ABSTRACT
Environmental planning is a complex field of research and professional practice. Since it emerged as a distinctive and coherent sub-discipline in the late 1960s, it has rapidly evolved into one of the core elements of planning. When we talk about planning here – we are referring to spatial planning, variously called land use planning, town planning, urban planning or regional planning. Planning is something that humans do every day. It is a pro-active anticipation of the future, identifying options, prioritising competing demands on our time and resources, and making decisions about what to do next, based on the best available information. At a personal level we plan what we are going to do on the weekend. We plan on what we are going to eat for dinner. Many of us plan on what we are going to wear, how we will get to work, which friends we will see next and what we will do on our holidays. We plan our careers, our parties, our weddings and our finances. But when we look at the looming environmental crises ahead of us, such as the impacts of global climate change, peak oil, peak phosphorous, food and water insecurity and the catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the small schemes of daily life seem insignificant. Australians must urgently give more attention to collectively planning the future of our cities and our planet so we can avoid or limit future macro-scale shocks and stresses. This necessitates living a philosophy of restraint and conscious actions – so that collectively our choices add up to what Janis Birkeland calls ‘net-positive development’ (chapter 20).
