In Santa Fe and around the world, people are calling for a sustainable way of life. Cities compete over who can be the greenest the quickest. Old industries are being retooled and new ones developed to address the challenges of global change. But in our rush toward solutions, are we making many of the same mistakes that created the trouble we want to address?

As sustainability moves to the center of culture and politics, some serious issues emerge. For example, we need to ask ourselves what we are really trying to sustain. I believe, whether or not we are fully aware of it, that our deepest desire is to sustain the places we live and love.

Although news reports on carbon emissions and loss of species are accurate, they miss the central point. They focus on quantity, not quality. Those qualities that make life worth living are threatened: clean air and water, good food and friends, vibrant local culture, education for children, care for elders, a sense of belonging.

So I propose the real work of the next century, the work that will make us truly sustainable, is qualitative work. It's about remembering place. Anthropologist and author Frank Waters once wrote: "Every place on earth bespeaks its own rhythm of life. Each continent has its own spirit of place, which it imparts to its distinctive species of plants and animals, its human races. So does every country, every locality. Even great cities impart their own special essence, apart from their architectural and cultural backgrounds."

Santa Fe derives its greatness from the underlying spirit of the mountains and valleys of Northern New Mexico. Our city is blessed with an enduring magic that seems to be able to survive even in spite of the bad choices we sometimes make. In our part of the world, place has a strong character and unmistakable flavor.

To sustain a good and meaningful life here requires relearning the rhythm of the land and allowing that rhythm to indicate appropriate patterns for human activities. The land is alive, and we are a part of that life. Our ways of creating business, development, energy, education, water use, agriculture, forestry, and all the other ways that people and land interact can and should take direction from Nature, the master designer.

The rhythm of Northern New Mexico comes from the unique qualities of its land: the melted snows that supply our water; the air high, dry and thin enough to see a hundred miles through; the sun pervasive and penetrating; the light, clear and cool in spring, honey colored in fall; the soils thin, precious and prone to salt; the distinctive smell of clay and sage after rain; the black earth that collects at the foot of a juniper; the leafy sound of aspens or cottonwoods.

These qualities make our region like no other on the planet. They suggest potential. The land has characteristics that make it uniquely suited to certain things. You can grow Chimayó chiles in other places, but they won't have the flavor and fire that comes from their native soil and water. As it has for millennia, the beauty of the land and light attracts artists, thinkers and spiritual seekers.

These "impractical" considerations rarely enter the sustainability conversation, which tends to share the same scientific and economic world view that created so many environmental problems in the first place. Its solutions are primarily sought from a combination of technology and governmental policy. The strategy is one of substitution: compact fluorescent light bulbs for incandescents, compost for chemicals, electric cars for gas guzzlers.

One of the perverse outcomes of the technological approach can be the exchange of one kind of destruction for another. Ethanol, a "renewable" substitute for gasoline, can be made from corn and other biological products. But the hidden costs of growing that fuel — such as soil erosion, pollution from chemicals, displacement of subsistence agriculture in the Third World — may be every bit as devastating as the problem it intends to solve.

As useful and appropriate as many of these technologies may or may not be, they can't replace a thoughtful examination of where we live. Or how where we live shapes the potential for who we could be. A strategy of substitution assumes nothing is wrong with the overall picture — it's just some of the parts that need to change. But many of our problems arise from the way we think (or fail to think) about the big picture.

As a culture, one of our most destructive tendencies has been one-size-fits-all thinking.

Nature, on the other hand, is in the business of creating difference and evolution. Nature operates a global network of local phenomena. To be genuinely sustainable, that is to be in harmonious relationship with Nature, requires indigenous solutions woven into a global fabric.

For Santa Fe, these indigenous solutions will need to address more than resources like energy and water. To be sustainable, Santa Fe also has to create an economy that allows its long-term residents — the very people who have made it such a desirable place to live — to survive and flourish here. In many ways, an economy based on place has the highest potential for generating the unique value that can be sustained over generations.

It is the qualitative dimensions of life on Earth that awaken human capacities for creativity, caring and love. Fear can be a motivator, but it can't be a sustaining source of motivation. Fear of climate change won't inspire us to change our image of who we are and who we could be. Fear of injustice won't cause us to get along. But love of place, and working to restore and release the untapped potential of place, just might.

Ben Haggard is an author, design consultant and lifelong Santa Fe resident. He is co-founder of Regenesis, an ecological design group. To see more of Haggard's thoughts on sustainability, see his article in the 2008 Sustainable Santa Fe guide, available at coffee shops and bookstores. For more information, visit www.regenesisgroup.com.