by Charles W. Rusch © 2002

[Prologue: This talk is not going to be an easy one for either you or me. Growth is a contentious subject these days. So your task is to try to understand why so many people are against growth despite its obvious benefits. My task is to try to explain that to you.]

It’s hard to talk about growth and sustainability without getting into all the gloom and doom statistics of the current world situation, but I don’t want to do that today for a number of reasons. First, I don’t have a lot of time, second, I think that this particular audience is aware of the present situation, and third, I don’t want you going home any more depressed than you already are. Maybe a summary of what you already know is all that’s necessary to get the discussion going.

You already know that the two big problems we face are overpopulation and over consumption. You also know that there are now 6 billion people in the world and that the doubling rate is about 47 years, which means that by 2050 there may be 12 billion of us. Most forecasters predict 10 billion by 2050. The most troubling prediction is that even if every country in the world did everything tomorrow that we know to do to stop population growth, there are enough childless young women in the world today to keep the population growing to about eight billion before it levels off — and that’s if we immediately did everything right — so 10 billion around mid-century seems likely.

Unless of course, Mother Nature decides to take care of it herself. Mother Nature has her own ways of handling imbalances in her carefully tuned biosystem: tools like pestilence and disease, flood and famine, drought and starvation, and enormous changes in the weather.

The other problem is over consumption. Many of the developed nations have population growth under control. Europe as a whole is down close to the replacement rate right now and Italy and Spain’s populations are actually getting smaller. So the population problem is mostly in the developing countries, but the developed countries are the big consumers. The U. S., with less than five per cent of the world's population, consumes one-sixth of the world’s natural resources and one fourth of the world’s energy. In the presentation of his energy proposal Dick Cheney said that the U. S. lifestyle is not up for negotiation — but that lifestyle is a big part of the problem! Of course, you know all this. You know Dick Cheney is wrong — that something has to change, particularly the American lifestyle. The only remaining questions are what to do, how to do it, and at what point doing it will be too late to head off enormous environmental consequences.

So overpopulation and over consumption are the two sources of all of our environmental problems, even in those countries which are no longer growing, and even in those countries where the American lifestyle is an impossible dream. It really is one world now; the global village has arrived; worldwide television is, well, worldwide. Our problems are their problems and their problems are ours. Air pollution, for example, knows no national boundaries, and people have a way of moving around as well, even illegally – when the consequences of getting caught are severe. So job #1a is to get the world’s population under control, and job #1b is to break our addiction to consumption. Fortunately, education does seem to make a difference on both of these problems, but it is a very lengthy process, so we’ll need some time.

Enough of the world’s problems! Think globally; act locally. What’s all this got to do with Florence or Eugene? What I want to talk about now is how to respond, particularly what to do about growth.

This is not going to be easy. Growth is part of how we define who we are. In the thinking of our culture, growth is good. Bigger is better. A successful company is one that is growing; a healthy city is one that is growing; a strong economy is one that is growing. Personal incomes are supposed to get bigger every year, and so are company profits, budgets, the number of workers employed, and the number of widgets sold. Then there is the down side. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. At least that is the belief system in place in the mainstream, western-based, dominant cultures of the world.

So it’s not easy for us to see growth as a problem. Even those of us who are beginning to get that it is, have trouble imagining an alternative, some other way of thinking about ourselves. We’re told that the alternative is sustainability, but what does that actually mean, sustainability? We’re told that it means living in such a way that it can be sustained indefinitely, over many generations, perhaps for thousands of years. To most of us living sustainably without growth conjures up images of cutting back, of making do, of skimping and getting by, maybe even of being out of work, or always scrambling to find a job. Not growing; what could that be like? One Florence friend of mine said to me once, “It sounds a lot like Reedsport.” Well, I don’t know Reedsport like you folks do. Anyone here from Reedsport? No? Good!

Because growth is part of who we are and because living sustainably seems to be the goal, there are a lot of intelligent people today trying to find some middle ground, something between all-out growth and living frugally within our means. Here are some examples of these attempts for you to ponder: In planning circles these days, you hear a lot about “smart growth” — more about that later. Here’s another: Part of the platform on which your County Commissioner, Anna Morrison, ran last time – and was elected – was “Sustainable Growth.” Another: One of the stated goals of the city of Eugene, in fact, on the wall in city hall, is: “Sustainable Community Growth.” And finally: Just last Friday an editorial in The Register-Guard concluded in part: “It’s essential that the city have a land use code in place that provides a clear, consistent path to sensible, sustainable growth.”

