FROM SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT TO
SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

  The political and cultural difficulties associated with attempts to achieve sustainability on a global level provide one of the key justifications for sustainable communities. Proponents of sustainable communities argue that global- or national-scale strategies tend to prevent "...meaningful and concerted political action" (Yanarella and Levine, 1992a:764). At these levels, the scale of change required is so great that problems of coordination and cooperation across political units are bound to be enormous. Moreover, those who espouse sustainability on a grand scale often portray environmental problems in such apocalyptic terms that they

...sometimes revert to the language of technocratic planning and administration and speak of the need for global ecological planners in international agencies who must work with national political elites and multinational corporate leaders to manage these environmental crises. The problem is that these technocratic designs and strategies only duplicate the social and organizational forms and mechanisms that helped to produce the ecological condition confronting us in the first place (Yanarella and Levine, 1992a:766)

  According to critics of global approaches to sustainability, this kind of solution leaves relations of domination in place. In such a scenario, those who control the resources (and who are responsible for many of the decisions and actions that have wreaked havoc on the environment) are also in charge of cleaning up the mess. The result is a crisis mentality which relies on technological solutions for use as band-aids to temporarily patch larger structural problems. From this perspective, sustainable development on a global scale might actually strengthen the economic and social conditions which support unsustainable practices, "...especially when such 'band-aid' solutions lead to situations where these deeper ecological problems fall below the threshold of public attention and the political momentum for more fundamental change is allowed to dissipate" (Yanarella and Levine, 1992a:766).

  In contrast, by focusing on sustainability at the local level, changes can be seen and felt in a more immediate manner. To speak of a "sustainable society" or a "sustainable world" requires a level of abstraction that is meaningless to most people. This simple fact makes it extremely difficult to generate and maintain the political will necessary to implement sustainable practices on a large scale. The locality, by contrast, is the level of social organization where the consequences of environmental degradation are most keenly felt and where successful intervention is most noticeable. This combination of factors arguably creates a climate more conducive to the kind of long term political mobilization that is implicit in the term "sustainable development." Moreover, as Yanarella and Levine (1992a:769) observe, sustainable community development may ultimately be the most effective means of demonstrating the possibility that sustainability can be achieved on a broader scale, precisely because it places the concept of sustainability "...in a context within which it may be validated as a process." In short, to the extent that concrete examples of sustainable development can be documented, the prospects for widespread acceptance and application of the idea are improved.

  Finally, sustainable development rooted in place-based communities has the advantage of flexibility. Communities differ in terms of environmental problems, natural and human resource endowments, levels of economic and social development, and physical (i.e., geological and topographical) and climatic conditions. Given such heterogeneity, it makes little sense to advocate a one size fits all approach to sustainable development. A community-level approach allows for the design of policies that are sensitive to the opportunities and constraints inherent to particular places.