Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Aloha Sustainability

Sustainable development: an oxymoron or a realisable dream? This question lies at the heart of environmental debate.

Certainly, 'sustainable mining' or 'sustainable fossil fuel use' cannot be achieved, but can we have continued population and economic growth and avert an environmental and ecological disaster?

The Mayor of the City and County of Honolulu firmly believes we can, at least for the time being.

This can be done through blending leadership with community empowerment, challenging attitudes and providing the correct incentives and ecological modernisation with traditional environmentalism.

This argument encompasses all that is wrong with the discourse of 'sustainable development': attempting to become all things to all people. Environmentalism without commitment; having your cake and eating it.

But it is an engaging and pragmatic vision in a nation that is beset with a developmentalist attitude where no regulation should constrain economic growth and impede the market.

Instead, Mayor Jeremy Harris demonstrates that sound environmental practices can be reconciled with sound economic practices: pollution is waste.

For an environmental scientist, the problems encountered on Oahu must have seemed terribly straightforward: An isolated island needs to take a 'systems' approach in designing its economic, social and environmental policies. One cannot continue to produce waste without making the intellectual leap to accept the fact that there is no 'away' to throw to.

In contrast to the linear route paradigm of 'resource - use - sink', 'waste' must be seen as seen as part of a cycle that somewhere feeds back into the island system: as either a recyclate, a bio-fuel or through reuse.

This is, of course, true for all societies. But on an island of just 1,560km2, this balancing of inputs with outputs achieves huge rhetorical significance. He mentioned it only once, but 'finite' is not a word commonly deployed by politicians. It suggests that there are certain constraints and limits to the growing wealth that they promise. But on an island where you can see the entire coastline from the highest point, finite is quite an easy concept to come to terms with.

For an island that depended for so long on visitors bringing in cash, using up imported goods whilst they were there and then disposing of most of them before they left, diversifying the economy was a priority issue.

The Mayor's vision was to transform the economic structure from a holidaymaker's playground into a more sustainable island 'system'. It has resulted in the region becoming an environmental innovator and industry cluster of global significance: now exporting its knowledge and expertise to other cities that wish to go along for the ride.

This is ironically reminiscent of the US post-war 'Military-Industrial Complex' characterised by Chomsky et al: a system of massive public subsidy to achieve a specific policy goal (in this case military superiority over the USSR) that stimulates innovation in technology and spawns whole generations of products and ideas that percolate into the consumer market. This brought us velcro and the internet. In Oahu, the City-County have subsidised and cajoled innovative sustainable processes, ideas and products by providing a ready market for the outputs, creating an 'Environmental-Industrial Complex' that now leads the world.

For a politician on the rounds of selling his vision he doesn't dwell long on the sticks but instead focuses on the carrots, designed to incentivise sustainability. Such highlights include:

• Two significant aspirational targets: Achieving a 'zero-waste society' and eliminating the use of fossil fuels (all of which must be imported).


• Investment in developing innovative pathways to renewable energy and energy efficiency.


• Work towards achieving a sustainable community and transport vision to challenge demand for non-renewable energy transport.


• Discounts and incentives for users of electric hybrid cars that are large enough to make the additional investment pay off in the lifetime of the vehicle.


• A program of urban and peri-urban renewal to encourage an outdoor, healthy lifestyle. This includes a significant tribute to Hawaiian culture.


• Waste water recycling and sustainable water usage.


• Sufficient investment in technology to achieve efficient public works, public services and transport management.

And it is not just in archetypical 'green' issues that Mayor Jeremy Harris has led the way. The City-County has also divested itself of nearly 9% of its annual spending - allocating it instead to community groups who can directly spend up to $2 million (US) each year on locally decided initiatives, projects and ideas. While this is not a 'pure' democracy and community groups can be more susceptible to vested interest than more representative and accountable structures, Harris defines democracy in 'means' based processes - not focusing on the output, but empowering the community to spend wisely and sustainability by allowing them to evolve their own decision making structures.

This is a far cry from the carefully designed US Constitution with its intricate layers of checks and balances. But then if such a well-sculptured piece of political science can be compromised, perhaps the time has come to get radical.

Institutional arrangements are also on his side. US Mayors, once elected, are like autocratic demigods - heading up both the political and bureaucratic administrations through being both Mayor and CEO. Remaining Councillors are restricted to being scrutineers and amenders.

This is fine, as far as it goes. The man is an environmental scientist by profession and sought entry to politics to further his environmental agenda. But he could, just as easily have been an oilman, a housing developer or an ex-Chrysler executive. In this case, the island could well have followed a different path, like so many on the mainland. Cutting out the traditional politics and moving towards a 'Mayor and the people' model could be construed as a radical and perilous route to follow. It could deliver either a model society such as Honolulu, or a dictatorial fiefdom, a la Queensland of the Joh era - with just a fine line separating the two.

Leadership towards this sustainable future has been in place in Honolulu for a sufficient time to allow the significant investments made by the City-County to start to pay-off. With a still rising population growth (but still well short of 1 million), the island now boasts more coppers, more firefighters, stable numbers of council officers and waterboard staff, all on a stable annual budget.

Only once this vision has been lived for a certain period does it become a self-perpetuating polity where sound environmental practice is equated with sound economic management and this becomes an assumption of the community (or to use his phrase 'the paradigm'). The benefits of continuing along this path can be simply demonstrated through cleaner air, less congestion, less waste and a stable local tax base.

Mayor Harris is a city man and firmly believes that cities can become our route to salvation. Driving environmental policies through is often a laborious process: battling the vested interest of oil companies (who, he said, now realise they are in the 'end-game') on the one hand and public apathy or sceptism on the other. But he has done enough to force through the change to beat the latter and to create a political base to move along this pathway to greater sustainability and economic efficiency. In a world where increasing urbanisation has pushed half the world's citizens into cities, it is not before time.

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