TNS-ICSP Update (Summer/Fall 2010)

NOTES on TNS-Canada's  5-month-long, Integrated Community Sustainability Planning (ICSP) course that I am taking. 

December 14, 2010.  The course will conclude in mid-January. We recently completed two productive workshops in Toronto in October and December. The first workshop focused on illuminating the sustainability gap for key community systems and formulating strategies and initiatives to bridge the gap. The second focused on governance options for implementing the plan, monitoring progress, and leading change towards sustainability. The leadership component of the second workshop was presented by Bryan Smith, co-author of the recently published Necessary Revolution (Senge, et. al.; highly recommended). The focus was on applying an organizational learning framework to the sustainability challenge and associated methods for creating high-performance teams needed to do the "impossible" transformational work of sustainability--in two words, powerful and inspirational. As the final homework assignment, i will prepare a ICSP process plan on renewing the San Francisco Sustainability Plan for advances in sustainability over the past 12 years and the next-generation challenges of integrative approaches to community sustainability planning that are essential for meeting the urgent transformational challenges of sustainability success.

October 23, 2010. We're half way through time wise. We've completed the 3-hour e-learning course, an ABCD exercise, and 5 webinars covering their ICSP Guide. This week will be the first live 2-day workshop in Toronto, Wed/Thurs., 10-27/28, with approximately 15 sustainability practitioners from Canada (about 10) and the US (about 5). I will try to write a few posts covering work/the experience to date, and then do some semi-real-time posts from this week's workshop. Check back periodically, subscribe to this Sustainability Clips journal or the RSS feed. Cheers, scott

Sustainable San Francisco - Bay Guardian

Links to a few articles:

(Oct. 27, 2008) Sustainable San Francisco--"A vision for the city's future, our 42nd anniversary special.  In honor of our 42nd year printing the news and raising hell, the Guardian imagines a sustainable future for San Francisco, with visions for energy, land use, food, transportation, culture, and the economy."

(Jan 2, 2007) Toward a sustainable San Francisco. EITORIAL "When you decide to buy your vegetables at a local ..." 

(Aug 3, 2010) Reinventing San Francisco, "We need to make sure development isn't just code for finding new ways to gentrify neighborhoods and displace existing residents ... We are proposing no less than a reinvention of San Francisco — a ... racially inclusive, ecologically sustainable city that grows its own ... Toward this end, the Community Congress, Aug. 14-15 on the University of San Francisco campus, will stimulate ideas, discussion, and planning to reinvigorate civic engagement and inspiration and create a concrete, locally actionable agenda for reshaping the city." [ SF2030: A real force for renewal, or more talk? See the comments.]

Green News--Climate, Living, Policy

Bookmark this section of the Washington Post -- Green News -- an ongoing news report on the environment that explores the science of climate change, green living, and its impact on policy.

Sustainable Community Development (Zoning) Code

"The mission of the Rocky Mountain LandUse Institute is to serve the public interest as an interdisciplinary, non-partisan forum for land use and environmental issues in the Rocky Mountain West."

One of their primary programs is the Sustainable Community Development Code and Reform Initiative, a highly innovative and comprehensive assessment of zoning code changes required to support the development of sustainable communities (Code Framework, also PDF Slide presentation, 2007).

A background paper, Sustainable Zoning: A New Imperative - The Sustainable Community Development Code, is useful. 

The Natural Capital Project

The Natural Capital Project . . . "partnership is a joint venture among Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment, University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund." The Project seeks to do the following:

• Developing tools that make it easy to incorporate natural capital into decisions
• Demonstrating the power of these tools in important, contrasting places
• Advancing natural capital approaches by engaging leaders in key institutions
• From theory to practice.

Ecological Economics On-Line Certificate

The Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont offers graduate-level training through a certificate program in ecological economics.

The certificate connects the many different fields of study encompassed and provides students with an opportunity to venture beyond academia and into a new world of solution-oriented learning even as they continue their concentrated studies in a traditional discipline degree program at the University. Students can also take the certificate separately to enhance their existing professional training.

Two of the primary courses required for the Certificate in Ecological Economics are currently online. The primary goal of these courses is to provide full access to ecological economics content to students, the general public, and educators all over the world. . . .

