Part One
The Transition from Our “New Development” Past to Our “Restorative Development” Future

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Restorative development: A mode of development that increases the health or value of existing assets without (or with minimal) destruction of other assets, and without significantly increasing the restored assets’ geographic or ecological footprints.

—one of several working definitions (by author)

The goal of Part One is to familiarize readers with the general nature of restorative development and its underlying history, dynamics, drivers, and cycles.

This section offers generalized, big-picture insights designed to help organizational and governmental leaders understand the basic nature and underlying causes of the dominant macrotrend of the twenty-first century: the growth of restorative development. This is the factor they can least afford to ignore when formulating their developmental strategies.

Chapter 1 will review the three global crises that are driving restorative development’s rapid growth. I’ve labeled them the Constraint Crisis, the Corrosion Crisis, and the Contamination Crisis. Chapter 2 will explore the concept of looking at development from a life cycle point of view, which divides it into the three modes of new development, maintenance/conservation, and restorative development.

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Chapter 3 will step back and provide a little historical perspective on restorative development. Chapter 4 will wrap up this first section by examining the question that, more than any other, seems to leave more people scratching their heads: how in the world did we accumulate such a broad expanse of related multibillion-dollar industries without noticing it much earlier?

Although you’ll probably be surprised by the size of our existing restoration industries, the real eye-opener is that none of them is close to mature. Many are very, very new. Despite their already impressive rapid rates of growth, two new factors will accelerate these restorative industries at an even more astonishing pace in the coming decade.

The first factor is the simple recognition of the Restoration Economy’s existence, its encompassing of both the built and natural environments, and its eight restoration industries. The second factor is the onset of integrated restoration, a practice that will spawn myriad new professional disciplines, research programs, design and consulting services, and entirely new industries. This book offers only brief flashes of the trend toward integration; this trend deserves its own book, and will get it.

The Restoration Economy will thus attempt to

1.raise awareness of why restorative development has emerged in such vast proportions, and why its advent has been both rapid and unheralded;

2.broadly define the restoration markets with the most growth potential; and

3.provide some insight into issues that must be addressed by organizations responding to restorative development’s threats and opportunities.

The major activities of the twenty-first century will restore our natural world, our built world, our social world, our work world, our family world, and even our “inner world” (the realm of spirit). We are maturing from the “exploit and run” behavior of raiders, to behavior befitting of long-term natives of our planet. We’re developing a sense of place, creating a present that forms a viable connection between our past and our future. Let’s now explore the frontier of this global restoration.