SUSTAINABILITY

 What Is Sustainability & How Do We Get There? 

  by Brian Kermath                                                                                 References               Links

Although the essential conceptual elements of the "sustainability" idea have been around for a long time, the term in its present context did not become a significant item of academic discourse across a range of disciplines until the 1980s following a few seminal publications, and it did not become popularized until a decade later after the release of Our Common Future by the WCED in 1987.¹  Since then, a veritable flood of publications has defined, redefined, and scrutinized the idea and applied it to most human endeavors.²  Although its charge is undeniably needed for forging a quality and durable future and comes with nearly universal appeal, some commentators have argued that sustainability is conceptually too vague to have much practical value.³  Others have suggested that the idea became so diluted and misapplied as to be meaningless in most forums.⁴

Yet despite the many misinterpretations of what sustainability is, widespread cooption of the term, and countless questionable claims of praxis,⁵ the concept has historical and theoretical foundations from which it grew that are only now beginning to solidify into a defined science.⁶  Here, it is important to note that sustainability does not simply involve attaching the broad meaning of the root word "sustain" to a free-for-all of any and all human activities (despite being done with regularity), nor does it necessarily mean maintaining the status quo in perpetuity; instead, it has antecedents that place it in a fairly clear and definite context. Indeed, calls for sustainability grew out of a need for real change — out of concerns that economic growth-based development efforts were performing poorly in meeting human needs and improving human welfare in many regions,⁷ while simultaneously depleting resources rapidly, degrading the environment, pushing environmental thresholds in unprecedented ways, and compromising ambitious nature conservation efforts.⁸

Thus, sustainability can be articulated with methodological and scientific rigor making it credible and useful for analyzing and managing human activities, especially as they relate to nature, resources, and development. Moreover, the importance of the doctrine's timeliness and urgency should be underscored given a number of undeniable challenges we face including tremendous and growing population pressure, huge and mounting socioeconomic disparities, and increasing human-induced environmental degradation including global-scale changes. The culmination of all of this is that we are now for the first time in our occupation of the planet capable of and already pushing many complex and interconnected global biogeochemical thresholds to their breaking points.

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In the present context, sustainability represents an idealized societal state where people live long, dignified, comfortable, and productive lives, satisfying their needs in environmentally sound and socially just ways so as to not compromise the ability of other human beings from doing the same now and into the distant future. It is, in effect, an attempt to merge development and nature conservation efforts in a mutually beneficial way for the common good of the planet’s present and future generations alike. In practice, achieving sustainability occurs through the process of sustainable development —  discovering, adopting, implementing, establishing, and adjusting appropriate institutions, policies, strategies, and technologies to produce a just transition that moves society toward the envisioned idealized state of existence. Democracy is often viewed in the same way, as a process of working toward the ideal.

In the case of sustainability, the ideal consists of the simultaneous establishment of the two spatially and temporally essential and universal conditions — "environmental integrity" and "social justice" — that must be maintained over the long haul.

"Environmental integrity" refers to the ability of the whole environment to function as naturally as possible and to do so without compromising the ability of the ecosphere from supporting all life forms on the planet and to maintain its inherent evolutionary potential. To maintain environmental integrity societies must:

• work with Earth's components, connections, and complexities to design human systems that function as parts of living landscapes that stress adaptability, efficiency, harmony, regeneration, resiliency, and sufficiency, and mimic natural patterns, processes, and rhythms;⁹

• design human systems for efficiency, so that the sum of their outputs ideally is equal to, or even greater than the sum of the inputs required to construct and maintain them, especially as related to embodied energy or emergy;¹⁰

• consume resources conservatively and efficiently;

• consider the optimal values of resources, the most efficient use of resources, time frames for the substitution of nonrenewable resources with alternative resources, the potential alternative uses of resources, the potential values to future generations of nonrenewable resources, and the phenomenon of resource supply curves (as with peak oil);

• use renewable resources no faster than they can be renewed and in a way that does no harm to human populations and Earth's life-giving systems, the latter of which have no substitutes and little market value in the current economy;

• maximize their reliance on clean renewable energy;

• diligently observe the "Rs of resource use" including rethink, refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, and recycle; [HERE for more "Rs of resource use"]

• consider historically viewed wastes as resources to the extent possible, but also to discharge them — to the extent that they must be discharged — slower than they can be absorbed by the environment and in a way that does no harm to human populations or Earth's life-giving systems;

• strive to eliminate the production and use of toxins, especially those that are not rendered benign by the environment in short order;

• extract ecosystem products, as in agriculture, fisheries, and forestry, without a net loss of natural capital;

• encourage resiliency and fitness, in both human and natural systems, by favoring regenerative, heterogeneous, and complex landscape mosaics over homogeneity and simplicity;

• favor polycultures over monocultures and consider perennial plants over annuals in biological production systems to the extent possible;¹¹

• protect biodiversity at all levels (i.e., ecological, genetic, and species) and ensure the ecosphere's evolutionary potential;

• restore degraded environments to the extent possible through management techniques or by establishing conditions conducive for nature's restorative processes to function.

"Social justice" refers to the fair and equitable access to, and distribution of essential resources and power, fairly applied laws and regulations, and the guaranteed opportunity for all individuals and communities to contribute to the pursuit of meeting human needs, improving the human condition, fully realizing human potentials for everyone in safe and clean environments, and to receive an adequate and fair return on their investments of capital, creativity, labor, and time.