Well, these are the words of really intelligent people, but I’m here today to tell you that there is no such thing as sustainable growth. There is not and never has been any form of material growth, natural, or social, or economic, that can be sustained indefinitely. In nature, plants and animals grow for awhile, absorbing nutrients to do so, then exist in a steady state, or period of maturity for a time, and then die, decay, and turn back into nutrients which feed the growth of others. Groups of animals tend to grow until their numbers overrun the food supply, and then the growth stops and the size of the herd falls back into balance with whatever food is still available. Some fungi, the world’s largest life-forms, seem to grow indefinitely, and the nature of cancer is to grow continuously, but even those species eventually run out of resources and die. Indefinite growth is just not sustainable.

Most of us would like our species, Homo sapiens, to be around for a long time, not forever, but say, another 100,000 years. Why not forever? Because forever is a very long time, and a lot can happen in the meantime, for example the sun one day will become a red giant and expand enough to absorb the earth. So we’re looking for a paradigm different from growth; we want to find a way of being in the world which satisfies all of our needs AND which can be sustained for a hundred thousand years. Let’s try to spell that out. So, what are our needs? What kind of community do we want?

Well, we all want to live in a healthy community. We want Florence to thrive, be vital, and be alive with social interaction, friendship, and support for each other. We want something as near to full employment as we can get. And we want the community to look good – not run down. In short, we want to love living here, and we think that to get all that, Florence has to keep growing.

Because we are what our culture is, we believe that to stay healthy Florence needs to get bigger, that is, have a larger population each year, more jobs, more construction, more roads, and more sales of all the stuff we need to live a comfortable life: cars, appliances, furniture, food, tools, as well as more services, like those performed by doctors, dentists, teachers, and yes, actors, artists, and librarians. More of all that this year than we had last year seems to be what’s required. In fact, such growth is frequently stated as an explicit city goal, although sometimes constrained, as in Eugene.

Now the problem is that if every city in the world were committed in that way to continuous growth, and grew that way in pursuit of a better life for its citizens, we’d soon have an enormous worldwide environmental crisis. Life would get a whole lot worse in a hurry. Our short-term gains would be swallowed up by their long-term consequences. My own conclusion is that any social system based on continuing, unchecked growth will not last the century.

Back to Florence. What to do? Think globally, act locally. Do we want to be part of the solution? Yes. Then it would appear that eventually we shall have to stop growth right here in Florence – if we want to stop it in the world. And we’re counting on that happening not just here, but all over the state, the country, and the globe.

I don’t know about you, but I hate the way that feels – that conclusion that we have to stop growth. It’s like getting kicked in the stomach. The essential sense of the rightness of growth is way down deep inside of who I am as a person. To come to the conclusion that continuation of the growth model will lead to the collapse of our culture, perhaps the extinction of millions of species, including our own, is not an easy one to accept. But it does help a little to know that we might have some time, that we can’t stop growth overnight anyway, even if we wanted to. As we speak, the polar icecaps are melting, but Manhattan hasn’t flooded yet, so we’ve still got some time. Let’s make the best of it. Now perhaps it’s time to talk about smart growth.

Smart growth recognizes that we’re living in a growth-based culture, that we’re part of that culture, that we can’t change who we are overnight, but that we might be able to change gradually over time, so the task becomes one of finding out how to buy some time so that we can phase growth out gradually. In a book called “Natural Capitalism,” Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and his wife, L. Hunter Lovins, argue that by living much more efficiently we can delay the inevitable for quite a while. They don’t say how long, but depending upon how fast we act, I’d guess about 100 years. Then they lay out a whole program for making our society run more efficiently, like heating our buildings on only 5% of the energy we now use to do it, driving cars that get 120 miles per gallon of fuel, which in turn could be produced from growing plants – or collected from the out-gassing of old landfills. These are not speculative ideas; the Lovinses work in a building that is 95% more efficient than a normal one and their research institute is designing and working with others to build prototypes of autos that get between 100 and 200 miles per gallon.

