Sustainable Development is About More than Environmental Conservation

My childhood memories, formed well before I had any inkling of what sustainable development was, are set to a soundtrack of the cicada's cadence. Although they emerge only once every seventeen years, their buzz, a shrill call emitted from the males in an attempt to woo females - the cicadas' version of Marvin Gaye's 'Let's Get it On' - looms large in my memories.

Raised on the eastern edge of New York City's second most diminutive (in reputation) borough of Queens, insects dominated my childhood: fat beetles that flew into our hair at dusk, lightning bugs that we would stomp on and then smear to leave a glowing trail, lady bugs that we would gather and store in porcelain jars until some unsuspecting parent stumbled upon the jars and the remains of our long forgotten 'pets'. We - my neighborhood was almost exclusively filled with girls - ran from wasps that would burrow out from beneath tiny front yard gardens, and screamed dramatically at the worms that emerged after storms. It was the cicadas, however, that truly terrified with the husks they left behind after molting that reminded us of every alien horror movie we'd been forbidden to watch but had managed to catch a glimpse of anyway. It was this early engagement with the natural world that spawned my adult interest in sustainable development and environmental conservation, a supposition backed by science: a 2006 study out of Cornell University suggests that environmentalism is born in children who are exposed to nature before the age of 11. It's also a declining experience.

"Kids", observed Richard Louv in his book Last Child in the Woods, "don't play outdoors anymore "- their engagement with natural systems are now often limited to school trips to 'nature' or the nature channel on television. Adults are even worse. We now spend 90% of our time indoors away from natural systems.

A lot could be said about this, some already touched on in my post Biophilia in the City. Yet, stated in brief this separation from nature increases depression and aggression while reducing our ability to concentrate and sense of well being. An advancing body of research, known as the Hygiene Hypothesis, is beginning to show that the rise of many autoimmune disorders- from allergies, to asthma to Chron's disease is linked to being raised in environments that are, paradoxically, too clean. Increasingly, kids are being encouraged to go play in some dirt, while desperate adults are shelling out $3,000 dollars to buy themselves a hookworm infection and perhaps some autoimmune disorder relief. Interactions with natural systems, reduces blood pressure, improves the blood sugar of diabetics, improves concentration while stoking our immune system - the amount of cancer fighting enzymes present in our blood increases after a stroll through the woods. It is as Robert Louis Stevenson once said "It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon mens hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit."

We literally, physically need to engage with and be a part of natural systems an idea that gets lost in sustainable development which often touts so-called environmentally efficient designs and ideas, such as passive haus, that in their pursuit of environmental conservation often serve to further entrench this human-nature separation. This kind of efficient thinking is a symptom of the same disease that got us into this mess. Viewed from the gaze of the microscope, nature is messy and horribly inefficient, but if we pull back to a macro view, nature is elegantly efficient. Our way of doing things - from home building to farming - is efficient on a micro level, but when we pull back for a wider view its horribly inefficient, a reverse Monet if you will. Humans are a part of nature, not apart from nature. Until we begin creating systems that strengthen the human-nature connection we are doomed to repeat this unsustainable pattern of behavior.

Sustainability is about more than resource conservation. Even if we could find a way to drastically reduce our consumption so that we were living within the confines of the planet's resource base instead of eroding her natural capital it could in no way be defined as sustainable if we continued to exclude humans from this daily engagement and interaction with natural systems. This is, however, a specious argument because it does not seem possible to live within the confines of our planet's ecosystems and live apart from nature. We are fabulously inventive creatures, yet even our best systems do not work as well as nature.  But beyond that, increased interaction with natural systems primes our humanness. It gets us to care about the world and helps us to make sense of the world and our place in it.