by Wayne Hayes, Ph. D.
8/20/00
This page, a work truly in progress, introduces the reade to some of the basic notions of sustainability.
This web node introduces the reader to the idea of sustainable development and its synonym, sustainability. I offer this for my students and for visitors to the Sustainable Development Web Site. The site will change from time to time and revisions will be noted in our Sustainability Bulletin Board.
The discussion of sustainability began about thirteen years ago, but has become more central an urgent as two trends have continued:
Globalization has accelerated, mostly in terms of trade and communications. Thus, the means toward widespread social change has surged beyond our ability to comprehend or adjust. Human population has surpassed six billion, aggravating this trend.
Climate change, although still under scrutiny, seems to have accelerated and its effects have become evident worldwide. The environment, despite redoubled regulatory regimes, has coninued to present novel surprises and dilemmas.
The global chasm in life chances between the rich and the poor has widened, presenting an ethical challenge to our species. Further, the unfairness of accidents of birth has become dysfuntional in terms of economic development, environmental protection, and the situations passed down to our children. The global rift must be addressed.
The response from international institutions has been to solve most of the percieved global problems with more and more trade and economic growth. Some see this as exacerbating the underlying causes, not providing adequate long-term solutions as currently practiced. Further, opportunities to find and implement a better way are squandered by narrow thinking. Thus, a debate on the future of humanity and the earth has ensued. This Primer provides a broad introduction to that debate.
We start with the now familiar definition of sustainable development from the well known Brundtland Commission Report (UN Commission on Environment and Development, 1987): "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Although simply stated, this mandate presents implications that require thought and attention from those who would be global citizens and substantial challenges to institutions influencing these trends. And what are the alternatives to a just and sustainable world?
The notion of sustainable development has caught on, especially among poorer nations of the global South. Governments, international aid agencies, and the emerging non-governmental organizations embraced the term, even though loosely understood and ill-defined. For example, in 1993, President Clinton established a federal agency, the President's Council on Sustainable Development, to oversee efforts to institutionalize sustainability within the fabric of government in the USA. On a global level, the notion of sustainable development provided a clearly distinctive path from the Bretton Woods institutions that had promoted and guided international development and trade policy since World War II.
Embedded in the notion of sustainable development is a notion of a divided world. Sustainable development points to the South, where economic development of some sort must occur, but has often failed. Further, the future generations, central to the discussion, necessarily means the South, where 90%, or so, of the population growth, currently about 84 million per year, will occur. The very notion, as originally defined, addresses the needs of the poorest regions of the world, which entailed obligations for the richer nations - - - primarily take less, rather than give more.
A debate on the Brundtland definition has focused on the key term, need, making the term relative: I need to have access to the Internet. The issue here relates to the reality of the truly needy, those suffering from abject physical poverty. These are fellow humans who do not possess the means to subsist, or sustain themselves in the most fundamental physical way, as defined in terms of food, water, shelter, land, energy, and health. And our world has become increasingly inhospitable to babies born outside affluent enclaves.
The social science literature has provided little guidance and much public policy has failed. A sharp divide separated ecology from social science from public policy considerations. Few had anything to say about sustainability at the close of an age dedicated to conquering material scarcity, albeit for a privileged minority. John Stuart Mill, the British political economist, writing in 1857, did speak to an age when physical limits would shift attention, values, and behavior to living well within a steady state, without significant further accumulation of material stuff, but the economics profession dismissed such talk. So, a shared understanding of sustainability must be widely and wisely discussed. This Primer tries to add to the conversation.
These are sharply divisive and contested terms, both pointing to a different vision of a planetary future, evoking different civilizations, and carrying distinctive obligations to each other and to progeny. Sustainability has been around longer than sustainable development, but both elastic terms cause confusion and ambiguity. Since either term portends a claim to the future, vested interests attempt to appropriate the language. So, the mere use of these terms requires careful scrutiny, lest our subsequent speculation become baffled or diluted. The stakes are high.
The term sustainability originally referred to "the method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged ásustainable techniquesñ ásustainable agricultureñ b : of or relating to a lifestyle involving the use of sustainable methods ásustainable society>"(Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary). Several sources of confusion confound us:
By its very nature, sustainability opens up a very broad discussion. Consider the spatial dimension: global. The temporal context: future generations. The underlying technical and empirical data do not adequately exist. Indicators of sustainability have yet been set. As a dispassionate, intellectual enterprise, sustainability remains daunting and at a preliminary, but still decisive, stage.
The scope and intentionality of the term sustainability has been amplifed to transcend the narrow topic of resources to include all aspects of social organization. Note the second definition, above: a sustainable society that maintains a lifestyle built around sustainable practices. An enormous literature, loosely called social ecology, has burgeoned, and has offered an enormous range of suggested values and behaviors, social ecology has not bees institutionalized. Within the context of Brundtland, the agenda for sustainability included official policy-level discussion, thus enlarging the scope of social ecology.
The term sustainability has been applied by other activities, such as finance, to mean that the entity can continue to operate in the black, so can be indefinitely continued. Can a voluntary association dedicated to conserving a wetland be continued indefinitely without permanent staff and assured revenue? This tendency dilutes the meaning of the term sustainability.
