Apparently our local Chamber, who enthusiastically endorsed the Lot 5 proposal at every one of the public hearings, is not familiar with Donella Meadow's essay on What Does Sustainability Mean?
The question our elected officials continue to overlook is how much growth are we willing to accept and over what kind of timeline? Do we need large-scale development in our community in order to protect the rural nature of the county or do we need to impose more obstacles to slow down population growth in the county without penalizing economic growth? Hasn't the unrestricted growth over the past 20 years created the problems we now have with unaffordability?If we decided to live sustainably, we'd start by eliminating waste. We would discover that we could run this country with half as much energy as we use now (some technological optimists say one-fourth as much). We could also cut our materials budget in half by better recycling, by increasing the useful lifetime of products, and by reducing extravagant practices such as overpackaging and junk mailing.
Those are efficiency gains, not lifestyle losses. Our showers would still be hot and our beer cold, our motors would turn, our drain on resources and flows of pollution would go down, and so would our monthly bills. If we used the savings to grow more -- more people and more stuff for each person -- we would quickly find ourselves unsustainable again. Halving the energy and materials use per car or house but doubling the number of cars or houses would put us right back where we started.
Our present world is much better at producing quantity and technology than quality and morality. But that's culture, not scientific law or immutable destiny. It would take a big change to turn from quantity to quality, but the change would start with just a small click in our heads. It could happen with the speed of a thought. The thought would be that we should stop working so hard to produce growth and instead produce what we really want.Does Chapel Hill want to grow into a larger and larger city or would we prefer to slow down growth and improve quality of life, ensuring the protection of our environment as well as maintaining affordability and diversity of population? Can we nurture a healthy, sustainable business community, without the current overgrowth in residential population?
The current unaffordability in this community is a feedback signal to elected officials. Our community is stuck in a positive feedback loop. We build more and more residential developments and get further and further in debt and lose more and more of our long-term residents. "So how big do we have to get to reach that magical, mystical place where growth will finally start lowering taxes? Or maybe it would be better to ask: how much more evidence do we need before we stop believing that myth?" (exerpted from The Real Cost of Growth in Oregon)
Lot 5, Greenbridge, and all the other new developments planned in Chapel Hill and Carrboro will not improve affordability, adding retail to our downtowns won't support sustainability economic development regardless of how green their business practices are, and concentrating the county's overgrowth within our urban boundaries won't protect our air and water quality unless we step back and take a hard look at the big picture of what is happening and where we want to go as a community. We need analysis of the overall situation, including the economic and social impacts growth are having on this community. We need to engage the entire community.
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