejuvenation and regeneration?

An easy place to start is waste. “Waste” is a word that didn’t even exist in any Indigenous language before the rise of our modern industrial systems. 

What if every food scrap, tech cable and piece of packaging were designed for unlimited reuse, or designed from the start to be in harmony with the ecosystems that support us?

From there, it’s not hard to imagine the rest, starting right here in Santa Cruz. Take Joby Aviation, a pioneer of quiet, electric vertical-takeoff air taxis; or CruzFoam, the world’s first commercially scaled biofoam; or Prometheus Fuels, which is turning carbon dioxide captured from air into carbon-neutral fuel.

We don’t need to dream of how it can happen here; these shining rays of hope are already happening. Now imagine every sidewalk becoming an energy-capturing surface using technologies like Pavegen tiles, which convert footsteps into power. Imagine kitchen floors that generate electricity as you cook or dance. Imagine windows that generate energy through transparent photovoltaic films like SolarWindow. Imagine every wall, roof and vehicle wrapped in ultra-thin, printable perovskite solar skins, creating energy.

Zoom out and the possibilities expand even further. Solar canals, like those used in Project Nexus, could shade waterways while generating power and conserving water. Or deploy building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), which is already turning commercial buildings into energy-positive structures – such as Norway’s Powerhouse Brattørkaia, which produces more energy than it consumes. Then there are microgrids and peer-to-peer energy trading, already at work with Quartierstorm, the world’s first microgrid that keeps energy local and community-owned through a blockchain-based, peer-to-peer model.

Solar is just one part of the wind-water-solar trifecta. Wind trees and Aeroleaf micro-turbines offer silent, artistic wind generation right in urban areas. Offshore and underwater turbines, like those developed by Tidalwatt, can capture energy without harming marine life. Nature offers endless opportunities to create this brave new world.

And then there are the solutions for healing what’s already been harmed. Models like Just an Acre out of Ontario, Canada, can remediate soil in just 1 acre. Larger scale, in the emerging science of mycoremediation, mushrooms are being used to decontaminate soil, water pollution and even plastics. They are working quietly in forests, landfills and damaged ecosystems. 

The natural world has always known how to heal itself; we just need to partner with it.

If these examples sound far-fetched, the inconvenient truth is that entire countries and cities are already implementing similarly bold ideas. A decade ago, Norway set a goal for all new cars to be electric by 2025. Today, around 90% of new car sales are electric vehicles. Utrecht in the Netherlands set out to reinvent mobility and is now the world’s leading cycling city, with over half its residents biking daily. 

These places didn’t wait for permission; they believed the impossible was possible and built the road by walking.

Another world isn’t just possible – it’s already here, scattered across nooks and crannies all over the globe. The future exists; it’s simply unevenly distributed. 

What if Santa Cruz became the place that stitched those patches together into a single living, breathing blueprint?

If we don’t ask, we’ll never know. And if we don’t imagine boldly, we’ll never build it. 

Consider this an open invitation to transform a question into action, to turn a dream into reality for 2026.

Danielle Lanyard is the founder of Climate Quilt, co-founder of the Regenerative Technology Project and owner of big deep digital. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz, she began international sustainable development work in the Peace Corps in Senegal and then became the development director for the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin. She also was the creator of Laos’ first sustainable development college course. Her passion for deep ecology led her into green startups, where her work fuses ecological innovation, technology and storytelling to drive systems change.