The terms sustainability and sustainable development refer to a yet incompletely defined dialectic, which is "any systematic reasoning, exposition, or argument that juxtaposes opposed or contradictory ideas and usually seeks to resolve their conflict b : an intellectual exchange of ideas" (Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary). So, sustainability and sustainable development will not stand still nor refrain from generating heated debate. So, we must continue the conversation: the future depends on it.
The debate over the definition of sustainability necessarily involves values, views of the future, a global scope, long-term decisions, public policy, distribution of goods and bads, investment guidelines, regulations, and overall high stakes. The terrain will be contested. Mere tinkering for purposes of respectability will mix with direct political conflict.
The classical political economist, John Stuart Mill introduced the notion of a steady state, in which human progress would continue, but without necessarily increasing the physical load on the earth. He, like John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Lewis Mumford, foresaw an age in which material needs had been met but human aspirations would continue to accomplish other, seemingly higher pursuits. Broadly, this constellation of views, values, and aspirations dreamed of a new civilization that transcended crass materialism, industrialism, and consumerism. Such thinking has its place in the discussion of sustainability, but remains more loosely defined than the Brundtland foray into sustainable development.
Among those who have participated in giving meaning to sustainability, there is great disagreement. Professor Lawrence Susskind has reviewed the literature, providing the basis for the discussion below. Consider the following authors and some fundamental contrasts among their positions:
The official position of the World Bank, to embrace economic development with environmental review, regards environmental protection and economic development as trade-offs, so any concern for the environment must sacrifice economic growth. Further, the root cause of environmental devastation is poverty itself. Desperately poor people take dire measures to sustain themselves, such as tearing down remaining woodlots for energy, thus spreading the encroaching desert. The best way, then, to save the environment and reduce poverty is export-stimulated economic growth, which usually means World Bank-assisted investment in export industries. Obviously, sustainable development directly challenges such orthodox economic growth policies and Bank critics charge the environmental review are specious greenwash measures.
Herman Daly, an economist and former official at the World Bank, has invented the new field of ecological economics, in which natural capital has become the scarce factor of production that must be economized, replacing a historical concern for labor and human capital. Ecological economics provides a rich framework to support a broad public policy discussion, so a dedicated web page has been created to capture the basics of this field, Ecological Economics: An Introduction
Vandana Shiva, an Indian physician and activist, has seen economic growth practiced from the perspective of the people she serves, and she does not like what she sees. Shiva wants human needs to be met directly, not as a minority stakeholder in a larger global investment game. She argues, as have many others, that a market economy, usually in the form of huge and remote transnational corporations, will ravage most people and their environment in its drive for maximum profits. Global systems of capital accumulation, assisted by such agencies as the World Bank, will continue to plunder the resources of the peoples of the South. She tirelessly advocates small-scale, localized programs, built at community and household scale, designed by those who know local culture, and oriented to directly meeting human and ecological needs. She particularly recognizes that as women around the world embrace sustainability, the patriarchal practices that have created global scale ruination will be fundamentally challenged.
Solow, Professor of Economics at MIT and Noble Laureate, introduces a distinction between natural capital and social capital, which can substitute for each other. As humans build a better, more capital-intensive social world, this displaces the natural world, but also improves upon it. Thus, progeny inherits not simply depleted natural capital but social capital, often in advanced technological forms, that more than compensate. Slowing the draw-down of natural capital may hamper the formation of social capital, thus depriving progeny of benefits. Genetic modification of crops furnishes a common example.
Lawrence Susskind, Ford Professor of International and Urban Environmental Policy at MIT, recognizes that sustainability necessarily involves mediation, although trade-offs need not be required. That is, the open process of seeking sustainability will open up alternatives that would otherwise not be considered. Further, the mediation around sustainability includes the sharing of costs and benefits, thus opening up opportunities for sharing now precluded by privatized decisions, including those of governmental agencies acting in non-consultative ways. Mediated, participatory public policy decision making processes, including legitimization of the vital role of NGOs, must be set up to implement and monitor sustainability. (This approach is built into SENV 207, Public Policy.)
Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins focus on industrial productions and call for closing the loop and for progressive technological innovation and diffusion.
Meadows et al. Continues to systematically simulate the complex interactions between the economy, population, resources, and global cycles, citing limits and blockages that threaten to prevail against economic growth as usually practiced.
Trent Schroyer, the Director of the Institute of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, articulates and documents a network of community efforts built around the principles of cosmopolitan localism. xxx
Timothy O'Riordan foresees token gestures disguising a reactionary political movement antagonistic to sustainability and latent statism which adopts the rhetoric of sustainability but actually attempts to control and co-opt change. Samuel Hays long ago identified such a tendency in the early conservation movement in the USA. Such a program gathers power in centralized, remote governmental bureaucracies and actually contradicts sustainability by denying effective sharing of authority and attention to decentralized, localized modes of decision making.
To help frame a public policy discussion of sustainability, we should turn to an explanation of ecological economics, in our web page Ecological Economics: An Introduction.