‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

Wouldn’t reducing ecological waste be detrimental to the economy?
Not if we define economic progress in terms of human development and life quality, as some ecological 
economists have tried to do.
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In any case, assessment systems only provide information and guidance.
They do not make decisions or generate design solutions. Decision-makers and the general public 
may, of course, continue to choose designed waste over eco-logical design, either deliberately or 
unthinkingly
. 
But while ‘design’ creates something that does not yet exist, assessing and ‘choosing’ 
among options is often a matter of the elimination of ‘less bad’ options. Thus, for example, selective 
forestry or plantations grown on degraded land for timber products might generate less ecological 
waste than clear-felling and mining native forests for woodchips. Decision-makers can continue to 
ignore critical sustainability issues such as time, space, living ecosystems, and the wealth transfers 
entailed in allocating land and resources to development. Nonetheless, the public has a ‘right to 
know’ what is happening. After all, basic democratic rights are inextricably linked with the control 
of and access to the means of survival, much of which is determined by land-use and development 
control decisions. Decision systems that ignore ecological waste also ignore the loss of the means of 
survival (ecological base) and the loss of substantive democracy (public estate) that result from the 
linear and unilateral pattern of resource transfers over time. It is apparent that analyses of waste that 
treat resources as inert materials will not preserve nature over the long term.
What would a new conception of ecological waste bring to current analyses?
We can use a simple example. An ecological waste analysis on whether to build a nuclear power plant 
would put a value on time, space, ecosystem functioning and end purposes, along with the other 
impacts and issues like reliability of uranium supplies, nuclear proliferation, etc.
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An ecological 
waste analysis for a nuclear power plant would quantify:
•
The opportunity costs of storing spent fuel rods for thousands of years (ie what could have
been done instead).
• 
The land area or space that uranium mining and waste storage would alienate from other 
purposes over thousands of years.
• 
The time required for the ecology to restore itself as complex and resilient ecosystems.
• 
The effective commissioned life span before the plant becomes a contaminated liability,
which is only about 50 years (the costs of decommissioning nuclear power plants have
generally been left to taxpayers).
• 
The purposes to which the uranium will be put (eg weapons) as well as the alternative means
of achieving those ends (eg peacemaking).
Environmentalists consider these things, but they are not integral to the balance sheets, and they are 
often excluded from the debate because they are ostensibly ‘unquantifiable’.

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Positive Development