There's no way to sustain this kind of growth

By: Ian Booth

The Business Editor of the Asheville Citizen-Times recently wrote an article headlined, "Firm says area's sustainable growth 'threatened'." As I read this article about the Wadley-Donovon report, it became clear that the editor was not talking about sustainable development at all, but about sustained development. A subsequent reading of the report revealed that it, too, had failed to make this distinction. While this may seem like a trivial point, it underscores what is fast emerging as perhaps the most critical area of change we now face as a region and as a nation. It also represents our best opportunity to head off such formidable challenges as global warming and environmental decline, the excessive and inequitable consumption of natural resources, and much more. These are, after all, indicators of underlying design flaws in our status quo, growth-at-all-costs economic model.

Sustained development essentially says "more is better," and is based on a concept you could call "quantity forward." Sustainable development, on the other hand, says "more is more; better is better," and considers the real-world impact of growth by using a wide range of economic, social, environmental, and quality-of-life indicators. As pointed out in Richard Douthwaite's "Good Growth and Bad Growth," economic growth is considered to have taken place if the total value of the goods and services purchased in the economy increases over the course of a year. It makes no difference whether the extra goods and services are beneficial goods and services or ones that we would have been better off without. "Who are we to judge?" the economists ask. "If people want them enough to pay good money for them, that should be sufficient."

Unfortunately, it isn't. The failure to make this distinction means that the Gross Domestic Product - the monetary value of a nation's output - is a mixture of goods and bads, of costs and benefits. As a result, a rise in GDP (and its regional equivalent) gives very little indication whether or not the welfare of the population which produced it is rising as well. In the words of The Economist, "a country that cut down all its trees, sold them as wood chips and then gambled the money away playing tiddly-winks would appear from all accounts to have gotten richer."

Designers and professionals of all kinds are discovering that there are no fundamental conflicts between real sustainability and economics. Many companies, local governments, NGOs and others are finding ways to profit from less waste: from how they manage energy, materials and water, from ecological restoration, from decreased toxicity, and from community stewardship. These transformations not only make good ecological sense, they satisfy even the most hardheaded economic criteria.

The greatest opportunities for healthy economic growth in our region are in the domain of sustainable climate-based development. Paradoxically, we are already seeing the physical limitations of sustained growth.

Ian Booth

Ian Booth writes for the Appalachian Institute for Sustainability

(This letter first appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times in November, 1998. The Appalachian Institute for Sustainability is now the Blue Ridge Sustainability Institute, or BRSI.)