Copyright © Leslie Paul Thiele 2016
The right of Leslie Paul Thiele to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition published in 2013 by Polity Press
This edition published in 2016 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1106-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1107-5(pb)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thiele, Leslie Paul, author.
Title: Sustainability / Leslie Paul Thiele.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016009865 (print) | LCCN 2016015961 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509511068 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509511075 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509511099 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509511105 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sustainable development. | Sustainable development–Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HC79.E5 T4759 2016 (print) | LCC HC79.E5 (ebook) | DDC 338.9/27–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016009865
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The first edition of this book was completed on July 1, 2012 in Nelson, British Columbia. July 1 is Canada Day, and the festivities were about to start: music, singing, dancing, games, speeches, food, and, at nightfall, fireworks. It is always a fine celebration that brings this small mountain community together. That year was no different, except…
Except the grounds of the city park had turned into a mud bog. It has been raining most of the day, and the just completed month of June was the wettest ever, doubling the previous record. The month of March had also set a record for precipitation.
Predictably, fewer people participated in the sodden event. And the fireworks had to be cancelled. The playing fields where people gather to watch the dazzling pyrotechnics when the music and dancing ends were flooded, merging with the waters of Kootenay Lake, which had breached its shore a few days back.
At the time, I hoped these record-setting weather events were just that: weather. More likely, I knew, we were seeing climate change at work. Now, as I write the preface to this second edition, scientists have just announced that the preceding year was the hottest the planet has known since records starting being kept in the 1800s. The urgency of our situation is palpable.
The world is quickly changing, and fortunately much of this change is for the good. Across the globe people are becoming informed, creatively solving problems, and collectively taking action. The second edition of Sustainability has been fully revised and updated to account for these trends. It integrates an expanded global breadth with increased attention to the importance of local relationships, responsibilities, and opportunities. New Inquire and Explore sections are provided at the end of each chapter to help readers probe and deepen central debates and topics. The thought- and discussion-provoking questions and issues presented here are directly linked to graphics, data, readings, podcasts, videos, and resource-rich websites at conservationandcreativity.net
There is still reason to worry that future generations living through the calamity of a much-altered climate – a calamity including extreme weather, rising and increasingly acidic oceans, countless species extinctions, food scarcity, coastal flooding, and the displacement of millions of people – will ask why their ancestors did so little to avert it. But I take heart that individuals and communities on our beautiful planet are learning how to live sustainably, and that there will be much to celebrate together in the future.
It is rightly said that sustainability is not a spectator sport. My hope is that the discussions, relationships, and actions fostered by this book, and the Inquire and Explore resources, will contribute to making that statement substantially truer.
This book was written with students in mind, specifically those enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts in Sustainability Studies and the Minor in Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida. These students are refreshingly diverse in their backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. I am grateful for their diversity as well as their abundant curiosity, energy, and dedication. I appreciate the astute editing of the manuscript provided by Mauro Caraccioli, Jonathan Davis, Maria Martinez, and Robyn Ostroff. Special thanks are due to Seaton Tarrant and Hugo Chaves for their additional work on the second edition.
While the motivation to live sustainably dates back to ancient times, its vocabulary is but three decades old. In this relatively short span of time, the concept and practice of sustainability has generated lifestyle changes for individuals, innovations within business, design, engineering, and agriculture, historic policies and laws at municipal and state levels, and crucial international protocols and agreements. Sustainability is now advocated by a growing number of citizens, corporations, professional agencies, educational institutions, civic organizations, political parties, and governments. It is one of a very few ideals – joining the ranks of democracy and human rights – that receive near universal endorsement. Across a diverse globe of peoples and nations, sustainability increasingly provides a common language, a lingua franca for the twenty-first century. Indeed, sustainability has been dubbed a “megatrend,” that is, a phenomenon with a massive and enduring impact on culture, the economy, politics, society, and technology.1
But what is sustainability? Is it an ethical ideal? Is it an ascendant ideology? Or is it a scientifically based effort to live well in an ever more crowded and complex world of increasingly scarce resources? Sustainability certainly has ethical components. It is grounded in moral claims about the responsibilities and obligations of individuals and organizations. And its ethics find support in age-old virtues.
Though seldom labeled an ideology, sustainability seems to fit the description. It constitutes a coherent set of interrelated beliefs and values that establish how collective life might better be organized. Some would consider sustainability the predominant ideology of our times, as it is global in its reach and ecumenical in its appeal.