Furthermore, we can reduce our waste stream to nearly nothing by putting capital R’s on the environmental trio: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. For example, the Interface carpet company will now sell you your carpets as a service. You buy the service and they install the carpet; then they come by regularly to inspect and replace it as it wears out. They take the old carpet with them back to the factory and remake it, sometimes 100% of it, into new carpet. Germany has laws in effect right now that require companies to take back their products when they wear out, and to recycle the old materials into new products. In Germany, recycling is the business of the makers as well as the consumers. According to Natural Capitalism, this can all be done under the present profit-driven business model. In other words, it makes good business sense to retool our industries in these ways.

As positive as all that sounds, I don’t think Natural Capitalism is the answer to the big problems we’ve been discussing today, I doubt if it would, for example, effectively diminish growth — but I do see it buying us 100 years or so while we come to our senses and give up our addiction to growth.

That’s all I have time to say about smart growth and consumerism, now how about smart growth and city planning? In 1998, the city of Eugene published and adopted the final report of a lengthy study called, “Eugene Growth Management Study: ‘Shaping Eugene’s Future.’” For those of you familiar with the term, “new urbanism,” there’s a flavor of that in this report. The central idea is to handle growth not by expanding the urban growth boundary but by building to higher densities inside of it. The way I like to say it is: “Eugene is going to have grow up (instead of out)”. In this model, the highest densities are at the center of the city – the highest business densities, but also the highest residential densities. Then the density gradually drops off as you move out to the edge. To handle future growth, we are right now designating carefully chosen neighborhoods as high-density nodes of mixed-use within the middle to outer rings of the city. Those are the areas in which we are encouraging future growth to take place by means of a regulatory mechanism we call an “overlay zone,” a system of constraints and incentives laid on top of the base zoning underneath. The result will be that the highest density will be in the downtown core. Density will drop off gradually and then swell up again around these neighborhood nodes, and then taper off again out to the UGB.

The report is also full of ideas on how to make living in compact mixed-use neighborhoods a better experience for everyone than our present single-use sprawling suburbs provide. By intermixing stores, offices, and housing everyone can spend more time in their neighborhoods, and less time traveling. Fewer people traveling means less money spent on building and maintaining roads and less land tied up in parking structures and parking lots. By sending high speed public transit to each neighborhood node, fast connections can be made around the city, further reducing automobile miles traveled and the amount of land tied up in roads and parking. At the present time, over 30% of the land in a city is devoted to roads and parking. Under a smart growth scheme, much of that land could be returned to the neighborhoods for parks, walking and bike paths, community buildings, and new commercial and residential uses. Smart growth uses land much more efficiently, reduces transportation needs and costs, increases the tax base, and gives its residents a more satisfying means of urban living, i.e., more time with their families, more neighborhood social contact, less time spent in travel, and reduced living expense through the use of shared facilities.

Admittedly, this description fits Eugene better than it fits Florence, but I am sure smart growth principles could be applied to Florence as well. Florence is definitely an automobile town, but it could be redesigned to make it more compact and to reduce the divisive impact of Highway 101 on its sense of community. In fact, I remember several Florence studies which attempted to do just that in the past, but they didn’t get very far. These things take time. We have to be willing to see a future that is different from the comforts of the present. Not a worse future, a better future, but different enough that many will find it hard to make the change. Rest assured, change will come to Florence, as to the rest of the world — particularly if the polar icecaps continue to melt.

Today’s planners call it smart growth. You can call it smart growth if you want, or slow growth, or even sustainable development, but just don’t call it sustainable growth, unless you want to sound like an oxymoron.

Finally, I’d like to kind of paint a picture to get you thinking of what life might be like without growth. An economist named Herman Daly has written a series of books outlining what he calls, “steady state economics.” I’m not an economist, but it seems to me to be a pretty fully developed theory about how to move our economies away from global growth and toward a largely decentralized system tied to our eco-regions. This makes sense to me; the world divides up naturally into ecological regions, each with a particular climate, and with plants and animals which thrive naturally in that climate. Because water is probably the critical resource, each of those large regions can be further broken down into river watersheds. Each watershed has an at least implied carrying capacity for each species living there, that is, the number of individuals of that species, including people, that that watershed can support indefinitely. Instead of shipping food in from all over the country or the world, people are fed from land in their own watershed. When there is some excess of food or other goods produced, trading will develop, but not to the point that the natural resources of the region are drawn down, as they are today.

