William Rees calls "smart growth" an "ineffective" solution to mankind's sustainability dilemma

[John Zeger]

In the recent article in the journal Building, Research & Information "The ecological crisis and self-delusion:implications for the building sector," William Rees writes that, "The world's top ecologists and climate scientists tell us that global civilisation is on a collision course with biophysical reality ... we have 'overshot' long-term carrying capactiy ... staying on our growth-based path to global development virtually guarantees eventual catastrophe for billions of people." Yet despite these warnings, society is in a state of denial because it is caught up in the myth that endless growth is both possible and desirable. Rees writes, "Any society so firmly wedded to ever-rising material expectations will naturally resist the argument that there are limits to growth." He quotes 19th century behavioural psychologist Gustave Le Bon:
"The masses have never thirsted for truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify
error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."

Rees goes on to say that the remedies that have been offered to date for our sustainability conundrum "are ill-conceived and largely ineffective ... most mainstream approaches to sustainability today -- hybrid cars, green buildings, smart growth, the new urbanism, green consumerism -- do not, in fact, address the fundamental problem. Instead they attempt to reproduce the status quo by other means."

Rees says that there is a cultural illusion that we can maintain growth and still achieve sustainability through techological innovation and greater material and economic efficiency. An example of this illusion is that the adoption of the LEED building standards will make our communities sustainable. However, "LEED (and its counterparts elsewhere) remain wedded to the techno-industrial paradigm. LEED is reform at the margin that would deliver a more energy- and material-efficient version of the otherwise status quo. The specific problem is that society cannot become sustainable merely by becoming more efficient at the margins."

Is "smart growth" and channeling people towards existing urban centres the answer? Not according to Rees. "High income consumer cities consume many more resources and generate much more waste per capita than do the developing world's political industrial cities and have a correspondingly large negative impact on the world's ecosystems. [As such, cities like Vancouver] are grotesquely unsustainable -- they currently exceed even the quasi-sustainability standard by a factor of four or five."

Rees concludes that we need a new social myth. "Growth must give way to the steady state. ... As for buildings themselves, the first step should be to acknowledge that greater material efficiency is not enough -- new buildings, no matter how green, still add to the total human load. ... Consistent with these principles, the building and construction sector should do the following:"

-- promote 'new and green' buildings mainly in the developing world
-- emphasize renovation and replacement as the most effective adaptation for the slow-growing countries of the developing world
-- energy adn material use in the developed world must be reduced to compensate for increased consumption in the developing world
-- make zero-carbon construction the norm everywhere
-- acknowledge that LEED and similar building protocols fall far short of what is both necessary and possible.