Creating a Wise Economy

Real sustainability includes economic sustainability | January 11, 2011

This post breaks all the Blogging 101 rules by actually having two purposes (ooh….don’t tell on me…).  The first purpose is to encourage you to read this blog entry by one of my favorite urban thinkers, Aaron Renn (who blogs under the title The Urbanophile).    This essay does an excellent job of analyzing one of my biggest irritations with current approaches to the urban sustainability movement: the almost overwhelming tendency of urban supporters to focus on greenhouse gas emissions as the reason why people *should* change their behavior in terms of how they travel, the food they buy, etc.  Leaving aside the debate over whether the greenhouse effect is occurring, there is a very pragmatic issue that a lot of the rhetoric overlooks: most of the choices we claim as “sustainable” have real economic benefits in terms of short- and long-term money savings.  There is an almost Puritan streak to the lectures about how everyone should sacrifice to do their part, but the simple fact of the matter is that a positive presentation of the economic benefits of making those choices is more likely to change more behavior than trying to guilt people into it.  That’s maybe not high-minded, but it’s a basic premise of dealing with humans.  Aaron says and illustrates it better than my summary, so check him out here:

http://http://www.urbanophile.com/2011/01/09/failure-to-communicate-accentuate-the-positive/

I’d like to go beyond Aaron’s point, though.  I think we are actually defining sustainability too narrowly.  In its pre-environmental days, we understood that to “sustain” something meant to carry, to keep it going for a long time.  You sustain a membership if you renew it on time; you sustain a grudge if you don’t forget what happened.  Similarly, a sustainable system is one that can keep going over time, and sustainability is a characteristic of an effort that can be maintained.  It’s obvious that this idea could be applied to an ecological system, but it can also be applied to anything that requires some energy to keep it going. 

Our communities are in dire need of sustainability, and green roofs and busses are not enough to sustain them.  We need to have sustainable habitats for the people who live in our communities — economies and jobs that allow them not just to thrive for today, but to have well-informed confidence in the community’s ability to provide that habitat into the future.  Without that confidence, any citizen that has the ability to leave for a better habitat, will, and what is left will become weaker and less able to support itself. 

My own Wise Economy Manifesto relies on environmental and horticulture imagery, as have the presentations that I have been doing around the country over the past couple of years.  And certainly the Economic Gardening approach to economic development taps into that same idea.  But if environmental sustainability efforts are going to facilitate deep and abiding change in how we tread on this planet, we must realize, acknowledge and accept that our communities and our people are part of that environment, and in need of being sustained as well.  That does not mean that we have a very good track record in building economically sustainable systems yet; Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns  has been doing an exceptional job of unravelling how our communities’ approaches to trying to grow local economies have created more Ponzi schemes than sustainable communities.  But our failure to build sustainable communities to date has only made that need more urgent.

One more point: a “sustainable” economy is not necessarily the same as “an economy where a lot of people get their income from building wind turbines or recycling.”  In many places, “green” industries also represent long-term sustainable growth industries, and in those cases, those businesses and jobs are certainly critical to building a sustainable local economy.  A small but growing number of communities in my own state of Ohio, for example, have been finding that their skill sets and old manufacturing infrastructure are giving them a chance to grow a more sustainable economy.  That’s a Wise Economy in action.  But again, a “sustainable” economic sector may do something entirely different.

We need to manage our communities as sustainable ecosystems: places whose internal interactions, as well as the way they interact with the rest of the world, give them a unique ability to support a richness of life over the long term.  And while a healthy ecological environment is certainly a big part of that equation, it’s not the only one.  As Aaron  illustrated, demonstrating the practical, everyday benefits of environmentally-responsible choices is going to be critical to making the Big Changes that environmentalists seek. Broadening that definition of sustainability to include us and our communities, not only as the problem, but as a system that needs care and sustaining, could lead to solutions even bigger.

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