To be sure, sustainability makes good use of science to ensure the adaptive management of scarce resources in a crowded and complex world. Scholars demonstrate that unsustainable lifestyles, economies, technologies, and social practices are hurtling us toward a precipice. In an age of global climate change, resource depletion, and “failing states” that can no longer meet their people's basic needs, sustainability has been given the daunting tasks of “rescuing civilization” and “saving the planet.” Learning to live and work sustainably is arguably the greatest challenge of our times, and it demands the best science.
For all its practical importance, the meaning of sustainability remains unsettled. Owing to the frequency and looseness of its usage, sustainability has been called “one of the least meaningful and most overused words in the English language.”2 The best response to this sort of criticism is not to stop using the word, but to define it clearly while making its practice more measurable and impactful.
Sustainability is most easily defined by saying what it is not. A practice, relationship, or institution is not sustainable if it undermines the social, economic, or environmental conditions of its own viability. It is unsustainable to extract water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers at a faster rate than they can be naturally recharged by rain and snow. Doing so will produce water-starved communities. Eroding the land upon which crops grow faster than fertile soil is naturally regenerated is not sustainable agriculture. It will end with failing farms and hunger. Running a corporation consistently in the red, with revenues that do not exceed expenses, is not sustainable business. It will end in bankruptcy. To be sustainable is to avoid collapse.
With this in mind, practitioners often define sustainability as meeting current needs in a way that does not undermine future welfare. This is a passable definition. But it neglects the crucial question of whose needs are being met and whose future welfare is at stake. As discussed in these pages, sustainability refers not only to the long-term survival of a specific practice, relationship, or institution. It entails an expanded scope. Sustainability extends our concern beyond the welfare of those participants who are directly involved in a practice, relationship, or institution. It also concerns the welfare of other stakeholders who become impacted by our actions – the welfare of people and other species distant in time or space.
In an increasingly interdependent world, virtually everyone is impacted – sooner or later – by everything we do. The consequences of our actions (and inactions) cross borders and generations, spanning the globe and casting long shadows into the future. The natural resources utilized in the goods we purchase in shops were likely extracted, processed, and assembled in dozens of other countries. The waste that we generate when these manufactured goods get thrown away may end up back in these far-off lands, or impact the health of our children's children. The carbon dioxide that today exits factory smokestacks, energy plants, and our vehicles' tailpipes will have its greatest impact on distant progeny, as the planet's temperature steadily rises under a blanket of greenhouse gases and oceans swamp shorelines. Sustainability concerns the global, long-term impact of our practices, relationships, and institutions because we live in a connected world. To live sustainably is to act with an expansive temporal and geographic awareness.
Sustainability is typically understood as the effort to use natural resources less wastefully. For many, it simply entails recycling and being energy efficient. But sustainability is both more challenging and more rewarding. It pushes us to better understand our world and ourselves, as we participate in expanding and shifting global networks. And it cultivates a sense of responsibility for maintaining the integrity and improving the health and resilience of the ecological, social, and economic networks that support us.
Notwithstanding common misperceptions, sustainability is not simply about preserving things. Sustainability requires change. It pertains equally to conservation and creativity. To be effective in our conservation efforts, we have to adapt to a changing world. But the change we foster must be limited in scope, and it must occur within an appropriate time frame. Practicing sustainability entails managing well the scale and speed of change.
For example, global warming and global cooling have occurred many times in the history of the planet. Planetary climate change is nothing new. However, the current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured in parts per million, is growing at many times the rate that occurred the last time the earth lost its polar ice caps millions of years ago, when much of its landmass became submerged under enlarging seas. Our species is altering the climate of the planet at such an accelerated rate that it will prove impossible for millions of species, quite possibly including our own, to adapt in time. Along with habitat loss and pollution, global warming is already one of the top causes of species extinction, and scientists assert that we are only at the cusp of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Our use of fossil fuels and our destruction of forests are unsustainable practices not because they are changing the climate, but because they are causing such disruptive change at a scale and speed that preempt successful adaptation by many forms of life.
Sustainability is not a recipe for creating a planetary museum where nothing ever changes. Its goal is not to achieve a “culture of permanence.”3 Rather, to practice sustainability is to manage change such that civilization does not undermine the conditions that allow it to flourish within a supportive web of life. Sustainability entails preserving crucial capacities and resources by way of adaptive change.
If we understand ideologies to be stubborn sets of beliefs that refuse revision in the face of good evidence, then sustainability is not an ideology. Optimally, it is an art that skillfully grounds moral commitments in, and adapts its practices to, the best available science. Sustainability is an adaptive art wedded to science in service to ethical vision. To define it succinctly: Sustainability is the practice of satisfying current needs without sacrificing future wellbeing by preserving core values and relationships while managing the scale and speed of change.
