notes later edited a little…
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C,
Hi,
Yes, as the consensus for sustainability develops, it’s
fascinating that there are still unthinkable parts to what it would really
take.
Consider the necessary step of our self-limiting explosive
growth, and the multiplication of human impacts on the earth. For some reason it’s hard for people to
imagine that a large thing expanding ever more rapidly isn’t in some sort of
conflict with a finite and fragile place.
You really can’t even suggest
what it would mean to clients, though, unless they themselves are looking for a
way to be very different from the people around them. It means giving up their main mechanism for
concentrating wealth. That’s what
drives growth, the compounding of investments.
They’d have to do the radical thing of using their
investment returns to foster their own long term values instead of to automatically
multiply investments. Just
unthinkable! The latter is what pumps up the economy exponentially, and is not
going to change in our present world since changing it would violate the almost
universal professional advice and personal expectation of every individual with
any money to save.
If everyone were to consider it, though, we’d have a chance
of making the transition away from explosive growth the way living systems do
it. All successful living organisms and
cultures step off from the explosive growth they began with quite early in
their lives. An oak seed stops its
exponential growth when it gets its first two leaves and embryos let it go at
about the time of their birth. The
start-up form of growth (exponential) always switches to the sustainable form
of growth (asymptotic) near the beginning of their lives, when they’re
juveniles. I see the main that changes with getting off
the explosive ladder as the system switching between multiplying variety to
progressively adding richness, it’s where the living
form gets fully detailed and becomes independent. How natural systems do it is a wonderful
puzzle and mystery, but just considering what it would take for our doing
it makes clear how real sustainability is still much too radical an
idea to be openly discussed.
-------------------
J,
So to
follow up with some other ideas, hoping we can bat them around a little. We do need to respect the reasons it's not a
current topic, despite being one quite obvious source of our problems. When a core assumption in most minds is that
growth is the definition of good, discussing how naturally overwhelming it becomes
makes no sense.
If
professional architects whose expertise is designing things for reduced impacts
can't consider whether a plan of multiplying impacts is at odds with their work,
though, I'd be shocked. For them I think
it may be more that they don't feel they have a right to speak on the
subject. There's comfort in numbers
though. How about an
open letter to give people in the community who see the problem a chance to
speak out. Maybe the cagy way to
do it would be as a multiple choice poll of the community, to gage their
perception of the situation and whether we're being sustainability is making
the world sustainable. We do take pride
in our ability to solve problems, but I'm sure some of us sense there's
something wrong with how things are going.
That question might be "Is economic growth is multiplying our footprints
and complicating our sustainability problems, or relieving them"? Another might be "What is the goal of
growth, to double business activity forever, or take us to a new level and then
refine". Use a 5 point scale as
the questionnaire maybe, and see what the distribution is. If it was well
designed everyone would learn a lot!
Another
reason it's not a common subject is that how economies work is mysterious. No one seems to be in charge, and the
markets are very actively changing with no plan. Architects are probably quite willing to
talk about that because it means tracing chains of reactions in circles and
getting somewhere with it. Jane Jacobs
did a very respectable job in her book (The Nature of Economics), though. Maybe
they'd be interested in "Learning from Sustainable Systems", using
Jacobs as one reference in a workshop format.
That could provide a vehicle for relearning the roles of growth in
living things, at least for our community, as you suggested.
Maybe those are a start.
-------------------
J,
How about making ‘deeper green’ a reality by giving developers or
philanthropists who want to step out of the pack on sustainability, an 'all
green' option. In addition to
being LEED certified, and using advanced strategies like multi-stakeholder
collaborative design, they would also commit to using the profits consistent
with their own personal values for making the world sustainable, with the
understanding that using profits in the traditional way, reinvesting them to automatically
multiply returns, generally creates an unconditional multiplier in the economy
that is naturally unsustainable. It’s
an obvious part of looking at the whole effect of what we do.
All
you need is a sponsor organization and a brochure to get it going. It changes the decision to multiply investment
from being automatic to being an informed choice of personal values, and that's
really the biggest part of the change needed.
Once it's a values decision seen as disastrous if the community of
investors at large doesn’t change rather than rather than considered to be a
competitive necessity, then information about compounding problems of compound
growth will be useful. Once you start
asking it’s just so obvious that the main enemy to solving global warming and
lots of other things is the tremendous speed at which we have to solve
them. That’s almost entirely due to
growth. People need a fair chance to
consider how much harder the problems of the world are to solve with continued
growth, as well as the much more fair distribution wealth that spending the money
reserved for pumping growth would creates.
Sound workable?
PF
Henshaw
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