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INTRODUCTION TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
By Jim Blackburn Copyright © August 2012
Sustainable development is a concept about the future of humans, human settlement patterns and the Earth. It requires a fusion of social, economic and ecological issues into a composite approach to addressing problems that are beyond past human experiences. As a global society, we who live in the 21 st century are pioneers of a new and different type – we are “full world pioneers”. The concept of “empty world” and “full world” thinking was articulated by the economist Herman Daly, and it provides an excellent way of considering a wide range of problems we are facing today. The “empty world” was a world that was relatively empty of humans and human impacts and the “full world” is the opposite. Today, we are living in a world that is full of humans and growing moreso every day, yet much of our thinking and many of our social traditions originate from the empty world. In many respects, our norms and traditions are a map to a place that no longer exists. We find ourselves today in Chicago with a map to Detroit. No matter how hard we try, the map does not work.
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http://sites.duke.edu/biology217_01_s2011_mkg14/achieving-sustainabledevelopment/achieving-a-sustainable-lifestyle/ A key issue in understanding our dilemma today is that we have no clear means to understand how many people we can support and at what style of living. As population grows, the ability of each of us to consume is diminished unless technology develops new and different innovations than we have seen in the past. The basic concern is that there is a carrying capacity of the Earth and that we are growing and consuming at a rate that is exceeding the ability of the Earth to support us at the style to which the currently developed world is accustomed.
http://8020vision.com/2010/06/21/the-real-population-problem/
Sustainable development was a concept created to respond to these challenges and arises out of a series of disasters and certain trends and patterns that first became obvious in the 1980’s. Major disasters struck with the drought and desertification in the Sahel in northern Africa, the Chernobyl nuclear explosion in the Ukraine as well as continuing deforestation in the Amazon and other tropical rain forests. Global population was rapidly expanding, yet many of the people of the world
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were unable to meet basic needs of food, water and housing. At the same time, the rate of loss of biological diversity was increasing at rates exponentially higher than previously observed, and the scientific community discovered that human activities were altering the Earth’s atmosphere, first with the hole in the Antarctic ozone layer and then with the detection and documentation of global climate change. These issues and more were set out in Our Common Future, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development that was published in 1987. Also known as the Brundtland report after Gro Harlem Brundtland, the chairman of the committee, this report envisioned sustainable development as a response to these multiple challenges facing the world community. This concept of sustainable development was adopted by all nations of the world through the signing of the Rio Principles at the World Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Since 1992, sustainable development has been a concept of great interest and importance throughout the world. Many nations have implemented the concept into their national planning. The United Nations has a directorate devoted to sustainable development. Many corporate web sites devote substantial attention to sustainability, and many cities have embraced the concept. We now have building and landscape standards for sustainable projects and certifications. In many respects, the world has been changed by the concept. On the other hand, the world has not begun to change to the extent that it will in the future. To achieve sustainability requires the dedication of time, energy and budget in schools, corporations, governments and institutions of all types, and these changes will happen. The key question is – will it happen soon enough to address the major challenges facing the Earth – soon enough to prevent irreparable harm to the atmosphere, to social structures and to the global economy? Sustainable development has many dimensions. If one agrees with the view that our institutional structures, our intellectual framework and our basic beliefs were established during an “empty” world and that we are now in a very different place in space and time, then the challenges and opportunities for change are unbounded. We have not begun to explore and understand the width and breadth of this issue.
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It is the challenge and opportunity of the next several decades. And we are only just beginning this journey.
What is Sustainable Development?
Sustainable development means to maintain humans and human settlements into the future in a manner that does not destroy our natural system in the process. It is about human health and safety. It is about the manner that we build things. It is about maintenance of social order. It is about realizing that the Earth is a planet, uniquely adapted to give rise to life of all types, and that if we want to continue on this planet, we need to find a way to preserve our home as well as ourselves. Without a healthy home, we cannot meet our basic needs. In the Brundtland Report, sustainable development was defined as: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This definition is accepted around the world and is a great starting place for discussion and action. It sets out that basic needs must be met today and in the future. This definition integrates the concept of equity into sustainability – equity for today and equity toward future generations. Without doubt, the equity focus of sustainability is controversial and many proponents of sustainability shy from this issue, yet it is very important. If people do not have adequate food, water and shelter, basic needs will not be met. At the least, we must address these issues of needs, for if needs are not met, people will do what they feel necessary to provide for their needs. Implicit in the Brundtland report definition is the protection of the Earth, leading to an expanded definition of sustainable development as: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs while observing the ecological limits of the Earth.” This definition adds a further controversial concept, the idea that there are limits to the ability of Earth to adsorb impacts. Limits were not a part of empty world
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thinking. We had not progressed to the point where human activities threatened the very stability of the planet. We have now, yet our mores, standards and intellectual concepts seldom incorporate the real challenge of limits. At its simplest, sustainable development is about understanding the impacts of human activities and modifying these activities to minimize if not eliminate impacts. It is about reducing the footprint of human activities and designing future activities with the goal of minimizing that footprint. It is about understanding how human activities transform the natural system and designing to minimize these transformations. And it is about understanding how our actions affect other humans and attempting to minimize those impacts. In sustainability thinking, there is an unstated implication that we should – for some reason – care about our impacts to the Earth and to others. As we progress deeper into sustainability, we must and will adopt a system of ethics to guide behavior in a full world – ethics that may differ from those of an empty world, ethics that may lead to development of new spiritual outlets and connections, for our religious mores are certainly founded in the empty world.
