This proposal investigates the origin and confronts the responsibility for the many problems plaguing urban areas here in the United States and around the world. It suggests solutions to those problems by creating environments of rich value, beauty, enthusiasm, and joy for us as well as for future generations. The proposal  provides a guide for each political jurisdiction to manufacture its own "Trimtab" for its own community's economic development in the factory of its own Council Chambers. The southwestern author Maureen Whipple in her 1940's novel, "This is the Place - Utah", observed that in the Navajo language, friends bid friends farewell with the sentiment, "May you walk, my friend, on the trail of beauty". We believe we should bend our efforts toward finding ways to create, build, and then walk upon, those trails of beauty for ourselves and for those who follow us. "What it is we think we want may not be as important as we like to think" as America's greatest architect Frank Lloyd Wright was wont to remark. Let us then attempt to perfect our thinking, to see where we are, how we got here and how we might plan a thoughtful and very important future to enthuse ourselves but more importantly to enthuse  those to whom we have the grave responsibility of preparing a future. Our children, those born and to be born in this present century in their ever increasing numbers  will live to either praise or condemn our efforts. That then, all by itself,  demands the very best of which we are capable - no excuses, none at all are allowed or considered permissible.

What do I want in my own personal backyard? A whole host of things that current land use, law, common practice and a modest pocketbook deny me. Most of all, I want simply the convenience that the unmanageably popular luxury called "Not In My Backyard" (NIMBY) currently denies me. I would like the outdoor amenities found in rural areas and the indoor amenities found in urban settings combined conveniently in one place. I imagine those amenities housed in creatively structured and sustainably built environments that are closely surrounded by beautiful natural environments. Read on to see and understand whether these ideas might strike a chord in your own mind and hopefully cause you to enlist in this very real and achievable effort to make Mother Earth welcome us as helpful aides rather than the despoilers we have unfortunately - if unintentionally? - become.

Buckminster Fuller, the internationally renowned American designer and innovator, used a model that he called the "Trimtab Principle", which in essence means finding and using the least possible means to create the basis for major change. This concept, based on nautical and aeronautical design principles, has demanded we think wholistically about how well-applied designs and resources can progressively and profitably undo the damage to our world wrought by unfortunate and misdirected political policy actions of the past that ignored their inevitable consequences. Describing precisely just such a trimtab and how to construct it, this proposal is designed to evoke political and professional collaboration together with the interest of policymakers, investors, developers, and others who will make  an astonishingly beautiful future possible.

This outlined program is not the only way, or the only answer, but it is a start, a way, and, most importantly, a positive achievable answer. Perhaps together we can find not just this one but many similar and collaborative ways to brighten the future of humanity by outlining a wonderful, healthful, nourishing, and beautiful prospect that can and should be reasonably achieved for all people.