While practitioners adopt sustainability as their principal informing perspective, politicians again see the environment as a barrier to growth, says Dave Adamson
A few weeks ago whilst sorting through old books in my attic I came across A Blueprint For Survival, a book by the editors of The Ecologist and first published in 1972. This book was my first introduction to the issue we now call ‘sustainability’ and was perhaps the first co-ordinated voice given to the emerging scientific concerns about climate change, food and water security and an impending energy crisis. Signed by over 30 distinguished scientists, the book also communicated the key concerns of the ‘Club of Rome’, a group of international scientists and industrialists who had formed to publicise their views. Reading this book again 40 years later is cause for both optimism and pessimism.
I followed the interests sparked by my reading of that book a little later in an environmental philosophy module on my degree at Cardiff University. This underlined the way that the global growth model of capitalism saw environmental protection as a cost of production and a barrier to economic growth. However, the views expressed in blueprint for Survival remained a fringe perspective for some 30 years after its publication and it was the mid-2000s before I was able to reconcile my personal views on ecology with my professional practice. Now, here in 2013, I have been able to attend two conferences this week in which these concerns were central. My optimism stems from sitting with over 200 people whose functional roles are now to address the issues that so concerned us in 1972. The gap of 40 years has at last seen the entry of the concept of sustainability into housing, health, education, economic development and regeneration. Practitioners are now implementing approaches to energy production, water management, food production and transport that have sustainability as their principle informing perspective.
However, there is a sense that this is happening against the grain of the mainstream economic policy of the EU, UK and Wales. Following what the Australians realistically call the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) there is a desperation to return to the growth-based model which lies at the heart of capitalist development of the last 70 years. We measure the recession and our recovery from it in terms of industrial output and wealth creation expressed in terms such as GDP and GVA. Without growth the economy is judged to be failing and politicians search for growth at any price.
A Blueprint for Survival began like this:
‘The principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is that it is not sustainable. Its termination within the lifetime of someone born today is inevitable – unless it continues to be sustained for a while longer by an entrenched minority at the cost of imposing great suffering on the rest of mankind’ (Ecologist, 1972, p1).
And this is precisely what we currently witness in a revealed and clear form. The universal governmental response to the GFC has been to inflict the solution for failure on the poorest sections of society. Whether in Greece or here in Wales, imposed austerity is the desperate act of the elite that benefits from the growth- based model of capitalism to shore up their privilege, wealth and power. The highest periods of growth have seen the greatest polarisation between the wealthy and the poor and now that wealth sustains itself by removing the welfare systems that have protected the poor. Welfare measures are no longer ‘affordable’ or ‘fair’. The bedroom tax has far greater significance than first appears. It is the first act by government in 400 years that reduces its responsibility for the welfare of its citizens.
Hence the source of my pessimism and it is sadly reinforced by a parallel damage experienced by the environment, which once again is relegated to the status of a barrier to growth and an unaffordable luxury that slows growth and reduces national wealth. Regeneration is perceived as achievable by unsustainable infrastructural investment in fast transport, nuclear energy and fracking. Sustainable regeneration through the green economy is laughed aside as unrealistic and small-scale. Low carbon protocols, standards and codes are set aside in the name of growth and return from recession and the pledge to be the ‘Greenest Government’ is now a joke. Fortunately, those who attended the conferences will carry on regardless and hopefully resist this return to a blind pursuit of growth at the expense of the poor and the environment.
CREW news
• We are very pleased to welcome Harriet Perkins to CREW. Harriet is a GO Wales graduate and will be working on the bibliographical database we are creating for our website. When finished, in about three months time, you will be able to search a wide ranging, regeneration related bibliography by key word and title and where possible with a direct link to the source of the article.
• Welsh Government has announced the results of the first round of the Vibrant and Viable Places funding process and CREW is looking forward to providing advice and support to the proposals entering the second round as well as those who will benefit from the £5 million set aside to support the other local authorities in Wales.
• We will also be supporting the emerging BIDS programme in Wales with two informational seminars. These are in addition to our usual programme of activities. Details available on our website at http://www.regenwales.org. You can also join our Town Centre and Housing-Led Regeneration networks from the website.
Dave Adamson @ProfDaveadamson dave.adamson@regenwales.org