Key Concepts In Sustainability
Several ideas are central to sustainability. First, sustainability requires the integration of economic, ecologic and social information. These topics are the cornerstones of sustainability – we need to protect the social structure, we need to provide ourselves with goods and services and we need to protect the natural system if we humans are to have a sustainable human web of life into the future. Secondly, information is a key to sustainable development and the integration of these three topics – information about our Earth, information about our social and economic structures, information about how we impact social and natural structures, information about alternative ways of doing things. Third, sustainability is about change. We need to be open to change – to doing things differently – and this may be the hardest of all issues. To paraphrase Einstein, we cannot solve these problems by thinking the way we were thinking when we created them. We must be open to new ways of thinking, to challenging the old ways, the “empty world” ways, and be creative and imaginative in developing
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rules for living in the “full world”. That is the excitement and the challenge of sustainability.
Why Sustainable Development?
As mentioned above, sustainable development was articulated at the end of the 1980s when a number of very disturbing global trends first emerged. Today (in 2013), we are beginning to see the impacts of our failures to address many of these emerging issues. Global climate change is happening. It is a scientific fact that our climate is changing, that the atmosphere is getting warmer, that rainfall patterns are changing and that sea level is rising. Here, there are two levels of issues. First, actions must be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But even with those actions, climate change will continue, and we must design today to live with these changes which will be pervasive. Climate change will have impacts in many disparate areas. As shown in the diagram below, climate change has impact on many different subject matters. These issues in turn have impacts on many other issues. For example, climate change leading to desertification or changed rainfall patterns can have a major effect on farm production. A major reduction in farm production can have a serious impact on the ability of a region or even a country to meet their basic needs. Similarly, water supplies will be substantially and severely impacted by climate change. Reservoirs may dry up. Groundwater recharge will be altered. Surface water supplies will dwindle, thereby affecting the ability to provide water for basic needs as well as for irrigated agriculture which again affects food supply. And of course a rising sea level will cause those of us living in very low areas to evacuate to higher ground. At the least, such change will lead to regional relocations of population and development. At worst, conflicts could result over the absence of land suitable for resettlement.
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Climate Change
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It is overly simplistic to suggest that addressing climate change is the key action needed to achieve sustainability, yet it is impossible to foresee a sustainable human system on Earth if climate change is not addressed. Undoubtedly, there are regions that will have problems meeting basic needs for food and water without taking into account climate change, but climate change will worsen that problem. There are major issues about resource availability and loss of biological diversity without consideration of climate change, but climate change will worsen that issue. And there are sustainability issues that appear independent of climate change issues about the failure of our economic system to accurately capture the full costs of goods and services that we exchange, making our transactions improperly priced - issues about the structure of corporations and the security of our highly leveraged and interconnected global economy. There is much work to be done independent of climate change, but all work on sustainability must include climate considerations. Without such action, we will not succeed.
Combining Ecology, Economics and Social Considerations
It has been readily accepted that sustainable development requires the integration of social, economic and ecological considerations. Some have described sustainability as a three legged stool, with each of these subjects being a leg of the stool. Others prefer a triangle with these three topics at the corners. Or perhaps a Venn diagram or a pyramid. Each of these approaches attempts to tie these three concepts together, but we know very little about how to actually combine these three concepts because our understanding of these concepts was developed in the empty world independent from one another. Each is their own academic discipline. Each is housed in their own tower - apart rather than integrated.
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My personal favorite is the triangle with interpretive comments between the corners. For example, consider the diagram below. Between social and economic lies “meeting basic needs”. Between economic and ecologic lies “eco-efficiency”. And between ecologic and social lies “resilience”. These terms are useful in better understanding the interface between the various subjects, and offer a way of breaking down issues a bit more specifically than the generic categories.
Each of these six sub-categories should be defined. The following is a suggested definition for these various sub-categories as developed by the students in the CEVE 325/SOSC 325 from the Spring, 2009: Meeting Basic Needs: Access to and ability to attain primary and secondary basic needs in order to maintain a reasonable quality of life Social: Aspects of the equity of distribution of wealth, resources and impacts Place: Characteristics of the surrounding environment including geography, climate, ecology, and available resources and the choices made, actions taken or decisions informed by those characteristics
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Ecological: The human impact on water, air, land and biodiversity. Eco-Efficiency: The efficiency of the movement and utilization of materials, energy and people Economic: The production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services that meets the needs of today without compromising the needs of future generations These diagrams and these concepts are important because an idea is being developed here – the idea of fusion of economic, social and ecologic concerns. Currently, we do not achieve this goal. We are not successful yet, and in fact we have only begun. While some of us may be able to conceptualize from words, images are helpful to others. And it is the idea that is important. While the goal is integration, it is both important and useful to fully understand each of the key subject areas – economic, social and ecologic - separately, but in the context of thinking sustainably.
