Sustainability
EVSS 695
Class 7: Defining Sustainability
Fall 2012
P. Brian Fisher
Heinberg,
“Beyond Limits to
Growth”
Beyond Limits to Growth
Heinberg
• 1. Rapidly Reduce dependence on fossil fuels
• 2. Adapt to the end of economic growth: reworking our current
economic system without “continuous expansion”
• 3. Design and Provide basic needs for 7billion people (and
constrain pop growth (e.g. education)
• 4. Address environmental consequences—first and foremost is GCC
• Post Carbon Transition: “must entail the thorough redesign of our
societal infrastructure, which today is utterly dependent on cheap
fossil fuels…This difference will be reflected in urban design, land
use patterns, food systems, manuf output, distribution networks,
job mkt, transportation, health care, tourism, etc…It will also
require a fundamental rethinking of our financial and cultural
systems.” (p10-11)
What is Sustainability
Heinberg
Heinberg’s five axioms
• 1. Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably
will collapse
• 2. Pop growth and/or growth in rates of consumption cannot be
sustained
• 3. To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed
at a rate that is less than or equal to rate of natural replenishment
• 4. To be sustainable, the use of non-renewables must proceed at a
rate that is declining, and the rate of decline must be greater than
or equal to the rate of depletion
• 5. Sustainability requires that substances introduced into the enviro
from human activities be minimized and rendered harmless to the
biosphere
Worldwatch,
“What is Sustainability,
Anyway”
Sustainability = Political Issue
“Ultimately, sustainable development and sustainability itself
are about collective values and related choices and are
therefore a political issue, almost certainly the supreme global
political issue of this century. Because values, politics, and our
understanding of the Earth and its systems will evolve, notions
of what is sustainable will never be static.”
• Worldwatch, “What is Sustainability, Anyway”
Care Instructions for Sustainability
• Sustainability: “things can keep going, and sustain
themselves, and keep going into the future.”
• Planet Sustainability: “can continue to do what it was
designed to do”
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Reduce dependence on fossil fuels
Reduce dependence on chemicals
Reduce destruction of nature
Remove barriers to meeting basic needs
Sustainability
• UN (Brundtland Commission): “development that meet the needs
& aspirations of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs”
• Fisher: Improving well-being for human and ecological systems at
all scales in ways that can endure to future generations (living
within the carrying capacity of ecosystems)
Simple Sustainability: How many people can
Earth’s systems support?
Depends…
• the typical level of material well-being;
• the distribution of material well-being;
• available technology;
• political institutions;
• economic arrangements;
• demographic arrangements;
• physical, chemical, and biological environments;
• how much variability in total population is acceptable;
• peoples’ willingness to risk local ecological disaster;
• the time horizon; and
• fashions, tastes, and moral values.
What is Sustainability, Anyway
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•
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Human Survival
Environment/Biodiversity
Equity
Human Well-Being/Life Quality
• “Since the industrial revolution, we have increasingly ignored or
altered the natural cycles—carbon, nitrogen, hydrological—that
replenish these systems. The resulting explosion in economic
output has come at the cost of the long-term and dangerous
depletion of natural capital.”
Lessons from Easter Island
1.
2.
3.
4.
Human beings respond strongly to incentives to overuse resources.
We have great difficulty noticing when things are going wrong,
unless it happens over relatively short periods.
Declining resource availability can undermine the very
organizational structures and capacities needed to fashion a
response.
Failure of Easter Island culture to grasp what was happening to it
led, not to its extinction, but to its radical impoverishment and
simplification
-Easter Island Sustainable? If def’n is about “survival”, yes; but if it’s
about “thriving” then no.
-Ecosystem and society became simplified from loss of biodiversity and
quality of life.
Tainter, “the inevitability of
Transition”
• Looking at 18 civilizations that reached growth limits and collapsed—
diminishing marginal returns on increasing social complexity.
• For localization:
• 1. collapse (in this context) doesn’t mean total destruction, but a rapid
descent to a lower level of social complexity
• 2. technological innovation cannot prevent this descent
• 3. So, as societies solve problems with technology, social complexity
increases; yet, there is diminishing returns  leading to vulnerability
and breakdown of complexity.
• 4. Interconnection of key systems makes “mutual descent” most likely
• Therefore, a “strong and meaningful notion of localization must go
beyond the local. It must be at once local, regional and international.”
