Sustainability is about performance, not about picking the "correct" technology. No individual strategy is right for every occasion - it's a question of what moves the world forwards instead of backwards. Responding to a Popular Science ranking of America's 50 greenest cities, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging raises the interesting challenge of how to define "forwards" and "backwards", and makes a few initial suggestions:
- Instead of measuring the amount of electricity coming from renewable sources, compare energy use with GDP: who's getting most prosperous using the least energy?
- Instead of counting how many people use public transportation, measure vehicle miles traveled per capita and car ownership rates: we should be reducing the need to travel, and distance travelled.
- Instead of assessing the best buildings in a city by counting the number with green accreditation, assess building codes and what the average building is like.
- Instead of assessing how comprehensive recycling systems are and how much material they take in, consider the percentage of solid waste that still goes to landfills: we want to reduce total waste, not just increase recycling.
Unfortunately for the politicians, it's often the more mundane actions and low-profile strategies that make the biggest impact. They are also harder to measure, but I believe we'll have to try.
Comments