The death of sustainability?
Why we should give up the word, but not the fight.
So a while ago I shelved the meat-and-three-veg lifestyle to pursue a more eco-friendly diet of the primarily plant variety. I’ve found myself a wonderful local grocer whose owner — Sandy, the darling — happily gives me tips on maintaining my own front-yard veggie garden. It’s going ok.
I also buy recycled toilet paper. I’ve become almost fanatical in my resolve to cycle everywhere: to work, to evening drinks, even to the airport. And I’ve recently made the executive decision to shower less for the purpose of saving water.
Considering these tendencies, I am perhaps a little more extreme than the average middle-class environmentally-conscious inner-suburban Melburnian. But we all, in our own ways, seem to be making lifestyle decisions increasingly in the direction of a common, important goal.
Sustainability is the name of the game. And with my organic soy lattes and repurposed clothing I look like I’m working my way up the ranks of the leaderboard.
But there’s a little problem. In this game, no-one seems to be able to agree on exactly where the goalposts lie, or even if we are playing in the right arena. We’re spending our time passing the ball around, when maybe what we really should be doing is bringing out the shovels and digging up the field.
You see, the term ‘sustainability’ is fraught with confusion and contradiction. For some it means making our current lifestyles greener: trading plastic for green bags in the checkout line, purchasing certified organic produce, taking the electric car out for a spin once in a while, and sourcing 20% of our electricity from wind farms.
For others, if we could only get those pesky “big polluters” to pay up, stick a (second, more permanent) price on carbon, and broaden the reach of our national parks and protected areas, we’d be able to create more rewarding jobs and promote a stronger, greener economy.
For still others sustainability demands no less than overthrowing the entire current global political-economic structure, along with its trusty sidekicks, Consumerism and Capitalism. These more radical punters advocate either a complete return to an agrarian lifestyle, or at least vastly simplified lifestyles, re-localisation of economies and massive redistributions of global wealth.
In short, sustainability has become a very fuzzy concept. There are probably as many definitions as there are people trying to define it. So I’d like to take a quick semantic detour for some hints on how we might sift through these varied and disparate uses of the term.
Sustainability = Sustain + Ability
Firstly, it goes without saying that if something is to be sustainable it must possess the ability to be sustained for some period of time. That much seems self-evident.
Unfortunately, when we read, hear or say the word, what exactly we are sustaining and for how long is rarely specified. Without appropriate context, claiming “this product is sustainable” or that “John is making sustainable choices” becomes essentially meaningless. Even worse, we risk these phrases coming to mean anything and everything to anyone and everyone.
Then there is the question of ‘ability’ itself. How do we know that something is truly able to be sustained?
It seems to me that the only way we can accurately assess sustainability is with the benefit of hindsight — once the timeframe we are interested in has already been and gone. The best we can hope for today is to make educated (or uneducated) predictions about the future consequences of today’s actions.
But we all know how hard it is to predict the future — especially when we start talking decades or even centuries, which really is the minimum timeframe we should be looking at for ecological sustainability. [Some Native American nations famously urge current generations to consider the impacts of their decisions on children born seven generations (about 140 years) from now].
Considering our unavoidable uncertainty about the future, is it ever possible to be so certain that something is sustainable?
Any such claim that ignores or obscures these important considerations is simply misleading, and is probably just being used to sell you something.
A sustainable Earth system?
Thinking in terms of systems throws yet another spanner in the sustainability works, and perhaps should signal the death of the common use of the term altogether.
We can think of our environment, our economy, our society, our planet, and even our own bodies as systems. Systems made up of systems, and systems within other systems.
Take yourself. You are beautifully constructed, there is no doubt about it. But this fine piece of machinery wouldn’t function without the help of the digestive, cardiovascular, nervous, skeletal and other various sub-systems that constitute your body. These systems are in turn dependent on chemical and electrical signals produced by systems of cells. At the same time, your body and mind couldn’t flourish without links to external systems, too—human systems of food production, your friendship circles and wider social network, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, the economic system, the atmosphere, language, etc.
Systems are obviously complex and highly interdependent. And they are far from static. For you to survive and thrive, for example, the cells in your body must be continuously replaced and renewed. We certainly don’t want cells that are too “sustainable”; consider the case of a cancer cell and the fate of its host.
Healthy ecosystems, too, are in a constant state of flux: individuals die, new ones are born, species go extinct, others evolve and proliferate, habitats shift, seasons change. Similarly, a productive and diverse modern economy thrives on ‘creative destruction’: ageing, inefficient industries are swept away by waves of new technologies, new production techniques, and new social trends.
This is the way of the world, and indeed the universe. A delicate balance of give and take. A perpetual cycle of birth, growth, decline and renewal.
We are currently living within a global social, political and economic system predicated on perpetual growth on a planet endowed with only finite resources. Humanity’s ecological footprint has overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity by over 50% — we now need at least an extra half a planet to meet our species’ resource and pollution needs. This obviously cannot continue forever, but the trend shows no signs of slowing.
With the OECD projecting strong global economic growth out to 2060, and parallel forecasts of potential social and ecological collapse, it seems our species is trying with all its might to “sustain the unsustainable.”
Using our impressive technological mastery over nature, we have been able to hold our economic system in an extended stage of growth against all odds. From a systems perspective, the global economy has now become cancerous; it is slowly chipping away at the ability of the ecological system — upon which all life on the planet depends — to remain healthy, stable and functioning in our favour. Former World Bank economist, Herman Daly, calls this “uneconomic growth.”
In the past, localised environmental damage was all we had to worry about. Nowadays, increasing interdependence of our national economies and the flows of pollutants across national borders means that our impacts have become truly global. Local footprints mean very little in terms of global ecology. We must now focus on the sum-total of humanity’s impact.
If the global collective is our necessary point of reference, then isn’t a focus on an individual, organisation or behaviour largely ignoring the forest for the trees?
Seen through this system-wide lens, the noble pursuits of ‘sustainable agriculture’, ‘sustainable buildings’ and ‘sustainable lifestyles’ start to make little sense, at least in definitional terms. Lower immediate ecological costs, perhaps. But sustainable?
Can my relatively frugal lifestyle ever be considered sustainable when it occurs within such an inherently unsustainable system of exploitation and excess? If our economy, ecology, or both do eventually collapse, will any of us be able to sustain our lifestyles?
I strongly suspect not.
The truth about sustainability
So here’s the unfortunate truth: sustainability really only becomes meaningful at a sufficiently large scale that cannot be managed by any single person, group, or nation. In fact, to come even close to achieving the long-term sustainability of the Earth’s complex systems, a truly global effort is required to reduce our collective ecological impacts below planetary limits.
So where does this leave me and my humble veggie garden? Well, it’s really just a small, manageable step in what I consider to be the right direction. I can (occasionally) eat delicious home-grown tomatoes, comforted by the knowledge that I’m doing so in a relatively environmentally-benign way, while not contributing further to the corporate economy.
But this modest gesture is hardly going to solve our global woes, even if each and every one of us began harvesting our own tomatoes. The momentum on this ship is just too great to hope for a gust of wind to change its course.
That is where reinventing ourselves as informed, engaged and politically-active citizens plays a vital role. This involves reading widely and sharing ideas persuasively. It involves challenging the status quo at every possible junction, not just when election day comes around.
To do this, some people choose to chain themselves to trees, or send fake press releases. Some sign online petitions, or ask difficult questions in their classrooms. Some support groups, organisations and companies with similar goals and values. Some give lectures, or organise rallies and events. Some talk to friends, family and strangers. Some write books. Some write blogs.
No single person can right the world’s wrongs, but when united we humans can wield phenomenal power. And it is only through collective action that we can begin to sow the seeds of change.
However you wish to do it, it’s time we got out there and made our voices heard for the sake of the future.
In the mean time, keep growing those tomatoes. But let’s lay off the ‘sustainability’ talk hey? It’s not doing anyone any favours.