Economics
Typically, economics is concerned with consumer demand and production, with the economy often depicted as an ever-enlarging circle of increased consumer demand leading to more production leading to more demand, etc. And in fact, most of our economic policies are structured to induce economic growth. To the extent that the term development is used, it is linked by the conjunction and to growth as in “growth and development”. Yet with sustainable development, the goal is to achieve a result different than growth as usual. In fact, the very concept of growth as it has been practiced and pursued in the past and even today must be challenged, at least the concept as practiced in the empty world. Simply stated, unmitigated growth in consumer demand worldwide cannot be sustained with present resources and within known limits of the Earth. The concept of Earth limits is illustrated below. Here, the ecological footprint of the average citizen of the United States is projected across the world’s population and a staggering fact emerges – we currently are consuming ecological resources at a rate that – if used by all of the people of the world - would be beyond the current
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capacity of the Earth. If that track is maintained into the future, it will take two Earth’s to maintain us. And we only have one. And our goal should not be to consume all of that single Earth. Some is needed by other living things if not humans. The same is true for water resources and many other examples. We are simply living beyond the ability of the Earth to assimilate us and remain a viable place for life and other living things.
As practiced today, economics is by far the most dominant of the legs on the stool – a stool which is unequal and unbalanced and unable to stand when viewed through the sustainability lens. Our capitalist economic system is all about growth. Governmental officials follow the gross domestic product (gdp) like a religious icon. If the graph slopes upward, all is good. If the graph slopes downward, all is bad. The same can be said of any number of metrics of economic growth, including housing starts, new jobs created, new sales records set, new construction loans made. Similarly, our system in the United States and Europe has also been about borrowing. As growth slows, we create money to stimulate new bursts of growth. And every so often we observe that the system collapses to some extent, a readjustment occurs and we restart the process, climbing back up the growth curve. Unfortunately, supposedly positive trend lines from an economic standpoint can be very damaging from an ecological standpoint. Consider, for example, the trend lines from the report on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). Here, growth in consumption of coal, petroleum and other fossil fuels has led to an increase in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) that are associated with global climate change. According to the best science, continued
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increases in the release of greenhouse gases will lead to continuing increases in the temperature of the Earth. We as a global society either have or will soon reach a tipping point where we must reshape this curve. In this case, the continued growth in fossil fuel usage and greenhouse gas combustion is inimical to sustainability. As such, as currently practiced, such patterns of consumption are contrary to sustainable development. Now, that does not mean that all use of petroleum products must be stopped immediately. That would be socially and economically destructive. Instead, we need to find balanced measures to reduce and stabilize petroleum combustion and greenhouse gas production. Eventually, the market will change to reflect this reality, but the market is slow to respond to situations such as climate change which is a so-called external diseconomy, or externality, of the use of fossil fuels. Regulation may be coming in the United States through the Clean Air Act, but more likely, consumer and global pressures will exert changes. In the short term, the simple solution is increased efficiency, or “eco-efficiency”, so labeled because it is beneficial economically and ecologically. It is the starting point for mitigating the negative impacts of current unabated growth. And it is not just with regard to greenhouse gases that we see conflicts between traditional growth concepts and ecological sustainability. Increased use of water in agriculture, industry and residential sectors can dewater aquifers and threaten surface systems with a loss of riverine flows. Increased use of fertilizer has led to a dead zone off of the Mississippi delta. Increased deforestation leads to loss of biodiversity. Unmitigated growth – growth without consideration of consequences – growth without boundaries – is not sustainable. So, in considering the economic realm of sustainability, one might keep in mind stability. Over time, we have to maintain our economy as well as our ecology and social order. We cannot have one leg out of kilter with the rest of the stool. There needs to be balance in order for there to be a stool. There needs to be balance for sustainability.
Ecology
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The Earth is magnificent. Our current understanding of the universe has found only one planet in all the galaxies that can maintain life and that is the planet Earth. We who live on Earth often take life for granted. It is, therefore it is. I am, therefore, I am. And as we expanded as humans in the “empty” world, the Earth was bountiful and without limit, at least with regard to expansion and resources. To the extent that humans found themselves lacking, our ingenuity often overcame immediate physical limits. The idea of denuding the Earth of vegetation – of covering it with human footprints of burning, deforestation, farming, paving and erecting – was unthinkable because we humans and our impacts were small and the Earth was large. Today, such a future – a future where humans have removed natural ecosystems from the Earth – is certain to occur if we humans continue to grow, develop and consume as we learned to in the empty world. We are directly destroying natural systems for myriad reasons – all of them certainly reasonable from one perspective or another. However, when the net result is to threaten the ability of Earth to maintain a diversity of life and living things, the very nature of the Earth is lost. When we threaten to lose that which is the essence of the Earth, we must rethink our goals, objectives and methods of human settlement and development. Documentation abounds regarding the loss of biological diversity, the genetic resource pool that makes humans different than frogs, corn different than rice, etc. According to recent estimates, we are continuing to lose genetic diversity at a rate that is unprecedented in the human past, with current estimates being in the range of 10,000 to 100,000 species being lost per year, compared to the “empty world” number of about three species per year. Rainforests are still being denuded at a net loss rate, although it has slowed in most areas of the world. The changes noted above are basically due to human settlement patterns, Climate change offers the potential of further adding to this rate of loss, with the most notable impacts being in the cooler climates. However, issues about role of temperature in plant maturation and propagation are only now being fully understood, and we may discover that these impacts are worse than previously thought.
