DON'T PICK THE LOW-LYING FRUIT:

SUSTAINABILITY FROM PATHWAY TO PROCESS

Richard S. Levine, Director

Center for Sustainable Cities

University of Kentucky

Ernest J. Yanarella, Assoc. Dir.

Center for Sustainable Cities

University of Kentucky

1. INTRODUCTION

Sustainable development and ecological sustainability have become the new buzzwords of the nineties in policymaking circles at every level from localities to the global forums. From the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro to the "From Rio to the States" Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, policy debates are replete with tactical proposals and strategic programs as pathways to the Promised Land of economic development and Eco-sustainability.

One of the great godfathers of the energy conservation/solar energy/appropriate technology movement is Amory Lovins. Through numerous books, lectures, and policy statements, he has staked out a carefully articulated and powerful position in the global debate about alternative energy futures as a most eloquent and effective spokesperson for the "soft energy path." Yet this soft technology approach is no mere social engineering solution offered up by a self-described "techno-twit." It is instead part of a galaxy of proposals entwining energy, environmental, and socio-political consideration into a coherent, even compelling, vision of the future.

One of Lovins' most emphatic policy dictums, taken by most ecologically- oriented organizations today as

gospel, is the injunction: "Pick the low-lying fruit." By this he means that energy and natural resource conservation policies should undertake conservation measures that do the technologically easiest, economically least expensive, and politically most palatable things first--i.e., those activities which are most practically feasible, least costly, and offer the most rapid payback. As his statistics would seem to convincingly demonstrate, investment in conservation--i.e., attic insulation, storm windows, energy-efficient lighting and appliances. Aluminum and other recycling, etc.-provide by far the quickest and highest dividends to the average homeowner and individual citizen.

As an immanent critique of this all but taken-for-granted policy proposition, this paper seeks to marshal a series of alternative assumptions and counter- arguments to show that just the reverse is true--that is, that a genuinely sustainable strategy requires a more sophisticated set of tactics and stratagems counseling that we do not begin by picking the low-lying fruit.

2. SUSTAINABILITY ~ I. PATH THAT CANNOT ~ TRAVELED

Underlying the broad appeal of "picking low-lying fruit" is a pathway metaphor for visualizing the approach to achieving sustainability. It grows out of the tendency of many environmentalists and ecologists to embrace the first task on a supposed path to sustainability as identifying initial barriers to sustainability and attacking them directly with discrete policies. If automobile pollution is seen as a major culprit of acid rain, generate a set of fuel emissions standards to reduce those toxic emissions being vaulted into the atmosphere and returning an acid precipitation. If our corporate economy and consumer society generates ever more garbage that requires increasingly larger and more expensive landfills, institute local recycling programs to reduce such levels. If nonrenewable energy and other natural resources are being depleted at an escalating rate, initiate conservation measures and technological fixes to stem the tide of diminishing resources and rising prices.

definition of the pathway to sustainability, these barriers take on different forms, including:

2.1 The Wall of Diminishing Returns

Corporations and governmental bodies engaged in ecologically beneficial programs are rapidly bumping up against the economic law of diminishing returns. As such incremental, scattered, and uncreative conservation policy mechanisms develop, the dividends diminish and become more expensive economically and less flashy and impressive politically. For example, urban recycling programs, once embraced by large voting constituencies for their putative ability to prevent steep increases in landfill costs, are now approaching the limits of practical efficiency and are prompting many localities increasingly to seek more distant and expensive landfills for unrecyclable city garbage loads whose size has continued to escalate, albeit at a more gradual rate.

In other words, postponing the inevitable day of reckoning does not mean that the day of reckoning will never come. It is just delayed and at best the net effect will be that we have bought some time.

2.2 ~ The wall of evaporating political support

The logic of taking small steps that assault manifest ecological problems head-on through individual actions or small changes in lifestyle mandated by governmental programs is extraordinarily attractive. The initial steps are real, concrete, easily put in place, not very costly, and return quick and large dividends. Yet, constituencies and coalitions built around incrementalist programs of energy and natural resource conservation are fair- weather friends. With each step, greater political capital is expended by policymakers to hold together voting alignments as the costs of each succeeding step becomes higher and the returns on investment diminish and become more marginal. Socialized into a quick-fix mentality and operating within a short-term time horizon, many key players-including average citizens, small business people, and even major corporate executives—will tend to abandon their enthusiasm, loyalties, and commitments to the vision of a sustainable future as soon as proximate benefits confront mounting long term costs.

