"There's no doubt this nation is strong because of oil and gas," Mitchell, 91, said in an interview Wednesday in his downtown Houston office. "But sustainability is the most important thing I'm working on."
Mitchell is not a typical oilman.
In 2002, the National Academies called him "a renaissance American businessman and entrepreneur" when he and his wife, Cynthia, who is now deceased, gave $10 million to fund sustainability science.
"Oil and gas people are usually just prone to thinking about oil and gas," Mitchell said. "I think all of us better start thinking about sustainability. How do you make the world sustainable for your grandkids to have a chance?"
The son of Greek immigrants, Mitchell said he was introduced to environmental issues in 1964 by futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, who was preoccupied with Earth's survivability.
"If we don't start waking up, in 2050 we're in trouble, because you'll have nine billion people worldwide," Mitchell said. "And if you can't make the world work with six billion people, how can you make it work with nine?"
Mitchell's concerns about the decline of U.S. cities in the 1960s inspired him to build his own town - sort of a quest for a perfect community. He bought 15,000 acres of timberland about 25 miles north of Houston, and in 1974, he founded The Woodlands.
The Woodlands incorporated the environmental principles of Ian McHarg, the renowned University of Pennsylvania landscape architect.
Mitchell credits McHarg's design of waterways and winding streets with The Woodlands' success. The community now has an estimated population of 90,000. (It has grown to 27,000 acres, or 42 square miles, about the size of Northeast Philadelphia.)
