The economics of greening cities.

• Author: Roelofs, Joan
• Position: Economics Reconsidered

The "new economics" associated with E.F. Schumacher, Paul Ekins, and Herman Daly values local self-reliance, right livelihood, and production for need. These ideas are highly relevant to cities and regions suffering from environmental destruction, economic decline, and increasing unemployment. Economic revitalization has become urgent because of automation, "globalization," military reductions, and the perennial loose grip of the "invisible hand." Yet a healthy economy can exist without economic growth. Conservation can reduce the drain of wealth from communities that import goods, services, and energy.

The alternative to globalization is not protectionism, that is, trying to export much while importing little. Small-scale production for local needs using local resources can provide jobs and most necessities although it might not produce great profits. This is hardly a new idea; throughout most of human history economic activity was undertaken to satisfy needs, and trade was confined to surpluses and luxuries. Only in the last 200 years has profit-making been regarded as the "engine" which should guide the economy. By-products of the profit system, from the very beginning, were devastated people, communities, and the environment. The statistics for "economic growth" take no account of lost non-renewable resources, destruction of the natural or built environment, or people made obsolete because profits were bigger somewhere else.

Whether people are motivated by economic theory, local needs, or international agreements, there are practical steps to a more humanistic economy. Governments have many tools for influencing economic development, including public enterprise, public-private partnerships, incentives and grants, purchasing, regulation, and social welfare policies. A "Green" goal would simply be working towards increasing desirable economic activity and reducing the undesirable.

Should a green city be nearly self-sufficient, perhaps trading only in luxuries? Certainly, greater control over the economy and more self-sufficiency would enable a city to be greener. Long supply lines can be reduced; those that cross are particularly irrational, e.g., importing cookies from 3,000 miles away and exporting similar ones to the same place. This actually occurs, and another true nutty example is the former importation of Belgian filbert paste by an Oregon candy producer located in an area considered the "filbert capital" of the United States.

On the other hand, to allow the devil his or her due, among Australian Aborigines, a model low-impact hunting-gathering society: "Materials and tools were sometimes imported into areas where adequate local substitutes existed. It appears that the very possession of exotic tools or materials bestowed status upon their owner even though they possessed no practical advantages over local alternatives." [1] Perhaps we must reckon with the karma of exotic imports.

Production to provide jobs and meet human needs is an alternative to dependency on corporate location decisions. If cities produce for local needs, using local resources, they can control processes and...