Sustainability and the System Problem
by Gar Alperovitz
Based on an address to the Executive Staff of the
President's Council on Sustainable Development
The Good Society, Vol. 5, No.3, Fall 1995

Page 5 of 8
Community

What is needed, ultimately, is a system design which not only stabilizes existing negative ecological trends, but reverses those trends and produces positive outcome results. How might we begin to sketch at least some of the properties of a system that might undercut the pressures which generate non-sustainable outcome results? When the question is put in this manner, I believe we can at least begin to think about some "elements" of a solution (if not, as yet, a total answer).

Given the limited time we have--and simply by way of illustration--one primary system property (as Herman Daly and John Cobb emphasize in their book For The Common Good) almost certainly must be the re-constitution of a culture of "community" or "common good" as a necessary condition of sustainability.

I do not believe, however, that this can simply be stated as a matter of abstract philosophical vision. "Community" has visionary (and moral and ethical) aspects, of course, but sustainability over time requires that a culture of community be institutionally based--which means it must be embodied in structures which generate, reinforce, sustain, and nurture values of community.

One aspect of the institutional logic of "community" may be posed straightforwardly: in both capitalist and socialist systems any firm has an incentive to pollute its local community if this means lower costs. But if, say, the community were to own the firm, it would have little incentive to pollute itself. Such an "institutional design" would at least structurally internalize most costs.

This is not to say that what is logical is easy to achieve institutionally.

(Nor would such structured change alone deal with inter-community planning.) On the other hand, the growing interest in community land-trusts--an increasingly common local institution--suggests one possibility of some quite practical forms which by their very nature give the broader community a stake in the same institutional structure. Might there be experimentation to slowly push the frontiers of institutional development of this kind well beyond their present modest levels?

In fact, just below the surface of most conventional inquiry a myriad of so-called "community development corporations" of all shapes and sizes have sprung up and are now involved in housing and business activities in almost every major locality. "Community-based," populist style economic development has also spawned hundreds of democratically controlled worker-owned firms and thousands of co-ops. Some are operating plants of significant scale in such industries as steel. There has even been a surprising growth of community-owned municipal enterprises. Elsewhere small-scale public firms are engaged in everything from methane production and real-estate development to cable television.

The enormous variety of experimental institutional fragments include many "seedlings" which just possibly may point a direction towards community forms more consistent with sustainable development than present capitalist or socialist models. If we agree that the experience of being part of a community is one necessary element of a sustainable system, then one obvious need is to assemble and systematically assess such institutional fragments--and build upon the best of them.

A related issue is how community life might be better undergirded and stabilized. Capitalist development in practice destroys the basis of community integration and wholeness as a matter of course: Companies come and go, and jobs rise and fall. Often as not the social fabric is undermined, the local culture disintegrates, the community unravels, and young people leave. A system which sought to engender the core idea "we're all in it together" would ultimately have to be better structured to stabilize the basis of local community experience. How best to do this then becomes a critical issue both for research and politics.

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