Social
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Social issues are concerned about the equity of the allocation of goods and resources in society. Sustainability does not guarantee equality, but it does hold equity - that fundamental concepts of equal treatment and opportunity - be met. At the least, it would require that all people within a community, a state, a nation, the world have their basic needs for food, water and shelter met. Many people in the world make less than $2 per day. Almost 15% of the people in Houston are undernourished. Over 30% of Houston residents live below poverty. So there is certainly a general concern about basic needs being met. But on a larger level, there are major concerns about equity between nations, particularly between less developed and developed nations. Many of these areas of the world have not yet begun to consume in the manner to which western societies have become accustomed. United States citizens consume about 20 tons of carbon per person per day, compared to the global average of less than 5 tons per day and the developed world average of less than 2 tons per day. If we are to reduce our carbon footprint and also see economic development of less developed counties, the developed world is going to have to reduce its carbon footprint. Otherwise, the rest of the world will have no capacity for expansion, a patently unfair and untenable outcome. At the far end of the social spectrum is potential for a failed state – the collapse of the social system. That has happened in several war-torn countries but the potential exists that this problem will become more widespread as food and water supply issues become worse and population relocations are caused by sea level rise and other climate-related factors. At a more local level, we have extensive personal bankruptcies throughout the United States due to our living beyond our means, piling up debt without hope of relief. We are beginning to observe bankruptcies at the municipal level as well, not to mention countries such as Greece and Spain that appear to be on the brink of economic collapse under the weight of debt. When government financial systems fail, the social system will also risk failure.
Needed – An Integrated View
The more one delves into the subject of sustainability, the more it becomes apparent that new systems must and will emerge to address the deficiencies of the
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current system. At the center of these changes is the transition from “empty world” thinking to “full world” thinking. The concepts upon which the sustainable society of the future will be built will be holistic rather than separate, integrated rather than apart. New behavioral boundaries and norms will emerge. And no concepts will be more pervasive than efficiency, full disclosure of social, ecological and economic impacts and pursuit of alternative ways of solving problems across these three dimensions. In fact, the philosophy of the alternative will emerge as the cornerstone of all designs as we endeavor to maintain our life style, our comforts at lower and lower investment of carbon and other environmental footprints. An efficient society of the future will be a secure society. And that is what most of us want – security for ourselves, our children and those who come after us. Growth as we currently practice it will become a relic, left behind as we mitigate our impacts, reduce our footprints and honestly come to grips with the dilemma of limits. As we move forward, we might do well to look to the ecological system for guidance. The natural world has ways of solving problems of limits. There are growth phases and then there are climax phases, the time when the growth spurt is left behind and the system begins to stabilize. It is the flattening of innumerable growth curves that should be the major goal of a successful human system, an economic system that is inclusive of ecological considerations. And we need to achieve this while still meeting basic needs for all in a manner that is at least arguably equitable. At its core, sustainability is about a very hard concept – “enough”. This is a very simple word conveying a very difficult concept that must be fully appreciated, understood and embraced. Relative to the concept of “enough”, I am reminded of a conversation with a plastics company about sustainability, about the layers and levels of issues. We talked about efficiency, about alternative products that use less resources and produce less pollution, and then we talked about dematerialization, about the removal of plastics from certain products. And then I tossed out the concept that I saw as the end point of sustainability – about reaching a place where there was “enough” plastic product and we did not need any more. I
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have seldom encountered a response so filled with lack of understanding. It was not that the company was against the idea of “enough”. It was that the idea did not compute. The concept that there could be enough plastic simply was not part of the corporate mindset, nor is it currently within the mindset of most of us. But it will be. We must approach sustainability not as idealists pursuing some noble goal, but as pragmatists solving a very real problem that ultimately threatens the livelihood of every citizen of the planet. Without a different model of the human future, we are on a path that cannot be maintained over time and certainly not into future generations. We know that from what we can see today, We need to stabilize the planet. We need to work with corporations. We need to work with governments. We need to work at every level where people assemble. And we need to start today. To achieve such a stable system will be a huge feat. It will require hard work for decades. It will not happen overnight.. The question is – are we wise enough to be able to make the changes that have to be made? That is the challenge of sustainability, that is the adventure of sustainability, and that is the future of sustainability. It promises to be quite an interesting ride. In summary, the goal is to develop pragmatic ways to integrate economic, ecologic and social thinking into a new methodologies and analytical constructs that do not view these issues separately but rather integrate them holistically. When that has been achieved, we will be embarking on a course of action suitable for living in the “full world”.
