March 20, 2008
The Local Background
In 2002, the URI sustainable communities initiative called for "a university-wide initiative that includes fostering enhanced curricula in topics of sustainability, planning for a new facility, and the design of a sustainable neighborhood in the North District of campus."
The curriculum web site was last updated in 2003 but a recent effort appears to be reviving the concept of a minor. There was a federal appropriation to design the facility, called the CILT building, but it was removed from University master plans in 2004. The North District now contains the biotechnology building, with a modest LEED silver rating (next to the lowest possible rating).
For much of 2006 and 2007, the Faculty Senate discussed formation of a Blue Ribbon Commission on Futuring.
Charge of the Blue Ribbon Committee on Positioning the University of Rhode Island for the Future (item F)
F. Consider a futuring exercise as divided into periods, including a 5-year “short-term” (through 2011), a 10-year “intermediate-term” (through 2016), and a 25-year “long-term” (through 2031). Most of the futuring exercise would focus on short-term and intermediate-term, but a significant part should also look at long term. This long-term segment of the exercise might consider such questions as:
- What impacts will external economic, political & social forces have in RI?
- Are there trends (economic or otherwise) indicating changes in how Rhode Islanders live and work over the next quarter century?
- Can URI position itself in a leadership role in transitions?
I suggested that the commission include a "deep future" (through 2100) component to begin positioning the University for a contribution to global climate change, post peak oil, and the probability of planetary chaos late in the century (economic collapse, starvation, disease, drought, warfare...the sort of thing anticipated by modelers and long term thinkers elsewhere, e.g., Meadows et al., Lovelock, Kunstler, Heinberg, etc.). That idea was rejected and the commission has yet to be formed.
In May, 2007, the President called for formation of a Council on Sustainability.
Much of the initial focus of the Council has been on cost savings.
Thus far, these local initiatives on sustainability are ... paced. Given the budgetary butchering proposed by the governor, a policy of not rushing into anything without careful contemplation of implications is ... measured. On the other hand, the north pole is predicted to be totally ice free by as early as 2013, and world oil production may have already peaked in 2005 (average world daily production, in thousands of barrels, was 73,807; 73,539; and 73,310 in 2005, 2006, and 2007, according to the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency (March 2008) ( Excel sheet ). Meanwhile, the student body, most faculty, and all administrators at URI remain clueless about the meaning of global climate change or peak oil (see Logan blog entry, March 9), and the University continues its policy of heading into the future with (to borrow Dan Varin's phrase) a lethal fervor while focusing intently on the rear-view mirror. I agree with Provost Swan's assessment (made in a ProJo interview about her pending stepping down from the role of Provost) that it is time for a new vision for URI; I hope that the University will begin to develop a more forward-looking perspective, one that might even allow it to overcome its propensity to focus on the world as though its main mission were to somehow overcome its perpetual budgetary crisis (something it has been focused on for three decades now—see Benchmarks or Reinventing, for example.).
What is Wrong with "Sustainable?"
"You cannot make the same house by substituting more saws for less wood."—H. Daly
While there is a great deal more that should be said about URI's slothful measured pace and 20th century perspective, there's another more immediate concern for this posting. Here, I raise concerns about the meaningless word "sustainable," and its vaporous cousins "sustainability" and "sustainable development."
Let's start with Herman Daly's concern with the phrase "Sustainable Development" (H. Daly, Beyond Growth, Beacon Press, 1996).
The power of the concept of sustainable development is that it both reflects and evokes a latent shift in our vision of how the economic activities of human beings are related to the natural world—an ecosystem which is finite, nongrowing, and materially closed. The demands of these activities on the containing ecosystem for regeneration of raw material "inputs" and absorption of waste "outputs" must, I will argue, be kept at ecologically sustainable levels as a condition of sustainable development. This change in vision involves replacing the economic norm of quantitative expansion (growth) with that of qualitative improvement (development) as the path of future progress. This shift is resisted by most economic and political institutions, which are founded on traditional quantitative growth and legitimately fear its replacements by something as subtle and challenging as qualitative development. The economics of development without—and beyond—growth needs to be worked out much more fully. There are enormous forces of denial aligned against this necessary shift in vision and analytic effort, and to overcome these forces requires a deep philosophical clarification, even religious renewal."