So given a stable population living in such a manner in such a region, see if you can imagine an active, vital community where there is no growth, but where there is full employment. As I see it, in this hypothetical community, individual tradesmen from all the building trades are busy working on projects: replacing buildings that have deteriorated to the point that they are unsafe, improving a park, or a civic building, or a neighbor’s house. In fact, all over town people are busy improving things, making them better. Doctors, dentists, and teachers are certainly employed, but so are writers and biologists. Everyone in town has a role to play, and everyone gets paid a satisfactory salary – or perhaps barters for what he or she needs. If you do an extra project one year, you might make a little more that year, but that is not the goal. The goal is satisfaction. The goal is feeling good about yourself, your family, your neighbors, and your community. Part of the secret is living simply and helping others. You don’t own a car because you can easily get to where you want to go by bike or bus. For longer distances, there are very efficient cars to rent or a train or plane to take. A carpenter might own a truck because he has to carry building materials around, but when he’s not working, he rides a bike too; it helps him keep in shape, and besides, he enjoys it.

In this hypothetical town, everything people own is for some good purpose, and it is used until it wears out. It is designed to last and to be repaired, not thrown away. Everyone in town lives in small homes or apartments that are simple yet elegantly comfortable. People walk to stores to shop, they know all their neighbors, and they have the time to talk with them and get caught up. Yet nothing about the city is growing – except the saplings and the children. The total population is roughly the same year after year; people die and babies are born; companies come and go; people move away and people move in, and yet everything stays about the same size. The schools always enroll roughly the same number of children, but they get better and better because they are always being improved, as are the hospital and the library. Budgets across the city, for offices, schools, and city departments are about the same each year, mostly because salaries and prices are not going up.

Almost all of the food that the community requires is either grown right outside of town or in community gardens, in backyards, or in sunrooms or greenhouses within the town. Most houses collect the water they need on their roofs, purify it on the way down, generate their own electricity, and process their own wastes, so there is little need for city services. Products that are manufactured outside of the community are picked up by the manufacturers when they are no longer serviceable. There is no waste, so there is no “landfill.”

The community is getting better every year, but it is not getting bigger in any way. Yet if you asked a townsperson about the purpose of life, ironically the answer would probably be, “Growth.” The town’s residents are certainly growing in knowledge, and growing as well in character and perhaps spirituality, but nothing about the material side of their life is growing, nor would they want it to be. Satisfaction levels in the community are very high. It is expected that the city will operate in this way indefinitely. And that is what is meant by sustainability.

Is this sketch a utopian pipe dream? Maybe so, but it is also close to the way life used to be here in America before and after the turn of the 20th century. In searching for a way to live sustainably into the future perhaps we need to look more carefully at the past. Is that such an outrageous idea? Well, perhaps it is; after all, the whole idea of growth is a product of the past. Ten thousand years of western thinking is now culminating in our plundering the world’s resources as fast as we can, yet our grandparents and our great-grandparents built cities in this country that had many sustainable features. Maybe we can use the best of their thinking to guide us to sustainability.

In summary, here are five steps for us to take in the interests of survival. First, we use the principles of Natural Capitalism and public education to slow down consumerism and population growth. That buys us some time. Second, we use the principles of smart growth and sustainable architecture to contain the damage we are causing the natural environment and to provide compact, comfortable, vital, interesting places for us to live. Third, we start working on an attitude change about who we are in the world. We don’t own it; we’re just one among some thirty million species. It’s arrogant to even pretend to be the earth’s “stewards.” Fourth, we begin to gently, warily, move away from growth in all its forms as a positive force in our culture (including smart growth, incidentally), and adopt, or rather, rediscover instead the values of parsimony and thrift. That should further reduce our negative impact on the planet. And fifth, while reducing our excesses in these ways, we use our excess wealth to bring up the standard of living of those around us, not for the purpose of replacing their culture with ours but quite the opposite – to keep their diversity alive. If there is one thing we should know by now it is that. We are all – every individual, every species, and every culture – dependent upon each other for our survival, which makes preserving diversity absolutely critical.

So there it is – my five-point, 100-year plan for “SAVING THE WORLD!” Now comes the hard part – doing it.

As a final footnote, many other cultures, mostly aboriginal, have lived for tens of thousands of years sustainably. Before we even began growing out of control, they were fine-tuning their relationship to their environment. Now our very success in exploiting the world’s resources threatens their cultures with extinction. Shouldn’t we help them cope with the problems we have brought down upon them? And shouldn’t we be learning from them how to live sustainably? Every culture lost reduces our entire species’ chance of survival.

…as delivered to the Florence City Club, Florence, OR, March 15, 2002.