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By Jim Blackburn Copyright © August 2012
Sustainable development is a concept about the future of humans, human settlement patterns and the Earth. It requires a fusion of social, economic and ecological issues into a composite approach to addressing problems that are beyond past human experiences. As a global society, we who live in the 21 st century are pioneers of a new and different type – we are “full world pioneers”. The concept of “empty world” and “full world” thinking was articulated by the economist Herman Daly, and it provides an excellent way of considering a wide range of problems we are facing today. The “empty world” was a world that was relatively empty of humans and human impacts and the “full world” is the opposite. Today, we are living in a world that is full of humans and growing moreso every day, yet much of our thinking and many of our social traditions originate from the empty world. In many respects, our norms and traditions are a map to a place that no longer exists. We find ourselves today in Chicago with a map to Detroit. No matter how hard we try, the map does not work.
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http://sites.duke.edu/biology217_01_s2011_mkg14/achieving-sustainabledevelopment/achieving-a-sustainable-lifestyle/ A key issue in understanding our dilemma today is that we have no clear means to understand how many people we can support and at what style of living. As population grows, the ability of each of us to consume is diminished unless technology develops new and different innovations than we have seen in the past. The basic concern is that there is a carrying capacity of the Earth and that we are growing and consuming at a rate that is exceeding the ability of the Earth to support us at the style to which the currently developed world is accustomed.
http://8020vision.com/2010/06/21/the-real-population-problem/
Sustainable development was a concept created to respond to these challenges and arises out of a series of disasters and certain trends and patterns that first became obvious in the 1980’s. Major disasters struck with the drought and desertification in the Sahel in northern Africa, the Chernobyl nuclear explosion in the Ukraine as well as continuing deforestation in the Amazon and other tropical rain forests. Global population was rapidly expanding, yet many of the people of the world
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were unable to meet basic needs of food, water and housing. At the same time, the rate of loss of biological diversity was increasing at rates exponentially higher than previously observed, and the scientific community discovered that human activities were altering the Earth’s atmosphere, first with the hole in the Antarctic ozone layer and then with the detection and documentation of global climate change. These issues and more were set out in Our Common Future, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development that was published in 1987. Also known as the Brundtland report after Gro Harlem Brundtland, the chairman of the committee, this report envisioned sustainable development as a response to these multiple challenges facing the world community. This concept of sustainable development was adopted by all nations of the world through the signing of the Rio Principles at the World Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Since 1992, sustainable development has been a concept of great interest and importance throughout the world. Many nations have implemented the concept into their national planning. The United Nations has a directorate devoted to sustainable development. Many corporate web sites devote substantial attention to sustainability, and many cities have embraced the concept. We now have building and landscape standards for sustainable projects and certifications. In many respects, the world has been changed by the concept. On the other hand, the world has not begun to change to the extent that it will in the future. To achieve sustainability requires the dedication of time, energy and budget in schools, corporations, governments and institutions of all types, and these changes will happen. The key question is – will it happen soon enough to address the major challenges facing the Earth – soon enough to prevent irreparable harm to the atmosphere, to social structures and to the global economy? Sustainable development has many dimensions. If one agrees with the view that our institutional structures, our intellectual framework and our basic beliefs were established during an “empty” world and that we are now in a very different place in space and time, then the challenges and opportunities for change are unbounded. We have not begun to explore and understand the width and breadth of this issue.
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It is the challenge and opportunity of the next several decades. And we are only just beginning this journey.
What is Sustainable Development?
Sustainable development means to maintain humans and human settlements into the future in a manner that does not destroy our natural system in the process. It is about human health and safety. It is about the manner that we build things. It is about maintenance of social order. It is about realizing that the Earth is a planet, uniquely adapted to give rise to life of all types, and that if we want to continue on this planet, we need to find a way to preserve our home as well as ourselves. Without a healthy home, we cannot meet our basic needs. In the Brundtland Report, sustainable development was defined as: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This definition is accepted around the world and is a great starting place for discussion and action. It sets out that basic needs must be met today and in the future. This definition integrates the concept of equity into sustainability – equity for today and equity toward future generations. Without doubt, the equity focus of sustainability is controversial and many proponents of sustainability shy from this issue, yet it is very important. If people do not have adequate food, water and shelter, basic needs will not be met. At the least, we must address these issues of needs, for if needs are not met, people will do what they feel necessary to provide for their needs. Implicit in the Brundtland report definition is the protection of the Earth, leading to an expanded definition of sustainable development as: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs while observing the ecological limits of the Earth.” This definition adds a further controversial concept, the idea that there are limits to the ability of Earth to adsorb impacts. Limits were not a part of empty world
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thinking. We had not progressed to the point where human activities threatened the very stability of the planet. We have now, yet our mores, standards and intellectual concepts seldom incorporate the real challenge of limits. At its simplest, sustainable development is about understanding the impacts of human activities and modifying these activities to minimize if not eliminate impacts. It is about reducing the footprint of human activities and designing future activities with the goal of minimizing that footprint. It is about understanding how human activities transform the natural system and designing to minimize these transformations. And it is about understanding how our actions affect other humans and attempting to minimize those impacts. In sustainability thinking, there is an unstated implication that we should – for some reason – care about our impacts to the Earth and to others. As we progress deeper into sustainability, we must and will adopt a system of ethics to guide behavior in a full world – ethics that may differ from those of an empty world, ethics that may lead to development of new spiritual outlets and connections, for our religious mores are certainly founded in the empty world.
