Originally published as an editorial under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 35, no. 8 (September 2009): 4.
Have we allowed sustainability to become a boring topic? Is it increasingly tempting to flick past the articles in Planning News and elsewhere that stress the urgency of action on climate change with nothing more than a quick “yep, know that” shrug?
If you can relate to this guilty impulse, we have a problem. Sustainability ought to be our core business as planners. The primary rationale for having a planning profession is surely because in some situations the market, left to its own devices, can lead to bad outcomes: is there a better example of this than environmental degradation? (Indeed it is, quite literally, the textbook example: remember the “tragedy of the commons?”) There surely can’t be a bigger challenge for this and the next generation of planners than ensuring more sustainable communities. Anecdotally, an urge to help plan a more ecologically sound built environment is central to the reasons many of our keen young planners enter the profession.