Deadly Fallacies of Growth Management

Dave Paulsen is the co-founder and executive director of Attraction Retreat, a Bellingham nonprofit organization that specializes in the ecotherapy and ecoeducation methods of applied ecopsychology, and its current major project, the EcoIntegrity Center of Bellingham (ECO Bell). He’s also a faculty member of the graduate department in applied ecopsychology for the Institute of Global Education, a special NGO consultant to UNESCO.

Part Two

Sustainable development, then, is that which meets current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability also carries with it a moral conviction that the current generation must pass on our inheritance of natural resources, not necessarily unchanged, but undiminished in potential to meet the needs of future generations.

The only way we can limit the negative impacts of growth is by stopping it—by simply building sustainability and stability into our management plans. Because, if we plan for growth, that’s what we’ll get.

There is a basic law in evolutionary biology that species will expand to fill an ecological niche. What we’re seeing in growth-based development is a forced and unnatural expansion of a niche, and the population is expanding to fill it. As long as we keep building, more people will keep coming. If the niche doesn’t exist or isn’t created, people won’t expand to fill it. There are some excellent studies available showing that, historically, increases in production and agriculture drive population growth, not the other way around.

Developers take the word “management” and assume it’s a private code word just for them that mean they can build more and faster as long as they draw up a set of plans first. Sustainable development, as provided under the GMA, is based on having a healthy economy, clean environment and thriving communities. These are necessary components of growth management. If development doesn’t meet these requirements, it isn’t sustainable, and thus is not allowed under the GMA. It’s up to the developers to prove that any plans they present meet all of the above requirements.

At this point you may be thinking, “Won’t limiting or stopping growth harm the economy?” The concepts above provide some of the reasons we need to develop a comprehensive alternative plan to growth. Another reason is that unrestrained growth, and the increases in production it requires, also contributes to global climate change.

Research is available on steady-state economies and their economic, human health and environmental benefits. There’s also growing evidence that working to decrease global warming will be beneficial to the economy. A petition has been signed by over 2,000 leading economists—including a majority of the American economists who have won Nobel Prizes in economics—stating that acting intelligently to combat climate change would be a boon to the economy.

We would have to import less oil and could invest in creating local smart energy industries that would have more jobs per unit of expenditure. We have numerous opportunities to save energy and move our energy needs toward cleaner and renewable sources of energy that can both benefit our economy and lower our ecological footprint.

It seems to me that the only truly ethical population projection (that takes all available evidence into account) used by any of the local planning departments should reflect a decrease in the population of Whatcom County over the next 20 years. Further evidence for a decrease in growth rates includes trends in global warming which show we could lose up to 25 percent of the forests in the Northwest within the next two decades.

Other forecasts show worldwide population decreasing within the next 20-50 years due to 80 percent overestimates on oil and natural gas reserves. Remember, fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides are necessary to sustain forced overproduction of the intensive agriculture necessary to feed the overpopulated world. Current Whatcom County population study figures are based on erroneous assumptions, exclusion of these other pertinent variables, and are thus invalid. I think a very good case can be made for a citizen’s lawsuit challenging the figures that assume continued population growth.

I believe we can actually have economic growth, as well as growth in quality of life measures, without more pavement or sprawl—or even any new houses on currently undeveloped lots. Residential redevelopment, multi-use zoning, and finding replacement industries in clean and renewable energy, or industries that use low-impact, clean production and zero waste technologies in manufacturing, are all methods we can use to decrease unemployment, increase living wage jobs and increase the quality of life.

Bellingham and Whatcom County can serve as a model for how to design and build a bright and sustainable future. We can show the state, and the rest of the world, that we’re intelligent enough to cooperatively come together to develop sustainably. We can learn to live in ways that allow all others to live as well.

The World Bank predicts that by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will suffer from lack of clean and safe drinking water. Water consumption is doubling every 20 years while water sources are rapidly being polluted, depleted, diverted and exploited by corporate interests ranging from industrial agriculture and manufacturing to electricity production and mining. Our government agencies cannot be allowed to retreat from their duties to act decisively to protect the resources on which a healthy and sustainable future depends.

We have to look at the larger picture, of the interconnected nature of our world and the consequences of our actions within it. There are currently plans, as expressed in the Washington state Department of Natural Resources’ preferred alternative in the draft environmental impact statement, to approve hundreds of acres of clear cutting on the lands within the Nooksack River and Lake Whatcom watersheds. Not only will this negatively impact the ability of our bioregion to ecologically sustain itself, it will exacerbate other trends. It’s not just cuts on “potentially unstable” slopes we need to be concerned with.

As previously stated, we could lose as much as 25 percent of the forests in the Pacific Northwest due to global warming. If we continue to allow logging at the current levels, we will have even less of this life sustaining and water purifying resource available. This combination will be increasingly deadly to all species. Quality of life will no longer be the issue—life itself will be.

The facts speak for themselves. The evidence of the damage that is being caused by overdevelopment cannot be simply overlooked or ignored. Denial, obfuscation or rationalization will not change this. Thus, one further point that bears mentioning is the very personal effect that unrestrained growth in a petrochemical, industrial based society has on the individual. Overdevelopment, and its attendant environmental degradation and toxic discharges, contributes to an individual’s “body burden.”

Body burden is a measure of a person’s contamination by industrial toxins. Of the 210 chemicals commonly found in consumer products and industrial pollution, it’s not uncommon for a health conscious person to find her or his body polluted with over 100 industrial toxins, with elevated levels of arsenic, mercury, PCBs and dioxin. On average, everyone in the U.S. has accumulated 50 or more chemicals linked to cancer, considered toxic to the brain and nervous system, or known to interfere with the hormone, reproductive and immune systems.

The industrial, agriculture and transportation industries have turned us all into walking toxic waste dumps. We have become unwilling participants in a huge chemical experiment that would not be permitted by the FDA if these chemicals came to us in the form of drugs.

I’ll close with two quick questions. Can we, as humans become the first species to use our vaunted intelligence to reverse our course when we discover we have taken the wrong fork in the road? Or will we continue on the fork of fanaticism, which means doubling our speed when we discover we’re going the wrong way?

Background information and further resources on the issues of sustainability and carrying capacity are located at http://www.dieoff.com ecological footprint resources can be found at http://www.rprogress.org and body burden information is available at http://www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden. §