Human interactions are crucial for sustainable development - Guest Editorial

Environmental Health Perspectives, Dec, 2003 by Don Cook

In the next few years it will become more important to face the fact that most cultures around the world have not found ways to create sustainable communities and regions. Perhaps we cannot address enough of the necessary factors on the long list, perhaps we do not have sufficiently effective technologies, or perhaps our skills in engineering public policies are too primitive. What is obvious is that we still conduct our lives so that the waste we generate is shipped somewhere "away"; costs are externalized to some payer other than the pollutant producer; and persistent toxic chemicals are found in the environment.

Human interactions in most geographic regions do not work as well as the feedback loops in ecosystems and homeostasis within a metabolic system. Permaculturist Bill Molison said that "the ecosystem is the teacher" (Molison 1988). Through Holistic Resource Management, Savory (1988) sought to bring an enormous array of natural forces and human tools to bear in ways that allow range land ecosystems to reach higher levels of productivity and stability. But the progress that has been made to date falls far short of the need. In the average county-sized unit (30 x 30 miles) of the United States or the world, the best that can be seen is isolated examples of low-polluting businesses and a few restorative economic activities that build and enhance the resource base. If we are willing to tackle the internal complexity of the proteome, we must not shrink from the search for democratic processes that will enhance human-to-human efforts for sustainable development.

A key reason to recognize the lack of progress is that we are exhausting the ways to protect humans and ecosystems. There is an ever lengthening list of chemicals and toxic factors that are produced in increasingly large quantities in industrialized countries. Consequently, the only way to reduce exposures at an acceptable cost seems to be to redesign regional and national economies so that hazardous factors are not generated in the first place.

NIMBY ("not in my back yard") reactions show us that people are concerned about things that pollute close to home. A larger question is, what kind of jobs do people want in their regions? Jobs using green technologies are about the closest things conceivable to a regional panacea; yet industrial development boards and economic development corporations seldom offer incentives to attract or create those kinds of jobs. Cultivating a green industry cluster should become a goal of economic development corporations.

In some regions of the world, methods to protect resources or at least forestall decline are being used with some success. Tuscany (Italy) and New Zealand have enlightened economies that protect, conserve, and restore the countryside in a manner that provides an optimistic and stable future. The Amish in the United States (e.g., Pennsylvania and Ohio) achieve a similar effect by carefully controlling many technology and social factors in the countryside of their farms and villages. Communities in these areas are largely meeting the classic definition of sustainable development--meeting the needs of the present generation while preserving the resource base for future generations.

The city of Curitiba, in Parana, Brazil, also deserves mention for extraordinary efforts at creating sustainability. AS a provincial capital with a population of 2.2 million, Curitiba has systems of public transit, housing, food distribution, parks, and government that avoid many of the environmental ills of other cities around the world. The city has established the Green Exchange, which exemplifies Curitiba's penchant for solutions that are "simple, fast, fire, and cheap" (Hawken et al. 2000). As Neal Pierce, the columnist on local government said, Curitiba "... is benefiting from a flow of interconnected, interactive, evolving solutions" (Pierce 2000).

Although regional solutions are scarce, it is not necessary to look far to find progress at the micro level. West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas, has constructed a building that produces more energy from wind and solar power than it consumes. The excess is stored in an electrically powered van that is used [-] or transport errands around the campus. That would seem to be a better form of research to fund than that aimed at fossil fuels or nuclear power. [A picture is available from the Alternative Energy Institute (2003)].

Regarding some of the major flows of materials, there is progress on the recycling of construction and demolition debris. The technique of deconstruction is emerging as a green business that uses what would otherwise be waste materials, conserves space in landfills, and has a built-in job-creation aspect. Deconstruction is the reverse of construction and dismembers and recycles up to 90% of the materials in a structure. When human labors supplant the demolition bulldozer, in creates jobs as well as sellable by-products from resources that are readily available.