Any regeneration project that fails to put environmental and social benefits at its very heart is unlikely to achieve anything more than a very short-lived spasm of spurious prosperity
Interpretation
Regeneration projects must prioritize environmental and social benefits to be sustainable; otherwise, they will only provide temporary success.
Jonathon Porritt emphasizes that for any regeneration project to be truly effective and sustainable, it needs to integrate environmental and social considerations at its core. Without this focus, such initiatives may lead to temporary gains that do not contribute to long-term prosperity, ultimately resulting in fleeting and superficial success rather than meaningful change.
In practice
During a conference on urban development, this quote could be used to emphasize the importance of sustainable practices.
The collapse of the world's banking system and the impending disaster of accelerating climate change are not separate phenomena. They are simply the most visible symptoms of a particular model of capitalism that will bring civilisation to its knees. But those symptoms will not get sorted unless and until we commit to a radical transformation of the way we create and distribute wealth in the world today
We're never going to scare people into living more sustainably! We have to be able to demonstrate just how dynamic and aspirational such a world could be
As more and more people wake up to the fact that further growth does not necessarily bring improvements in quality of life (and often exactly the opposite), sustainability is going to become one of the key characteristics with which places want to be associated.
...the core values that underpin sustainable development - interdependence, empathy, equity, personal responsibility and intergenerational justice - are the only foundation upon which any viable vision of a better world can possibly be constructed
The future will be green, or not at all
Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described by economists as an “externality.” This absurd label means, in essence: we don’t to keep track of this stuff so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist.
Climate change is hugely exacerbated by changing patterns of how we choose to live, often in danger zones such as extremely vulnerable coastal zones - from New Jersey to the Philippines. This enormously increases the economic and human costs of hurricanes, rising seas and changing weather patterns.
In the future, every industry should be an environmental industry. In a world where energy and carbon emissions are constrained, every business must take resource productivity seriously
Conserving energy and thus saving money, reducing consumption of unnecessary products and packaging and shifting to a clean-energy economy would likely hurt the bottom line of polluting industries, but would undoubtedly have positive effects for most of us.
Beyond reducing individual use, one of our top priorities must be to move from fossil fuels to energy that has fewer detrimental effects on water supplies and fewer environmental impacts overall.
There is an old belief that solving environmental problems can only be achieved by first building enough economic wealth so we can 'afford to save the environment.' This 'Kuznets Curve' thinking has never been correct and must be abandoned once and for all if we are serious about economic development for a thriving humanity on Earth.
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