Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9311220261
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: EDITORIAL EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The council was gathered to brainstorm (excuse the corporatespeak) goals and strategies for our region, and it seemed almost as if Brand, the businessman/poverty fighter from Salem, had introduced a foreign phrase into the discussion.
One council member objected that he had looked up "sustainable," and was pretty sure it meant keeping things the way they are. He asked: Don't we want growth?
Another participant noted that, as a technical term, sustainable development had originated in agriculture.
Others on the council looked on blankly as a scribe recorded the words on a flip chart. A few comments later, the meeting had moved on to other suggestions.
This was, after all, Roanoke. Sustainable development is in vogue among the kinds of people who worry about global warming and Third World deforestation. Attend any U.N. conference, you'll see it on the agenda.
But for the Roanoke and New River valleys' agenda? Why bring it up in the Marriott ballroom, where community leaders and officials were working up a "vision" for this part of Virginia, USA?
Why? Well, maybe because the idea of sustainable development should be central to any strategy for, of all places, this region.
Maybe because the New Century Council would do well to absorb sustainable-development thinking into its plans, and encourage people to act on its local implications.
"If we'd been paid 50 cents for every word that's been written about sustainable development to date, we'd be wealthy," says a Dow Chemical executive. "If we'd been paid 50 cents for every action taken, we'd be paupers."
But to observe that a lot of words have been spent on the idea is not to say it isn't worth both defining and implementing. A 1987 international report, "Our Common Future," defined sustainable development as the sort "that meets the need of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs."
Which sounds, to me, like damage control. We ought to be trying to improve future generations' ability to meet their needs. Still, the idea's essence enjoys a validity that practically everyone can appreciate. It combines common sense (don't eat your seed corn) with basic morality (don't screw up the world our kids will inherit). The federal debt is just one example of ways our country violates both good sense and fairness to the future.
And how is sustainable development relevant to this region? It clearly is so in underscoring the need to preserve our area's natural beauty and distinct character. Just as it makes no sense to destroy the global environment on which life depends, so should we in Western Virginia take care that growth not destroy the very assets - the scenery, the mountains, the neighborhoods and downtowns, the quality of life - that attract development in the first place.
This is, in fact, a pro-growth agenda. The point isn't to block development, but to guide it in ways that will make future development more likely. In short: sustainable.
Yet sustainable development, as I understand it, goes beyond economic growth to encompass a whole set of values and ways of looking at the world. It means thinking long-term, and anticipating and preventing future harm before it happens - such as the future harm inflicted by mediocre schools and inadequate access to health care.
It means recognizing that everything is connected in a diverse and complex web: growth and quality of life, schools and jobs, initiative and preservation, city and suburb and farm, development in one part of the region and impacts in another, this generation and its successors.
It means figuring how to develop full-cost accounting so that, for example, the costs of a poorly designed housing subdivision - with inadequate infrastructure or harmful effects on a scenic asset - are understood to include more than the developer's expenses.
It means, also, "sustainable human development," to use Brand's words, which presumably imply that people need to be healthy and well-educated and prepared for the future, and that growth cannot be sustained if a sizable segment of the population is left behind in poverty.
One thing I like about the notion of sustainable development is its capacity for bringing seeming antagonists into consensus. For example, there are those who believe our region needs to grow more, and those who like it the way it is. But what if growth and quality of life can be sustained only if each supports the other?
Similarly, a lot of people aren't especially enamored of government regulation and taxes. But if you explain connections, account for social costs, stretch the time horizon, you begin to build consensus for such public endeavors as land-use planning that over time increases land owners' options and property values, and investments in downtown rehab projects that make future prosperity and cultural amenities possible.
As land-use lawyer Ed McMahon observed in a recent visit to Roanoke, "There is no place in America today that has retained its special character accidentally." We have to plan to keep it.
That special character - what we like about the place - is vital not only for existing residents' quality of life, and to attract tourists. It's also what can draw and keep the kinds of workers who earn high salaries, are plugged into the international knowledge-based economy, and can live pretty much wherever they want.
The New Century Council's "visioning" draws, appropriately, on the corporate lexicon of total quality management. There's no reason it can't also embrace an environmentalists' buzzword if it suits, which it does.
A Washington-based group called the Global Tomorrow Coalition - an alliance of organizations interested in sustainable development issues - has offered to assist in the council's goal-setting process. I hope the council takes up the offer.
Keywords:
SUSTAIN
by CNB