To maintain crucial relationships and values while embracing adaptive change requires the enduring and expansive integration of ecological health, economic welfare, social empowerment, and cultural creativity. Ecological health entails the conservation and cultivation of vibrant, biodiverse wild spaces, ecosystems, and pollution-free land, water, and atmospheric environments. Economic welfare entails the creation of infrastructure and opportunities for individuals and families to pursue enterprise and material prosperity, with mechanisms to avoid corrosive disparities of wealth and aid for those who cannot meet their basic needs. Social empowerment entails the creation of institutions and opportunities for people to meaningfully direct their individual and collective lives, including access to education, democratic government, basic human rights, and a vigorous civil society. Cultural creativity entails opportunities to engage, explore, enrich, and innovate in all facets of human culture, including science and knowledge, ethics and politics, economy and technology, customs and diet, arts and recreation, religion, and spirituality. Often, when people use the word sustainability they are thinking about environmental issues. To be truly sustainable, however, a practice, relationship, or institution must do more than protect nature and conserve natural resources. It must meet economic needs and cultivate economic opportunities. In turn, it must meet social needs and cultivate equitable relationships. You are not running a sustainable business, no matter how “green” your practices, if you consistently fail to make a profit and cannot pay your employees. Likewise, in today's connected world, social institutions that do not empower stakeholders and treat them equitably cannot contribute to enduring economic welfare and ecological health.
Sustainability has traditionally been described as standing on the three pillars of society, ecology, and economy, or, alternatively, as grounded on the “triple bottom line” of people, planet, and profit. The point is that these three goods stand − or fall − together. You cannot have one without the other two, owing to the interdependent nature of our world. But there is a problem with these formulas. They suggest that sustainability requires a static, rigid balance. By insisting on cultural creativity as a fourth component of sustainability, we underline the fact that our practices, relationships, and institutions have to initiate and respond to change if they are to endure for long. Sustainability demands imagination and innovation.
The humorist Will Rogers once remarked that even if you are on the right track, you will eventually get run over by a train if you just sit there. To practice sustainability we cannot just sit there. We have to learn and we have to adapt. Without creativity, it is impossible to sustain what we value.
Sustainability is endorsed by a diverse and ever-growing number of citizens and governments, local, national, and international organizations, producers and consumers, clients and corporations. Sustainability is very popular today, even trendy. Popularity is a double-edged sword. To be sure, it is exciting and hopeful for growing numbers of people to embrace sustainability. But is it a good thing for sustainability to be championed by people who may have little understanding of its meaning, little intention of putting it into practice, and track records indicating that their lifestyles, policies, or business operations are anything but sustainable?
Virtually all politicians and rulers today, including the most autocratic, endorse democracy. Likewise, governments and businesses across the world endorse sustainability. But verbal endorsements often do not translate into policy or practice. Lip service does not move arms and legs into action. It is often said that hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue. Perhaps, then, the widespread and growing endorsement of sustainability, even when preaching does not lead to practice, is still a victory of sorts. Perhaps it represents progress, an advance over a time when few even paid lip service to sustainability, and endorsements were rare.
Or perhaps not. Vague, hypocritical, or unsupported endorsements of sustainability may fatally weaken the concept and undermine its practice. Sustainability today often gets reduced to a slogan bandied about that results in few if any meaningful efforts or achievements. Many large corporations, for example, make claim to being “green” and embrace sustainability as a core value. But their business practices fall far short of anything they espouse. Indeed, the sustainability of their products or practices is largely a fabricated claim. Such “greenwashing” is a response to the perceived concerns of customers, clients, and stakeholders. As a megatrend, sustainability now serves as a marketing tool. To paint oneself green is savvy public relations; good PR, and often little more. The endorsement of sustainability serves as a green veneer for business as usual rather than a driver of fundamental change.
Governments also greenwash. Representatives of non-governmental organizations attending the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, for example, declared the meeting an “epic failure” that has “given us a new definition of hypocrisy.” The summit, which brought together more than a hundred heads of states and delegates from 188 nations, was mandated to deliver “a pathway for a sustainable century.” But its officially endorsed document, entitled “The Future We Want,” was widely criticized for failing to address major challenges or commit countries to specific actions and firm deadlines. “We didn't get the Future We Want in Rio,” the activist group Greenpeace concluded, “because we do not have the leaders we need. The leaders of the most powerful countries supported business as usual, shamefully putting private profit before people and the planet.”4 The summit was described as another example in a 20-year trend of gaining widespread endorsement of sustainability “by sacrificing real substance.”5
Since ancient Roman times, consumers in the marketplace have been given a warning: caveat emptor! It means buyer beware. Not everything that glitters is gold. People interested in sustainability might also heed this advice. Not everything that shimmers green is truly sustainable. One must scratch beneath the surface.