Eventually, political cynicism erupts within the body politic, eroding further the bases of political stamina and determination to pursue the long-term gains. With no larger vision of a sustainable framework

informing policy incrementalism, a popular "waste now for tomorrow we die" [Ophuls' (1977) "overshoot and collapse" scenario] is all but an inevitable outcome of hopes that are dashed and promises that cannot be realized.

2.3 The wall of hardball Q: interest-group politics

One method of confronting palpable environmental threats and ecological problems typically favored by legislative bodies and environmental groups is governmental regulation that mandated standards that are phased in over a period of years. With some notable exceptions, this legal-administrative approach has historically been a legislative ploy for generating meliorist policy whose oversight responsibility is then shifted to an administrative agency. As the rocky and discouraging history of efforts to mandate fleet fuel economy standards in the United States shows, this approach bumps up against corporate lobbying pressures in the Congress to postpone and reduce such standards and environmentalist legal battles to enforce such regulations, leading to lowering of such standards and delay in enforcement. Even if it were possible to determine standards that would take us to sustainability, such standards would be significantly higher than those currently being considered. However, in order to implement such standards, they would inevitably have to be subjected to political processes involving negotiation and compromise. Thus, the first step in such a process would be to compromise the idea of survivability.

2.4 The wall of technological fixation

The history of the Clean Air Act and its amendment and renewal process illuminates the way that good political intentions to reduce environmental pollution borne of the strategy of policy incrementalism often lead to bad consequences through techno-fix approaches. When the Congress sought to reduce local ambient air pollution levels, it mandated a set of pollution level standards that allowed industry to meet those standards by the least cost method(s). By responding to those regulations the cheapest method available--i.e., building higher smokestacks whose pollutants eventually fell hundreds of miles away as acid precipitation--this technological fix solve one problem (local air pollution) while producing another (acid rain).

2.5 The wall misplaced collective effort

As the preceding suggests, an incrementalist and diffuse approach to environmental quality and ecological and social sustainability promotes a policy orientation that focuses on symptoms rather than the disease itself. That is, legal-administrative and technological fix solutions seek to attack the byproducts of unsustainable social and industrial technological systems instead of the unsustainable processes churning out these by-products. As against those mainstream institutions and interests that benefit from the hegemonic unsustainable practices, policies, and processes of national and global political economies today, the meliorist-reformist policies to stem that tide typically require sustainability groups and ecologically-minded organizations to mobilize enormous political energy and to expend sizable organizational resources to achieve highly focused ends (laws, regulations, new agencies, etc.). Insofar as these scarce collective resources are misdirected toward the symptoms and not the disease, they are being poorly deployed in a battle against the wrong targets.

The incremental, diffuse, additive approach implied by the pathway metaphor and the "pick the low-lying fruit" dictum leads to the unhappiest of all states of affairs. Not only are these walls unavoidable on their own terms and insurmountable by their own virtues and means; worse still, when one peers over these walls, one finds, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, that there is no there. That is, even if these barriers could be surmounted, we would still not find the sustainable society posited as the end or goal of these individual, scattered, and step-by-step pathways to sustainability. Like lay Gatsby's green light, the condition of sustainability ever recedes as the path is pursued until the eventually each resource for

sustainability traveling along that avenue is shattered against the wall of impossibility.

But what if sustainability is not a place in time or space in a future that we are trying to get to, but a process partly constituted and shaped by the past and present whose characteristics can be enumerated?

3. FROM PATH TO PROCESS

The word Sustainability has become the catalyst for change embraced by numerous ecological groups and other supportive social movements populating the globe who have designated sustainability as the path which must be taken. Analytically, we consider the problem of sustainability as a two-step process (Levine and Radmard, 1992). The first is the level of "moving toward sustainability" by working to make the world less unsustainable. This first dimension, incorporating as it does the tactics and strategies outlined above, involves the commitment to politically feasible tradeoffs, such as trying to balance, for example, air quality against jobs or economic growth. It is essentially a reactive, analytical approach having the potential to fight the biggest fires; but it is unlikely to address the root causes of those fires, much less to propose or synthesize any alternative sustainable vision and framework capable of bringing into being a society where unsustainable processes no longer hold sway. Simply put, making the world less unsustainable is not the same as making the world more sustainable. The former merely slows the rate of deterioration. It does not carry with it the ability of eliminating or reversing that decline.