Key Concepts In Sustainability
Several ideas are central to sustainability. First, sustainability requires the integration of economic, ecologic and social information. These topics are the cornerstones of sustainability – we need to protect the social structure, we need to provide ourselves with goods and services and we need to protect the natural system if we humans are to have a sustainable human web of life into the future. Secondly, information is a key to sustainable development and the integration of these three topics – information about our Earth, information about our social and economic structures, information about how we impact social and natural structures, information about alternative ways of doing things. Third, sustainability is about change. We need to be open to change – to doing things differently – and this may be the hardest of all issues. To paraphrase Einstein, we cannot solve these problems by thinking the way we were thinking when we created them. We must be open to new ways of thinking, to challenging the old ways, the “empty world” ways, and be creative and imaginative in developing
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rules for living in the “full world”. That is the excitement and the challenge of sustainability.
Why Sustainable Development?
As mentioned above, sustainable development was articulated at the end of the 1980s when a number of very disturbing global trends first emerged. Today (in 2013), we are beginning to see the impacts of our failures to address many of these emerging issues. Global climate change is happening. It is a scientific fact that our climate is changing, that the atmosphere is getting warmer, that rainfall patterns are changing and that sea level is rising. Here, there are two levels of issues. First, actions must be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But even with those actions, climate change will continue, and we must design today to live with these changes which will be pervasive. Climate change will have impacts in many disparate areas. As shown in the diagram below, climate change has impact on many different subject matters. These issues in turn have impacts on many other issues. For example, climate change leading to desertification or changed rainfall patterns can have a major effect on farm production. A major reduction in farm production can have a serious impact on the ability of a region or even a country to meet their basic needs. Similarly, water supplies will be substantially and severely impacted by climate change. Reservoirs may dry up. Groundwater recharge will be altered. Surface water supplies will dwindle, thereby affecting the ability to provide water for basic needs as well as for irrigated agriculture which again affects food supply. And of course a rising sea level will cause those of us living in very low areas to evacuate to higher ground. At the least, such change will lead to regional relocations of population and development. At worst, conflicts could result over the absence of land suitable for resettlement.
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Climate Change
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It is overly simplistic to suggest that addressing climate change is the key action needed to achieve sustainability, yet it is impossible to foresee a sustainable human system on Earth if climate change is not addressed. Undoubtedly, there are regions that will have problems meeting basic needs for food and water without taking into account climate change, but climate change will worsen that problem. There are major issues about resource availability and loss of biological diversity without consideration of climate change, but climate change will worsen that issue. And there are sustainability issues that appear independent of climate change issues about the failure of our economic system to accurately capture the full costs of goods and services that we exchange, making our transactions improperly priced - issues about the structure of corporations and the security of our highly leveraged and interconnected global economy. There is much work to be done independent of climate change, but all work on sustainability must include climate considerations. Without such action, we will not succeed.
Combining Ecology, Economics and Social Considerations
It has been readily accepted that sustainable development requires the integration of social, economic and ecological considerations. Some have described sustainability as a three legged stool, with each of these subjects being a leg of the stool. Others prefer a triangle with these three topics at the corners. Or perhaps a Venn diagram or a pyramid. Each of these approaches attempts to tie these three concepts together, but we know very little about how to actually combine these three concepts because our understanding of these concepts was developed in the empty world independent from one another. Each is their own academic discipline. Each is housed in their own tower - apart rather than integrated.
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My personal favorite is the triangle with interpretive comments between the corners. For example, consider the diagram below. Between social and economic lies “meeting basic needs”. Between economic and ecologic lies “eco-efficiency”. And between ecologic and social lies “resilience”. These terms are useful in better understanding the interface between the various subjects, and offer a way of breaking down issues a bit more specifically than the generic categories.
Each of these six sub-categories should be defined. The following is a suggested definition for these various sub-categories as developed by the students in the CEVE 325/SOSC 325 from the Spring, 2009: Meeting Basic Needs: Access to and ability to attain primary and secondary basic needs in order to maintain a reasonable quality of life Social: Aspects of the equity of distribution of wealth, resources and impacts Place: Characteristics of the surrounding environment including geography, climate, ecology, and available resources and the choices made, actions taken or decisions informed by those characteristics
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Ecological: The human impact on water, air, land and biodiversity. Eco-Efficiency: The efficiency of the movement and utilization of materials, energy and people Economic: The production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services that meets the needs of today without compromising the needs of future generations These diagrams and these concepts are important because an idea is being developed here – the idea of fusion of economic, social and ecologic concerns. Currently, we do not achieve this goal. We are not successful yet, and in fact we have only begun. While some of us may be able to conceptualize from words, images are helpful to others. And it is the idea that is important. While the goal is integration, it is both important and useful to fully understand each of the key subject areas – economic, social and ecologic - separately, but in the context of thinking sustainably.