The word “sustainability” derives from the Latin sustinere, which literally means “to hold up.” Something is sustainable if it endures, persists, or holds up over time. But we do not want all things to hold up over time. We want many destructive things to end, and to end sooner rather than later. The sad truth is that certain people and institutions are the cause of much harm. There is money to be made and power to be gained from economic instability, social injustice, ecological degradation, and ignorance – at least in the short term. For this reason, sustainability will never be endorsed by everyone. Some stand to gain from unsustainable practices, relationships, and institutions. We should not shy away from the fact that there are tough battles to be fought with individuals and organizations whose narrow self-interest leads them to oppose truly sustainable practices.
When sustainability gets defined in terms of general values and abstract concepts without specific means of implementation or a sense of the stakes in the game and the opponents to be faced, it ceases to be a force for positive change in a complex and contested world. To create more sustainable societies requires significant changes in the way we live, organize our communities, and do business. And change, especially radical change, will always have its opponents. As such, advocates of sustainability must be wary of superficial consensus.6 If we are so eager for sustainability to be universally endorsed that we are unwilling to offend or oppose anyone in its pursuit, then we will achieve nothing of merit. The pursuit of sustainability need not encourage conflict; but it cannot avoid it. If sustainability becomes a “feel good” issue that shies away from all controversy in pursuit of consensus, then a crucial battle will already have been lost. Pursuing sustainability requires taking a stand.
Allies of sustainability are, oftentimes, fair-weather fans without deep commitments. We can expect many who endorse it by name to shirk it in practice. The same could be said, of course, for most any ideal. This is not to recommend a cynical perspective. Cynicism forgoes the hard work of having to determine, in each case, when hypocrisy or deceitful advertising is in play, when compromises go too far, when the practice employed to achieve a valued goal betrays its principles, and when opponents must be squarely confronted. And cynicism forgoes the crucial task of determining how the inevitably flawed means we employ to pursue our ideals might be improved. Sustainability is a twisting path blazed through rough terrain. It is best pursued when informed by principle, steadied by hope, directed by practical judgment, and is welcoming of all potential allies. It cannot afford cynicism. There is too much at stake.
Sustainability cannot afford naive idealism. It needs to be more than an endorsement of a better world. It needs to be a practice. To speak of practicing sustainability underlines two important points. First, sustainability is an activity. Second, sustainability is something we pursue but never perfect. We practice sustainability in the same sense that we practice a musical instrument. There is always room for improvement. That is the point of practicing. And as the world is ever changing, the balance that sustainability seeks to establish between ecological, social, and economic welfare is dynamic, not static. To practice sustainability is to promote adaptive change. That is why sustainability can only be pursued by way of cultural creativity grounded in learning. Sustainability is not a destination to be reached, but a winding path to be well traveled. Practicing sustainability entails lifelong learning.
Ideals are things to be reached for but are rarely fully grasped. But sustainability is different from many other ideals, such as liberty. If you only care about a single good, such as personal freedom, then it is consistent and theoretically possible to seek its full measure. Libertarianism, for instance, is an ideology that celebrates the value of individual liberty and recommends its maximization in all situations at all times, whatever the results. In contrast, sustainability is not a single value. It entails the balanced pursuit of at least four distinct goods.
If you like apples and do not like broccoli, rice, or carrots, then you can indulge your preference for this fruit and never consume these other foods. But if you like apples and broccoli and rice and carrots, then you cannot maximize all four preferences. Every time that you eat an apple, you could be eating broccoli or rice or carrots, and vice versa. It is impossible simultaneously to pursue each of a number of diverse goods in full measure. Sustainability is not the effort to maximize a singular good. It requires us to combine, integrate, and balance ecological health, economic welfare, social empowerment, and cultural creativity. These four goods are compatible and mutually supportive. But that does not mean that all of these goods can be simultaneously maximized. Each and every day, compromises have to be made.
The environmental group Earth First! proudly bears a slogan on its journal's masthead: No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth.7 Over the four decades of its existence, Earth First! has defended forests, watersheds, and ecosystems from resource extractors and developers, oftentimes by destroying their machines. Earth First!'s methods are radical, some would say extreme. Then again, so is the greed and destructiveness of many of their targeted opponents. But the environmental organization unnecessarily gives compromise a bad name.
