Sustainability

A Systems Approach

Tony Clayton, Nicholas Radcliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138141636
• eBook ISBN: 9781134172016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

The question of sustainability affects most areas of human activity. It is intrinsically complex and multi-disciplinary. Sustainable policies have to adapt to new knowledge and changing circumstances. Understanding sustainability and ways of achieving it have to involve an understanding of complex adaptive systems and general systems theory - a rapidly developing new branch of social studies.;This book provides an introduction and thorough explanation of this field, and shows its application in the social and economic management of sustainability. It is written for readers at an undergraduate level and should be useful for a wide range of undergraduate courses.

1
Introduction

Such is the history of it. Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.

Mark Twain, The Damned Human Race.

The brief history of humanity

The Earth is about four and a half billion years old, somewhere between one quarter and one half of the age of the universe. It is the only planet in the universe currently known to support life. Life began on this planet nearly four billion years ago, so the story of life on Earth is only a little shorter than that of the planet itself.¹

The human species is of relatively recent origin. Humans have existed for some 0.005 per cent of the time during which there has been biological activity on the planet, a ratio approximately equivalent to one day in a 55 year lifespan. The initial divergence from other apes occurred some 7 million years ago. The precursor Australopithecus lived from 7 to 2 million years ago. Homo Erectus evolved, via Homo Habilis, some 1.7 million years ago. Our immediate ancestors, Homo Sapiens, evolved from Homo Erectus possibly as little as 200,000 years ago. From about 100,000 years ago Homo Sapiens occupied parts of Africa, and the warmer parts of Europe and Asia.

It is not clear at what stage we became a cultural species. It has been suggested that there is evidence for cultural behaviour from as far back as 60,000 or even 100,000 years ago. However, the earliest unambiguous evidence for sophisticated cultural behaviour, including a technology of tools and weapons, burial of the dead, fertility worship, paintings, sculptures and so on dates from some 40,000 years ago, as modern man, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, spread across Europe and replaced Neanderthal Man (now generally considered to be a member of the species Homo Sapiens). Humans reached Australia some 35,000 years ago, North America perhaps 20,000 years ago, and had spread across most of the ice-free world by the end of the last ice age, some 15,000 to 12,000 years ago. The first domestication of plants and animals happened some 12,000 years ago, and there were farming communities in various parts of the world by some 8,000 years ago.² Some of these villages grew into the first small cities some 6,000 years ago. In comparison to the duration of life on Earth, therefore, contemporary human civilisation is of very recent origin.

The origin of civilisation

The original development of permanent human settlements was probably rooted in both functional and cultural needs. All species are faced with the functional problems of survival and reproduction, which has led to the evolution of some structurally similar solutions. There are situations in which some form of social organisation or other form of cooperation makes it more likely that the individuals concerned will survive and reproduce, and that their genotype will therefore survive. In such cases, the process of evolution will tend to select for cooperative modes of behaviour. Certainly, humans are not the only social species. It is probably inappropriate to try to draw any moral implications from this, or to conclude either that humans are essentially selfish or that humans are essentially social and cooperative. Such arguments are generally based on a simplistic genetic determinism. The process of evolution has no moral connotations.

However, the first semi-permanent settlement sites may have also had important cultural significance from the outset. It has been suggested, for example, that the core of a group’s territory would have had great symbolic importance as the place where they buried their dead, had their most sacred sites, and carried out their most important rituals.³ It is probable that the development of humans into a fully social and cultural species, with sophisticated political and economic modes of organisation, was primarily achieved through the medium of the proto-city, which made such social differentiation and organisation possible. Some of the complex patterns of relationships, functions, and purposes that constitute modern civilisation today probably existed, in an embryonic form, in the neolithic villages 11,000 years ago, and evolved to meet the more complex demands of larger settlements as villages grew into the first small cities some 6,000 years ago.

As humans have developed into a cultural species, we have acquired the ability to regulate the pattern of interaction between members of the community and between the community and its environment via socially transmitted information rather than biological feedback processes. The concepts of ethics, rights, responsibilities and codes of behaviour, for example, probably originated in the functional need to manage both the internal group dynamics and the interaction between the group and its wider natural and social environment by controlling individual and interpersonal behaviour. Such concepts would have been first expressed as customs or mores, group-based behavioural codes that would influence the behaviour of individuals in ways that would aid the survival of the group. Such group-based customs have been developed and extended, over thousands of years, into philosophical, moral, legal, governmental and other codes and systems of behaviour, as well as conceptions of organised morality in the form of religious proscriptions.

