The Sustainability Movement:
Rhetoric or Reality?

Dena Leibman, Anna El-Eini
Friends of The Earth
Sep/Oct 1996

• Once voted the "dirtiest city in America," a town in America's South transforms itself into a model of environmental and economic health.

• A Brazilian city solves its garbage problems by exchanging school books and bus passes for recyclable garbage.

• A group of citizens in Jacksonville, Florida talk about how to measure their community's well-being and quality of life — not just by the amount of revenue the city brings in, but by the diversity of businesses, water and air quality and the high school graduation rate.

• Two years in the making, a U.S. presidential commission releases a voluminous report outlining a plan to merge economic and environmental goals.

• A European environmental group catches the imagination of jaded policymakers with new, more equitable ways of thinking about worldwide consumption of natural resources.

Although we've been hearing the term for years — sustainable forestry, sustainable agriculture — it wasn't until the Earth Summit, the 1992 UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, that the concept of sustainable development gained acceptance and momentum in environmental circles. The definition of sustainable development bandied about at the conference was one issued in 1987 by the UN-commissioned Brundtland Report: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs," a definition that was born out of a growing sense that to solve our ills the world needs to meld the often adversarial goals of environmental protection, economic growth and social justice. However vague and open to interpretation, it was this notion and the conference's accompanying sustainable development action plan for national and international policymakers, Agenda 21, that prompted citizen groups and some governments to try to shape this amorphous idea of sustainability into workable policy.

Five years later, the range of opinions about whether or not this is being achieved is far-ranging. Some think that the pursuit of sustainability is the next great social movement. Others think it is just a diversion from the immediate tasks at hand: fighting dams, protecting the ozone layer — the individual battles that could get mired in the quicksand of consensus-building, the prerequisite of many sustainable development initiatives.

But almost everyone who has been following the rise of the "sustainability culture," as it is sometimes called, seems to agree on one thing: Sustainability — however defined and perceived — is an idea that is catching on and is going to be pursued as more individuals, communities, states, government agencies, international bodies and citizens groups are trying to reach — some with great success — beyond the rhetoric.

Sustainability means many things to many people, but more and more agree that any sustainable development initiative should include the following:
• An integrated plan to protect a community's environmental, social and economic well-being (none should take priority over the other).
• Civic engagement and participation by all affected parties (making decisions through consensus is controversial but is being used more and more in planning and policymaking).
• Development of "indicators" that not only measure a community's economic health but also its environmental and social well-being, and then setting new quality-of-life targets based on these measures.

Community-by-Community Long before Agenda 21, before sustainable development even had a name, a few visionaries dreamt of stopping urban deterioration in their communities with renewal projects that were based on long-term economic, environmental and social health. One of the first of these efforts began in a country heavily criticized over the past few decades for its unsustainable use of its forests and other natural resources: Brazil.

In 1975 in Curitiba, a city of more than 2.1 million people, then-Mayor Jaime Lerner saw a city ripe with problems: unemployment, urban sprawl, clogged streets, choking air pollution — the standard menu of ills that plague the majority of growing metropolises. An architect and planner by training, Lerner envisioned a multidisciplinary approach to the city's development, and he brought together business, government and citizen leaders to find a way to direct the growth into patterns that would be environmentally, socially and economically sustainable — a participatory approach that has become a hallmark of modern sustainable development initiatives.

Lerner and the city council first launched a state of the art public transport system and geared development away from private-car use. They also instituted land-use reforms and land restoration programs. The result is a city where fuel consumption has dropped by 25 percent

(partly because more than a quarter of Curitiba car owners use public transport to travel to work); green space has increased a hundred fold and people have their pick of more than 1,000 parks, most of which are linked by bike paths; and recycling is encouraged through programs that exchange garbage for bus passes, food and school books.

One might wonder if Curitiba is an anomaly, the right combination of progressive leadership and economics that made it ripe for such an Ecotopian experiment. Can Curitiba's sustainable development model work in the car-obsessed, fast-paced cities of America?

The answer is that on the local level, there already are some pretty convincing sustainable development models. Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example, was once called "the dirtiest town in America." The air was so polluted drivers used headlights during the day to cut through the smog. But in 1984, a group of citizens worked together to engage the whole community and city officials in a "vision" process that made the city think about how to plan for a different future. From electric buses providing free transportation to a new "zero emissions" industrial park, the city has drastically reduced air pollution, attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in new investments and created 1,500 new jobs, many of them in "green" industries.

Chattanooga and Curitiba are oft-cited inspirations for a burgeoning but decentralized sustainable communities movement that in the past five years has become loosely networked through a series of sustainable development-themed conferences (it's been said that "sustainable development" is the "mantra that launched a thousand conferences"). This communities movement, though chronically underfunded and almost always fueled by volunteers, has become more and more methodical in its approach to holistic development.

