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Conclusion

Latter-day new development has been typified by activities that tend to diminish the quality of life, in order to make way for some new asset that’s driven only by the quantity of human life. We destroy what we love to make room for what we think we need, only to find out later we could have had both in one package, at far less cost. Converting an attractive old warehouse into an apartment building serves the needs of a growing population, but it uses many existing resources (and thus far fewer new resources), not to mention zero additional real estate, so it’s considered restorative development.

Of course, the quantity and type of restorative development varies from nation to nation, and from area to area, according to geography: newer coastal cities, for example, may have less heritage or infrastructure restoration on the agenda, but far more rebuilding efforts due to natural disasters like hurricanes.

In almost every successful case of urban revitalization, a focus on restoring green space has been a key ingredient. These projects are often based on historically significant sites, such as the private woodlands of industrial barons, and battlefields. Most battles were fought on farmland, 288meadows, or other open spaces offering a clear field of fire. Thus, battlefield restoration also helps battle a negative side effect of our recent decades’ passion for reforestation: the loss of grassland ecosystems.

At Gettysburg National Military Park, for example, the National Park Service is restoring the battlefield’s original open spaces, and doing so in such as way as to provide better habitat for native grassland wildlife species. Its restoration team has wisely collaborated with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Audubon Society, The Nature Conservancy, Pennsylvania’s Game Commission, and researchers from Penn State University.

In a very large percentage of urban resurrection stories, the restoration of a waterfront has been the heart of the success. Throughout the industrial revolution, river, Great Lake, and bay frontage tended to be industrial zones, with the best neighborhoods as far away as possible. But people like to be around bodies of water, so cleaning up these frontages (often a brownfields project) and making them publicly accessible as parks, boardwalks, and shopping arcades is an element common to many successful downtown revitalizations. This key asset is available to many city planners, because we have traditionally built our cities near bodies of water.

Bottom line: bringing life back to the built environment often requires revitalizing the natural environment.

BUILT AND NATURAL ARE OFTEN HARD TO SEPARATE

Restoring our built heritage isn’t always a matter of renewing bricks, mortar, paint, and pipes. Sometimes it involves restoring ambience and context, and that’s often in the form of nature.

Like most tourists who have visited Stonehenge—England’s most important archaeological treasure—in recent decades, I was appalled at the manner in which the British government had ruined the site. It built roads very close by (just a few yards at some points… I’m talking single digits!) on two sides, one of them the A303, a major highway and truck route. What should have been a contemplative, if not outright mystical, experience was turned into an irritating one. Annoyance at government “planners” competed strongly with the site’s wonder for one’s attention.

Good news, though: Even though Britain is still on an austerity budget, in 2001 it committed $225 million to “restore silence and solemnity” to this endlessly fascinating 5,000-year-old artifact. Doing so will 289involve restoring and rebuilding everything on and around the site, but the monoliths themselves will remain untouched.

The money will be spent burying a 1.25 mile stretch of the A303; removing the access road entirely and restoring its path with native grass; and moving the parking lot with associated buildings a full two miles away thus necessitating an underground tram system. One of the challenges developers will face—because this tunnel will be a form of new development—is that the area surrounding Stonehenge is likely to contain many important burial sites and other ruins, which tunnel construction could disturb or destroy.

THE RESTORATION OF OUR NATURAL AND BUILT ENVIRONMENTS HAS BECOME THE GREATEST BUSINESS FRONTIER OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

That headline might sound like a utopian dream, but it’s a trillion-dollar-plus reality. Ours is the first global Restoration Economy. As common as the three crises of Constraint, Corrosion, and Contamination have been throughout history (on the local and national scales), this is the first time that any of them has been global, and the first time all three have occurred both globally and simultaneously.

It’s only recently that we’ve reached the point where

• most of our cities have reached the limits of their expansion
• most of our built environment is not just aged, but in need of restoration
• most of our land is at least mildly contaminated, and much is heavily poisoned

Consider that the industrial revolution, itself a previously unseen phenomenon, accelerated (not just grew) continuously for a quarter of a millennium.

Consider that there are people alive today who grew up in a world with “only” 2 billion people (one-third of today’s population).

Consider that all of these first-time-ever dynamics are being electronically connected in real time.

Considering all of this, it should come as no surprise that we are in uncharted waters. Every generation likes to think of itself as living during a crossroads in history—and every generation really is at a crossroads of some sort—but this is a Big One, folks.

