The End of Sustainability

Resilience and the Future of Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene

Melinda Harm Benson, Robin Kundis Craig

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700625161, 9780700625161
• eBook ISBN: 9780700625178
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Biological Sciences

The time has come for us to collectively reexamine—and ultimately move past—the concept of sustainability in environmental and natural resources law and management. The continued invocation of sustainability in policy discussions ignores the emerging reality of the Anthropocene, which is creating a world characterized by extreme complexity, radical uncertainty, and unprecedented change. From a legal and policy perspective, we must face the impossibility of even defining—let alone pursuing—a goal of “sustainability” in such a world.

Melinda Harm Benson and Robin Kundis Craig propose resilience as a more realistic and workable communitarian approach to environmental governance. American environmental and natural resources laws date to the early 1970s, when the steady-state “Balance of Nature” model was in vogue—a model that ecologists have long since rejected, even before adding the complication of climate change. In the Anthropocene, a new era in which humans are the key agent of change on the planet, these laws (and American culture more generally) need to embrace new narratives of complex ecosystems and humans’ role as part of them—narratives exemplified by cultural tricksters and resilience theory.

Updating Aldo Leopold’s vision of nature and humanity as a single community for the Anthropocene, Benson and Craig argue that the narrative of resilience integrates humans back into the complex social and ecological system known as Earth. As such, it empowers humans to act for a better future through law and policy despite the very real challenges of climate change

Melinda Harm Benson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico.

CHAPTER ONE

Welcome to the Anthropocene

The world around us is changing. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) extensively documented in its Climate Change 2014 Summary for Policymakers,¹ “human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.”² Ongoing changes include alterations to air temperature and wind currents, ocean temperature and currents, and terrestrial and weather conditions around the world. In turn, these changes impact the ecosystems, that depend upon those global systems as well as the societies that depend upon those ecosystems, including for their livelihoods and well-being.³ The impacts of climate change underscore that we are living in the Anthropocene, an era in which humans are a fundamental agent of change on our planet.

The realities of the Anthropocene demand a new approach to environmental governance. To date, natural resource environmental law and policy in the United States have not kept pace with our understanding of how natural systems actually work or the nature and scale of climate change. For this and other reasons, it is important to reexamine current and past approaches to environmental management in light of the Anthropocene. The key argument of this book is that the time has come for us to collectively reexamine—and, we argue, ultimately move past—the concept of sustainability as an environmental governance goal.

While definitions of “sustainable” and “sustainability” vary, the core concept in most invocations is some version of living within one’s means—that is, not expending or consuming more than can be maintained or replaced. And that focus is important. “Sustainability” becomes an almost meaningless concept unless it is applied to a particular subject: the sustainability of what, exactly? Personal financial sustainability, for example, envisions living within a budget and not mounting up debt when the principal cannot be repaid.

The focus is not all that different in the natural resources context, in which goals of sustainability have to take account both the difference between renewable and nonrenewable resources and the interconnectedness of physical, chemical, and biological systems. For example, nonrenewable resources such as oil and natural gas that are mined raise critical questions regarding what we mean by sustainability. Similarly, pumping groundwater from an aquifer that will take millennia to recharge is by definition unsustainable, regardless of how many decades it takes for that point to become clear.

Defining the sustainability of renewable resources also takes a bit of thought. For example, a “sustainable” harvest of timber might mean taking no more trees than can be replaced before the next harvest. However, that rather simplistic approach ignores the fact that trees play many roles. Ideally, the calculation of a “sustainable” harvest would also take account of the trees’ role in providing a forest for recreation, the other forms of life that depend on those trees for shelter and for food, the role of the trees in soil production and retention, the trees’ contribution to water storage and release, their production of oxygen and uptake of carbon dioxide, and so on.

Done right, pursuit of “sustainable” use of natural resources requires a fairly elaborate analysis of what those natural resources are actually doing in and across several scales of complex and changing social-ecological systems (SESs) as well as an acknowledgement that any change in resource use will almost always come with trade-offs, however minor they may be: a tree used to build a house is the loss of a tree that could sequester carbon dioxide. More fundamentally problematic, however, is the fact that the pursuit of sustainability in natural resources governance has inherently assumed a certain level of predictability and stationarity in these systems—that the world tomorrow will behave as the world does today despite human intervention. As Chapter 3 will explore in detail, this assumption ignores the core dynamism of ecological systems and hence has long been in need of refinement.

