Sustainability: The Basics

Peter Jacques

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317649328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ökologie

Sustainability is concerned with the issues around the ongoing and mutual preservation of both society and the environment. It is a widely used term and supposed goal for many governments but it is also easily misunderstood. Sustainability: The Basics offers an accessible and interdisciplinary introduction to the concept, and discusses key questions such as:

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• How do we decide who or what should be sustained?
• How can we ensure that the world's resources are distributed fairly?
• What lessons can we learn from the collapse of previous civilizations?

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Sustainability studies is in a position to ask some of the most interesting questions about human purpose, identity, modernity, ethics, and the nature of "progress". This book is an ideal starting point for anyone who wants to know more about we can 'hold up' civilization, humanity, and the world we live in.

1
Sustainability

What is at Stake?

Map of this Chapter

The central storyline of this chapter is that of contradiction. We first focus on the central contradiction between growth and integrity, where using more resources undermines the very relationships that are required for continued growth. Growth also has a distributive effect on life chances for others and fundamentally involves justice problems. This essential contradiction is evident in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire described here first. The chapter will highlight a number of concepts dealing with the era of human domination, the Anthropocene, and the opportunities and challenges this presents. The chapter also proposes that we are obligated to use knowledge responsibly and discusses the problems involved in this pursuit. The chapter then discusses the context, extent, and meaning of these global environmental and social changes, and some of the particular threats these changes pose to people, that make studying sustainability necessary.

What Lies Beyond the Gates of Rome?

At midnight on August 24, 410 CE, Roman slaves slipped open the Salarian gate to the city and the Goths famously sacked Rome. This was the beginning of the end of one of the most powerful and influential empires in history, and “By 476, Rome was the fiefdom of Odoacer, king of the Goths” (Ferguson, 2010). This collapse is also one of the great mysteries that has generated thousands of volumes of work, analyzing how and why the Roman Empire fell. Like issues in sustainability, there are competing ideas about how to look at the problem. What we take away and remember beyond the gates of Rome and other historical collapses is essential for future adaptation and resilience of human society.

Ancient Rome was one of the cornerstones of Western society. Romans built enormous architectural and engineering monuments, its social structure was highly complex, and its political organization was legendary. Our calendar, many military strategies, and many contemporary Western legal traditions date back to this period, amongst other important legacies. Rome was an empire and therefore its center of power ruled over many other areas. Rome controlled vast areas of Europe, stretching across western Asia and northern Africa, which it used as a granary and tax base. Early on, Rome conquered these areas to solve resource shortages. However, the imperial approach produces a contradiction: As expansion and conquest fed the imperial center of power, new Roman territories required more resources and complicated the social dynamics for governing. More conquest produced more needs and, over time, the Empire hit a critical moment where these needs could not be met adequately. The classic scholar of Rome, Edward Gibbon (1994) wrote:

the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

Scholarship of the Roman collapse has changed substantially since Gibbon originally wrote these words in 1781. For example, Jones (1964) wrote that over-taxation undermined the Roman economy, leaving peasant agriculturalists without enough to survive, setting up the Empire for collapse. This view has been recast though, with evidence that peasants were not being over-taxed and the economic productivity from agriculture was booming in the fourth century, “with no sign of overall population decline” (Heather, 2006). However, the Empire had maximized its agriculture productivity and could not increase it substantially and, at the same time, barbarian tribes had evolved to respond to Rome and had allied together to create a very large threat. Because Rome had grown so much, it had generated this antagonism and opposition; and, because it had maximized grain output, it could not raise a larger army to fight this opposition.

The west Roman state fell not because of the weight of its own “stupendous fabric”, but because its Germanic neighbors had responded to its power in ways that Romans could never have foreseen. There is in all this a pleasing denouement. By virtue of its unbounded aggression, Roman imperialism was ultimately responsible for its own destruction.