The increasing numbers in settlements, with the consequent concentration of demand and technical and religious power is also likely to have generated early political conflicts and structures. The land-use and other resource demand generated by neolithic settlements, for example, probably created conflicts of interest with residual palaeolithic migratory people. This conflict is reflected in various religious and mythical forms, such as the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis, and Lugubanda and Dumuzi in Mesopotamian legend.

As settlements grew, councils of village elders were replaced by more differentiated political structures, with the first emergence of castes of warriors, priests, and kings. Of course, the development of increasingly sophisticated social organisation imposes its own demands. There are new opportunities for the interests of the individual to clash with those of the group, and such conflicts must be managed in such a way as to limit the damage that might otherwise ensue. Thus the early cities probably gave rise to the first political and economic forms and structures.

The death of civilisations

There have been a number of occasions in human history in which societies have failed to meet their challenges, and have ceased to exist. In some cases this has been due to natural disasters, where events of non-human origin such as earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanic eruptions have made life impossible. In some cases disintegration has been caused by invasion and the destruction of pre-existent social, cultural, and economic systems. There is also a third category of cases, in which societies have damaged their environmental support systems to the point at which their demands or their numbers exceeded the reduced carrying capacity of the area. The collapse of the civilisations of the Old Kingdom of Egypt around 1950 BC, the Sumerians in 1800 BC, the Maya at about 600 AD and of the Polynesians of Easter Island at about 1600 AD, for example, all appear to be of this type.⁴ Although the circumstances were varied, these instances of social disintegration appear to have been at least partly caused by a pattern of demands that degraded the resource base and eventually exceeded the available flows of resources, with a critical conjunction of external environmental change with various social, cultural, political or economic circumstances that resulted in a failure to develop an adequate response to the changing situation and a consequent inability to achieve a more sustainable balance. Another common feature of these examples is that while the final stage of social disintegration was relatively brief, the causes of decline developed slowly and so may not have been sufficiently obvious until rather too late.

While there have been some societies that have exhibited a relatively high degree of stability over lengthy periods, a ‘profile’ of human society over the 40,000 years of our existence as a cultural species would show points of relative equilibrium, punctuated with periods of more rapid change. All systems have some ability to resist perturbation, or they rapidly cease to operate as systems. However, no living or social system is static. Cultural values change, political and economic systems develop, expand, and collapse, and environmental systems evolve, grow, and perish. It is therefore more accurate to say that societies have periods of relative stability and instability. A society in which numbers and demands are low relative to available resources, and in which the area ecology has absorbed the human impact while retaining the same essential characteristics is more likely to be ecologically stable than one that does not have these attributes, while a society that has a strong consensus on the distribution of power and resources is more likely to be politically stable than one that does not have such a consensus. Such attributes always vary over time, so that a society could become politically or ecologically unstable when some key element of political support fails or the availability of some critical environmental resource falls below the necessary minimum.

Those societies that have achieved periods of stability do not generally appear to have planned explicitly for sustainability. Customs or policies that had the effect of maintaining a particular human-environmental balance, for example, would have made that society more likely to survive. Those groups that did not have such customs would be less likely to survive. As many social structures in pre- or non-literate societies are largely unrecorded, most of the available evidence (in the form of surviving societies) would be on relatively successful models of behaviour. This may be partly responsible for giving rise to the idea of the ‘noble savage’, living in harmony with nature.

Throughout its brief history, the human species has extended its influence and control, expanded into a wide range of environments, and changed or displaced a number of other ecological balances. This human-environment interaction has always been a process of dynamic evolution. The recent development of formal science and technology, and the consequent extension of human influence, has accelerated the actual and potential rate of change. Our numbers are currently increasing rapidly, and our demands have increased and become more diverse.

There are now a number of issues that suggest that we should start planning explicitly for sustainability, for perhaps the first time. The alternative may be that current human society will undergo the kind of social and economic dislocation and collapse that a number of earlier societies have already experienced, and that the situation will in that way self-correct (in the sense that demand will then fall to within carrying capacity), but at considerable human cost. Perhaps the sole consolation would be that at least this time the causes of failure would be relatively well documented for some future historian.