Economics
Typically, economics is concerned with consumer demand and production, with the economy often depicted as an ever-enlarging circle of increased consumer demand leading to more production leading to more demand, etc. And in fact, most of our economic policies are structured to induce economic growth. To the extent that the term development is used, it is linked by the conjunction and to growth as in “growth and development”. Yet with sustainable development, the goal is to achieve a result different than growth as usual. In fact, the very concept of growth as it has been practiced and pursued in the past and even today must be challenged, at least the concept as practiced in the empty world. Simply stated, unmitigated growth in consumer demand worldwide cannot be sustained with present resources and within known limits of the Earth. The concept of Earth limits is illustrated below. Here, the ecological footprint of the average citizen of the United States is projected across the world’s population and a staggering fact emerges – we currently are consuming ecological resources at a rate that – if used by all of the people of the world - would be beyond the current
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capacity of the Earth. If that track is maintained into the future, it will take two Earth’s to maintain us. And we only have one. And our goal should not be to consume all of that single Earth. Some is needed by other living things if not humans. The same is true for water resources and many other examples. We are simply living beyond the ability of the Earth to assimilate us and remain a viable place for life and other living things.
As practiced today, economics is by far the most dominant of the legs on the stool – a stool which is unequal and unbalanced and unable to stand when viewed through the sustainability lens. Our capitalist economic system is all about growth. Governmental officials follow the gross domestic product (gdp) like a religious icon. If the graph slopes upward, all is good. If the graph slopes downward, all is bad. The same can be said of any number of metrics of economic growth, including housing starts, new jobs created, new sales records set, new construction loans made. Similarly, our system in the United States and Europe has also been about borrowing. As growth slows, we create money to stimulate new bursts of growth. And every so often we observe that the system collapses to some extent, a readjustment occurs and we restart the process, climbing back up the growth curve. Unfortunately, supposedly positive trend lines from an economic standpoint can be very damaging from an ecological standpoint. Consider, for example, the trend lines from the report on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). Here, growth in consumption of coal, petroleum and other fossil fuels has led to an increase in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) that are associated with global climate change. According to the best science, continued
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increases in the release of greenhouse gases will lead to continuing increases in the temperature of the Earth. We as a global society either have or will soon reach a tipping point where we must reshape this curve. In this case, the continued growth in fossil fuel usage and greenhouse gas combustion is inimical to sustainability. As such, as currently practiced, such patterns of consumption are contrary to sustainable development. Now, that does not mean that all use of petroleum products must be stopped immediately. That would be socially and economically destructive. Instead, we need to find balanced measures to reduce and stabilize petroleum combustion and greenhouse gas production. Eventually, the market will change to reflect this reality, but the market is slow to respond to situations such as climate change which is a so-called external diseconomy, or externality, of the use of fossil fuels. Regulation may be coming in the United States through the Clean Air Act, but more likely, consumer and global pressures will exert changes. In the short term, the simple solution is increased efficiency, or “eco-efficiency”, so labeled because it is beneficial economically and ecologically. It is the starting point for mitigating the negative impacts of current unabated growth. And it is not just with regard to greenhouse gases that we see conflicts between traditional growth concepts and ecological sustainability. Increased use of water in agriculture, industry and residential sectors can dewater aquifers and threaten surface systems with a loss of riverine flows. Increased use of fertilizer has led to a dead zone off of the Mississippi delta. Increased deforestation leads to loss of biodiversity. Unmitigated growth – growth without consideration of consequences – growth without boundaries – is not sustainable. So, in considering the economic realm of sustainability, one might keep in mind stability. Over time, we have to maintain our economy as well as our ecology and social order. We cannot have one leg out of kilter with the rest of the stool. There needs to be balance in order for there to be a stool. There needs to be balance for sustainability.
Ecology
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The Earth is magnificent. Our current understanding of the universe has found only one planet in all the galaxies that can maintain life and that is the planet Earth. We who live on Earth often take life for granted. It is, therefore it is. I am, therefore, I am. And as we expanded as humans in the “empty” world, the Earth was bountiful and without limit, at least with regard to expansion and resources. To the extent that humans found themselves lacking, our ingenuity often overcame immediate physical limits. The idea of denuding the Earth of vegetation – of covering it with human footprints of burning, deforestation, farming, paving and erecting – was unthinkable because we humans and our impacts were small and the Earth was large. Today, such a future – a future where humans have removed natural ecosystems from the Earth – is certain to occur if we humans continue to grow, develop and consume as we learned to in the empty world. We are directly destroying natural systems for myriad reasons – all of them certainly reasonable from one perspective or another. However, when the net result is to threaten the ability of Earth to maintain a diversity of life and living things, the very nature of the Earth is lost. When we threaten to lose that which is the essence of the Earth, we must rethink our goals, objectives and methods of human settlement and development. Documentation abounds regarding the loss of biological diversity, the genetic resource pool that makes humans different than frogs, corn different than rice, etc. According to recent estimates, we are continuing to lose genetic diversity at a rate that is unprecedented in the human past, with current estimates being in the range of 10,000 to 100,000 species being lost per year, compared to the “empty world” number of about three species per year. Rainforests are still being denuded at a net loss rate, although it has slowed in most areas of the world. The changes noted above are basically due to human settlement patterns, Climate change offers the potential of further adding to this rate of loss, with the most notable impacts being in the cooler climates. However, issues about role of temperature in plant maturation and propagation are only now being fully understood, and we may discover that these impacts are worse than previously thought.