Flying Blind With GDP

A discussion of the sustainability movement often starts with a hard look at how we measure our well-being. Most of us grew up believing that the Gross National Product (now measured by the more narrowly defined Gross Domestic Product ) was a magical measure of how America was doing. But in the 1980s, when GDP was high, people's sense of well-being was starting to slip — crime rates were on the rise, as were divorces, single-parent households, homeless people, toxic waste dumps — a host of "indicators" signaling that not all was well with the country despite the rosy economic picture being painted by politicians.   GDP, which only measures the market value of all the goods and services produced in a nation, largely ignores the societal and environmental costs of economic growth. It is such a blunt economic instrument, in fact, that it turns environmentally devastating events like the Exxon Valdez oil spill into an economic plus for America. The spill cleanup created jobs, so it made GDP rise. The spill's costs to the environment, to the well-being of the communities on Prince William Sound's shores, largely were not subtracted from GDP's calculus.   It is the twisted logic of GDP and traditional notions of economic growth that guide much of natural resource extraction policy and environmental management in the U.S. and around the world. For example, the money made from a gold mine is added to the plus side of the national accounting ledger. The environmental and health care costs arising from mine waste pollution never shows up as a debit. And like job creation by oil spills, when money is spent on mine cleanups it is registered as an economic plus under the GDP framework — in fact, the more mine pollution the better.   Says activist and economist Hazel Henderson, "Trying to run a complex society on a single indicator like the Gross National Product is literally like trying to fly a 747 with only one gauge on the instrument panel."   That's why it's important to develop new indicators of well-being both at the community and national levels.

New Measures: One word often heard in any discussion of sustainable communities is "indicators" — new, nontraditional markers of well-being that measure not only the economic but also the social and environmental health of a community. Historically, local governments have looked solely at employment rates or at the amount of revenue a community generates to gauge success. But often when the town coffers or employment rates are up, residents feel their quality of life is diminishing (see Flying Blind sidebar). Yes, a town can reach almost full employment, but if the town's major employer is a factory that pays low wages, offers back-breaking work and spews pollution, then people's dissatisfaction with their lives also will be high. As well, a town can build an impressive park system, but if employment levels or wages are too low, then parks become housing for the growing numbers of homeless.

Addressing a city's economic, environmental and social problems separately has not led, historically, to long-term, sustainable solutions. Citizen-led community groups and city councils across the country are coming up with nontraditional "indicators" of well-being such as job satisfaction, income distribution, literacy rates, mental illness rates, infants born with low birth weights, fish and wildlife populations, diversity of businesses, vitality of downtown cores — and more quality of life markers that paint an integrated picture of a community's overall health.

Jacksonville, Florida is largely considered the pioneer of using new indicators to gauge quality of life. Every year since 1985 the community has produced Life in Jacksonville: Quality Indicators for Progress, an annual report on the state of the city's education, economy, environment — and a host of other community concerns. The city of Jacksonville keeps tabs on its educational health, for example, by monitoring public high school graduation rates, achievement test scores, expenditures per student; economic health is measured by effective buying income, retail sales, taxable real estate value; environmental health is measured by days that the air quality index is in the good range and rivers and streams are in compliance with quality standards (these are only partial lists of each category's measures). And when Jacksonville's yearly pulse-taking showed that its water quality was declining in the late 1980s, citizens and the city established programs to improve the situation; and similarly, when high school graduation rates fell, citizens and businesses worked with schools to improve educational performance.

Seattle, too, has become known for new citizen-developed indicators, some of which have been incorporated into its city plan. With varying degrees of success and official involvement, cities from Santa Cruz, California to , Massachusetts and states such as Kentucky, Iowa, Minnesota and Maine are taking Jacksonville's and Seattle's cue and starting to build new sustainability principles into their planning efforts. In fact, examples of these kinds of initiatives are too numerous to list here. But growing numbers of these efforts do not necessarily reflect quality: It's hard to calculate the real, on-the-ground success of these efforts in the U.S. since at all levels the sustainability movement is still in its infancy and is without much political momentum, especially at the national level.

What should be clear by now to thoughtful greens is that without social and economic justice, there can be no environmental or ecological justice, and thereby no sustainability. If one community becomes "sustainable" at the expense of another, is the bioshere better off? ...Unless a significant number of humans stand actively against all degradations, wherever they occur, global sustainability simply won't happen.

--Mark Dowie, author of Losing Ground:

American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century

Footdragging Feds

At the regional and national level, the words "sustainable development" and "new indicators" and "quality of life" have become part of official rhetoric, and actually have started translating, in some cases, into federal efforts to marry environmental, economic and social concerns. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, is engaged in several efforts that might fall under the sustainable development banner. The Common Sense Initiative, for example, one of the largest federal consensus-building efforts ever, brings together stakeholders from all interests to try to forge new "cheaper, cleaner, smarter" rules for how six polluting industries do business.