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OUR INTEGRATIVE FUTURE

In April 2002, USEPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman announced a Bush administration initiative to clean up and restore the Great Lakes. Over 30 million people get their drinking water from the Great Lakes, and over 600 beaches front them on the U.S. side alone, making their recreational value not just significant, but vital to many local economies. As with the European Community’s multinational Danube River restoration, the U.S. government is catching on to large-scale, integrated, international restoration projects. Among the goals Whitman announced:

• reducing the introduction of additional invasive species
• reducing the levels of PCBs in walleye and lake trout by a quarter by 2007
• restoring 100,000 wetland acres by 2010
• accelerating the cleanup of contaminated sediment and completing all brownfields remediation (including Great Lakes Superfund sites) by 2025

A partnership of federal, state, and tribal agencies—the Great Lakes U.S. Policy Committee—actually wrote the plan. As such, it stands a good chance of bringing a greater level of integration and synergy to the multitude of current restoration projects. Among other integrative measures, the plan instructs federal agencies to work more closely with local and state agencies. Canadian initiatives will also be crucial.

The good news is that many municipal and county-level Great Lakes restoration initiatives are already integrative, because their goals usually revolve around community revitalization. More good news: these current 291projects include all eight restorative industries: ecosystem, fisheries, watershed, agricultural, brownfield, infrastructure, heritage, and disaster-related (primarily spills). Significant progress has already been made towards restoring what was once the most economically valuable freshwater system on the planet.

The bad news is that increased synergies are all the agencies will have to rely on, because the Bush plan, despite its ambitious language, failed to budget a single new dollar to the effort. But don’t underestimate the value of synergetic connections. Unlike new development, where each new unit often detracts from the value of existing units, as typified by gluts of office space, each restoration initiative tends to increase the value of other restorative projects in the area.

Witness historic downtown areas, which require a certain percentage of restored buildings to reach the “critical mass” needed to achieve destination status. Likewise with restored ecosystems: linking many of them can produce exponential increases in wildlife, and can also turn an area into a tourist destination. Despite the Bush administration’s failure to throw any new money at the Great Lakes restoration (such a refusal to fund a restoration project is actually quite unusual), its commitment to better coordinate the billions of dollars of restorative efforts already underway is likely to spawn tremendous investment and business opportunities.

Many of the best growth opportunities will not be found within each restorative industry, but in the interstitial spaces among them. The leaders of the Restoration Economy will be the connective tissue that pulls “peripheral” restoration industries into each project. Several such integrative firms are already emerging—many of them already quite profitable— but they represent only a tiny handful of the “integrated restoration” companies that will soon exist.

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STRATEGIC INTEGRATION GUIDE

If you are a corporate, NGO, or community leader planning a project—or a student planning a career—here are some suggestions on “mixing and matching” the eight restorative industries. This is only a general guide to predesign: Each project has its own unique agenda and characteristics.

The following matrix indicates the types of restorative projects that work best when integrated and performed simultaneously. (Note: Disaster/war is a wild card that can skew priorities swiftly and dramatically.)

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See Table

The following matrix indicates the types of restorative projects—and nonrestorative developments—that are often the most profitable or effective sequels to completed projects. (Note: Integration doesn’t always need to take place “on the ground”: Integration of marketing, fundraising, and postrestoration management all can achieve substantial results, even if the actual restoration projects are done in isolation from each other.)

See Table

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Integrated restoration will be the next big thing. Each industry of restorative development has emerged independently of—and often oblivious to—the other restorative industries. At the time of this writing, I’ve not encountered any sense of community or shared purpose among, for instance, the restorers of brownfields, the restorers of cathedrals, and the restorers of fisheries. I hope one of the small contributions of this book will be to foster the emergence of such a community, or at least a multidisciplinary professional network.

One way an integrated restoration community could develop would be if those who sponsor conferences and/or trade shows related to the various restoration industries would work with each other to colocate. Properly coordinated, this should not only provide for wonderful interdisciplinary networking and sharing of expertise, but should also produce some fringe benefits like cheaper hotel rooms and meeting space, thanks to combined bargaining power.

Imagine being at the first combined event, maybe bringing together the Restoration and Renovation show (commercial and residential buildings), one of the annual brownfields conferences, the American Fisheries Society, several of the hundreds of regional watershed and river restoration NGOs, the Society for Ecological Restoration, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, inner-city revitalization commissions, the Land Trust Alliance, the American (and the Royal) Society of Civil Engineers… well, you get the idea.

