Sustainability more broadly grew out of an environmental movement that utterly opposed the direction the world was developing – wasting resources, polluting the earth, killing people and increasing extinctions.

It started with clarion calls from four great writers: Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Barbara Ward and Donella Meadows. Here’s the primer on those women’s work.

The aims were high: a complete revolution in thinking, acting and living. By any realistic view of those aims, sustainable design has been a catastrophic failure.

To understand how big a mess it is, we first need to understand the history of the environmental sustainability movement and design within it, most easily seen in three waves: moral encouragement, bureaucratic regulation and lifestyle enhancement (a longer explanation can be found here).

The first wave: moral encouragement

In the 60s and 70s, sustainability was focused on alternatives to the then-current strongly held forces of the market-based economy.

Scientists and architects waxed lyrical about the benefits of alternative designs such as passive solar, which, in writing at least, stretched back to Homes in the Sun by Walter Bunning in 1945.

But despite their manifest ‘moral encouragement’, they completely failed to convince the mainstream.

Suburban subdivisions took no account of orientation; house designs were dumb and numb to the climate; and larger buildings, with a few notable exceptions, were tricked-up business-as-usual modernism.

Moral encouragement didn’t work. For all the raising of green consciousness by enthusiasts promoting solar design and energy efficiency in response to climate change, the public did not act.

Sustainability was sold as something you did for the planet, but the public’s understanding was that you had to give something up; it was a threat to lifestyle.

Everyone had an excuse not to go green: elderly parents or young babies needed air conditioners, workers needed longer showers, and families with teenagers needed bigger fridges. Sustainability was something that was good for my neighbour but not for me. Moral encouragement went nowhere.

The second wave: bureaucratic regulation

Sensing that climate change was real, but people were reluctant to adopt sustainability on their own, some governments sought to regulate for it in the 80s and 90s. Their interest wasn’t entirely altruistic: electricity brownouts and blackouts were proving intractable to fix.

They had two choices: control supply or control demand.

Changing energy supply and water to sustainable sources required considerable political will, something in short supply in Australia then as now.

New coal-fired power stations didn’t stack up, and no government was willing to run the gauntlet of getting a new dam past the greenies. Regulating supply with a carbon scheme was voted down twice, once by Bob Brown’s Greens and then by Tony Abbott, whose puppeteer, Peta Credlin, finally admitted the scheme was never a tax.

Rather, governments chose ‘demand-side management’, a complex art of persuading people to change habits with a nudge so they don’t notice and don’t feel that their lifestyle is under threat.

Two choices: carrots or sticks. The carrots were few and went after the low-hanging fruit: subsidies for solar water heaters and water tanks, low-flow taps and fluorescent (later LED) light fittings.

The big sticks were applied to individual house designs, hitting easy targets, leaving bigger issues of large-scale buildings and urban design alone.

Their favourite stick, NatHERS, failed to deliver an outcome that simpler methods of specifying could have. Houses worked (and sadly looked) like eskies, while designers wanted ‘sophisticated tents’. We needed “tentskies” that could do both.

Like moral encouragement before it, regulation was largely a failure, and for the same reason: it was seen as a lifestyle threat. Regulation barely stemmed the tide of ridiculous oversized houses; town planning floundered, and industrial design went backwards with no minimum standard for star ratings applied for electrical goods.

The third wave: better lifestyles

In the 21st century a different approach was tried: promote sustainability through design that is better ‘for you’ (and the environment, BTW). Accentuate the lifestyle value to the homeowner or occupant above all else.

Forget saving the planet, forget loopholing the regulations, and just emphasise how you can live better and save money in a sustainable home (only don’t call it that).

This turned the market economy back on itself: if an improved lifestyle is the goal, then encouraging a belief in a ‘better life through green’ will convert many more to the cause, without the ‘nanny state’ hectoring or scolding.

Far from being seen as a threat, green will be seen as a boon to users. The very name of Your Home website was the ne plus ultra.

Despite the raging success of some issues, such as rooftop solar, it was a cultural failure, propping up unsustainable lifestyles with technological substitution.

If the middle class could lower their energy bills with solar and batteries, why not run more air conditioning, more dryers and a bigger pool?

The poor got screwed.

The big failure

Sustainability should be much more than sustaining the status quo through technological improvements and substitutions.

The original aims of the 1960s, for a better world, better equality, more peace and a saved planet, have been lost. We need to thrive, not merely survive.

That is next week’s starting point.

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, formerly of Tone on Tuesday. Amateurs draw plans; professionals draw sections – never at cross purposes.

Tone Wheeler

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