(Heather, 2006)

Even as the Roman project lasted more than 1000 years (the Empire lasted more than 400 years) and had withstood attacks and challenges for much of this period, it became increasingly vulnerable to economic and social instability that were connected to the food supply and the use of Roman power to deliver it. Eventually, critical events cast the Empire into collapse during the fifth century CE. The Western Roman Empire was pounded by Germanic invaders in 406, and sacked in 410, noted above. The Huns stretched Roman resources to the brink of exhaustion. By the middle of the fifth century, this exhaustion led to the loss of control over England, much of its European base, and—critically—North Africa. The Vandals took control of African territories one by one, removing grain supply and revenue that had been essential to keeping Rome from teetering into the abyss of oblivion.

With these losses, Rome became a classic example of social collapse. Such collapse has occurred with regularity across human history and often with breathtaking and shocking velocity. Societies can appear stable, just as a forest appears stable before a forest fire, but then at unpredictable times, small changes can hurl the society into chaos and disintegration. Causes for these social collapses are typically overlapping economic, social, and ecological problems. This book will consider some of the lessons from sustainability studies and science at a time in human history when we, as a species, have begun to radically change core ecosystems and cycles. Some of these lessons are quite dire, but we have advantages that Rome did not have, obviously including a good understanding of Rome’s own demise and a good understanding of other civilization collapses. Of course, the record of people learning from history is notoriously spotty, and anthropologist Patrick Kirch (2005) opines:

Yet dare we hope that such retrospective understanding of how humans have transformed the Earth—and in the process suffered through a panoply of crises, social collapses, and restructurings—could possibly be of use in guiding our collective future? Some at least think that the archaeological record provides lessons that could guide our future. Whether we heed them is up to us.

Civilization collapse occurs when critical needs are not met for that civilization and it is what happens when a civilization fails to be socially, ecologically, or economically sustainable. Collapse can also result from imperial aggression and dispossession, where the target society may be subject to disease, slavery, or loss of resources, and then the empire itself requires more and more resources that are difficult to ensure. Collapse has occurred across history numerous times, and there is little reason to think that the danger of a civilization collapse has passed. In fact, many scholars in the area of sustainability warn of the threats of civilization collapse by the end of this century. Celebrated sustainability intellectual, David Orr, warns of the oncoming deep crisis that faces world civilization:

The “perfect storm” ahead, in short, is caused by the convergence of steadily worsening climate change; spreading ecological disorder (e.g., deforestation, soil loss, water shortages, species loss, ocean acidification); population growth; unfair distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of economic growth; national and ethnic tensions; and political incapacity.

(Orr, 2012)

The story of Rome tells us there are inherent contradictions to growth and consumption of land, resources, and social capacity to solve problems. On the one hand, expansion of Rome meant that it became more powerful, and its people enjoyed some prosperity but, on the other, this prosperity had to come from somewhere and even as the empire grew, it weakened and destabilized the social and natural sources of this growth. The contradictions of this growth set the stage for Rome’s demise, and Rome is only one demonstration of the power of these contradictions. As great as any one people may believe themselves to be, they are always reliant on finite social and ecological systems. Past a certain threshold, growth contradicts the integrity of these critical systems. This is a central lesson of sustainability, and the irony is that every great society probably has known and at the same time denied this fundamental condition of history.

What is Sustainability?

We begin here with some of the basics of sustainability, though these questions are explored more in-depth in Chapter 2. There are literally hundreds of attempts to define sustainability, but many of these efforts agree around a few basic broad, if ambiguous, values. My reading of these literatures is that sustainability is the imperfect process of building and maintaining global social systems of capable, accountable, adaptive, just, and free people who can make important decisions and trade-offs with foresight and prudence and who foster the robust, self-organizing, dynamic, and complex ecosystems around the world for now and future generations.

In the last few decades, sustainability studies and science has grown around an increasing concern that the modern, interconnected global economy and population is moving far away from the above aspirations and is pushing Earth systems to their limits where they will no longer be able to support the human prospect in the same way.

The Latin root of the word “sustainability” is sus tenere—to “hold up” or “maintain,” perhaps just as Atlas is said to hold up the heavens in Greek myth. However, the most widely used definition of sustainability comes from the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), otherwise known as the Brundtland Commission. WCED (1987) defined sustainability as development that, “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” But these two definitions are really just the beginning, because global sustainability involves complicated questions about economic growth, ecological integrity, and justice around the world.

