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 6 of 8
Scale

Another fundamental issue is that of scale. To take seriously the preconditions of a culture and politics which might ultimately constrain the forces that produce trends inimical to sustainability requires that we come to terms with the size of the "polity" involved. Quite simply, it is extremely difficult and expensive to build a social consensus in a large polity. It may be--I think it is--impossible in a continental system.

The question of scale used to be part and parcel of the study of political theory. Today "scale" is making a come back in regional studies and among ecological activists in the bioregional movement. It's also certainly coming back in the developing world, the former Soviet Union, and Canada--as "breakdowns" of big nations occur left and right. Although our national system is increasingly stalemated, in the United States we have yet to confront the gigantism of the continental scale of our country.

Many discussions of social and political theory related to sustainability, and proposals for change in the United States, utilize comparative European models: "the Scandinavian countries did this, the Germans did that, the Dutch did this." The truth, however, is that all of the European geographic polities are of an order of magnitude so vastly different from our own as to make most comparisons questionable: West Germany, home of the postwar economic miracle, could have been tucked into the state of Oregon. France can be dropped into Texas. The Netherlands is minuscule. Compared to the United States all are very small geographic polities.

If we agree that the size of a polity has implications for consensus building, then we need to look to entities which are smaller than the continental national government: i.e. states or groupings of states within a region. Hence, smaller scale and semi-autonomous regional polities with increased powers and responsibilities vis-a-vis the national government might ultimately be another requirement of a new system--if, that is, democracy and sustainability are serious objectives.

Related to this, another possibility for future development might involve regionally-scaled public enterprise. This, in fact, was the regional-ecological concept behind the original "grass roots democracy" inspiration of the Tennessee Valley Authority--before it was subverted by a variety of political-economic and military pressures (especially during World War II). Despite the current wave of privatization and much rhetoric condemning public enterprise, many studies show that under the right conditions public enterprise can also be efficient in strictly economic terms. (Indeed, large U.S. corporations regularly undertake joint ventures with efficient public firms around the world.)

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