George Rebane

Sustainability season is upon us, and it will probably beat spring this year in all the blooming proposals that will be written to attract other people’s money to Nevada County.  Nevada City is leading the way with consultant facilitated public workshops that will identify the sustainable projects which the city will undertake once the money comes rolling in.  Well, some of the projects actually don’t need OPM, and can be launched with new ordnances designed to nudge us to behave properly or else.

I briefly observed this effort being launched and gain steam last Monday (8 March) in city hall.  The gathering definitely looked enthusiastic, with lots of high energy evident at each of the breakout tables.  It looked like attendance was a bit north of sixty, all under the able hand of Mayor Reinette Senum and consultant.  So I asked a fellow observer and colleague how they had cleared the first hurdle, namely defining ‘sustainable’.  He informed me that they decided to bypass that hurdle and get right down to business.  After all, everyone knows what sustainable means – don’t they?

Actually, here’s a little test you can do yourself.  Ask ten people to define sustainable, and see if you don’t get twelve distinct but perfectly good answers.  It turns out that sustainable is one of the more slippery words in the English language.  Sort of like, depends what your definition of ‘is’ is.

So I decided to look into the matter of ‘sustainable’ and see how it relates to public policy and projects.  Sustainable is really the adjectival form of sustain, so I had to start there.  Sure enough, it turned out that sustain is not a verb to be trifled with.  The Oxford English Unabridged devotes over five densely printed columns to it that take up most of two pages.  Sustain is defined as 1) to uphold, back up, give support to; 2) to keep in being, to cause to continue in a certain state, to preserve the status of; 3) to provide for the upkeep of; 4) to keep up or keep going, as an action or process.   There were more definitions, but it was clear the others were not relevant to the goings on in city hall.

I also checked the Random House Unabridged and Dictionary.com.  But their definitions were basically restatements of Oxford’s.  Random House did throw in a new one – ‘to provide for by furnishing means or funds’.  And maybe this last one can motivate a bit of productive thought on sustainability as it pertains to places like Nevada County.

The problem with all the definitions is that every one is ambiguous as to the source of the sustenance that will sustain the sustainable undertakings.  To put a finer point on it, if the undertaking is auto-sustainable or endo-sustainable, then during the normal course of its operations it will generate the wherewithal to “keep up or keep going”.  Exo-sustainable efforts need exogenous (outside) input to continue operating so as to provide their normal output.

Looking at these notions, it quickly becomes clear that one’s view of sustainable has a fundamental ideological component.  When you talk to a progressive person, their definition is more or less all encompassing.  History shows that they will accept both auto- and exo-sustainable projects, and consider them to be of almost equal worth.

However, the conservative and/or libertarian takes a narrower view of ‘sustain’ and objects to anything that is not auto-sustaining when considering public policy that involves any form of transfer payments.  S/he will argue that the meaning of the naked ‘sustainable’ is lost if exo-sustainability is allowed into the mix.  S/he will point out that selling framed photos of toenail clippings is a sustainable enterprise as long as someone else makes up the cash shortfall and/or puts a government gun to the customer’s head in order to induce a sale.

So there you have a bit of research and reflection with which to evaluate the goings on nationwide and in Nevada City.  It just occurred to me that our trillion dollar deficits and exploding national debt has been exo-sustainable, and will remain so for as long as the Chinese behave themselves.  In any event, I’ll bet that all the nifty local sustainability projects being discussed will have to be funded by the Chinese, Japanese, and Saudis from their auto-sustainable economies.  Let’s hope that these sustainable enterprises don’t turn out to be of the ‘start with stimulus, maintain by mandates’ kind.

For a report on the yesterday’s meeting, please see Russ Steele’s post here.  And here’s a snoot full on ‘sustainable development’ to get more of a feel for how such things are defined.