SUSTAINABLE CITIES: AN URBAN MYTH?
Presenter: William Rees, PhD, FRSC
Professor and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia and author of Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth.

Chekhov said, "A man will become better only when you make him see what he is like." Much of the problem derives from our incapacity to understand who we are and what we are like. The values and beliefs underlying our culture are so incompatible with the way nature behaves, it is inevitable that the two systems are incompatible. That didn't matter 100 years ago, but we have now reached critical scale. Human kind is the largest erosive force on earth—more than all the natural processes on the planet. We are no longer insignificant.

Why don't we pay attention to the warnings of the scientific community? There are two underlying reasons for this. First, as organisms we are hardwired to act in unsustainable ways: unless or until constrained by negative feedback, all species' populations tend to expand to fill all the ecological space accessible and to use all the resources available. Second, our present cultural and philosophical overlays reinforce our maladaptive tendencies. All human societies construct myths, shared stories to provide social glue and to locate themselves and their societies in the world. Our mythology reinforces our ecological tendencies: our greatest resource is the human mind; human ingenuity—not nature—created the resources we consume; and the technology exists to continue to produce to support this level of consumption almost indefinitely. Our mythology tells us we can ignore the data.

In fact, like everything else on earth, we are subject to the second law of thermodynamics: without the constant input of energy, systems decay. Natural ecosystems develop by assimilating and dissipating solar energy and are characterized by accumulation. Human-dominated ecosystems grow by dissipating nature and are characterized by reduction. Climate change is the result of the dissipation of fossil fuels in the atmosphere.

We can measure the human load by calculating our ecological footprint: the area of land and water ecosystems required to produce the resources a population consumes and to assimilate the wastes it produces—wherever on earth that land and water may be located. Ecological footprints vary with income. The ecological footprints of most developed countries are larger than their geographical footprints: they need other people's resources to maintain their life style.

In the context of the built environment, cities are parasitic, dissipative structures. Cities grow and maintain themselves by increasing entropy in the rest of the ecosystem. Every city occupies an area elsewhere on the planet that is hundreds of acres larger than the city itself. "Sustainable city" is an oxymoron unless we completely rethink urban living.

We need to rethink what we mean by human habitat. Our disconnection from nature gives us no sense how deeply embedded in its ecosystem every built environment is. We must reduce the entropic burden of cities.

We must remember that sustainability is the greatest collective enterprise we will ever be engaged in. We cannot be sustainable as individuals: we are all in the boat. The good news is that we have the technologies to achieve 75 to 85 percent reduction, and to gain a more inhabitable urban environment, with cleaner air and lower housing costs.

Efficiency alone isn't sufficient, because what we're doing in the name of efficiency is to grow more efficiently when what we need is absolute reduction. In the ecological view, planet earth is like a ship. It has a carrying capacity, marked by the Plimsoll Line, the safe loading line. When consumption exceeds production, societies diminish their carrying capacity—and this is a permanent loss. If our ship is loaded to the Plimsoll Line and heading into heavy seas, we should be throwing things overboard; but we're continuing to load the ship with more efficiently produced goods.

We need interventions in the marketplace to make it happen, but the marketplace responds to short-term immediacy, not long-term interests. We need policy interventions, because the market alone won't solve the problem and more sensible ecological policies would necessarily include fiscal reform. We get cheap goods here because the Chinese are bearing the costs; we externalize our entropy and social costs to China, so we can consume more. And that reinforces our state of cultural denial—we improve air quality improve here, and worsen it in China.

What does this mean for North Americans? Canadians and Americans need an average of 9 hectares (22.24 acres) per capita to satisfy our consumer lifestyle. Our fair earth share today is 1.8 hectares (4.45 acres), for sustainability with equity. (Sustainability has a huge moral dimension.) This means a reduction of about 80 percent to our fair earth share. We could achieve this now, but if we wait much longer and our population increases, we will lose the opportunity.

The bottom line for green building is that the project must result in an actual reduction in order to contribute. New green buildings that use 25 to 30 percent less energy are less bad, but they are still adding to the entropic load. Building new green has the most leverage in the developing world, because that's where most of the world's unavoidable urban growth is occurring. In the developing world, especially in Europe, the greenest building is one that is already built; we should retrofit our existing building stock to reduce our ecological footprint, because building new and green actually increases unsustainability.

I plead with you to realize the opportunity that exists in the kind of work you do to turn this around. There is hardly another profession as closely associated with manipulating the human environment as architecture and urban design. Given the huge impact of the built environment on the natural world, you have the leverage to turn things around—what an opportunity.

Additional Information

Ecological footprint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint

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