Sustainable development is a term that everyone likes, but nobody is sure of what it means. (At least it sounds better than "unsustainable nondevelopment.") The term rose to the prominence of a mantra—or a shibboleth—following the 1987 publication of the U.N.-sponsored Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, which defined the term as development which "meets the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of the future to meet its needs." While not vacuous by any means, this definition was sufficiently vague to allow for a broad consensus. Probably that was a good political strategy at the time—a consensus on a vague concept was better than disagreement over a sharply defined on. By 1995, however, this initial vagueness is no longer a basis for consensus, but a breeding ground for disagreement. Acceptance of a largely undefined term sets he stage for a situation where whoever can pin his or her definition to the term will automatically win a large political battle for influence over our future.
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For over twenty-five years the concept of a steady-state economy has been the center of my thinking and writing. John Stuart Mill, back in 1857, discussed this idea under the label "stationary state," by which he mean a condition of zero growth in population and physical capital stock, but with continued improvement in technology and ethics. Following Mill and the classical economists, I have always thought that this concept was most relevant to "developed" or "mature" economies. During the six years that I worked for the World Bank(1988-1994), I was therefore surprised to see a very similar idea, now called "sustainable development," become the dominant ideal for the less developed countries (the South), but not for the mature, developed countries (the North). In my view, while sustainability is certainly relevant to the South, the critical issue is for the North to attain sustainability in the sense of a level of resource use that is both sufficient for a good life for its population and within the carrying capacity of the environment if generalized to the whole world. Population growth and production growth must not push us beyond the sustainable environmental capacities of resource regeneration and waste absorption. Therefore, once that point is reached, production and reproduction should be for replacement only. Physical growth should cease, while qualitative improvement continues.
(Daly also refers to and discusses the President's (i.e., Clinton) Council on Sustainable Development, which included a statement of 15 principles.
Heinberg approached sustainability with an eye on peak oil (Richard Heinberg. 2007. Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. New Society Publishers. 212p.) (why this is familiar?).
However, the word sustainable has become widely used in recent years to refer, in a general and vague way, to practices that are reputed to be more environmentally sound than others. Often the word is used so carelessly as to lead some environmentalists to advise abandoning its use. Nevertheless, I believe that the concept of sustainability is essential to understanding and solving our species' ecological dilemma, and that the word is capable of rehabilitation, if only we are willing to expend a little effort in arriving at a clear definition.
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The term gained widespread usage after 1987, when the Brundtland Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development defined sustainable development as development that "meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This definition of sustainability has proven extremely influential, and is still widely used; nevertheless, it has been criticized for its failure to explicitly note the unsustainability of the use of non-renewable resources, and for its general disregard of the problem of population growth.
Heinberg's Peak Everything "history and background" also mentions Karl-Henrik Robèrt's Natural Step (1989), William Rees's ecological Footprint Network (1992), and Albert Bartlett's 17 Laws of Sustainability. These are insightful sources. For example, from Bartlett we have:
Barlett, on THE USE OF THE TERM “SUSTAINABLE”
A sincere concern for the future is certainly the factor that motivates many who make frequent use of the word, "sustainable." But there are cases where one suspects that the word is used carelessly, perhaps as though the belief exists that the frequent use of the adjective "sustainable" is all that is needed to create a sustainable society.
"Sustainability" has become big-time. University centers and professional organizations have sprung up using the word "sustainable" as a prominent part of their names. Politicians have gotten into the act. For example, a governor recently appointed a state advisory committee on global warming. The charge to the committee was not to see what the state could do to reduce its contribution to global warming, but rather the committee was to work to attract to the state, companies and research grants dealing with the topic of global warming. The governor’s charge has the effect of increasing the state’s production of greenhouse gases ( a move away from sustainability ) and thus increasing the state’s contribution to global warming. In some cases, these big-time operations may be illustrative of what might be called the "Willie Sutton school of research management." ( Sutton )
For many years, studies had been conducted on ways of improving the efficiency with which energy is used in our society. These studies have been given new luster by referring to them now as studies in the "sustainable use of energy."
The term “sustainable growth” is used by our political leaders even though the term is clearly an oxymoron. In a recent report from the Environmental Protection Agency we read that:
President Clinton and Vice President Gore wrote in Putting People First, "We will renew America's commitment to leave our children a better nation - - a nation whose air, water, and land are unspoiled, whose natural beauty is undimmed, and whose leadership for sustainable global growth is unsurpassed." ( EPA 1993 )
We even find a scientist writing about "sustainable growth:"
...the discussions have centered around the factors that will determine [a] level of sustainable growth of agricultural production. ( Abelson 1990 )
And so we have a spectrum of uses of the term "sustainable." At one end of the spectrum, the term is used with precision by people who are introducing new concepts as a consequence of thinking profoundly about the long-term future of the human race. In the middle of the spectrum, the term is simply added as a modifier to the names and titles of very beneficial studies in efficiency, etc. that have been in progress for years. Near the other end of the spectrum, the term is used as a placebo. In some cases the term may be used mindlessly ( or possibly with the intent to deceive ) in order to try to shed a favorable light on continuing activities that may or may not be capable of continuing for long periods of time. At the very far end of the spectrum, we see the term used in a way that is oxymoronic.