The objectives of this book are to explain the central debates and advances in the field of sustainability studies, and maintaining global social and ecological systems. Buckminster Fuller captured the sentiment of planetary sustainability this way: “making the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone” (Fuller, 2008, emphasis added). The vocabulary to refer to 100 percent of humanity is awkward, where we might refer to world civilization, world society, global societies, but the central concern is to think about a holistic, planetary sustainability.

If global welfare is a worthy goal of sustainability, then we are left to reconcile how growth and the accumulation of wealth are arranged with limited Earth systems to feed and deal with the waste of growth. This means that as Earth systems are exhausted, some present groups and future generations may have less, across local, regional, and global contexts, and this growth then has a distributive effect on wealth and welfare. Since growth and its waste affects and trades off current and future chances for people to live well, sustainability is a justice problem.

Checkpoint: Responsibility and Knowledge

Why do we need to discuss sustainability? Would it have been useful for Roman senators or citizens to think about problems of sustainability? If they did, what claims would have merited attention at the time, and if there were warnings of a coming crisis, how responsible would the leaders and emperor of Rome have been to following through on such alarms?

Are there really problems that threaten human societies that are that serious? And, really—how do we know? Perhaps the problems of sustainability are just what social critic H. L. Menken warned about when he said that “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary” (Holloway and Sou, 2002). We should take Menken’s warning seriously, which means we need to have a good answer to “how do we know” that there are serious sustainability problems that are not just meant to scare populations into submission to a state, corporation, or faction.

When it comes to global environmental changes, such as climate change, it is important for us to ask: “How do we know what we think we know?” The study of how we know what we think we might know comes from the philosophical tradition of epistemology. There are a lot of ways that individuals come to believe something is true, and the veracity, or truth, of that knowledge is permanently uncertain.

Consequently, we need a strategy to evaluate assertions. The strategy in this book is to rely primarily on technical scientific literature to describe environmental problems because outside of this literature claims receive less oversight and scrutiny. This does not mean orthodox science is always right, but there is a system of correcting what it gets wrong over time. If we rely on assertions outside of the scientific community, for scientific questions, we can easily be caught in the crossfire of ideological conflicts without even knowing it.

Environmental groups may often report problems with accuracy and diligence, but they are political groups and we must expect them to cherry-pick their evidence to promote their goals. We must expect the same from industry and governments, who often serve political and economic elites. Often, government and international governmental organizations provide accurate information, but, they too, have important political agendas and we should use these sources consciously and with purpose. The scientific literature is imperfect and it has its own biases and politics, but it has systems in place that guard against overt propaganda.

The epistemology used in this book assumes that all knowledge is political, and therefore is never an un-slanted vision of reality—all knowledge is produced, distributed, and sustained with a purpose. On the other hand, the epistemology used in this book also assumes that the human condition is not so subjective that reliable knowledge is impossible. One strategy to negotiate the forces of political subjectivity and establish a defensible understanding of the world is to corroborate points of view over time. When some form of reality can be described similarly by multiple people who have different interests and perspectives, then that knowledge is more reliable.

The process of oversight and corroboration in science comes from peer-review, which provides a system of good faith witnesses. Experts weigh-in on every publication, including this book you are reading. Authors must respond to criticism from others who are experts in the field and revise their work accordingly. Over time, corroboration openly builds confidence and the body of knowledge grows.

This approach is consistent with Norton’s “limited realism” that admits that we are forced to individually interpret the world, but experience and time winnow mistakes. Our belief systems and behavior that come from our understanding of the world, “must stand the test of more and more experience on the part of more and more observers and their inputs over time” (Norton, 2005). Corroboration by multiple voices provides a shared judgment to build common ground for sensible action. Indeed, the ecological thinker Aldo Leopold warned that human survival will itself test the validity of our beliefs and decisions.

That said, there is rarely unanimity in communities of scientists, and responsible use of science indicates we work with the consensus that is forged in these communities, even with the understanding that it is always possible for minority dissidents to be right in the end.

This means that it is irresponsible to ignore scient...