Sustainability is the one thing for which I am best known (multiple awards in its name, etc.), so it may come as a surprise that I am walking away from it. No, not walking. I think sustainability, as it is practised now, literally stinks. I’m running away from it.

As described last week, the origins of sustainability lie in the environmental movement of the 1960s. The idea of alternatives to almost everything to save the environment.

How we lived, what we consumed, what we ate, how we travelled, and who we communed with. The entirety of our life. The alternatives promulgated in 1968, arriving in Australia in 1973, were magnificent aims.

I drank the Kool-Aid. (In more ways than one, as it turns out – I became a devotee of the Grateful Dead and their Kool-Aid acid tests when I lived on communes in the USA in the early 70s).

All those ideals seemed so possible with the election of the Whitlam government, with ministers like Tom Uren and Moss Cass. I volunteered for Jim Cairns and worked on community radio, freedom of information legislation, alternative technologies, and festivals.

I firmly believed in alternatives, in every aspect of life, as the way to a better relationship with our environment. A key awakening was that autonomy, the holy grail of technology, was antithetical to community, which I increasingly understood to be the central focus for change. I held such strong hope. We would do it communally.

But to no avail. It didn’t change a thing. The mainstream wasn't changing. I’d have to join, work from within, and try to shake it up from the inside.

It is said that “if you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.” The pivot point, I presume, being a mortgage. But I was determined to stay with the ideals of the left.

But real sustainability died the death of a thousand cuts. It happened slowly. First, the ‘moral encouragement’ I described last week didn’t move the dial. I must have given a thousand talks, from organic growers to DIY builders to counter-culture conferences. I slowly realised the nodding heads were nodding off.

The second wave of bureaucratic regulation through government programmes was worse, particularly in energy. The great leap forward turned out to be nothing more than technological substitution: replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, all the while allowing the consumption lifestyle to continue unabated.

The optimistic trust in NatHERS to improve our dwellings was unfounded. In technology and in application.

Houses pass through bureaucratic hoops to achieve 7 stars by spreading photovoltaics on the roof. The bureaucratic star beckons a sustainable life, all the while the air conditioning is cranked up.

But NatHERS fails to lay a glove on the 90% of houses that weren't designed with it, and they’re not being upgraded. It has not improved our life and the way we live.

It comes as no shock that most houses in Australia still have miserable thermal comfort.

Replacement ideology in the name of sustainability sees high-energy, high-performance building materials substituted with lower-energy but lower-performance materials. Designers’ ugly great replacement theory. It doesn’t ask if it improves our lives.

It looks to sustain what we have in a different form, rather than ask if we need that form at all.

We've known forever that mass transit is better than individual transit. But the technological substitution of EVs for ICE (electric vehicles for fossil fuel internal combustion engines) has ironically allowed us to have ever more vehicles clogging up the roads, requiring ever more motorways. Electric advocates and boosters fail to recognise the flaws in addressing transport.

The few improvements we've seen in food production, substituting ‘organics’ for pesticides and fertilisers, are grossly offset by increases in red meat and junk food.

Obesity makes us less healthy than 60 years ago. We built an enormous health industry to mask that, so we live longer, but those in old age are without community, isolated, and often in pain and distress.

Strenuous efforts for recycling mask our overconsumption. We wouldn't need to recycle so much if we consumed less and reused more efficiently. And plastic packaging film for goods just shouldn’t exist.

In each of those cases, a highly bureaucratic or mechanistic approach leads to a dead end. In that sustainability cul-de-sac, we have highly paid consultants eternally doing celebratory doughnuts.

I've come to the point where I see the bureaucratic corporatisation of sustainability has seeped into every part of our design life. Substitution of technology in the name of alternatives has masked over the true need to radically change how we live.

I’m finding it harder and harder to discuss and debate it, speak on it, write about it, teach it, promote it, or be involved.

For me, the deep inequality that has developed over my design life is the issue. I am returning to that other great movement of the 60s: the modernists' belief in a better life through design.

Our main focus should be making a more democratic, equitable architecture, housing all the population in an equitable fashion.

Concentrating on the two-thirds of the houses that are so poorly designed, suffered by mortgagees and renters, not on the 5% highly awarded glamour homes at the top end.

We need to change the whole housing programme to change the houses. Which in turn improves the quality of life for our fellow citizens, and through that action, improves our cities.

Environmental sustainability has been a catastrophic failure. From its brilliant beginnings 60-odd years ago, it has descended into technocratic substitution. It now stinks of morbidity.

We need to thrive, not merely survive. We need to prosper, not merely exist.

Social sustainability rules.

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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