This list of potential professional and scientific societies, trade associations, NGOs, government agencies, international development banks and agencies, and commercial trade shows related to restoration numbers in the thousands. Universities could also play a key integrating role in the shared programs.

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

As illustrated earlier, new development-based economies, when excessively extended, destroy their past and depauperize their future in an increasingly frantic and futile pursuit of health, wealth, and security. There are at least two inherent ironies in our current situation: (1) restoring our “depauperized” future can be tremendously profitable, both for practitioners and investors; and (2) new development was supposed to be all about “progress” and “creating the future,” but in its latter days, our New Development Economy mostly stole from the future, in a desperate attempt to hold a deteriorating present together.

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No matter what political or economic changes occur, restorative development will continue to mushroom, and the necessary funds will (usually) appear. Public funding is subject to the usual ups and downs, of course, but the ebb and flow of support from Capitol Hill is far less vicious than that for new development and maintenance, because restoration is far more politically saleable. As with smart codes and the spawning of the brownfields restoration industry, sometimes it only takes minimal (well-directed) public efforts and funding to catalyze vast amounts of private investment in restoration.

At this early stage, though, it’s investors who are likely to be among the biggest near-term beneficiaries of restorative development’s growth. New technologies, new companies, and new projects all require financing, and precious few institutions have developed their expertise in this new investment frontier. Here’s a quick review of three general categories of opportunities that pervaded these pages:

• Restorative real estate investment This is akin to the old fixer-upper scenario, but with more focus on intrinsic value and true restoration. It could be as “normal” as restoring a house with an interesting history. Or it could be more adventurous, such as buying degraded farmland, mildly polluted industrial property, or a clear-cut forest with ugly erosion scars that happens to be in a great location (a gorgeous tropical island?), and restoring it to health. Such investments could be the pinnacle of buy-low-sell-high, and the lifestyle enhancement, fringe, and tax benefits can be tremendous. Restorative land development is accessible to both private individuals and large corporations. One wealthy couple is restoring the oyster beds—which also brings back crabs and fish— offshore from their waterfront Chesapeake Bay home. Dee Hock, creator of the Visa credit card network, bought a tract of devastated land and restored it as a restorative therapy for himself, as he wound down from a high-stress business career. With experienced ecological restoration professionals guiding you—and an ability to trade time for capital—real estate restoration can be amazingly enjoyable, satisfying, and cost-effective.
• Restorative mutual funds, REITs (real estate investment trusts), etc. This is both a business opportunity for those owning the funds, and an investment opportunity for those who buy their shares. Many folks simply want to enrich their portfolio with investments that tap restorative development’s energy, but they 295don’t have the time or desire to research or get involved with specific projects. Restorative funds have already begun to emerge, and some are quite exotic, such as those dealing with water rights, wind farms, etc. (Note: The only business Enron owned that had significant real, physical assets—and real, bottom-line profits— was its wind energy business. Remember too that wind farms are increasingly being built on polluted land and former military bases, returning the land to economic productivity long before it has had time to heal ecologically.…)
• Public infrastructure opportunities Restoring public infrastructure can be expensive, and, as pointed out earlier, there’s over a trillion-dollar backlog of this work in the United States alone. Innovative solutions are beginning to emerge, such as New York City’s 2002 announcement that it was thinking of selling the Brooklyn Bridge (and others). The idea is that a company would purchase and restore the bridge, and then charge tolls to recoup its investment. This is similar to the design-build-operate model that has worked well in recent years for the building of new toll roads, water treatment facilities, etc. The emerging paradigms of the commercial and infrastructure construction industries will be design-restore (as opposed to design-build), design-restore-operate, etc.

RESTORATIVE POLITICIANS

Without extensive restoration, this planet will be physically incapable of returning to a predominance of new development for many, many millennia (barring global cataclysm). Those political and industry leaders who still see new development as the sole path to progress need to either retire, or adapt to the new reality. Not doing so will doom their constituents or companies to following new development into decline.

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This is mostly a business book, so I’ve tried to avoid excessive focus on politics. Restorative public leaders have been pointed out when appropriate, such as the current and previous mayors of Lisbon, Portugal, and Mayor Richard M. Daley in Chicago. Business and government restoring together is good for the economy, good for culture, and good for the environment: it’s a still-rare but powerful thing.

