ronment at large, is the way governments stream their administrative conscience
into an enabling-now rather than an outcome-later public policy format. The
developmental thrust of successive governments in the New World has centred
around exploitation of the natural resource capital, and an obsession with fiscal
growth-on-growth based largely on an ever-expanding money supply and tech-
nological change. As monetized growth has increased in compound fashion to
compromise the environment, this generates what is usually described as an ‘eco-
nomic crisis’ which, in fact, is also a ‘social values’ crisis and an ‘environmental’
crisis. The rallying call is for administrations to pursue life-and-nation practical
goals which set out to establish social wellbeing and environmental harmony as
well as achieving economic growth.
This book takes up the challenge to set out pragmatic develop-
ment and conservation objectives – national, regional, community
and household. The policy issues are outlined in chapter 3, where
they are collated in box 3.7 as a Matrixfor conservation with
development. The appeal made there is to identify the essential
economic-social-environmental public policies in win-win-win
terms for growth-community-environment moving from received
patterns of ‘smart’ modernity, to thinking in a ‘clever’ neomod-
ern way.
This emphasis on within-nation growth management also
follows the lead of seven of the United States – Oregon in
particular – in the pursuit of a reasonable ambition: that as resource-plundering
and ex-urbanization profiles alarmingly, the mandate for urban and rural growth
management control should be strengthened and locked on. The thrust lies
squarely with socially appropriate conservation with development on a within-
nation basis: within regions, within communities and of course within house-
holds. The societal preference at the larger scale is for dual-democracy
administrations to move toward an opening-up of local government to wider
‘powers of general competence’ or to the lesser ‘subsidiarity’ basis of operation.
The sustainable concomitant is the application of growth pattern powers which
establish firm urban and rural delineations, backed up with incentive-based
encouragements and occasional enforcements (use of the ‘carrot’ and ‘stick’
approach).
The neomodern emphasis is too important to leave to the vagaries of the open
market simply because the market response leads to a ‘cash-profit
resource-deficit’ outcome. Additionally, and importantly, markets
‘optimize’ by working to a demand immediacy, whereas the
longer-term future of every community is dependent on perpetual
wisdom with regard to the utilization of resources. Communities
need to seek out a more clever, value-based future, one which
includes custodial regard for the whole of a nation-state as a
resource common. It falls to the voters in open democracies to
define the clever new ‘public interest’ and establish goals for the
‘common good’.
Sustainable and Ethical 21Settler society
populations remain
mostly ambivalent about
environmental
protection. People
recycle papers and
bottles, but will not
trade in their
automobile for some
bicycles; or forgo a jet-
plane vacation for a
regionally available
widerness respite.‘Landscape guilt’ – the
setting aside of pristine
wilderness areas, the
camouflage of
environmental damage,
and the pocket creation
of natural heritage – is a
theme explored by
Robert Thayer in Grey
World Green Heart,
1994.