3 E’s of Sustainable
Development
Environment Dimension:
Management of Planetary Resources
• Enviro Management
• Biosphere
• Freshwater/Oceans
• Land Use
• Human Management
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Energy
Water
Food
Transportation
Materials, Toxins, and Waste
Waste Example
Environmentalism: Stresses individualization based on recycling
Sustainability: Stresses minimization and Prevention by changing systems
Economic and Social Spheres
• Economic Dimension
• Decoupling Econ Growth & Enviro Decline
• Economic Externalities (of nature)
• Economic Opportunity
• Social Dimension
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Security and Social Justice
Poverty and Inequality
Human Settlements and New Urbanism
Eco-Democracy
Levels of Sustainability
Waste
minimization
Energy
Efficiency
EcoEffeciency
EcoEffectiveness
• Process of reducing output waste
• Minimizing linear waste streams to landfill
• Recycling, composting, forms of resuse
• Process of looking at energy throughput
• Look at energy input/output streams
• Building efficiency, energy use, and energy infrastructure
• Look at entire life cycle of both material and energy throughput (to a level in line with carrying capacity)
• Achieved through the delivery of competitively priced goods and services that satisfy human needs and
bring quality of life while progressively reducing environmental impacts and resource intensity
• Focus is on NEGATIVE impacts – “doing more with less”
• Eco-efficiency PLUS providing comprehensive strategies for creating a wholly positive footprint on the
planet – environmental, social and economic
• Emphasis on linear redesign of systems to cycles that become more effective not just reduce negatives
Thompson’s
“What is
Sustainability”?
History  Sustainability
• Our shared understanding of “sustainability” is less a scientific
concept than an historical discourse through which we might
imagine more hopeful futures.”
• We need “new ways of talking about sustainability that will
galvanize diverse and experimental forms of action b/c it is through
such experimentation that we will find the vocabulary we need.”
(p4)
What is Sustainability?
• Sustainability = resource sufficiency and functional integrity
• Non substantive Sustainability: much of discourse is based on
political, ethical, and cultural concerns—that have nothing to do
with above (sufficiency)
• Jamieson: Sustainability does little to explain human activities in
terms of philosophy (moral obligations) and/or motivational power
(little effect on behavior)
• Sustainability must be more than optimization (or well being over
time), it must be a by product of resource sufficiency and functional
integrity of the system
Studying and Employing
Sustainability
• Resource Sufficiency = Econ sustainability
• Functional Integrity = Ecological sustainability
• Equity Fairness = Social Sustainability
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Environ + Soc Justice?
Sustainability as social mvmt
Sustainability = interests of labor, marginalized
Sustainability = storyline contested in locale
Thompson’s conclusion
• Social Sustainability (or non-substantive sustainability) amount
to merely normative commitments and is insufficient.
• Need empirical factors like resources & functionality
• Yet, sustainability as social impetus is important and
compensates for its vagueness.
• Believes that storylines are important, esp around democracy
and social justice
US Constitution & Hubert Humphrey
CULTURAL NARRATIVE FOR
SUSTAINABILITY
Preamble US Constitution
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a
more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic
Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote
the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty
to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish
this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Sustainability = US Constitution
US Constitution
Sustainability
“We the People”
Democracy, citizen empowerment
“to form a more perfect Union”
to FORM community, connection
“establish Justice”
GENERATE justice, equity
“provide for a common defense”
Convey security and resilience
“promote the general Welfare”
Foster collective benefits & well being
“secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves & our Posterity”
Obtain freedom & self-determination
and responsibility to future generations
Cultural Narrative from
Constitution on Sustainability
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Citizen empowerment and democracy
Build connection and community (perfecting the Union)
Generate Justice and equity
Convey security and resilience
Foster collective benefits and well being
Obtain freedom and self-determination
Responsibility to future generation
Hubert Humphery – Landon
Lecture (1970)
• Topic would be "How We Can Make Our Government Work”—but about our social order, our
government, this country, its role in the world
• Lessons of the Past – Sons and daughters of the depression, so “economic security was vital.
We learned the hard way. There were no jobs; the nation was prostrate…our leaders…had
suffered the anguish and the pain and the disaster of war—world war—, of depression—
worldwide depression.”
• “And we spent our time trying to create the economic mechanism that would assure the
production of goods and services to guarantee economic health for the nation. Perhaps we
forgot that man does not live by bread alone. But we did learn—also learned the hard way—
that isolated as a nation, there was no security.”