Governmental support for small, emerging industries is often a double-edged sword: The young industry becomes too dependent on incentives and/or direct funding, and thus is vulnerable to shifting political winds. The U.S. solar industry is a perfect example: Jimmy Carter gave it a good kick in the pants and it took off like a rocket. Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush shot that rocket out of the sky, putting the United States way behind other countries in this crucial technology.

Fortunately, restorative development, although still emerging, certainly isn’t small. Although most of the eight restorative industries receive large amounts of public funding, none except public infrastructure is totally dependent on it, and even that industry is becoming much more privatized. Politicians who protect distressed new-development industries could theoretically impede the Restoration Economy’s progress, but this seldom seems to happen. There’s no shortage of politicos who oppose conservation—and even sustainable development—but all seem to love restorative development.

Brownfields redevelopment is a rare example of a truly successful federal program. It might even be considered a “grassroots” government program, because it bubbled up from managers within the USEPA, rather than being mandated by legislation. They have been acting as facilitators for the many innovative state and municipal programs, and have provided a forum for sharing best practices.

Even regulators are partners in this process, something you almost never see in either new development or maintenance/conservation projects. This is a vital difference from the usual green initiative: brownfields redevelopers usually partner with the government, creating political pressure on regulators to expedite projects. The only way these officials can do their job properly under such time pressure is to get involved in the project at the earliest possible point, which means during the initial planning process. This is government at its best.

Christine Todd Whitman

Many Clinton-era conservation and sustainability initiatives were gutted by the George W. Bush administration, but the EPA’s support of the brown- 297fields program has continued unabated, because it was inherited by a true believer. Former EPA Administrator Carol Browner was at the helm when the brownfields initiative was created. She passed the reins to Christine Todd Whitman, who, as New Jersey’s governor, was perhaps the brown-fields redevelopment champion among U.S. state governors (despite her dismantling of many hard-won environmental legislative protections).

Via smart codes, Whitman pioneered innovative approaches to the adaptive reuse of old and/or historic buildings to revitalize blighted New Jersey cities. She was also active in river and coastal ecosystem restoration, and fisheries restoration. Her strongest competition for the title of “most restorative governor” might have been Maryland’s Parris Glendening (for reasons documented in Chapters 7 and 11).

In the U.S. Congress, there are several examples of restorative legislators, but here I’ll just choose the two (one from each party) who seem to be the leaders. Let’s look at the Democratic example first: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.

Remember the discussion in Chapter 11, about the cities that demolished their heritage during the urban renewal craze of the ‘60s and ‘70s? Although most of the cities that survived that period with their heritage intact were those that were too poor to afford “renewal” at the time, not all were saved by serendipitous economic depression. Occasionally, far-sighted leadership won out, but it was usually based on individual champions, not general enlightenment.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Washington, D.C., provides a perfect example. John F. Kennedy hired a celebrated architect, Nathaniel Owings, to plan the rebuilding of Pennsylvania Avenue. This is the central artery connecting the Capitol Building to the White House. In typical ‘60s fashion, Owings planned the demolition of a huge swath of the city’s most beautiful buildings, including the Willard Hotel and the Washington Hotel, the National Press Club building, the Old Post Office (now a luxury hotel and shopping mall), the Old Patent Office (now Smithsonian museums), and more.

The man who almost single-handedly killed the plan, saved these buildings, and called for their restoration was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Fortunately, his commitment to restoring the city superceded political affiliations, and this Democrat went on to become Richard Nixon’s urban affairs advisor. This post enabled Moynihan to provide critically important continuity, and the plan that finally emerged in 1972 followed his recommendations to a large degree.

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The one building from Owings’ original plan that did get built— the sterile, somewhat disturbing eyesore called the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building—stands as evidence of how ugly Washington might be today were it not for Moynihan. His influence didn’t end there, either: the fabulously restored Union Station is also one of “his” projects, as is the largest new building—the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center—which is modern, beautiful, and architecturally appropriate.

Nor was his restorative hand at work only in D.C. In New York City, many restorations and redevelopments owe their existence to Moynihan, including Penn Station and the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House in Battery Park. In 2001, the Urban Land Institute awarded him its second annual ULI/C. Nichols Prize for Visionary Urban Development.