Green Procurement Toolkit

California Sustainability Alliance

The California Sustainability Alliance, a market transformation programmanaged by Navigant Consulting, Inc. (NYSE: NCI), has released the Local Government Green Procurement Toolkit andGuide to assist local governments in adopting environmentally friendlyprocurement plans.

“Research shows that green products frequently cost no more than otherproducts but produce ongoing savings,” said Craig McDonald, ManagingDirector with Navigant Consulting’s Energy practice. “By weighing not onlythe purchase price of a product but also its lifecycle cost andsustainability, green procurement policies can help local governments save money, create local green jobs, and reduce their environmental footprint.”

The toolkit incorporates case studies of eight leading local governments inCalifornia and Washington. In addition, it outlines steps for greening procurement policies and includes a variety of resources such as:

* Draft policy language* Sample green bid specifications* Best practices from local, state and federal governments across the country* Information on eco-labeling and links to public and private eco‐labeling programs* Listings of environmental preferable products and vendors withrankings across 23 sustainability criteria* Sustainability case studies

While the toolkit and guide are tailored for local government applications,all organizations can benefit from the policies, processes, and practicalresources featured. 

The California Sustainability Alliance was designed to help meet the Stateof California's aggressive energy, climate and resource and environmentalgoals by increasing and accelerating energy efficiency in combination withcomplementary green measures and strategies. Founded in 2006, The California Sustainability Alliance is a program managed by Navigant Consulting,administered by Southern California Gas Co. (The Gas Company), and funded byCalifornia utility customers under the auspices of the California PublicUtilities Commission.

JRW Bioremediation’s LactOil™ groundwater clean-up technology awarded U.S. Patent

JRW Bioremediation’s LactOil™ groundwater clean-up technology awarded U.S. Patent

Lenexa, Kansas, September 1, 2010 – JRW Bioremediation, LLC, in partnership with Archer Daniels Midland Company (NYSE: ADM), announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office awarded a patent to the two companies for LactOil™ soy microemulsion. This renewable product enables environmental professionals to cost effectively clean-up soil and groundwater contaminated by chlorinated solvents, metals, nitrates and perchlorates. 

The U.S. EPA estimates that in the U.S. alone there are over 217,000 contaminated sites that require remediation. LactOil can be used to treat 18 of the top 20 most frequently occurring ground water contaminants found at hazardous waste sites, including Trichloroethylene (TCE) a common degreasing solvent, Perchlorethylene (PCE) the most widely used dry-cleaning solvent, Ammonium Perchlorate, found in solid rocket fuel and munitions, and Hexavalent Chromium (Cr+6) the main groundwater contaminant highlighted in the movie Erin Brockovich.

LactOil is a soy based product containing five functional ingredients designed to stimulate bacteria already residing in the environment to degrade and remove toxic pollutants from groundwater, thus restoring these valuable resources. LactOil is biodegradable and is exclusively derived from corn and soybeans. U.S. Patent number 7,785,468 published on November 6, 2008, and issued on August 31, 2010 describes the properties of this innovative bioremediation amendment.

LactOil™ soy microemulsion mixes easily with water.

Since June 2007, environmental professionals have successfully deployed LactOil at more than 40 locations in North America varying in size from small drycleaner sites, to industrial properties, to large federal projects. Professionals using LactOil have commented on the ease of material handling, excellent subsurface distribution and multiyear longevity. They are also pleased with the competitive cost advantage the product gives them when bidding for projects.

Using LactOil and JRW’s other bioremediation products can save more than 90 percent on clean-up costs as compared to traditional pump and treat systems. LactOil doesn’t leave behind any residual hazardous chemical byproducts like chemical oxidation technologies typically can. In contrast to standard vegetable oil substrates, LactOil’s unique high solids, low viscosity, long lived, highly stable properties allow environmental professionals to more quickly and cost effectively reach their clean-up goals.

JRW Bioremediation is an innovator in the development of green and sustainable products that provide economical solutions for environmental professionals. JRW’s natural products have been deployed in hundreds of communities across North America and Europe improving the quality of life for those living there. For more details on the full line of bioremediation products, visit JRW Bioremediation online.