The Department of Energy (DOE) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) also have launched fledgling programs in sustainable development — not surprisingly, underfunded and understaffed. HUD's Andy Euston, an expert on sustainable development, has tried to push a sustainable development approach to the agency's work in what he calls a complete absence of urban development policy in the country. Euston says demand for sustainable urban and rural renewal projects is growing, but funding has so far been inadequate. For now, says Euston, "the sustainability movement has to work from the community up. The national level doesn't have real leadership. "

There was hope three years ago that the President's Commission on Sustainable Development (PCSD) — a Clinton-appointed council of business leaders, nongovernmental organizations, and government officials — would provide the federal direction that Euston and others say is sorely needed. The commission, which just this year released its Sustainable America report detailing a ten-point plan for implementing national sustainable development policies, was praised widely for its strongly worded guiding principles. But the commission was also heavily criticized for its lack of commitment to a few issues that sit high on most activists' priorities for change, in particular increasing public transport and reducing resource-intensive consumption. Some of these concerns have been addressed at the level of the PCSD work group and task forces, which released issue specific reports that went beyond the main document. But most telling, perhaps, is that President Clinton has not shown much interest thus far in backing the report: Federal sustainable development initiatives are receiving inadequate funding, and the Commission's recommendations did not make their way into the president's election-year speech-making, a sign that many sustainability activists say means that little tangible action will result for all the effort.

The money and political leadership may not yet exist for a U.S. national sustainable development policy, but that could be a blessing in disguise. Jim Schulman, co-director of Sustainable Communities Initiatives, says that "the politicization of the sustainability debate may kill it," the movement being so young that it could easily be diluted by partisan and regional politics. Many community-level activists believe that the President's report will serve well to educate people on sustainability and legitimize the sustainable development efforts of small community groups pleading their cases before city councils. When the time is right, says Schulman, the dialogue on the national level and the U.S. role in a global sustainability movement will be stronger for its committed, informed and determined community base.

A survey by the Merck Family Fund indicates that as we gain in material consumption, beyond a certain point we lose in happiness:

Compared to My Parents at My Age:   I have more possessions:  72 percent  I am more financially secure:  66 percent  I am more successful in my career:  58 percent  I am happier:  49 percent

Sustainability International Style

In the U.S., few sustainability activists point to the Earth Summit's Agenda 21 as the starting point for their efforts. Many, in fact, have never heard of the document, which called on local authorities and nations to develop, with diverse interests represented, new quality-of-life indicators. But outside the U.S., the Earth Summit is largely considered the epicenter of a growing and dynamic sustainability movement.

According to the Toronto-based International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, 1,500 cities in 51 countries have started "Local Agenda 21s." Local authorities from Quito, Ecuador to Buga, Columbia to towns throughout England and Norway are engaging the spectrum of community interests in developing new quality-of-life indicators.

The Local Agenda 21 movement likely will get high marks when the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) conducts its five-year review of the worldwide implementation of Agenda 21 next June. The local initiatives also will be highlighted at the Rio Plus Five conference, an NGO-sponsored Earth-Summit-review conference to be held in March 1997 in Rio de Janeiro. Criticism might be levered, however, at the CSD itself, which is said to have a "talk-shop" quality to it that, with the exception of a proposal to ban lead in gasoline worldwide, has produced little in the way of tangible sustainability policy at the global level. Many activists say that one of the CSD's primary virtues to date is the opportunity it affords activists to network and showcase their on-the-ground efforts.