Our concept of sustainability, instead, is grounded in the second level of sustainability--i.e., "sustainability as balance-seeking process." Almost no one is dealing with sustainability in these terms, yet it is clear to us that sustainability can only be actualized at the level of balance-seeking processes. In a series of articles and founding statements, the Center for Sustainable Cities has tried to articulate the principles and conditions underpinning this conceptualization of sustainability.

3.1 Sustainable development does not lead to sustainability

One of the central arguments of the unfolding vision of this center is that orthodox strategies of sustainable development for achieving global sustainability are shot through with the same sort of shortcomings and contradictions enumerated above--deficiencies that

can only be overcome by a shift to an alternative strategy of sustainable cities (Yanarella and Levine, 1992a). Through an immanent critique of conventional approaches to sustainable development populating the global debate, we have tried to show that such strategies operate at too large a scale to tack down and institutionalize self-sustaining processes at smaller scales where sustainable development may be more realizable and the result more palpable. Moreover, globalist approaches, precisely because they are so scattered and do not concentrate political energy and resources in a place and space, hold little hope of achieving a critical mass where sustainability can become a balance- seeking process.

3.2 The locus of sustainable programs and activities is the city

The linchpin of our argument, elaborated in the Center's "Sustainable Cities Manifesto" (Yanarella and Levine, 1 992b), is that the proper scale and nodal point of sustainability is the city conceived as both the largest unit capable of addressing the many imbalances plaguing the modern world in crisis and the smallest scale at which such problems can be meaningfully resolved in an integrated and holistic fashion. As that human settlement possessed of the minimum density supportive of true urbanity and organized public life and as the potential nodal point of the many countercurrents convergent with social and ecological sustainability, the city is the locus of sociality, local economic production and exchange, responsive architectural design, and political participation--precisely the ingredients necessary to weave together the social change-oriented movements for institutionalizing ecological sustainability.

3.3 Sustainability is a balance-seeking process

Globalist approaches to sustainability are diffuse, scattered, and produce indeterminate results in any sustainability quotient (i.e., the net balance or outcome of aggregate sustainable and unsustainable trends worldwide). Localist strategies to sustainability undertake sustainable initiatives locally without grappling with larger scale state, national, and global imbalances and tendencies. By contrast, the strategy of sustainable cities locates the city as the place and nexus for striving to put into balance the many levels of sustainable and unsustainable systems flowing through the city. Conceiving of sustainability as a dynamic balance-seeking process, this alternative view raises the issue: what are those minimum activities and components necessary to

integrate and coordinate the ecological programs at the scale of the city such that, once those conditions are met and put in place, the various walls limned above dissolve and each succeeding step becomes easier, not more difficult?

3.4 The balance seeking, process of sustainability requires building. multiple working, models of the city

In coming to grips with this question, the work of the Center has moved in two complementary directions: towards centralization and towards democratic participation (Levine, Yanarella, Radmard, and Harper, 1991). That is, we have looked to synthesizing processes using computer modeling programs to allow us to build systems models of real cities so that hypothetical and synthetic sustainable designs can be generated and their ramifications for one or another of is faces (commercial development, housing, energy demands, public life, etc.) illuminated. The technocratic/authoritarian potential of such a planning approach is counterbalanced and neutralized by the democratic principle that such synthetic design and planning processes be opened to the widest possible groups, interests, and constituencies to test out, bargain, and help fashion sustainable models whose only prerequisite is a nonnegotiable commitment to sustainability of the whole city as a dynamic, balance-seeking process.

3.5 The basis of the Law of Sustainable Transformation is not the supposed law of the transformation of quantity into quality but instead the idea that the relationship between Quantity and qualitv--i.e.. between individual policy steps and the encompass "end-state"-- is reciprocal and lateral, not incremental and cumulative.

Whether Marxism-Leninism or liberal progressivism, social change has been essentially defined in terms of small, incremental reforms eventually leading to a qualitative transformation of the larger social and political system. An alternative view of social change emerges from the strategy of sustainable cities and its conception of sustainability as a balance-seeking process--one that offers the promise of getting from here to there ~d working from present-day incremental policy initiatives.