L.A. mayor, Latino activists take on oil companies over Proposition 23

LA Times Article:  L.A. mayor, Latino activists take on oil companies over Proposition 23

the oil company-sponsored ballot initiative to repeal the States path-breaking law to combat climate change by driving the economic innovation required to transition to the renewable energy economy of an ecologically sustainable society.

The Environmentalist’s Paradox

ENN-Environmental News Network,
From: David A Gabel, ENN
Published September 1, 2010 10:06 AM

The Environmentalist’s Paradox--The signs are all around. Many places in the world show degradation of the air, water, and soil. Species becoming extinct as natural habitats are being destroyed. The emissions of greenhouse gases that can alter the planet's climate are unacceptable. All the environmental issues put together amount to a very serious threat to human welfare. Yet at the same time, all accepted measures of well-being show that, on average, quality of life is improving around the globe. How does an environmentalist call society into action under such conditions? <<Click here to find the answer--Ecosystem Brittleness!>>

Although a good answer, and a great study, the work beats around the bush--the source of ecosystem degradation and resulting ecosystem brittleness is the daily machinations of the human economy. Every dollar increase in GDP and associated measure of current human welfare also systematically degrades ecosystem productivity and resilience, increasingly compromises associated ecosystem services, and brings us closer and closer to irreversible degradation and fatal compromises to ecosystem services, which are critical, nonsubstitutable inputs into the human economy, GDP and current measures of human welfare. Thus, declines in both will eventually occur, and sooner than anyone would care to guess.

The answer is not necessarily to reduce consumption, reduce production, and simplify lifestyles, although there are a range of conditions underwhich these are good ideas. Why are these not the answer? Because they do not address the root cause of the systematic destruction of the earth's life support system and critical nonsubstitutable inputs into the human economy that lie at the heart of the human economy--the current methods and materials of economic production and consumption. Thus, the answer is reinventing the human economy so that it is at least ecologically benign, if not ecologically enhancing. Doing so requires reverse engineering nature, the primary economy, to learn the ecological-economic design and investment lessons from 4.5 billion years of the biosphere's evolution required to produce its current, rather exquiste constituion.

How could such an audacious and ambitious undertaking be possible, let alone affordable?  Because doing so would reduce costs and improve ecological integrity, therefore pay for itself and increase profits even under current business context of incomplete financial accounting methods and imperfect prices. Because, doing so would reveal the more accurate accounting methods and real prices upon which the optimum results of capitalism depend, which in turn would amplify profits for adopting firms and point the way to system-level reforms. Because doing so would illuminate, even profitable? Because doing so would unleash a new source of "deep" innovation that would lead to the new business models, production methods and processes, supply chains, products, and services, social contracts, community governance, finance, and services of an economy and society that enhances ecological integrity of the biosphere just social relations. Early adopter firms of sustainability innovation at the heart of their business, community, state, and nation strategies would reap the rewards of being first in the market place to combat the next-period threats from our destabilized biospheric and climate system and seize the benefit opportunities of responding effectively to the sustainability challenge. (see links below, forthcoming).

Global Warming Contrarian Reverses on Carbon Tax

NYT, Green--A Blog on Energy and Environment

August 31, 2010, 5:05 pm--A Warming Contrarian Calls for a Global Tax
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

With the publication of his 2001 book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish economics professor, became a leading contrarian voice on global warming and a leading opponent of carbon reduction efforts like the Kyoto Protocol.

Mr. Lomborg did not dispute that adding greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide to the atmosphere was warming the climate; rather, he argued that the vast expense of reining in emissions would far outweigh the benefit deferred by the resultant effect on global temperatures. . .

Yet Mr. Lomborg’s latest book, “Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits,” is unlikely to bolster his popularity among those opposed to drastic immediate action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In the book, . . .  he calls for $150 billion in new investment annually for clean energy development, climate engineering and climate change adaptations like building sea walls to protect low-lying areas from sea-level rise — with the money to be raised through a global tax on carbon dioxide emissions.

“If we care about the environment and about leaving this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future, we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming,” . . . .

Mr. Lomborg denied making an abrupt U-turn on climate change, arguing that he has always taken the issue seriously. He blamed the highly partisan nature of the climate debate for skewing his views.

ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability

ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability is an international association of local governments as well as national and regional local government organizations who have made a commitment to sustainable development.  ICLEI provides technical consulting, training, and information services to build capacity, share knowledge, and support local government in the implementation of sustainable development at the local level. Our basic premise is that locally designed initiatives can provide an effective and cost-efficient way to achieve local, national, and global sustainability objectives.  Formed in 1992, ICLEI, The 'International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives' became 'ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability' in 2003 with a broader mandate to address sustainability issues.

International Center for Sustainable Cities

Sustainable Cities is a small catalytic organization that tackles the daunting challenges of urban sustainability. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with an active network of over 40 cities in 14 countries, Sustainable Cities is a think tank and a "do tank," delivering results through practical demonstration projects and peer learning networks, and scaling those lessons out through affiliations and high-profile events.

Key Concepts of a Sustainable City - P. Hawken

In an introduction to Sustain Lane's webpage on their sustainable city rankings, these excerpts from Paul Hawkin's introduction provide an instructive rationale and inspiring vision for the role, need, and possibility of sustainable cities.

. . . Rather than perceive the city as an ecological sink sucking up the resources of the countryside, which cities can do [are now designed to do], cities can also be [designed as] a kind of ecological ark, places where humanity gathers while we peak in population and develop ecological intelligence for a new civilization. There is wisdom in this that is rather extraordinary. It was not predicted that cities might be the best strategy for our long-term survival and well-being. Yet, that is exactly what is happening.

The viability of the urban environments, however, is not a given. Population is still increasing, demand on resources is growing faster than the population, and our climate, oceans, and ecosystems are perilously close to disaster. In other words, while we grow we must use less resources. We must build urban arks that are equipped to navigate the uncertainties and demands of the coming decades; cities have to be redesigned, reimagined, and reconsidered. The sustainable city is a place that interacts with its region and resources in a symbiotic way so as to increase the quality of both environments.

The SustainLane US City Rankings is the first systematic report card measuring city quality of life combined with resource impacts. For too long, we believed that more meant better, that energy-, concrete-, and automobile-intensive cities would bring us a better life. That tall tale is being replaced by common sense understanding that what makes for a fulfilling urban existence is neighborhoods, farmer’s markets, parks, mobility, quiet, greenery, and meaningful livelihoods, all of which require less resources and better design.

Urban sustainability is not an option. It represents prudent governance and provident management by and for the people. A carbon-constrained world is upon us. While international action is required to prevent global climatic catastrophe, cities must lead the way in creating a post carbon environment where people can thrive. What we do in the United States and other developed nations can help far-away cities. Our level of consumption and its attendant wastefulness has set an unfortunate example the world strives to emulate. Now we must set a different example because how people live in India and China will have a direct effect upon our children’s futures and vice versa. The upper stratosphere has no national boundaries; nor do jet streams and climate. By creating cities that address the future bravely, brilliantly, and humanely, we create examples and possibility for all cities everywhere.

The worldwide diaspora of immigrants, refugees, and peasants to urban slums is growing. The World Bank has predicted that more than five billion people will be receiving less than $2/day by 2030 in today’s dollars. The future of the world is being cultivated in the despair, anger and bleakness in the chawls of Mumbai, the favelas of Rio, in the kampungs of Jakarta , the shammasas of Khartoum , in the pueblos jovenes in Lima , and in the umjundolos of Durban . In Darwinian terms, the slums and squatter cities are a rapid breeding pool for human evolution. Leaders, activists, and scholars will emerge from these places, but so too will demagogues, jihadists, thieves, and mobs. That famous lyric “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose” may be true for seekers and monks, but it is not true for the bulk of humanity. Freedom and the rule of law are valued and honored when people have something to lose. Neighborhoods work, and are safe and livable because there is a “we” there. The greening of the world’s cities is a profound act of social healing and justice, because sustainability addresses whether people feel hope or despair, are secure or threatened, want to cooperate or compete.

. . . In the end, there is only one ark, the earth. Cities, like individuals, are passengers on this miracle. All cities must work together in this green and just enterprise to insure that the journey continues. . . .

