a decision-flash they can be a lasting influence for either ‘good’ or bad’. Get urban
and rural policies wrong, and things mostly stay wrong; get them right, and devel-
opment and conservancy practioners know that they have performed a beneficial
and lasting service. These thoughts are based on an awareness of the socio-
environmental significance of ‘development’ instilled during practice and
research with mining, agriculture, tourism and urbanism in the service of
less-developed (Third World) economies. That economic-social-environmental
bound-up together emphasisis carried over to these pages.During the 1970s I encountered a disappointing mismatch between the ecodevel-
opment policies put out by Tanzania, Jamaica and Papua New Guinea, and the
actual on-site outcomes. And today, for OECD nations, there is many a mismatch
between web-site and on-site. Contemporary student envoys, comparing official
‘Local Agenda 21s’ with actual situations on the ground, return disillusioned. This
point is made to show how possible it is to be deluded into the writing of policy-
making and design-formulation in a context removed from real on-the-job con-
servancy and development practice. Hence my emphasis on local people, local
politics, local action, local habitat, local wellbeing and locally beneficial outcomes.
Not ‘everything’, nor of course ‘nothing’, but somethingprogressive and agreeable,
achieved by ‘tipping the balance’.
Ten years after ‘Stockholm’ I produced Ecodevelopment, addressing the Third
World situation (1981). Now, ten years and more after ‘Rio’, the North American-
Australasian context inclines toward an economic-social-environmental emphasis
on ‘sustainability’ with economic growth the policy lead. Validating this growth-led
emphasis in a populist way, it is worth reflecting for a moment about the auto-
mobile, pilloried as the root of much environmental evil. But what an amazingly
useful invention, and what a dynamic accessory to individual freedom and choice
it has proved to be. People can be encouraged to walk, bus, cycle, but should not
be threatened with an absolute automobile ban. The path to neomodern sustain-
ability is ever-improving progress based on good social and environmental
science,nota leap of blind faith.
This book is about adaptations of a beneficial kind, most emphatically for sus-
taining a balanced quality of life which is realistic and realizable for the middle-
income majority. The line of reasoning advanced is founded in historical reality,
resource fact, the received landscape ecology and social understanding. The chal-
lenge for this new century is to retain and build on the vitality inherent in every
community. Pragmatic sustainable performance of the kind sought is a function
of the delivery of effective administrative power to the point of action. Get the
delivery of power and policy wrong – likely with contra-indicated projects,
confused sectoral administrations, and conflicting legal instruments – and the
outcome is economic imbalance, entrenched social discord, and environmental
degradation.
When the delivery of policy is effective – in a phrasing, cleverly steered toward
balanced growth – the achieved result can be economic growth advantage,social bet-
terment and habitat enhancement– a synergistic uplift to the overall quality of life.
This can be metaphorically portrayed as a neomodern ‘tapestry’. The ‘belief warp’2 Introduction