A Revolution in Thinking about Spaceship Earth

Friends of the Earth-Netherlands, in their landmark 1992 report Sustainable Netherlands, argued that sustainability is mainly about two things, environmental space and equity. These concepts are the cornerstone of FOE-Europe's and FOE-lnternational's Sustainable Societies Program.  Environmental Space is the amount of non-renewable resources that we can use and the amount of pollutants we can emit without damaging the capacity of the planet to support ourselves and future generations. Environmental space is calculated per person, per country, based on population. For example, if environmental space is spread equitably throughout the world, each person would be allotted an average of two gallons of liquid fossil fuel per day. FOE-I argues that the changes necessary to start living within our environmental space allocations, like living closer to work and using the train or other types of public transport, would ultimately improve our quality of life.  The Equity Principle calls for a fair division of environmental space among the world's population. Simply put, the industrialized nations with only 25 percent of the world's population cannot continue to consume 80 percent of the world's resources if the earth is to adequately provide for future generations. The U.S. in particular needs to reduce its consumption of natural resources, including wood, minerals and agricultural land by as much as 80 percent in the next 50 years in order to move toward global sustainability.  Making the environmental space and equity principle work is by no means easy. It involves fundamental changes in the way we make things, use things and dispose of things. The average product we buy in the supermarket has traveled 1,500 miles to reach us. Its paper label may be from one country, the food from several others and the plastic packaging from yet another. For example, according to Towards a Sustainable Europe, a report commissioned by FOE-I and written by the Germany-based Wuppertal Institute, strawberry yogurt made in Stuttgart, Germany has components that have traveled a total of about 7,000 miles — and simple changes in production could reduce the transport intensity of the product by 75 percent!  So how can we achieve equitable distribution of the our environmental space?  Closed process cycles: Manufacturing products made with minimal raw material input, returnable/recyclable packaging and repairable or reusable parts.  Energy conservation: Reducing fossil fuel use through renewable energy programs and energy conservation.  The proximity principle: Locating production processes as near to the consumer as possible to reduce environmental costs of transport.  Tax and pricing reforms: Incorporation of environmental costs and accounting into production processes and product purchase prices.  Around the world, FOE groups are working on or have completed their own national sustainability reports, calculating how much their country's natural resource consumption must change in order to meet environmental space targets.

Friends of the Earth-International (FOE-I) is one of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that has been a strong and persistent voice at the CSD meetings, pushing international policymakers to adopt the concepts of environmental space and equity to reduce overconsumption in industrialized countries (see Revolution in Thinking sidebar).

 The group has presented papers and lobbied at other UN fore and the FOE-I staff have been featured speakers at a variety of international symposia including a recent meeting of all the European environment ministers in Sofia, Bulgaria. As well, FOE-I, led by FOE-Netherlands (the originators of the environmental space idea), has held a series of meetings with trade unions and business leaders to garner support for the idea of creating more efficient economies and setting targets to reduce consumption. The concepts are catching on with European environment ministers and some international policymakers, but the real success so far seems to be in education. Few policymakers can argue with the simple fact emphasized in almost all FOE-I literature: The industrialized nations, with only 20 percent of the world's population, consume 80 percent of the world's resources, an inequitable and certainly unsustainable consumption pattern. If the developing countries, particularly rapidly growing India and China, develop beyond their limits as we have in the North, the Earth's carrying capacity will be exceeded in short order.

All that has been said here brings us back to our headline question: The Sustainability Movement: Rhetoric or Reality? First, some argue that you can't call this a movement at all: there is no central hub, no emerging leader, not even a clear consensus on what sustainability or sustainable development means. People have chosen other terms: sustainability culture, philosophy, approach, planning revolution. But whatever you name it, something big seems to be gelling — a growing collective understanding that as more of the world's forests are felled, as we feel less and less safe to walk the streets, as the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, we are arriving at a tipping point in history. Environmentalism or social justice or economic growth pursued separately cannot leave our children a world that is better, or even the same as we have now. Have we seen more rhetoric than action since the Earth Summit? Probably. But we can still be encouraged by the sustainability pioneers: the community visionaries, tireless activists, maverick policymakers — all the people who are willing to try something new and difficult to create something better.

--Dena Leibman, Anna El-Eini

What FOE-U.S. is Doing

Local:

• FOE's Community Support Project helps communities and individual activists find and evaluate environmental information that is used to develop and track new quality-of-life indicators.

• FOE has recently launched a sustainable development initiative in North Carolina's Research Triangle area that, among many things, promotes public transportation and fights urban sprawl and new highway construction.

National:

• FOE's Green Tax Project is working to reform the U.S. tax code so that it promotes sustainable development goals. For example, we advocate. shifting the tax burden from employment taxes, which hinder job growth, onto polluters with polluter-pay taxes.

• FOE's Appropriations Project has co-produced reports with taxpayer groups and citizen activists to cut unsustainable federal spending. One recently released report, Road to Ruin, tackles federal subsidies for unnecessary highway building. Reducing private car use and increasing funding for mass transit is the keystone of many local sustainable development efforts.

• FOE is a key player in the EPA's Common Sense Initiative, which brings together stakeholders from business, environment, social justice and labor interests to forge "cheaper, cleaner, smarter" rules for polluting industries.

International:

• FOE's Global Action Project is the leader in the fight to cut through the World Bank's and International Monetary Fund's sustainable development rhetoric. FOE has campaigns to increase public participation in the institutions' policymaking, to give developing countries debt relief so that they don't have to harvest their natural resources unsustainably to pay back loans, and to channel the Bank's and IMF's increased lending to corporations toward more sustainable, long-term investments.

• FOE's Green Investments Project teaches people how to invest personal savings in companies that promote sustainable economic growth.

• FOE's Ozone Protection Project works with stakeholders to strengthen the Montreal Protocol, the international treaty to protect the ozone layer.

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