Sustainability

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Sustainability
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Sustainability

• Alan Holland

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Framing the Concept of Sustainability A
Sustainability Hierarchy

• Julian D. Marshall Michael
  W. Toffel

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Sustainability Discourses

• Historically linked to I PAT.
• Conceptually linked to the question of
  obligations/responsibilities to future
  generations of people.
• 1972-1990s Typically couched in terms of
  sustainable development.
• 1990s-today Typically couched in terms of weak
  sustainability or strong sustainability.

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I P x A x T

• I Impact
• P Population
• A Affluence (consumption)
• T Technology (includes pollution)
• ? Paul R. Ehrlich John P.
  Holdren ?

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Obligations to Future GenerationsFive Central
Problems

• 1. Ignorance Problem How can we know what
  future people will really need and want,
• what rights they might insist upon, and what
  they will blame us for doing right and
• wrong?
• 2. Typology of Effects Problem How can we
  determine which of our actions will really
• have moral implications for the future?
• 3. Problem of Intergenerational Trade-Offs How
  should a particular generation balance
• concern for its own moral and prudential
  concerns with concern for future generations?
• 4. Distance Problem How far into the future do
  our moral obligations extend?
• 5. Saving Stuff Problem What should we save
  for future generationsactual natural
• resources or monetary investments?

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Sustainable Development Some Overview

• Inaugural Address (1949) President Harry S.
  Truman claims that the United States has to
  extend foreign aid to underdeveloped areas of
  the world for humanitarian reasons and to prevent
  communism from expanding. The U.S. is assumed to
  be a developed area.
• UN Stockholm Declaration (1972), Principle 13
  In order to achieve a more rational management
  of resources and thus to improve the environment,
  States should adopt an integrated and coordinated
  approach to their development planning so as to
  ensure that development is compatible with the
  need to protect and improve environment for the
  benefit of their population.
• World Conservation Strategy (1980), International
  Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural
  Resources The term sustainable development
  first appears and is presented as the central
  goal of the strategy.

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Sustainable DevelopmentSome More Overview

• Our Common Future (1987), World Commission and
  Environment and Development (WCED) provides the
  most-often cited definition of sustainable
  development
• The ability of humanity to ensure that it meets
  the needs of the present without compromising the
  ability of future generations to meet their own
  needs.
• The Rio Declaration (1992)
• http//www.unep.org/Documents.multilingual/Default
  .asp?DocumentID78ArticleID1163
• There are many definitions of sustainable
  development today.

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Precursors to Sustainable DevelopmentEnvironment
alism into the 1970s

• Limits to Growth (1972) by the Club of Rome
  articulates an influential anti-(economic) growth
  position.
• Much skepticism about the modernist model of
  progress.
• Stress on impending ecological/environmental
  catastrophe/crisis, including pessimism from Paul
  Ehrlich.
• Northern mainstream environmentalists set out to
  save the world.
• Rise of Southern grassroots environmentalism
  some examples include Indias Chipko Movement
  (1973) and Kenyas Green Belt Movement (1977).
• Corporate and business backlash.

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Popularization of Sustainable Development late
1970s to early 1990s Environmentalism

• Managerial environmental ethics zone the planet
  for conservation.
• Corporate activism the greening of business.
• Green consumerism consumption will save the
  Earth.
• Much environmentalism becomes married to
  technological progress win-win outcomes.
• Much focus on intergenerational equity.

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Sustainable Development (SD) in the 1990s

• United Nations Environmentalism
• 1. Rio Declaration.
• 2. Agenda 21 The real non-implemented work of
  the Rio Earth Summit.
• 3. Actual financial development assistance
  between nation-states declines.
• Rise of the global marketplace and free trade
  business approaches to SD.
• SD becomes technological proliferation
• 1. Belief that technology is neutral and will
  expand wealth and productivity.
• 2. Belief that nature needs human technology to
  sustain itself and us.
• SD discourse is dominated by Northern talk about
  eco-efficiency
• 1. If we become more efficient, we dont have
  to reduce consumption.
• 2. More efficient consumption becomes the
  solution.
• Northern and Southern development and ecological
  agendas continue to compete.

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Refresher Two Kinds of Sustainability

• Substitutability Are natural resourcesfrom the
  more-than-human worldinterchangeable with
  human-produced goods and monetary assets?
• Weak Sustainability Yes! All we need to
  sustain are non-declining stocks of utility for
  people.
• Strong Sustainability No! We need to sustain
  (at least some of) the more-than-human world.

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Holland Values of Sustainability

• 1. Human well-being
• a. Sustainable development discourse is
  typically couched in
• anthropocentric terms.
• b. But human well-being might require strong
  sustainability.
• 2. Justice
• a. Intragenerational justice does not guarantee
  
• intergenerational justice.
• b. Sustaining non-declining stocks of utility
  for people might be
• compatible with enormous per capita
  inequalities.
• 3. Nonhuman nature itself (intrinsic value)
• a. Its not clear if sustainability supplants
  or matches up well with
• nature protection.

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Hollands Conclusion

• The real importance of sustainability may lie in
  providing a new conceptual context within which
  issues of growth and environment can be debated,
  and in provoking us to reassess our notions of
  quality of life and environment. It answers also
  to a need, visceral as well as pragmatic, to do
  something in the face of loss. But as a guiding
  principle, it must be judged ultimately
  unsatisfying. It seems too closely locked in to
  conceptions of the worlda storehouse that must
  be filled, a machine that must be maintainedthat
  are themselves no longer sustainable. In the
  wake of Darwin, the world looks much more like an
  open-ended historical process ill-suited for
  filling or maintaining. Our more modest task is
  how not to blight the interlocking futures of the
  human and the natural community that we have the
  power profoundly to affect but lack the capacity
  and the wisdom to manage.
• (Sustainability, page 400)