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

Does this mean our views of waste get in the way of Positive Development?
If we just add up the costs and benefits of environmental change from this point on, we do not design 
for whole systems improvements. Assessments are used as a basis for approving development proposals 
whenever and wherever they are put on the table by willing investors [Chapter 7]. Remarkably, the 
benefits of a development still 
only
need to be deemed to outweigh the costs. The project need 
not contribute positively to sustainability objectives or reduce existing impacts in the environment.
Approval is generally assured if a project is ‘less unsustainable’ than conventional buildings. In 
theory, the market should be able to close loops on its own, as eco-efficiency improvements to existing 
processes and products are inherently cost-effective on a level playing field. But in this institutional 
context, it cannot. We could, however, reverse the process of market-driven, government-subsidized 
innovation that ignores the ongoing public costs of development. For example, planners could: 
•
Identify problems and waste in the existing environment that developers can address through
eco-retrofitting
• 
Determine positive low-risk development opportunities for innovators and investors to
invest in 
• 
Allocate public investment to stimulating eco-innovations that can replace resource-intensive
machines and products with natural systems
Our development approval systems discriminate against sustainability, because they do not consider 
the ecology (let alone the ‘solar system’). Therefore they do not consider the foundational complex 
system, nature, upon which all else is built.
Why can’t we just require the externalities to be internalized?
Internalizing usually just means paying (a portion of) the immediate economic costs of negative 
impacts. In other words ‘internalizing’, in the conventional usage, is not the opposite of externalizing.
Even if private industry ‘internalized’ public costs, as green economists propose, this would not 
repair the damage. Nor would it compensate the public for the goods and services that benefit 
developers – such as environmental quality and transport systems that bring the employees, clients 
and customers to their business. Over time, environmental management systems have effectively 
facilitated the transfer of public goods and resources (eg land, water and forests) to private interests.
We can consider these transfers ‘internalities’, as they are the converse of externalities. These benefits 
are left out of assessments. This happens through both direct and indirect forms of institutional 
design [Chapter 14]. In other words:
•
Externalities include indirect transfers that result from allowing toxins and waste to 
accumulate in nature and diminish the ecosystem viability of the ecological base
• 
Internalities include political policies that allow public resources and space to be used for
private purposes and profits in a way that diminishes the public estate
An example of internalities is where public goods and services are effectively privatized through 
environmental management systems that allocate ‘rights’ in pollution, water ownership, and so 
on [Chapter 11]. The privatization of resources appears more ‘efficient’ than it really is when the 
analytical framework does not take into account the loss and opportunity cost or long-term ecological 

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Positive Development
viability. Our environment is being shaped to fit an economic model and decision process that not 
only devalues natural resources, but treats them as inert. If we considered the cumulative privatization 
of environmental benefits (as well as the distribution of negative impacts), and its effect on the 
ecological base and public estate over time, we would at least make the loss of ecosystems more 
‘visible’ [Box 52].