Notwithstanding Earth First!'s slogan, no one who partakes of modern civilization and industrial society can escape compromising in his or her effort to promote ecological health. To buy durable goods from a store, drive a vehicle or fly in a plane, heat or cool your home, or consume food means that you have deprived the planet, an ecosystem, or another species of a valuable resource, and often a life. We compromise in our defense of Mother Earth the moment we get out of bed in the morning and step into a hot shower or eat breakfast. And it does not obviate the compromise, though it may greatly diminish it, if our water is heated by solar energy and our breakfast made from organic foods. However sustainably we live, it is virtually impossible to avoid depleting resources and adversely impacting the welfare of other life forms.
If sustainability were solely a matter of minimizing our impact on the planet, then we should consume the least we can and never propagate. Indeed, if minimizing impact is the goal, then the best thing is not to have been born in the first place. But sustainability is not simply a matter of minimizing our negative impacts. It entails maximizing our positive impacts. The point is not to erase our existence, but creatively to embrace our responsibilities.
Sustainability is a pragmatic affair. Because it entails pursuing multiple goods in tandem, its advocates ought to wear their willingness to compromise as a badge of honor. Absent this balancing act, sustainability would justify the accusation of being a “gigantic exercise in self-deception.”8 The fact that compromise is unavoidable should not dishearten us. Compromise, at its best, means achieving a healthy balance. To eat a balanced diet is to recognize that there is no one food that yields optimal health. Eating apples, broccoli, rice, and carrots provides needed variety in one's diet. Likewise, ecological health, economic welfare, social empowerment, and cultural creativity mix very well together and, in the right proportions, prove mutually supportive. The effort to maximize any one of them in isolation, in contrast, will undermine the chances of achieving a good measure of all.
Sustainability is both a powerful ideal and a pragmatic mandate. It speaks to our lives as citizens and leaders, neighbors and community members, consumers and business people, students and teachers, workers and professionals. It affects what we buy and sell, consume and discard, how we travel and what we eat, whom we vote for and how we interact socially. It bears moral weight, political implications, and cultural consequences.
At times, sustainability appears all-encompassing in its scope. But should sustainability subsume all of our values and aspirations? William McDonough and Michael Braungart observe that “If a man characterized his relationship with his wife as sustainable, you might well pity them both.”9 Why is sustainability seen as an ideal for society, but a pretty meager achievement for personal relationships? Given that almost half of all first marriages today end in divorce within 15 years, a sustainable romantic partnership is perhaps quite an achievement. But few of us would say that the notion of simply sustaining a relationship, in the sense of maintaining it over time, excites our passions. We want joy, intimacy, spontaneity, and fulfillment from love and from life. None of those words rhymes with sustainability.
Should they rhyme? Should sustainability be understood as something optimal and sufficient for our lives? Does sustainability trump all other ideals? Or is it simply a means that allows us to pursue higher goals? If so, how do we balance its practice with the pursuit of other cherished goods? In the following pages, we will grapple with such questions.
Chapter 1 engages the history of sustainability as a concept and practice. More broadly, it examines the relationship of sustainability to expanding time horizons that relate us both to ancestral legacies and future generations.
Chapter 2 investigates our spatial horizons, the global geography of sustainability and its social foundations. Duties to future generations are compared to the obligations we have to contemporaries who share our communities and planet.
Chapter 3 explores the ecological foundations of sustainability. We examine the value of biodiversity and environmental health, and the nature of resilient ecosystems.
Chapter 4 probes the impact of technology. It underlines the importance of green innovations while confronting the side effects of technological solutions.
Chapter 5 addresses political and legal issues. We investigate the role of political parties, policy and regulation, law and the courts, as well as the changing nature of national security and forms of governance.
Chapter 6 examines the economic foundations of sustainability. It tackles limits to growth in relation to current levels of consumption and waste, while exploring the demands and opportunities of an ecological economics.
Chapter 7 explores the cultural foundations of sustainability, including its intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions. It considers the role of spiritual traditions and education in fostering cultures of sustainability characterized by both creativity and the conservation of core values and relationships.
The Conclusion challenges us to confront the prospect of the collapse of civilization and to embrace sustainability as a journey that can inspire us as individuals, ground us in community, and help us redefine prosperity.
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Get your sustainability lifelong learning off to a great start!
For web resources and more information on these topics, please visit conservationandcreativity.net