and because we are biologically programmed to establish a suc-
cessor generation. Children are in human terms thefuture, and in
logic we would avoid polluting our contribution to that future by
‘providing’ or if necessary ‘purchasing’ for it and them, an eco-
nomically stable, socially secure and environmentally healthy
habitat. Our children will re-inherit, reside, recreate, reproduce
and eventually return to this same space and place. What is good
for the economy in accordance with sustainability precepts has to
be tempered and fashioned to be also good for those children and
the environment ‘indefinitely’. And to the extent that the urban
and regional planning service has a role in bringing about a triple-
bottom-line advocacy, and to effect sustainability in a planned
manner, it behoves local and regional planning organizations to
define their operational role within the overall constellation of
public policy providers. In short, planning operatives and conservancy agents act
importantly for future policy in a political way which is large and meaningful to
the communities they serve.
The Means
The attainment of generic sustainability has its social origins in a political and
public motivation to undertake a style of resource banking for society.
The banking analogy is arresting, although there are key differences between
the ‘store of money’ in fiscal banks, and the socio-environmental ‘store of
resources’ in the environmental banking system. The fiscal growth process thrives
in an open-ended non-planning and above all flexible context which moves
quickly to downsize-upsize-restructure-relocate: in short to mop
up gains, and take fiscal root wherever opportunity knocks. Fiscal
stratagems and tactics are characteristically reliant on growth-on-
growth with opportunism the key factor. Operationally, there is
little enthusiasm for the niceties of socio-environmental values.
Compatibility and reconciliation between the largely exploitative
dynamics of fiscal growth and the sustainable dynamics of socio-
environmental targeting is, in sporting parlance, ‘a big ask’; yet
such a balanced approach is the only logical way ahead.
From a historical perspective, people today can reflect on the
injustices visited by their forebears upon indigenous peoples and
the damage done to the landscapes of the New World. Modern
societies have passed, and continue to pass, various points of no
return, much as was the case for the isolated Easter Islanders
before the visitations of Euro-explorers and colonizers. The
call, in a phrase, is to ‘indefinitely’ pursue sustainability as an
output; to fashion a capacity to empower and deliver plan-led
conservationwithdevelopment in a style which triple-balances
growth community and environment. The Easter Island – earth
Tipping the Balance 273For a sense of hope from
turncoats:
David Suzuki with Holly
Dressel,
Good News for a Change,
2001.
For a ‘no-worries’
optimism:
Bjorn Lomborg,
ASkeptical
Environmentalist, 2001.
For a pessimistic blast
from the past:
Paul Ehrlich,
Population Bomb, 1968.Robert Heilbroner
(1991) observes that
some critics see
‘Capitalism as one
gigantic negative
externality, in which the
achievement of a high
level of profitable growth
is obtained only at the
cost of an even higher,
yet unnoted, level of
public damage’.
Indeed, such is the
perverse perception of
economic progress that
the clean-up of humanly
induced calamities – oil
spills, for example –
generates growth and
gain, and is seen by some
to be fiscally good for
GNP.