On this account, older ideological assumptions are discarded for a different set of assumptions and an approach placing individual steps within a more encompassing sustainable foundation that connects these policy initiatives to the qualitative framework

that is at once their resting point and their nurturing place. Thus, the quantitative step is situated in a wider qualitative framework that locates is place and meaning laterally within that more encompassing sustainable web and in relation to other integral elements-- some inherited from the past, others already present or still others yet to be incorporated of the complexly knitted and balance-seeking processes woven by the Loom of Sustainability.

Policy initiative and strategic framework are not put on a hierarchical ordering with the latter standing above the former; rather, policy initiative and strategic framework exist on the same plane and mutually remold each as the goals and intent of the policy step become better defined in interaction with the framework and the framework in turn gains greater clarity and definition in relation to the policy component. Sustainability, then, is less conceived as an endpoint or future condition than as an on-going balance- seeking process participating in a continually spiraling interaction between part(s) and the whole.

This difficult concept may be more easily appreciated intuitively than rendered analytically. IS basic thrust, though, is that individual policy reforms are only truly sustainable if they interact with larger holistic processes-some of which already exist, while others remain to be constructed. Within this dynamic synthesizing process, these incrementalist policy reforms become non-reformist in nature since they fit into, partly comprise, and reciprocally interact with the unfolding organic structure that gives them a role and significance. Wrenched from their wider moorings, these actions lose their tacking points and drift along willy-nilly, risking negative policy evaluation because they are assessed independently of their larger meaning and supporting context.

While both the Leninist and liberal-progressive versions would suggest that getting from here to there involves a linear progression of individual steps, our understanding of that "transformation law" entails a constant interplay between movement and structure where each mutually informs and transforms the other. Understand in this manner, recycling programs, for example, should not be evaluated solely or simply on the narrow terms of how much depletable and other resources they save or how much longer they stretch out the need for more landfill space. Rather, placed within a more encompassing framework of sustainability, they must be implemented and assessed in terms of: how they

are implicated in other spiraling processes relating to other components of sustainability; how they promote political education about the need for a sustainable economy (including sustainable industries and durable, environmentally-benign, and recyclable products); and how they stimulate other constituents of such an economy.

4. CONCLUSION

In sum, just as Garrett Hardin demonstrated in his musings over the "tragedy of the commons," the lesson to be drawn from these arguments is that what may be best in the short-run and for the individual from a utilitarian perspective may not, however, be best for posterity or for existing or future communities. Worse still, such individual investments may even serve to increase the evolving unsustainability of society or the world order. The model of sustainable agriculture tells us that no true farmer would "pick the low lying fruit." Were s/he to do so and reap the short-term profit because of the ease of such a harvest, such a farmer would make each succeeding tier of fruit more difficult to reach and finally uneconomical to pick. Likewise, in the pursuit of sustainability from cities to the globe, this lesson must not be lost.

As an overall strategy, attempting to move toward sustainability on an incremental basis without an evolving sustainable framework can only lead ecologists and policy planners, citizens and visionaries, down a rocky detour filled with new economic crises and old political stalemates. The strategy of sustainable cities and the Law of

Sustainable Transformation hold not merely a better hope, but the only hope of negotiating an uncertain and contradictory present toward a future that can only in retrospect be seen as inevitable.

5. REFERENCES~

Levine, Richard S., and Taghi Radmard. 1992. "The Two Step Process for Generating Ecologically Sustainable Cities." A paper prepared for the Second International Ecological City Conference, Adelaide, Australia, April.

Levine, Richard S., Ernest J. Yanarella, Taghi Radmard, and David Harper. 1991. "The Development of an Interactive Computer Aided Design Model for Generating the Sustainable City." A paper prepared for the ISES World Solar Congress, Denver, Colorado, August.

Lovins, Amory. 1977. SoftEnergv Paths: Toward_ Durable Peace. New York: Ballinger Publishing Company.

Ophuls; William. 1977. Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. San Francisco, CA.: W.H. Freeman. 1977.

Yanarella, Ernest J., and Richard S. Levine. 1 992a. "Does Sustainable Development Lead to Sustainability?" Futures. 18 (October): 759-774.

Yanarella, Ernest J., and Richard S. Levine. 1992b. "The Sustainable Cities Manifesto: Pretext, Text, and Post-Text." Built Environment. 18 (December): 301-3 13.