This wide spectrum of uses is a source of confusion, because people can ask, "Just exactly what is meant when the word 'sustainable' is used?" Is the use of the word "sustainable" sufficient to identify the user as one who is widely literate, numerate, and ecolate, in matters relating to the long-range problems of the human race? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be “No.”
Heinberg cites a search of Amazon.com which yielded 25,000 hits for books related to sustainability, and 62,000 containing sustainable, including sustainable leadership, communities, energy, design, construction, business, development, urban planning, tourism, etc. He also cites a search of Google Scholar, producing 538,000 hits. See also Waking Up in the Century of Limits, posted July 2007 (same as publication date of Heinberg's book!), where I note that google or yahoo searches for sustainable produced 76,000,000-78,000,000 web pages in July 2007 (but only 51,200,000 today for some reason).
Heinberg consolidates much of the above by positing five axioms:
As a contribution to this ongoing refinement of the concept, I have formulated five axioms (self-evident truths) of sustainability. I have not introduced any fundamentally new notions in any of the axioms; my goal is simply to distill ideas that have been proposed and explored by others, and to put them into a form that is both more precise and easier to understand.
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Here are the axioms, each followed by a brief discussion:
1. Tainter's Axiom: Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.
Exception: A society can avoid collapse by finding replacement resources.
Limit to the exception: In a finite world, the number of possible replacements is also finite.
I have named this axiom for Joseph Tainter, author of the classic study, The Collapse of Complex Societies, which demonstrates that collapse is a frequent if not universal fate of complex societies. He argues that collapse is directly related to declining returns on efforts to support growing levels of societal complexity with energy harvested from the environment. Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed similarly makes the argument that collapse is the common destiny of societies that ignore resource constraints.
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2. Bartlett's Axiom: Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.
I have named this axiom for Albert A. Bartlett because it is his First Law of Sustainability, reproduced verbatim (I found it impossible to improve upon).
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3. To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of natural replacement.
Renewable resources are exhaustible. Forests can be over-cut, resulting in barren landscapes and shortages of wood (as occurred in many parts of Europe in past centuries), and fish can be over-harvested, resulting in the extinction or near-extinction of many species (as is occurring today globally).
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4. To be sustainable, the use of non-renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is declining, and the rate of decline must be greater that or equal to the rate of depletion.
(The rate of depletion is defined as the amount being extracted and used during a specified time interval, usually a year, as a percentage of the amount left to extract.)
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5. Sustainability requires that substances introduced into the environment from human activities be minimized and rendered harmless to biosphere functions.
In cases where pollution from the extraction and consumption of non-renewable resources that have proceeded at expanding rates for some time threatens the viability of ecosystems, reduction in the rates of extraction and consumption of those resources may need to occur at a rate greater than the rate of depletion.
Perhaps the most critical of sustainable development is James Lovelock (2006. The Revenge of Gaia. Basic Books. 177p.)
Sustainable development, supported by the use of renewable energy, is the fashionable approach to living with the Earth, and it is the platform of green-thinking politicians. Opposing this view, particularly in the United States, are the many who still regard global warming as a fiction and favour business as usual. Their thinking is well expressed in the recent novel by Michael Crichton, State of Fear, and by that saintly woman, Mother Theresa, who in 1988 said, 'Why should we care about the Earth when our duty is to the poor and the sick among us. God will take care of the Earth.' In truth, neither faith in God nor trust in business as usual, nor even commitment to sustainable development, acknowledges our true dependence; if we fail to take care of the Earth, it surely will take care of itself my making us no longer welcome. Those with faith should look again at our Earthly home and see it as a holy place, part of God's creation, but something that we have desecrated. Anne Primavesi's book Gaia's Gift shows the way to consilience between faith and Gaia.