Lincoln D. Chafee

Our Republican champion of restoration in the Senate is Lincoln D. Chafee from Rhode Island. The ranking Republican on the Superfund, Waste Control, and Risk Assessment subcommittee, Senator Chafee has amassed an impressive record of restorative leadership in the past decade:

• He sponsored the 2002 Brownfields Revitalization and Environmental Restoration Act.
• He sponsored The Estuary Restoration Act of 2000.
• He was executive director of the Northeast Corridor Initiative (now expanded to the National Corridor Initiative) which works to revitalize America’s rail service.
• He was mayor of Warwick, Rhode Island, where he championed the revitalization of Greenwich Bay. Heavily contaminated with sewage when he became mayor in 1992, it’s now one of the best places in the state for shellfishing.

Lest conservationists worry that the good senator is single-minded about restoration, it should be noted that Lincoln Chafee was one of the 299few Republicans brave enough to oppose oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

There are, no doubt, many other U.S. politicians who should have been mentioned here, such as California’s Gov. Gray Davis, who recently signed an executive order requiring government agencies to reuse old buildings, or-if that’s not possible-to reuse inner city land (which would often involve brownfields remediation). There’s an even larger number of restorative politicians from other countries who have been ignored here. To them, I apologize. Suffice it to say that restorative development is a passion that is crossing all political boundaries. Keep an eye out for restorative candidates in your city, county, state, province, and country: they represent our restored future.

WHAT TO DO WITH THIS KNOWLEDGE

At the very least, I hope this book will get the subject of restorative development on the agenda of your next strategic planning or brainstorming session. Reading it should, I hope, give you a starting point for realigning your organization’s mission with the threats and opportunities of this “backswing” of the economic pendulum.

“Backswing” sounds regressive, but everything in the universe runs in cycles. A grandfather clock stops running when its owner decides that only one swing of the pendulum is “good,” and manually forces it in that one direction. Likewise, those organizations that continue straining towards new development will founder when they refuse to evolve— culturally, structurally, and strategically—in harmony with this natural, inevitable transition to restoring our world.

The United Nations currently predicts that the world population will eventually stabilize at between 10 and 11 billion by 2150. Based on trends “down here” at 6 billion, that’s likely to be one ugly state of stability: Global ecosystems already can’t service us adequately. Again, widespread restoration offers the only light on the horizon, unless a deadly pandemic of biblical proportions “rescues” us first. The United Nations does have a more optimistic alternative scenario: It shows world population declining to 3.6 billion by 2150. But even under that projection, world population will first double in the next 40 to 50 years, which is the only time period that matters for today’s leaders and investors.

Even if the happiest of those predictions manifests, we still have to get from here to there with enough species remaining on the planet for it to function, and with our ecosystems strong enough to provide something 300approaching a “quality” of life. Absent wide-scale restorative development, things will get much, much worse before they (maybe) get better. Continuation of an economy based heavily on new development would guarantee that the path to 2150 would be the same resource-poor nightmare for “First Worlders” that it already is for many “Second and Third Worlders.”

A FEW PARTING THOUGHTS

You’ve probably discovered in this book a lot of “trees” you never before heard of—or never noticed—but I hope your main takeaway from this book is a new perception of the “forest” they create.

Despite all my jumping up and down about “the Restoration Economy,” we should remember that economies and societies are sloppy, complex, endlessly surprising organisms. Restorative development will no doubt be the overarching theme of the twentyfirst century, but it certainly won’t explain everything we do. Nor will it instantly end our lingering attachment to new development.

What we need more than anything else at this point is dialogue and contemplation, and to avoid charging ahead as if we already know what we’re doing. Restorative development is complex because it’s huge and diverse, but also because it involves human societies and economies, natural ecosystems, and a network of built systems (industrial, residential, commercial, infrastructure, etc.), each of which is, or is part of, a complex system.

Maybe I’ve overreached in my enthusiasm to wake readers to the work of the world’s restorers. My definition of “restorative development” might be too broad for practicality, but my assumption was that the more people who are involved in this dialogue, the better. I hope that more capable researchers, practitioners, and writers will pick up the ball and run with it, taking it in more accurate and productive directions.

Simply dividing development activity into the three modes of new development, maintenance/conservation, and restorative development greatly increases our ability to have clear, practical dialogue about our past, present, and future. With luck, someone may build a useful economic model around this trimodal perspective. A sufficiently rigorous model might even develop into every economist’s fantasy: a tool with at least a little predictive value.

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Of course, there’s nothing new about viewing economies from a closed-loop, life cycle perspective. The Scandinavians have led the world in life cycle economic planning for some time now—thanks to the pioneering work of Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt and his Natural Step program— and Paul Hawken has been that concept’s primary champion in the United States. The trimodal development perspective is so obvious that I’ll be amazed if readers don’t flood me with reports of similar ideas published earlier, which somehow eluded my research.

Please Join Me in Better Documenting the Restoration Economy, Especially Its Best Practices and “Leading Lights”

For every organization and project mentioned in these pages, I was forced to ignore dozens for lack of space, and I’m probably altogether ignorant of far more. I became familiar with many of the nonprofit and community projects featured in these pages while setting up Restorica (www.restorica.org), a small charitable organization that’s still forming. Restorica, Inc.’s mission is to better integrate the eight industries of restorative development via research, multidisciplinary networking, and community-based model projects.

The Restoration Economy focuses primarily on big-picture issues— concepts, technologies, and illustrative projects—rather than the companies, nonprofits, and people behind them. The business, investment, academic, and government leaders of restorative development will be profiled in a future book dedicated to success stories.

I’m collecting material for that work now, and would appreciate hearing from readers who know of exemplary research, firms, institutions, individuals, or restorative projects. You can contact me at [email protected]. If you know of a deserving community or not-for-profit project that needs assistance connecting with resources of any kind (human, knowledge, monetary, material, etc.), please submit the request at www.restorica.org, or email me at [email protected]. If your organization or community has a successful project you’d like me to publicize through my talks, I’m always looking for dramatic before-and-after photos.

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Personal Restoration

I hope I’ve also motivated you to get involved in some form of restoration, if not professionally, then as a volunteer. Why? Because personal exposure to restoration has remarkable power to change our worldview, often in a way that puts new development into a dramatically new perspective (seldom a flattering one).

What’s more, the act of restoration can be profoundly restorative on a personal basis. Wildlife rescue workers at oil spills often cite their days or weeks of cleaning beaches and de-oiling seabirds and otters as life-changing. They frequently extend a volunteered weekend into a month of leave from their jobs without pay. Many pray for the day when oil industry executives will be sentenced by the courts to partake hands-on in these efforts, the way vandals are often sentenced to removing graffiti. Nothing, they say, would more expeditiously end many of the socially and ecologically pathogenic practices of the increasingly dysfunctional realm of new development.

T. S. Eliot once said in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1922), “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it.… For order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, value of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.” So it is with the shift to a Restoration Economy: When we marvel at the results of a restorative development project, we simultaneously lose some of our previous infatuation with the wonders of new development. New development’s destructive, wasteful, and/or toxic side effects—so easy to overlook when new development is the only game in town—suddenly appear shabby, even criminal, when viewed from a restorative development worldview.

There is always a place for some new development in any economy, but the growth of restorative development always comes at the expense of new development’s slice of the pie. New development isn’t going away. Remember that term “Restoration Economy” only refers to the dominant mode: the economic phase we’re entering is putting significant power to all three development “wheels,” but restorative development will be grabbing by far the most traction.

For the past three decades, progress has been impeded by the pervasive fallacy that a decline in new development equates to economic recession in general. We’ve believed the choice to be two-sided: the unsustainable path of new development vs. the sustainable—but less economically vigorous—path of maintenance/conservation.

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Now, we’re discovering that there’s a third option, restorative development, which combines the economic power of new development with the sustainability of maintenance/conservation. Therein lies the twenty-first century’s most extensive new universe of business and investment opportunities.

The past few decades also have been typified by a wealth of innovation in tools, along with a dearth of vision as to how to best put them to use. Restorative development is the vision we’ve been missing, the one that can make full and responsible use of the many technologies, such as genetic engineering, that have simultaneously been wooing and threatening us.

As witnessed by the above quote from Michael Grunwald’s in-depth, four-part Washington Post series on the Everglades restoration, the dollars flowing into the Restoration Economy are vast, but so is the learning curve. The worst thing that can happen—and what is happening to a large extent in the Everglades—is for the people who created the need for restoration in the first place to be put in charge of the restoration, without first undergoing a thorough restoration of their own organizations, their component disciplines, their mindsets, and their body of knowledge. This need for increased knowledge, sensitivity, multidisciplinary approaches, and comfort with complexity also applies to restoration of the built environment—particularly the industries of heritage restoration and disaster/war reconstruction—though not to the same extent, since those who restore the built environment are usually not the ones who created the need.

Samuel Johnson said in his Preface to Shakespeare (Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespear’s Plays, 1765), “Of the first building that was 304raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or square, but whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time.” To apply the insight of the esteemed Mr. Johnson to our discussion: of any developing society, we can easily determine the amount of money or goods it produces, but whether that development was intelligent, just, or healthy will be determined in comparison to what comes after.

Individual restoration projects—even of a single building—often rate their own book (I’ve got dozens of such books). Community revitalization projects have so many stakeholders, factors, and agendas, that their stories are much lengthier. Ask the folks in Portland, Maine about their restored waterfront; ask Norfolk, Virginia about Diggs Town; ask Ponce, Puerto Rico about its Historic Center; or ask Los Angeles, California about restoring its Central Public Library. All deserve their own books.

Restoration-oriented laws and codes are emerging, restoration businesses are flourishing, and restorative mayors, governors, and presidents are entering office. It usually takes two terms for elected leaders to make a difference, which is just one of the reasons I’m projecting that restorative development will become the largest development sector sometime between 2012 and 2020.

Many folks are already actively restoring our world—built, natural, and social—in ways large and small, as professionals and as volunteers. They are all my heroes.

In Conclusion…

In this book, I’ve attempted a number of tasks:

1. Introducing the three modes of development and offering a brief taste of the eight industries of restorative development in both the built and natural environments.
2. Showcasing a few projects that demonstrate how the restoration of one portion of our world can synergistically affect the restoration of other portions.
3. Familiarizing you with some of the Restoration Economy’s players. (Note: Many of these were in the public and not-for-profit sector; corporate players will get more coverage in this book’s sequel.)
4. 305Inspiring the millions of people involved worldwide in the eight industries of restorative development to “look up and see each other.” Hopefully, this will lead to more interdisciplinary collaboration, more standardization of terms/principles/agendas, and more multifaceted restoration project integration.
5. Hinting at important areas of needed research, organization, investment, and legislation that will accelerate the already-fast-growing Restoration Economy.

Is restoring our entire world utopian? Maybe. Is it achievable? Absolutely. Is it likely? That’s up to you. As the old saying goes, “Anyone can make a living … I want to make a difference.” Nothing makes a more dramatic difference than restoration. Our best possible world will come when every aspect of human endeavor has been imbued with the restorative dynamic, not just in our built and natural environments, but our social environment as well. One likely result would be the restoration of cultures, land, rights, and access to justice to those from whom such things have been lost, stolen, or denied.

The book was only a high-speed, high-altitude reconnaissance of a vast new territory. Its intent was to whet—not satiate—your appetite for knowledge about restorative development. In the process of researching this book, I accumulated enough material for at least four books.

Excising those in-depth explorations of the Restoration Economy’s many fascinating subjects was painful but necessary, if this initial work was to fulfill its goal of being an overview, accessible to readers of almost any background and discipline. As you’ll see in Restoration Readings, though, there is no shortage of excellent material already in print, ready to help you explore almost any facet of restoration in more detail.

Where We Go from Here

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Our evolution to restorative development is well begun.

Of the three modes of developing civilizations within our natural and built environments—new development, maintenance/conservation, and restorative development—only the latter is capable of being perpetuated indefinitely. Moral and spiritual evolution aside, if we have any chance of achieving the “indefinite perpetuation” of our civilizations, it will come from recognizing and embracing the “final” third of the societal life cycle: restoration.

We are finally maturing beyond the shortsighted, frontier-style, plundering mode of new development. We are finally ceasing our naive dependence on maintenance and conservation to balance new development’s compulsive excesses. We are finally realizing that sustainability isn’t based on limiting economic growth, but on making it restorative. Nature has demonstrated this for millions of years. We’re finally displaying that same wisdom, and it’s none too soon.

Restorative development is already a very substantial factor in our everyday lives, but we’re in a rather awkward transitional period. It’s awkward because we’re not used to nice surprises. War, tragedy, and disaster seem to be the norm when it comes to unplanned major events. Discovering that we have a sure path to a brighter future, and that it’s already roaring along with a good head of steam, seems downright strange. After a steady diet of political hype and corporate promises regarding “brighter futures,” discovering that it has become reality feels, well, unreal.

This century shows every sign of going down in history as our proudest moment (warfare and crises, which have always been with us, notwithstanding.)

You should now be more prepared to perceive the economic growth opportunities that will make this global restoration happen. Welcome to the Restoration Economy!