Unpredictability and change undermine sustainability goals. To go back to the personal finances example, significant and unpredictable fluctuations in income from week to week, month to month, or year to year make it difficult to establish a sustainable budget. Similarly, the unpredictability of the relevant national and local economies might be critical factors in how large the budget should be, such as during periods of high inflation rates. Prudent households facing these kinds of unpredictable financial realities are likely to take a precautionary approach to spending and, if possible, establish a substantial savings account to bridge large variances in income and spending power.

Today, natural resources management, law, and policy face similar dilemmas as a result of change and unpredictability. In the Anthropocene, the simplistic approach to natural resources sustainability displayed in the timber harvest example ignores the realities of climate change and other anthropogenic influences on complex SESs. The effects can be dramatic: as climate-related pine beetle infestations and forest destruction in Colorado and British Columbia attest, we might not in fact get a next harvest because the underlying ecological support systems for tree growth are themselves changing.

The continued invocation of sustainability in international talks, development goals, and other policy discussions ignores the emerging reality of climate change and its implications for our ability to define—let alone achieve—sustainability as the natural world is altering under our feet. It’s not that sustainability is not a laudable ideal; the issue is whether the sustainability narrative is still a helpful way of conceptualizing environmental governance goals. Two major elements of the sustainability story are clearly worth transmitting into the Anthropocene: the idea that we cannot consider environmental, economic, and social issues in isolation and the importance of inter- and intra-generational equity. However, the Anthropocene demands difficult conversations about the trade-offs among economic development, social improvement, and environmental protection, as well as the future costs of present actions and the inevitable inequities that will result.

In this introduction, we present the nature of the Anthropocene. We then provide a brief outline of the environmental challenges that climate change will bring in this new era and discuss the cultural narratives that US society has used to date to understand climate change. We argue that these current narratives have disempowered us and reduced our capacity to address climate change. More broadly, however, climate change narratives are a specific manifestation of the more general and increasing gap between ecological understandings of complex natural systems and environmental and natural resources law and policy. We explore this more general historical evolution in Chapter 2, before proposing in Chapter 3 that the narrative of resilience is a more productive new way of conceptualizing environmental and natural resource management in the Anthropocene. Resilience is not itself an environmental goal. Instead, resilience theory is a theoretical framework for conceptualizing how complex SESs respond to continual change and how those responses might affect human environmental management efforts.

While not inherently incompatible concepts, resilience and sustainability are not the same. The pursuit of sustainability inherently assumes that we: (1) know what can be sustained and how; and (2) have the capacity to maintain some type of stationarity and/or equilibrium in the relevant systems. These assumptions are not appropriate in the Anthropocene (and they probably never were). By contrast, resilience theory does not assume stationarity within ecological and planetary systems and instead acknowledges disequilibrium and nonlinear change in SESs. It embraces the dynamics and complexities of SESs, does not require certainty, and emphasizes building adaptive capacity rather than maintaining stationarity. For these reasons among others, resilience theory provides a more realistic approach to environmental governance in the Anthropocene.

What Exactly Is the Anthropocene?

The term “Anthropocene” acknowledges that human action has become an important driver—arguably the most important driver—of ecological change. It recognizes that humans are pervasively altering planetary ecological function.⁴ The most authoritative definitions of “Anthropocene” come from the International Union of Geological Sciences, the international scientific organization that is in charge of officially designating and naming geological time periods, and the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), which evaluates the scientific evidence in support of new geological period designations. On August 29, 2016, the ICS’s Working Group on the Anthropocene recommended that our current interval be recognized as a new epoch, the Anthropocene,⁵ or “the new age of humans.”⁶ It noted that:

Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer [coined the term “Anthropocene”] in 2000 to denote the present time interval, in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities. These include changes in: erosion and sediment transport associated with a variety of anthropogenic processes, including colonisation, agriculture, urbanisation and global warming[,] the chemical composition of the atmosphere, oceans and soils, with significant anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals[,] environmental conditions generated by these perturbations; these include global warming, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic “dead zones”[,] the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, species invasions and the physical and chemical changes noted above.⁷

While these alterations to natural systems derive from many causes—consumption of natural resources, pollution and waste disposal, and a growing human population—the Working Group is currently dating the Anthropocene to about 1950, reflecting the dispersal of radioactive materials from nuclear bomb tests across the planet. Another possibility for the starting point, however, is the Industrial Revolution, underscoring the importance of climate change as the most recently acknowledged, pervasive, and complex of these human drivers of ecological change.

Beyond strict geological conventions, the concept of Anthropocene is already being extensively used in a variety of academic and policy contexts.⁸ At this point, however, the Anthropocene and its implications are not reflected in environmental and natural resources law in the United States. As we shall see, current approaches tend to view humans as separate from the environment, most often as agents who act as the controlling engineers who can shape environmental processes to our own desires and goals. The notion of an Anthropocene provides a potentially powerful tool for reconceptualizing our relationship to the natural environment. Specifically, the concept of the Anthropocene underscores the fact that humans are one component of vast networks of complex SESs—systems that sometimes react in ways that humans did not intend or, often, could not have even predicted. These systems operate in multiple temporal and spatial scales, some of them fast and local, others plodding and regional, and still others millennial and global.

As an example, the immediate and local environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution was air pollution created by burning coal, producing the smog and the “killer fogs” in London and many US industrial cities that occurred when inversion layers in the atmosphere trapped soot and other air pollutants close to the ground. There were no environmental laws in place at the time to address these issues because the Industrial Revolution brought with it radical changes to our use of fossil fuels, creating new pollution problems beyond anything previously imagined. Nevertheless, these events did lead to new laws to address air pollution—in the United States, the Clean Air Act, enacted in its current structure in 1970.

However, the air pollutant products of the Industrial Revolution, particularly carbon dioxide, also impact medium- and large-scale planetary systems, and we are just now beginning to feel the effects of the Industrial Revolution at these scales. At the medium time scale is climate change, resulting from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over a few centuries, with planet-scale implications. At the large scale is ocean acidification, the progressive lowering of the ocean’s pH as it absorbs excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cycle it, eventually, back into the earth’s rocks and crust. Like climate change, ocean acidification is planetary in geographic scale, but scientists estimate that it will take at least a thousand years to cycle carbon dioxide back out of ocean waters, meaning that ocean acidification reflects system processes that operate on a temporal scale at least an order of magnitude greater than climate change.

Humans did not intend to cause air pollution, climate change, or ocean acidification as we increasingly exploited fossil fuels—but that’s the point of the Anthropocene. Humans can affect, and in turn be affected by, larger-scale planetary systems in ways that we neither intended nor predicted. We are embedded within these complex earth systems at all scales, clearly able to influence them but also increasingly clearly not in complete control of them. Humans are both part of something bigger than our species and subject to system dynamics that we cannot completely master.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, responses to the Anthropocene often reveal anxiety and feelings of disempowerment. Among ecologists and biologists, for example, Paul Robbins and Sarah Moore have identified two conflicting reactions to the Anthropocene in the context of ecological restoration efforts. “First is the clear and abiding concern—or obsession—with human transformation of the earth to a point of irreversibility,” a reactive narrative that sounds in tragedy, value judgments, and an urgent call to restore ecosystems to prehuman status.⁹ Second is a deepened concern regarding the possibility of scientific objectivity, a recognition that “in a quickly transforming environment, deeply held human biases (like those towards nativeness) cause apparently scienti...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Welcome to the Anthropocene
• 2. Narrating Our Relationship with Nature
• 3. Resilience and the Trickster: A New Narrative for the Anthropocene
• 4. Regime Change for New Mexico Watersheds
• 5. Marine Fisheries and Biodiversity: How the Trickster Undermines Sustainable Yield
• 6. Thinking Like a System: Resilience as a Narrative of Connection
• Conclusion. Living the New Story: Implications for Governance
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover