Inherently unsustainable?

It was 7:30 a.m. in a conference room in the ironically plush Pan Pacific Hotel on Vancouver's waterfront, and the ecological footprint guru, William Rees, was throwing cold water on the hope that we are making progress toward a more sustainable world. Indeed, our prospects are direr than we think because unsustainability is actually coded in our genes.

Rees, a professor at the University of British Columbia, was saying that humans, like other animal species, are predisposed to expand their numbers, occupy all available habitats, and consume all possible resources. This biological tendency is exacerbated by cultural factors, such as the present belief in unlimited economic growth facilitated by global trade.

The conventional view of sustainability doesn't question the idea of endless economic expansion, Rees said. Rather it encourages the idea that technology will solve our problems. "But sustainability isn't a problem of technology or efficiency," he added. "Such measures just allow us to become unsustainable faster...Globalization gives us access to the remaining pockets of resources on the planet, which assures that the whole planet will reach limits at the same time."

Rees developed the ecological footprint technique to help people appreciate just how unsustainable is our present society. It calculates the number of hectares (I'm writing this from Canada!) of the earth's productive biosphere required to support a person's lifestyle -- the footprint needed to provide all the fresh air, clean water, food, fish, fiber, minerals, metals, energy, and other resources.

If you run the numbers, you find that the typical, mega-consuming North American needs about nine hectares. People in developing countries use less than half a hectare, and the world average is about 2.2 hectares. So we Americans consume far more than our fair share of the world's resources. Overall, human consumption exceeds the planet's carrying capacity by 20 percent, Rees said. If the rest of the world achieves North American levels of consumption, we will need four more planets to sustain us.

Numbers like this help you appreciate the magnitude of the transformation required to create a sustainable human civilization that exists in balance with the earth's biosphere. We will need a lot more than incremental improvements in energy efficiency or more bike lanes to alter the trajectory of the world economy.

The redesign of cities will be a critical part of this transformation. Right now, cities are "the human equivalent of livestock feedlots," Rees said. To survive, they must import tremendous amounts of resources and energy from all over the world. For example, Vancouver, which has a reputation as an enlightened green city, has an ecological footprint 48 times its actual land area. Its clean environment is possible because many of its polluting activities are in places like China.

To reduce the ecological burden of cities, we need to figure out how to live in balance with surrounding regions. The future, according to Rees, will be bioregional. Cities will be fed from their surrounding hinterlands, micro-businesses will respond to local needs, and energy will come from local, renewable sources.

Most of all, the consumer, throw-away society — a social construct created by advertising only recently in human history — will have to change. And that won't be easy, Rees said. "People won't change behavior if it involves sacrifice. We need a tool kit of practical and positive incentives — a new story that offers hope of a better life."

The new human narrative might help us create self-reliant cities with livable neighborhoods where people walk to jobs, have access to nature, and enjoy a clean environment, healthy food, more free time, and greater security.

We have no time to lose. Another 2 billion people soon will be living in cities around the world. "We will have to live more lightly on the planet so that other people can live at all."

New urban planning

As might be expected, the World Urban Forum (WUF) has attracted a lot of planners, and they are having an intense discussion about the future of urban planning. Indeed, some of them are talking about how to re-invent planning to meet the unprecedented challenges of an urban planet on which a new city of a million people will be built every week, mostly in poor nations.

Just prior to the WUF, the World Planners Congress met in Vancouver. As a result of that meeting and further discussions at the WUF, the participants are issuing a "Vancouver Declaration" for a new urban planning. It commits the profession to address the Millennium Development Goals, inclusion and equity, poverty, climate change, and environmental disasters. And it proposes 10 principles for a new urban planning.

The paper says:

Time is short. Today, for the first time in the world’s history, the majority of its population live in cities. Urban development is rapid, and its impacts are longlasting. Unless urban areas can be made more sustainable, and rural life more tolerable, the legacy of negative environmental and social costs will become irreversible. If current trends go unchecked:

• Urban poverty will become pervasive. In 2002, 30% of the world’s urban population lived in poverty: on current trends this figure will become 45-50% by 2020, some 1.6 billion people.
• The numbers of environmental refugees, people displaced by more frequent and severe disasters as the global climate changes, will mount. The pollutants and greenhouse gases generated by our rapidly spreading urban areas are motors of climate change.
• Cities will continue to provide a refuge for those escaping conflict zones, but will increasingly become places of crime and terrorism.

The combination of these threats amounts to a crisis that is global, systematic and already discernable. Yet much policy-making remains reactive, and presumes that urban development is only a local matter, and that natural disasters and outbreaks of urban unrest are random events. Practices built on these foundations are programmed to fail. In contrast, New Urban Planning means being proactive, focused on sustainability, and making the connections between people, economic opportunity and the environment. That is why planning is central to a new paradigm for governance of human settlements.

World vocabulary

Brown agenda: The agenda to provide basic needs — including shelter, water, and sanitation — for people in developing nations (as opposed to the high-tech green agenda of developed nations).

Blue and green city: People in Oslo, Norway, are calling their hometown a green city on a blue fiord.