The real difficulty is that human society now appears to be facing a global problematique, a complex of interacting complex problems. Many countries are undergoing major political and economic transformations, and balances of power are suddenly fluid and shifting. Political concepts are changing as well. Nationalism is resurgent, yet the concept of the nation state itself is being questioned in the emerging economic groupings. Previously dominant economies are manifesting serious structural weaknesses, other economies are expanding at rates that cannot be sustained. New technologies are developing, old ones are relocating to other parts of the world. Patterns of resource demand and pollution output are changing accordingly.

More fundamentally, it now appears that human activity can, potentially, affect the global ecology in ways and to an extent not previously thought possible. Global warming, ozone depletion, soil erosion, deforestation, desertification, and species extinctions are all indicators of the extent to which human activity is now altering the conditions for life on Earth. There is now concern that current and projected human demands might exceed the mineral and biological flow rates that the planet can yield without adverse consequences, such as ecological, social, or economic disruption. Similarly, there is concern that the flows of wastes generated in meeting these demands could exceed the capacity of the global ecology to absorb these wastes without similarly adverse consequences. Some of these problems might, if unchecked, eventually cause widespread damage to human society. Some could conceivably threaten the survival of the human species. There is currently considerable uncertainty as to just how realistic these scenarios are. This means that there are no definite grounds for either alarmism or complacency. However, given that the worst-case scenario is very severe, prudent action would probably be wise. Some of the more obvious environmental problems are reviewed in Chapter 4. It is important to note that the problem is not one of absolute shortages of energy, resources, or pollution absorption capacity. The problem is in the pattern of interaction and usage. It is, in effect, a problem of poor management.

There is probably no currently possible human action that could threaten the existence of life on this planet. There are few conceivable human actions that could achieve the scale of ecological disruption already experienced by this planet on a number of previous occasions, such as the mass extinction at the Cretaceous–Tertiary boundary 64 million years ago that eliminated some 50 per cent of all marine species, or the Permian–Triassic boundary event 250 million years ago that may have eliminated some 95 per cent of all species.⁵,⁶ Human action is, however, having a significant impact on the global ecology, sometimes unknowingly and to little advantage. It is probably within current human capability to pursue these actions to the point where severe damage to human society would result, possibly even to the point where it could shorten the potential lifespan of the human species.

Of course, the ultimate fate of all species is extinction. More than 99 per cent of all species that ever lived are extinct. Species have very varied lifespans, and while the blue-green algae have been here for about 3 billion years, the typical lifespan is very much shorter. The potential lifespan of the human species is unknown, but not infinite. However, premature extinction would be regrettable.

The changes in the global ecology indicate that we need to become more aware of the consequences of our actions, and to start to manage our affairs more consciously than has generally been the case in the past. This may mean that it will be necessary to evolve new political and economic structures and decision-making mechanisms in order to respond to these emerging global environmental demands. However, as indicated earlier, we may have to do so from a position of relative political and economic instability. This is likely to be a challenging process.

Defining problems and finding solutions

If these issues can be adequately addressed by making relatively minor changes in the ways in which society meets its social and economic goals (as currently defined) a comprehensive re-evaluation of these goals would be redundant. If, however, an adequate response would entail more fundamental social and economic restructuring, it would become more likely that the goals themselves would have to be re-examined. Later chapters in this book will argue that the number, complexity, and interrelatedness of the issues now indicate that a strategy that consists of relatively unconnected adjustments to social and economic policies and means is less likely to be successful than a systematic attempt to construct socio-economic systems that engage and interact appropriately with the ecological systems of the planet. Such an approach would include the evaluation and reappraisal of many social and economic goals.

It is also clear, for reasons that are reviewed in later chapters, that many existing organisational, political, and economic concepts and structures are probably now inappropriate and unhelpful. It is unlikely that the necessary structures for international coordination, for example, will be evolved without some degree of organisational and political transformation. This in turn is unlikely to happen without a parallel evolution of the cultural and psychological concepts on which political and economic structures a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 General Systems Theory
• 3 Complex Adaptive Systems
• 4 Environmental Factors
• 5 Ecosystem Economics
• 6 Integrating Economic and Environmental Factors
• 7 Economic Policy Instruments
• 8 Discounting and Investment
• 9 The Levels of Sustainability
• 10 Financing the Transition to Sustainability
• 11 Economic Development and the Environment
• 12 Socio-cultural Factors
• 13 A Systems Approach to Managing Sustainability
• 14 Assessing Sustainability
• 15 Conclusions and Recommendations
• 16 Further Reading
• References
• Index