When I hear the phrase 'sustainable development' I recall the definition given by Gisbert Glaser, the senior advisor to the International Council for Science, who said in a guest editorial of the International Geosphere Bioshpere Program (IGBP) newsletter, 'Sustainable development is a moving target. It represents the continuous effort to balance and integrate the three pillars of social well-being, economic prosperity and environmental protection for the benefit of present and future generations.' Many consider this noble policy morally superior to the laissez faire of business as usual. Unfortunately for us, these wholly different approaches, one the expression of international decency, the other of unfeeling market forces, have the same outcome: the probability of disastrous global change. The error they share is the belief that further development is possible and that the Earth will continue, more or less as now, for at least the first half of this century. Two hundred years ago, when change was slow or non-existent, we might have had time to establish sustainable development, or even have continued for a while with business as usual, but now is much too late; the damage has already been done. To expect sustainable development or a trust in business as usual to be viable policies is like expecting a lung cancer victim to be cured by stopping smoking; both measures deny the existence of the Earth's disease, the fever brought on by a plague of people. Despite their difference, they come from religious and humanist beliefs which regard the Earth as there to be exploited for the good of humankind. When there were only one billion of us in 1800, these ignorant policies were acceptable because they caused little harm. Now, they travel two different roads that will soon merge into a rocky path to a Stone Age existence on an ailing planet, one where few of us survive among the wreckage of our once biodiverse Earth.
What Should Replace Sustainable?
In search of a replacement for sustainable, I feel as though I am on a search for Christopher Alexander's The Quality Without a Name (1979. The Timeless Way of Building. Oxford University Press. 552p.)
root criterion of life and spirit in a man,
a town, a building, or a wilderness. This
quality is objective and precise, but it
cannot be named."
The fact that this quality cannot be named does not mean that it is vague or imprecise. It is impossible to name because it is unerringly precise. Words fail to capture it because it is much more precise than any word. The quality itself is sharp, exact, with no looseness in it whatsoever. But each word you choose to capture it has fuzzy edges and extensions which blur the central meaning of the quality.
I shall try to show you now, why words can never capture it, by circling around it, through the medium of half a dozen words.
Alexander then circled using
"alive"
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But the very beauty of the word "alive" is just its weakness."whole"
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But the word "whole is too enclosed."comfortable"
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Yet the word "comfortable" is easy to misuse, and has too many other meanings."free"
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And yet, of course, this freedom can be too theatrical: a pose, a form, a manner."exact"
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And yet, of course, the word "exact" does not describe it properly.and "egoless"
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And yet, although the old bench and its carving may be egoless, this word is also not quite right.
Alexander reached one last time. "A last word which can help to catch the quality without a name is the word "eternal."
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And yet, like all the other words, this word confuses more than it explains.And so you see, in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it.
If we are going to seek a word that carries both the environmental and the economic intentions of sustainable, we should at the same time seek in the same word a sense of the quality which Alexander cannot name. That is, we should also seek to inject the human into the natural and economic machine.
I have struggled with this search for a word. I assigned this as a task to my Century of Limits students, asking them to contemplate the problem over spring break (without many illusions as to whether any of them would actually consider such cogitation). It is a struggle that I cannot end right now.
But in pondering, I recalled a word that my late father, Donald Logan, had once used to describe the 1966 movie, A Man for All Seasons, with an excellent portrayal of Sir Thomas More by Paul Scofield. How ironic that this thought occurred to me today, during the morning of the day Mr. Scofield died. My father was greatly taken by the Oscar-winning performance, and I recall how he sought a word to describe its greatest quality, and came up with "constrained."
I can do no better for now, than to offer this word. If we must turn the adjective into a horrible nominalization, then I suppose we might be stuck with constrainability. It doesn't fall from the tongue, and it has too many syllables, but I am going to leave it on the table at present.
My greatest concern with sustainability comes from seeing how readily my students recoil in horror when they begin to understand some of the real implications of global warming, the end of the liquid fossil fuel era, or the meaning of overpopulation. Their first response is to want to hold on to all they have known all of their lives, seeking ways to retain a hold on "life style." While it saddens me to think of the fearful shallowness of such a materialist generation— not too different from the overly-indulged and privileged baby-boom parental generation—it saddens me more to think that they may be being led to believe that we can, in fact, sustain this age of self indulgence. It is not the illusion of perpetual growth of population, consumption, or wealth that is most disturbing. It is the delusion that any aspect of this is worth sustaining for even a single further generation.
While our goal this century is certainly to exit the century with as little misery and disorder as possible, my hope is that we can also develop a sense of individual constraint to our rapacious propensities, yielding to a socializing awareness of the need for trans-world and trans-generational brotherhood. The key, I submit, is to learn the humanizing meaning of constraint.
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