Social
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Social issues are concerned about the equity of the allocation of goods and resources in society. Sustainability does not guarantee equality, but it does hold equity - that fundamental concepts of equal treatment and opportunity - be met. At the least, it would require that all people within a community, a state, a nation, the world have their basic needs for food, water and shelter met. Many people in the world make less than $2 per day. Almost 15% of the people in Houston are undernourished. Over 30% of Houston residents live below poverty. So there is certainly a general concern about basic needs being met. But on a larger level, there are major concerns about equity between nations, particularly between less developed and developed nations. Many of these areas of the world have not yet begun to consume in the manner to which western societies have become accustomed. United States citizens consume about 20 tons of carbon per person per day, compared to the global average of less than 5 tons per day and the developed world average of less than 2 tons per day. If we are to reduce our carbon footprint and also see economic development of less developed counties, the developed world is going to have to reduce its carbon footprint. Otherwise, the rest of the world will have no capacity for expansion, a patently unfair and untenable outcome. At the far end of the social spectrum is potential for a failed state – the collapse of the social system. That has happened in several war-torn countries but the potential exists that this problem will become more widespread as food and water supply issues become worse and population relocations are caused by sea level rise and other climate-related factors. At a more local level, we have extensive personal bankruptcies throughout the United States due to our living beyond our means, piling up debt without hope of relief. We are beginning to observe bankruptcies at the municipal level as well, not to mention countries such as Greece and Spain that appear to be on the brink of economic collapse under the weight of debt. When government financial systems fail, the social system will also risk failure.
Needed – An Integrated View
The more one delves into the subject of sustainability, the more it becomes apparent that new systems must and will emerge to address the deficiencies of the
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current system. At the center of these changes is the transition from “empty world” thinking to “full world” thinking. The concepts upon which the sustainable society of the future will be built will be holistic rather than separate, integrated rather than apart. New behavioral boundaries and norms will emerge. And no concepts will be more pervasive than efficiency, full disclosure of social, ecological and economic impacts and pursuit of alternative ways of solving problems across these three dimensions. In fact, the philosophy of the alternative will emerge as the cornerstone of all designs as we endeavor to maintain our life style, our comforts at lower and lower investment of carbon and other environmental footprints. An efficient society of the future will be a secure society. And that is what most of us want – security for ourselves, our children and those who come after us. Growth as we currently practice it will become a relic, left behind as we mitigate our impacts, reduce our footprints and honestly come to grips with the dilemma of limits. As we move forward, we might do well to look to the ecological system for guidance. The natural world has ways of solving problems of limits. There are growth phases and then there are climax phases, the time when the growth spurt is left behind and the system begins to stabilize. It is the flattening of innumerable growth curves that should be the major goal of a successful human system, an economic system that is inclusive of ecological considerations. And we need to achieve this while still meeting basic needs for all in a manner that is at least arguably equitable. At its core, sustainability is about a very hard concept – “enough”. This is a very simple word conveying a very difficult concept that must be fully appreciated, understood and embraced. Relative to the concept of “enough”, I am reminded of a conversation with a plastics company about sustainability, about the layers and levels of issues. We talked about efficiency, about alternative products that use less resources and produce less pollution, and then we talked about dematerialization, about the removal of plastics from certain products. And then I tossed out the concept that I saw as the end point of sustainability – about reaching a place where there was “enough” plastic product and we did not need any more. I
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have seldom encountered a response so filled with lack of understanding. It was not that the company was against the idea of “enough”. It was that the idea did not compute. The concept that there could be enough plastic simply was not part of the corporate mindset, nor is it currently within the mindset of most of us. But it will be. We must approach sustainability not as idealists pursuing some noble goal, but as pragmatists solving a very real problem that ultimately threatens the livelihood of every citizen of the planet. Without a different model of the human future, we are on a path that cannot be maintained over time and certainly not into future generations. We know that from what we can see today, We need to stabilize the planet. We need to work with corporations. We need to work with governments. We need to work at every level where people assemble. And we need to start today. To achieve such a stable system will be a huge feat. It will require hard work for decades. It will not happen overnight.. The question is – are we wise enough to be able to make the changes that have to be made? That is the challenge of sustainability, that is the adventure of sustainability, and that is the future of sustainability. It promises to be quite an interesting ride. In summary, the goal is to develop pragmatic ways to integrate economic, ecologic and social thinking into a new methodologies and analytical constructs that do not view these issues separately but rather integrate them holistically. When that has been achieved, we will be embarking on a course of action suitable for living in the “full world”.
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