• “So the 1960's could be described as a time when we had too much confidence in our wealth,
too much confidence in our power —thinking that wealth was goods and services and that
power was military might and alliances. There was far too little emphasis, I suppose on real
power, namely, reason arid understanding, knowledge directed to action, a knowledge with
commitment.”
• We had a little too much confidence in our science and technology. We were overwhelmed—
awed—by computers, by electronics, by the Space Age…we failed to recognize that science
must be a tool for man; that it must be his servant, not his master. The 1960's taught us that we
should make science and technology our servants and this requires that we have political
conviction, political decision, and social decision.”
Achieving our Goals
• What I am saying is that we have created the material means to do the great
things that need to be done. The question is whether we, as individuals, have the
willingness to do what the founders of this republic said we would have to do if
we wanted life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: namely, to pledge our lives,
our fortunes, and our sacred honor to the achievement of these goals.
• The first sign of health is recognizing your sickness. A strong nation and a great
people do not run away from their problems, they confront them head on—and
recognize that they can be solved.
Poverty
“We are coming to grips for the first time with the hidden poor and with the victims of poverty.”
Urbanization
“we were a nation of cities…and all at once, the problems of noise, of congestion, of slums, of overlapping
governmental jurisdiction, of the inadequacy of social services and resources was right on our doorstep.”
Polluters/Pollution
“In fact, that environment was becoming more dangerous to our well-being than the weapons of
our military arsenals.”
Social Change
• The preamble of the Constitution of the United States says "we the people of these
United States do ordain and establish”…” It is a contemporary document. It is a living
instrument; and because it is that, it changes just like the human body and the human
mind and the emotions of human beings, and all living organisms.”
• “And what we seek is change with order and order with change. It's a tremendous
assignment. And it requires that we understand the difference between dissent on the
one hand and violence on the other; the difference between liberty and license; the
difference between rights and privileges.”
• Need a “new great partnership….modern society requires a partnership of private and
public sectors, a partnership of the university with the private economic community
and the government and all other segments of society….And it requires new
management methods.”
• “New federalism, therefore, wasn't so much a delineation of power between national
and state government as it was a pattern or description or formula of cooperative
partnership of all levels of government in concert with private resources, the
partnership of creative federalism…Your government—and that's what we're talking
about—was designed to maximize and mobilize the nation's resources for the
achievement of national goals and the solution of increasingly complex problems. This
is the only modern industrial nation in the world that lacks a system to establish our
priorities.”
Solutions
• Need a new GOAL(s) and priorities  have limited resources
• Need Strong Federal branch because of mobility  this mobility has made
matters of national, rather than just local, concern.
• New "people programs” (like Civil Rights and Education Policies of 60s) is
that they are designed to meet local needs, but local needs that are in the
national interest.
• Streamline and Coordinate  “We must find ways to coordinate and to
eliminate duplication in this huge and complicated government structure, so
that we maximize the purpose of government as never before…coordination
is essential.”
• Strength in People  “The strength of this nation is not in its arms or in its
industry, it is in its people. And the wealth of this nation is not in its banks or
its insurance companies, it is in its people. We must develop these human
resources.”
• Environmental Protection  “And surely if there is one focus for the
seventies, it must be survival and the protection of our physical
environment….ladies and gentlemen, don't underestimate the danger that is
before us…The danger that faces us today comes right out of the exhaust
pipe of our automobiles and our busses, and out of the water that flows
from an industrial plant into the river, and out of the smoke stacks that spew
their poisonous gases into the air and out of a jet engine.”
Solutions Part II
• We can't have two Americas  We need a positive program to set priorities
for the development of human resources.
• Democracy is not self-executing  We have to make it work. We have to
understand it. Not only external vigilance but unending self-examination must
be the perennial price of liberty because the work of self-government never
ceases…unending self-examination is the perennial price of liberty ….the work
of self-government never ceases.”
• Challenge of Change  “with a sense of urgency, I suggest that we ventilate
the clogged channels of political participation and of social opportunity. These
refreshing winds of change, which are everywhere about us, must be directed
to constructive purposes…through responsible debate and dissent, through
reason and discussion, until decision and direction are clear.
• Gov’t through the consent of the Governed  “This is what we mean when
we say a wholesome and decent respect for the opinions of others. This is
what we mean by a social contract among equals…And this is what creative
federalism means—a government that never stands still, a society that sees
change as a challenge not as an enemy, a social structure that constantly
expands and opens its doors because we, the people, know that there are
new people to be heard from, new ideas 'to be discovered, and new ways of
life to be found.”