These thoughts are excerpted from SustainLane's 2007 Book: How Green Is Your City?, The SustainLane US City Rankings, published by New Society Publishers. Of SustainLane's sustainable city assessment, Paul Hawken's says, "I believe the SustainLane methodology will become international, and none too soon. Providing and analyzing the metrics for sustainability is critical to humanity’s future. . . . I believe SustainLane’s work reflected in this website is a critical tool in that pursuit."

Eco-Municipalities and Networks

A Wikipedia overview.

The distinction between an eco-municipality and other sustainable development projects (such as green building and alternative energy) is the focus on community involvement and social transformation in a public agency as well as the use of a holistic systems approach. An eco-municipality is one that recognizes that issues of sustainability are key to all decisions made by government. Many eco-municipality projects also incorporate the Natural Step into their change processes.

the North American Eco-Municipality Network (NAEMN).

“Sveriges Ekokommuner” (SEkom), in English “The National Association of Swedish Eco-municipalities”.

See also the more general topic of sustainable cities.

Reweaving the Urban Fabric in Victoria BC

A draft community plan considers two options that focus growth over the next 30 years in existing developed areas instead of green fields--downtown centered vs village centered--with the village centered option being the popular one (article 1, article 2).

Mission Bay Wins Sustainability Award?

The exact rationale for the distinction is not obvious, but interesting. Requires further inquiry.

NEWSOM ANNOUNCES $1.35 MILLION STATE GRANT FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN MISSION BAY

The California Department of Housing and Community Development Announces the Designation of Thirteen California Communities as Models for Sustainability

California selects models for sustainable land use, New Urban Network News (links to projects)

ICLEI USA Partners with Virginia Group to Foster Greener Cities, GreenBiz.com

In San Francisco, efforts to turn a 303-acre former brownfield into a large-scale, transit-oriented mixed-use development are paying off.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that the Mission Bay redevelopment project (pictured right) will receive a $1,350,000 state grant to support affordable housing and has been designated as one of five "gold-level California Catalyst Communities" by the state's Department of Housing Community Development.

The designation recognizes Mission Bay as a model for sustainable development and establishes the project as a priority for future state and Federal funding.

There are now more than 30 life science companies in Mission Bay. When fully built, the site is to include more than 6,000 housing units (about 30 percent of them affordable), 49 acres of new parks, 4.4 million square feet of new office and laboratory space, a 43-acre University of California, San Francisco life science research campus and a 550-bed UCSF hospital for women, children and cancer patients.

Seoul to Lead on Global Green Growth?

Seoul to bring G20 leaders’ attention to 'green growth.'

Young Soo-gil, chairman of the Presidential Committee on Green Growth,  said . . . that Korea is seeking to take a lead in the global green growth drive by sharing its knowledge and experience.

“Korea would like to help those developing countries harmonize their growth aspirations with the environmental ones by sharing its green growth tool kits and experiences, as well as by working together to undertake specific mitigation and adaptation projects in cost-effective and growth-friendly ways in individual countries,” he said.

“Korea is also willing to take leadership in the international efforts to help build physical infrastructures in the developing countries in climate-change resilient ways. For these purposes, Korea is to make green growth partnership a leading component of its increased ODA (Official Development Assistance) commitment as a new member of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC),” he added.

As part of this effort, Korea has launched the East Asia Climate Partnership (EACP). Most significantly, on July 16 of this year, the Korean government launched a Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) based in Seoul.

“Korea hopes to develop GGGI into an international treaty-based institution by 2012 with support from other countries which share belief in the value of green growth as well as of sharing insights, know-how and experiences on it,” he said.

“The Green Growth Committee also hopes that Korea’s green growth inspirations will play a facilitating role in making a breakthrough over the issue of how to reconcile economic, social and environmental development objectives at the Rio plus 20 Conference on Sustainable Development to be held in 2012,” he added. . . .

UNEP Green Economy Initiative

Go to the:

• Home Page
• Press Release

The Green Economy Initiative (GEI) is designed to assist governments in “greening” their economies by reshaping and refocusing policies, investments and spending towards a range of sectors, such as clean technologies, renewable energies, water services, green transportation, waste management, green buildings and sustainable agriculture and forests.

Greening the economy refers to the process of reconfiguring businesses and infrastructure to deliver better returns on natural, human and economic capital investments, while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions, extracting and using less natural resources, creating less waste and reducing social disparities.

APA-SCP Sustainable Community Planning Interest Group Launched

The pace of APA's sustainability initiatives is quickening. In Fall 2009, the APA officially endorsed the Sustainable Community Plannng (SCP) Interest Group (see also the Ning Site) and the group launched itself publicly at the New Orleans National Conference in April 2010 (interest group formed in fall 2009). The initiative comes at a time of potential sea change for the APA regarding sustainability and the role of the planning profession in society. This sea-change moment is not unrelated to the critical, make-or-break juncture in world history that humanity finds itself facing at the beginning of the 21st century--the challenge of wrestling global sustainability from the increasingly irreversible and unsustainable effects of business as usual in all spheres of global society.

The APA has noted this critical moment with its own Sustaining Places Initiative (March 2010), its founding presence in the Global Planners Network (2006), and in collaborative work on the challenge for planning to reinvent itself, both nationally and internationally, to be a leading force for the sustainability transformation in the 21st century. This reinvention effort is similar to planning's genesis in the city beautiful movement as a response to early 20th century industrial challenges and subsequently, to the evolving challenges of post-industrial capitalism later in the century.

Since April 2010, the APA-SCP has gathered momentum with an email list already in the thousands, an organizing committee, etc. They see themselves as an advocacy campaign focused on moving a "deep" understanding of the sustainability imperative to the forefront of APA thinking and practice. Skim through the following links for a briefing and to get involved.

• Overview Document
• Newsletter 1
• Newsletter 2
• Newsletter 3
• Newsletter 4

Go to their social networking spaces and get a sense of the dialogue and participants.

• Linked-In
• FaceBook
• Ning
• Twitter

Based on their written material and social network sites, the group has a refreshing, energetic, youthful feel, embracing all contributions to a deeper more effective approach to sustainable community planning. It's amazing what the main streaming of a concept can do in a few short years compared to the late 1990s when I participated in an APA panel at the 1999 Seattle APA National Conference and contributed to some early work on the APA Sustainabiilty Policy Guide.

The challenge the group faces--as does any sustainability actor--is acquiring a powerful strategic sustainability planning approach that is effective at achieving sustainability in complex systems. Such an approach is needed to distinguish the sustainable from the unsustainable and the high-value from low-value initiatives and investments. Such distinctions form the basis for setting up contingent scenarios of the most promising future moves in a dynamic fluid environment, much like the game of chess. It is also needed to transform disparate, disconnected tactical sustainability initiatives into a powerful, on-going, self-funded, expanding, strategic approach of continual innovation and accelerating sustainability transformation at all levels of social organization, from community to global.

[It should be noted that time is of the essence in the face of accelerating socioeconomic-ecological trends that will soon approach or have already passed thresholds for biospheric change that are irreversible, will likely cause dramatic systems disequilibrium leading to substantial deterioration in life support capacity, and potentially will cause biospheric systems collapse at some point.]

One effective approach is The Natural Step (TNS)--a powerful innovation in planning methodology designed for working effectively in complex systems generally, and for achieving sustainability in particular. For that reason, it should be of special interest to planners and the planning profession given the comprehensive, complex, systems challenges they/it routinely face(s). Developed 20 years ago by a Swedish oncologist, Karl-Henrik Robert, and a team of 50 scientists, a scientific consensus was forged regarding the conditions for sustainability. Those conditions have been incorporated into a powerful strategic sustainability planning methodology that some businesses and municipalities around the world have used with success, often dramatic and transformational. In 2010, at this critical, make-or-break juncture in world history, the insights and benefits of The Natural Step’s powerful strategic sustainability planning methodology may be especially salient.

That cancer was likely incurable "downstream" after a patient incurred it, with the only cure being prevention far "upstream" in the chain of cause and effect was the epiphany that sparked Mr. Robert's innovative response. Planners are intimately familiar with the simple and familiar logic behind this epiphany--an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In fact, that very logic is found in many reasoned assessments of climate change (the front line of the larger sustainability challenge), such as the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Prevention is much less expensive and wiser than a cure after the fact, and highly preferable to adaptation once afflicted, particularly in the case of cancer, or similarly, unsustainability.

Of particular interest to the planning profession may be TNS-Canada's innovative work in Integrated Community Sustainability Planning (ICSP) over the past six years in response to federal legislation. They have been developing and leading transformative change and engagement programs based on TNS's strategic sustainability planning methodology to help communities and their leaders advance the practice of sustainability. One distinctive aspect of TNS (and ICSP), is that it is not characterized by a variety of discrete actions in diverse sectors, but rather by finding integrative approaches that produce multiple impacts and benefits within a strategy of on-going strategic innovation to the point of success. With the lessons learned over the past six years, TNS-Canada feels that what makes for effective community sustainability planning is beginning to emerge, and the course is a vehicle for transmitting those lessons more broadly. 

Of course, this challenge of forging an approach for effective sustainability planning in complex systems--such as communities and regions--is not unique to the APA-SCP, but faced by the planning profession and any actor embracing the sustainability challenge. The land use planning profession faces the challenge, both in current practice and in reinventing planning to deal effectively with the global-local nature of the sustainability challenge. The core conundrum is that the theoretical and practice domain of the planning profession is the physical/spatial settlement dimension of society, place, community, etc. To be practical and make problems managable in the face of larger political and societal forces that shape place, and that often operate outside the control of planning and planners, planning practice often defines a field of action and goals that exclude these larger forces. This will be a problem when it comes to adding community (and by implication, local-global societal) sustainability to planning's many existing objectives. The key societal forces shaping "place" sustainability are socioeconomic in nature, situated, in the first instance, outside of the spatial realm, but interact with it.

Thus, the sustainability challenge society faces is beyond “place” but affects it, and in turn, the nature of place(s) at any point in time affects the local, and systems-level, sustainability challenge. This linkage between place, the larger forces, and subsystem/system sustainability is the nexus for planners and planning to go to work with new multi-dimensional, multi-sector, multi-tasking, whole-systems resolutions that will not only create great places locally (the main charge of the planning profession), but drive the larger system towards sustainability too (an absolute requirement for sustainable communities). To fast-track employing a powerful strategic sustainability approach, the planning profession, through the APA, could partner with TNS-USA to develop a wide range of training and practice applications of a strategic sustainability approach to land use, community planning, etc., and doing so would accelerate a variety of APA's sustainability planning initiatives to make "great places happen."

TNS-USA works with buinesses and municipalities, as follows:.

• City of Madison, Wisconsin
• City of Santa Monica, California, USA
• College Housing Northwest, Portland, Oregon, USA
• Eugene Water and Electric Board, Eugene, Oregon, USA
• North American Eco-Muni Network
• TriMet, Portland, Oregon, USA
• Tualatin Valley Water District, Oregon, USA
• Twin Ports, Minnesota and Wisconsin, United States.

As part of the larger "reinvention" challenge the profession faces (see APA CEO Paul Farmer's et. al, position paper), responding to the full challenge of planning and sustainability--that of place and the larger forces at play--somehow needs to be reframed as legitimately within planning’s professional domain (or at least the domain of one of society's institutions). Planning, due to its interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and potentially integrative nature, is well situated to be that institution for society. At least championing and leading an effective response to the full sustainability challenge needs to be reframed as legitimately within planning’s domain, and not simply left to the political realm, which does not seem inclined to touch it effectively (let alone embrace it for the seeds of political renewal that lie within it--but that's another story), or left to the uncoordinated net additive result of disparate expert initiatives:  energy experts, climate experts, food experts, water experts, etc. We've already seen where both of these approaches to the issue have gotten us over the past 50 years--to the brink of unsustainability. Business as usual will no longer cut it, and in fact is often unwittingly viewed as without negative risks and consequences, somehow blissfully eternally prosperous (the flawed logic of a type II error if there ever was one). Driving continual innovation towards sustainability transformation is now the "name of the game", the "order of the day," the task before us.

So, it is towards this challenge that the APA-SCP and the planning profession more generally march. The APA-SCP, along with other APA sustainability initiatives, could push the growing momentum for sustainability past the social tipping point where it becomes ubiquitous and produces the effective response we need in the few short years we have left to sow and grow the necessary seeds of economic and institutional transformation for sustainability success.