Resource Guardianship: Principles into Practice
At every turn and during every hour of our lives each of us can identify personal
gratifications deriving from an engagement of ‘hard’ technologies. These include
ease of transportation (the owner-driven fossil-fuelled automobile), eating with
convenience (prepackaged and ready-to-eat food from distant places), ablution
comfort (potable water supply, and water-borne sewage disposal), trash discard
(garbage collection and dumping), chemical weeding and pest eradication
(herbicides and pesticides), home and workplace comfort (air conditioning and
electric heating). Of course the list goes further than this selection.
In order to achieve sustainable urban outcomes the mainly for
myselftechnologies for personal gratification must be aligned
much more in the direction of de-mystified, functional and
neomodernfor uspatterns. To do so need not raise the spectre
of universal identity cards or whole populations pulling on hair
shirts. The most favourable prospect is ‘win-win’ outcomes
for all – and establishing and continuing that outcome with
succeeding generations.
The pursuit of actions beneficial to sustaining the natural
resource estate, and for the wellbeing of the population at large,
is open to adoption and pursuit by every individual and every
community. It is already a motivating factor in the lives of many
individuals and a few communities. Yet even the most ardent environmentalists
never totally compromise their modernity by, for example, avoiding the use of
petrol-powered automobiles or passing up jet vacations. The main difficulty is
finding the means for getting from where matters stand, reduction of individual
instances of energy profligacy and discard of toxins, to upholding fossil energy
conservation and the use of benign biological control agents. A powerful acces-
sory to the environmental justice movement, noted by David Harvey (1995) are
those ‘symbolic politics and powerful icons of pollution incidents. Toxins in
someone’s basement...(rather) than the diffuse clouds of ozone’. There is a
difficulty of insubstantiality with ozone ‘clouds’ and multiple gas-guzzling
automobiles, whereas with Harvey’s ‘basement toxins’ there is a specific effect,
obvious victims and a fairly obvious perpetrator.
The case for finite energy resource conservation is summarized in box 3.6 as
Kicking the energy-use habit. The pattern under challenge is machine-driven and
fossil-fuel sourced, which aggregates throughout the OECD as a profligacy. What
is shown here are some pragmatic options for reducing energy consumption and
achieving improved finite resource conservation. These options will
turn into imperatives over time because, simply, the most easily installed hydro-
kinetics, for example, have mostly been harnessed and the most easily won fossil
fuels have already been tapped; and because each level of further exploration and
exploitation reduces the ratio of recovered energy output relative to the energy
sequestered into exploration, development and production. The imperative put
here is to reduce the rate of fossil energy dependence, and eventually to reduce
Charter for Conservation with Development 101’There is an acute
recognition within the
environmental justice
movement that the
game is lost for the
poor and marginalised as
soon as any problem is
cast in terms of the
asymmetry of monetary
change.’
David Harvey, 1995
‘The Environment of
Justice’