Sustainable Land Development Today - February 2009 - (Page 13)

process that tends to put moratoriums on their projects, raising costs even more. After evaluating the local SD experience in the United States, a congressional research panel concluded that: “Overall, the effort to define and achieve sustainability [in local government] has involved a significant amount of consciousness-raising about the trade-offs involved in community decision-making. At its best, it is a process for ensuring that otherwise overlooked perspectives and constituencies are not excluded from decisions. But it remains an ill-defined process in which operational results remain elusive.” In the American SD experience, there are three fundamental ideological differences operating in the creation of local growth-management policy: I Free market ideology versus environmental regulation. I Private property rights versus the public’s right to private lands. I Representative democracy versus public participation in the local policymaking process. These are the divergent lenses through which various groups perceive sustainability, prompting them to focus on those features of SD that suit their needs while disregarding those that do not. tablished the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. The Council’s 1999 report, Towards a Sustainable America, targeted urban sprawl as the greatest threat to achieving the American brand of SD. Federal prescriptions intended to curb sprawl never put limits on growth, but instead encouraged local municipalities to rebuild livable communities through smart growth. However, the national SD effort, as with the international effort, has been marked with an inability to create policies that are meaningful to all parties involved. The issue, once again, is that differing ideological approaches towards SD give opposing views on how to achieve it. Elim Papadakis’ study, Environmental Values and Political Action concludes that SD policy prescriptions made by local officials are often criticized as being “seriously flawed, mostly reflecting personal, organizational, and political preferences.” Meanwhile, Robert G. Paterson and Devashree Saha’s study, Local Government Efforts to Promote the Three Es of Sustainable Development shows “there is little evidence that cities are connecting sustainability to equity and social justice issues.” Lastly, developers feel that the local, growth-management process requires them to go through a costly procedural who typically disagree over the pathways towards SD And despite Brundtland’s intentions on the international front, SD has become a nebulous, normative concept, involving trade-offs among social, ecological and economic objectives. Without shared goals within and across the international community, SD is struggling. In closing, SD is not a fixed ideal based on “where we are going,” but rather an evolutionary process better expressed through the lens of “where we have been.” As Roger Wilkinson and John Cary contend: “…the [SD] process is not deterministic: the end-point is not known in advance. The starting point of the process is not some degree of sustainability because this cannot be known or observed. It is considered that unsustainability – which can be seen – is necessarily the starting point for this process. What is known to be unsustainable will change and evolve with new information and experience, which makes the process dynamic rather than static. Within this evolutionary approach, a sustainable system is one that evolves as a consequence of adaptation to changing circumstances, rather than one that resists all assaults upon it.” In the end, it is not the conflict of opinion that matters, but rather the conversations needed to resolve these differences that give the SD movement its strength. From this perspective, SD has and continues to be an ongoing discussion where consensus will always need to be negotiated and renegotiated. Perhaps the elusive common ground needed to achieve sustainable development can be found through the continued review of SD’s evolution. Perhaps the first step toward that common ground is to recognize the multi-cultural approaches to its advancement. In our differences may lay the solutions that take the world to true sustainability. SLDT About the author: Chris Moore (LEED® AP) is an Environmental Planner with the national facilities and infrastructure consulting firm RS&H, working with sustainable transportation and environmental program management. He may be reached at christopher.moore@rsandh.com. Conclusions SD has become the most widely used catchphrase among policy advocates wishing to create a balance between the ostensibly opposing goals of economic growth and environmental protection, with the issue of social equity lying somewhere in between. However, as we have seen, attempts at finding such a balance typically result in ineffective policy. On the local front, three-quarters of the American public consider themselves to be environmentalists, but are at the same time disengaged from the political process. Their knowledge of the relationship between natural and economic systems is often limited and inconsistent. Due to the lack of understanding of the complexities involved with SD, a political vacuum is created by the disengaged American public, which is often filled by special interest groups www.SLDTonline.com 13 http://www.SLDTonline.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Sustainable Land Development Today - February 2009

Sustainable Land Development Today - February 2009 Contents Our Voice Modern Flood Disasters Origin of the Sustainability Movement SLDI in Focus Calendar Build Smart Product Innovation Takeoff and Cost Management Industry News Products & Services Advertiser Index Editorial Board SLDT Resources Last Word

Sustainable Land Development Today - February 2009

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