Notice that I identify two essential and universal sustainability conditions — environmental integrity and social justice — in contrast to the many authors who variably include other system components like economic viability, institutions, social capital, and technology. Although these and other components are undeniably important to make sustainability a reality, I argue that social justice and environmental integrity are the real objectives of sustainability, whereas the other system elements are merely means to those ends. Moreover, the importance of the other attributes and how they function may vary widely over time and space and may even be theoretically irrelevant under certain conditions.

From an ecologically-centered (ecocentric), or biologically-centered (biocentric), perspective, environmental integrity is often viewed as sustainability's single most critical element. It can be argued that all else depends on a healthy environment or conversely that nothing else matters if the planet can no longer support life. From an anthropocentric perspective, however, it can be argued that social justice is sustainability's only essential condition. Even environmental integrity can be viewed through the social justice lens; for example, environmental degradation that occurs as a result of someone's negligence, narrowly-focused interest, or short-term gain often unfairly negatively impacts other people somewhere at sometime.

As to economic viability, the arguments for including it in the contemporary context are straight forward and not without merit. After all, who would promote an economic activity that could not be viable? It is possible, however, to include economic viability as an element of social justice/equity. For example, economic failure may be seen as a function of a range of inequities including unfair access to information, resources, technologies, incentives, and/or markets.

Beyond that, the economic leg is often discussed in the context of the triple bottom line (3BL), which combines measures of a business' environmental and social performance with those of profit and loss to evaluate success. The obvious attractiveness of the 3BL concept as a sustainability measure within the capitalist system not withstanding, the idea has been challenged for several reasons having to do in part with the inherent difficulties in measuring environmental and social variables compared to conventional profit and loss indicators. Moreover, some authorities view unrestrained capitalism itself with its growth imperative as unsustainable over the long-term in a finite world.¹²  Others characterize the transfer of the burden to deal with externalities to consumers and suppliers as a function of neoliberal policies.¹³  Alternative economic paradigms would internalize such costs through full-cost accounting mechanisms, thereby eliminating the need to turn 'responsibility' over to companies and consumers, which results in part in a system with a minority of elite conscious consumers and much talk about corporate responsibility and sustainability, but little action other than lip service, posturing, tokenism, greenwashing, and distortion.¹⁴

It should also be noted that for most of human existence, people subsisted without cash economies, and even in some places today groups survive largely beyond the greater cash economies. Of course, the logic of including economic viability in the modern capitalist context is obvious and I do include it along with other system components — e.g., political and cultural — that may be treated in similar theoretical frameworks as secondary components of the modern system. But again, economic viability is merely a means to an end within the concept of sustainability.

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Difficult though it has been to accurately disseminate sustainability's history and meaning,¹⁵ it has been far more difficult to implement, and few enduring examples of its complete embodiment exist, despite the many dwindling remnants of marginalized indigenous societies, many of which are associated with sustainable ideals,¹⁶ and the countless recent initiatives that show promise. Although numerous factors impede sustainability's march, chief among them is the reality that all landscapes have been shaped by complex and committed constituencies — both internal and external to them — that do not defect easily to new visions without assurances that a change of course would bring them more gains than losses.

Moreover, the policies, institutions, and physical infrastructures that have grown from their vested interests and sunk costs,¹⁷ and the structural realities of the larger political economies that govern and impact them, distort the human system, often standing as "systemic limits" (or limits imposed on the current system by past decisions). An example here would include the byproducts of colonial mercantilism and neoclassical economics that are now manifest in neoliberalism at the international/national scale and clientelism at the regional/local scale, along with widespread corruption.¹⁸  These structural realities obstruct or otherwise impair the necessary processes of change and either permit and/or encourage and indeed reward unsustainable activities to persist that would not be viable in a truly sustainable system.¹⁹

• strives to engage, enlighten, empower, and include all community members/stakeholders and builds local capacity, participation, and human and social capital for posterity, while also recognizing the importance of influential leaders and powerful individuals;²⁹

• encourages experiential learning, life-long learning, service learning, shared learning, and transformative learning, in addition to conventional forms of education;³⁰

  promotes community-based production, consumption, organization, learning, decision making, governance, and investing, while also understanding the importance of more distant connections;

• seeks to open the blinders and correct the myopia that derive from the bounded rationality and cultural inertia that characterize all societies, and in so doing strives to avoid and/or eliminate human-induced systemic limits, problem denial, and social traps;³¹

• addresses the misguided arguments that have contributed to the concept's cooption and misunderstanding;³²

• recognizes that although humanity's field of possibilities is infinite on some levels, not all things are possible, and that all human realities represent only subsets of what could have been and what could be;

• celebrates and values biological and cultural diversity and natural and cultural heritage and cultivates a sense-of-place that is deeply rooted in both cultural and natural heritage;³³

• develops and employs appropriate technologies and stresses adaptability, durability, effectiveness, efficiency, and simplicity;

• recognizes that current consumption patterns must change and so encourages critical, or conscious consumption that stresses efficiency, ethics, fairness, functionality, purpose, responsibility, and simplicity, and considers the sequence factor of all inputs in the production and distribution paths in the life cycle of all goods and services;

• works estimates of natural capital — including ecosystem services (HERE & HERE) — and historically externalized costs (or externalities) into full-cost accounting procedures and fixes development policies (e.g., grants, loans, and debt), discount rates, subsidies, taxes, and trade policies to reflect its values;

• in seeking to eliminate poverty, recognizes that economic growth does not necessarily correlate positively with human welfare,³⁴ and thus measures progress broadly on quality of life and well-being for all, rather than narrowly on economic growth rates and per capita incomes.

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Endnotes

 ¹ Some of the early seminal publications around 1980 include Allen (1980), Catton (1980), Coomer (1979), Brown (1981), and IUCN (1980).

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