Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Storm Cunningham is a redevelopment policy advisor for communities worldwide. He is the author of The Restoration Economy (Berrett-Koehler, 2002) and Rewealth (McGraw-Hill, 2008).

Storm is publisher of Revitalization News, the global journal of urban, rural, and planetary regeneration.

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Your guide to wealth creation through restoration

Restorative development is the largest, fastest-growing new source of prosperity in today's global economy. ReWealth! unveils the astonishing growth of this trend, presenting the context and strategies for taking advantage of the tremendous wealth of restorable assets-all while renewing and revitalizing the world around us.

Redevelopment expert Storm Cunningham explains how business and job growth is increasingly generating rewealth by rebuilding derelict structures, restoring water and dying ecosystems, and revitalizing farmlands. Drawing upon his extensive experience in economic development and integrated revitalization, Cunningham provides

• A clear explanation of the global shift that is driving the multi-trillion-dollar market for products and services that revitalize cities and restore natural resources
• Proven, universal rules of renewal that will enable you to bring communities, urban lands, and whole regions back to life-and raise all the money you need to do so
• Proof that pollution, sprawl, and loss of wildlife habitat are not the inevitable price of progress

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reWealth!

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

The first fundamental economic revolution since 1776: Adam Smith cured the major economic problem of his day but ignored a fatal flaw, creating many of the economic, environmental, and social problems of our day.

For some 5,000 years, our wealth has been based—directly or indirectly—on development, defilement, and depletion. Every gallon of ocean water is now polluted to some degree, all humans have some Chernobyl in their bodies, and all ecosystems in the planet are in decline or collapse. This sets the stage for the twenty-first century, the Century of Revitalization. The Age of Rewealth is already well underway to the tune of some $2 trillion worth of annual activity worldwide.

Most attempts to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution to the world's plethora of crises and injustices have all had the same fundamental flaw: they tried to improve an economy based on development, depletion, and degradation; dewealth activities that together comprise what we're calling a deconomy. This was just a matter of default, of accepting the 5,000-year-old mode of wealth-creation that was already in place. After all, how else do you create a civilization than by constructing new buildings and infrastructure, and by extracting food, water, oil, metals, from raw land and pristine seas?

But hanging on to civilization's birth mode too long is now undoing both our present and our future. It's obvious to any child that a growing population on a planet of finite size cannot remain in that pioneering mode forever. Sooner or later, if we wish to keep growing economically, the basis of wealth must shift to renewing what we've already built, and on repairing the damage we've done to our natural resources. Such wealth-creating activities—redevelopment, replenishment, and restoration—comprise rewealth. We're shifting from a deconomy to a reconomy.

Many of the problems we now take for granted as the "price of progress" simply disappear when our existence—as individuals, companies, and communities—no longer relies on the extraction of virgin resources and the conquering of raw land. Our most fundamental assumptions about our future are altered beyond recognition when our present is based on renewing the capacity of the communities we've already developed, and on repairing the damage we did to our natural resources while developing those communities. The de/re shift turns our planet-wide catalog of woes into a vast global inventory of restorable assets.

This isn't just semantics or positive thinking: some $2 trillion worth of restorative business is conducted annually, worldwide. It's the fastest-growing major sector of the world economy, tapping an equally fast-growing inventory of restorable assets currently valued at some $100 trillion (more on that later). For instance: the remediation and redevelopment of contaminated sites (brownfields) didn't even exist as an industry in 1990. Today, it accounts for some $7 billion annually in the United States alone, but only a few thousand of the approximately 1,000,000 U.S. brown-field sites have been dealt with. California alone has at least 100,000 brownfields.

Likewise, ecosystem restoration barely existed as an industry 20 years ago: now multibillion-dollar environmental restoration projects are appearing, some in the tens of billions of dollars. A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking real money. Not only is rewealth not a niche or a peripheral curiosity, it already accounts for the majority of economic growth in many—possibly most—older cities.

A note regarding semantics: this book refers to ecosystems, human culture, and other sources of often-sublime beauty by the cold accounting terms "assets" and "resources." My intention isn't to infer that they only have value if monetized. Nor is it to infer that all of them are inherently "ours." The goal is to simply fit everything that contributes to our quality of life within the rewealth paradigm. This systematic approach should make it easier for more people to earn a living restoring those things that bring us health, wealth, and happiness.

Three Types of Wealth Creation

Before we go further, let's briefly posit three categories of wealth creation:

1. Destructive wealth or dewealth: Wealth derived from depleting the planet's "savings" ... that is its store of endowed assets that are either nonreplaceable or very slowly replaceable (not relevant to human timescales). Dewealth destroys perpetual assets (ecosystem services that produce such things as clean water, clean air, and fish), replacing them with transitory assets (office complexes, shopping malls). This style of wealth builds new civilizations, but will undermine those same civilizations if they remain in birth mode after they should have shifted to renewal mode. This failure to transition from dewealth to rewealth briefly benefits a few people in the present, but impoverishes and poisons the majority both now and for many generations to come.

2. Preservative wealth or "prewealth": Wealth derived from preserving assets and maintaining systems. This kind of wealth is neutral, neither depleting nor actively replenishing the overall health or wealth of the world. Prewealth activities maintain our built environment and conserve our natural environment. Besides conserving natural systems not damaged by dewealth, prewealth preserves assets (infrastructure and buildings) created by dewealth, and maintains built and natural assets already renewed by rewealth.

3. Regenerative wealth or rewealth: Wealth derived from replenishing depleted natural and cultural resources; from remediating contaminated properties; and by restoring, renovating, reusing, or otherwise increasing the capacity and efficiency of an aging built environment. When the renewal of one asset requires the destruction of another (such as removing a dam to restore a river) preference should usually be shown to the longer-lived or irreplaceable asset. For example, a river can provide benefits to humans and wildlife for hundreds of thousands of years. Dams have a useful life measured in decades.

Let's use farming to illustrate the three types of wealth creation: sustainable agriculture (prewealth) replaces the soil nutrients removed by each crop. An example is the old Aztec beans/squash/corn system still in use on many small farms throughout Mexico. This is as opposed to extractive agriculture (dewealth), such as practiced on the Great Plains of the United States. There, the topsoil depth has decreased from 10 to 20 feet to only an inch or two on most factory farms. Contrast both with restorative agriculture (rewealth), which leaves topsoil thicker and healthier with each passing year.

Rewealth restores value without destroying existing value. The exception to the non-destructive rule is when the continued existence of an asset conflicts with an area's renewal program, such as a highway that isolates a community from its waterfront. Within the context of community revitalization, that highway is a liability, even though it might be carried on the accounting books as a multimillion-dollar asset.

Being in a reconomy...