"Sustainability" - Encyclopedia entry in J. Baird Callicott & Robert Frodeman's "Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy" more

Sustainability McGarity, Thomas O. 2002. ‘‘Seeds of Distrust: Federal Regulation of Genetically Modified Foods.’’ University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 35: 403–510. ‘‘Statement of Policy: Foods Derived from New Plant Varieties.’’ 1992 Federal Register 57: 22,984, 22,985. Gregory N. Mandel SUSTAINABILITY The word sustainability has become ubiquitous in environmental affairs since the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) report Our Common Future popularized the concept of sustainable development. The idea, however, has a long history. The term sustainability has a range of definitions running into hundreds, making any preliminary definition necessarily highly abstract, but all cluster around the core idea that some system, process, range of welfare, or set of items can be maintained at a certain rate or level for the long term; the ingredients of this formulation and its applications, however, vary widely, as do their disciplinary roots and practical implications. POLITICAL ECONOMY The earliest clear example of the concept of sustainability in economic thought is in John Stuart Mill’s (1806– 1873) treatment of the ‘‘stationary state’’ in Book IV of his Principles of Political Economy (1848). In this work Mill argues that an end to economic growth is ultimately unavoidable but that this limitation need not imply a rejection progress; rather, he anticipated significant moral and emotional human improvement through a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and reduced economic competition. Although this prescription was original to Mill, in making it he acknowledged debts to Thomas Malthus’s (1766–1834) earlier writings on natural limits, especially ‘‘An Essay on the Principle of Population,’’ which had gone through six editions between 1798 and 1826 and significantly influenced opinion among Mill’s utilitarian philosophical bedfellows in England. Malthus’s argument, however, did not share Mill’s optimism about prospects for social improvement, and was originally motivated precisely by Malthus’s opposition to doctrines of human progress advanced in the wake of the French Revolution. Malthus argued that unchecked population increases geometrically (e.g., 1,2,4,8) whereas food supply increases only arithmetically (e.g., 1,2,3,4); hence there is a constant tendency for demand on necessities to outstrip supply when population rises, along with a permanent likelihood of poverty and starvation for some section of the population, a circumstance that undercuts arguments for social improvement. This focus on population rather than differences in wealth and consumption was underscored by Malthus’s opposition to contraception and was further emphasized by his supporters’ tendency to concentrate on (possibly compulsory) birth control, but only for the poorer classes, priorities that were sharply condemned by the nineteenthcentury radical left (e.g., Friedrich Engels’s 1844 work Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy) and that still fuel suspicions of Malthusian influence on thinking about sustainability today. Mill’s idea of the stationary state presented a contrast to Malthus’s views not only in its optimism and advocacy of contraception—Mill served two nights in prison for distributing advocacy literature on birth control methods in 1823—but also in the conditions he envisioned. Whereas Malthus saw the changes of population and resource base as a potential source of chronic instability, Mill’s stationary state is stable and loosely egalitarian, and thus a progenitor of notions of a ‘‘steady-state economy’’ that have been popular among contemporary advocates of sustainability. Both Malthus’s outlook and Mill’s utilitarian schemes grew increasingly irrelevant to mainstream political economy in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as technological improvements, along with increased agricultural and industrial productivity, appeared to dispel Malthusian gloom about an unavoidable disparity between a sprinting population and a crawling resource base. Cornucopian technological and productionist optimism were the prevailing ideas in economics at the turn of the twentieth century. Developments within economic theory also contributed, for the marginal-utility theory that arose in neoclassical economics at the nineteenth century involved a new scarcity postulate worked out simultaneously by Carl Menger, W. S. Jevons, and Leon Walras. This postulate saw need in radically subjective terms, as an internal human state rather than as the naturalistic, interactive phenomenon postulated by Mill and Malthus, and maintained that internal human desires defined need, and that satisfying these desires/needs, which themselves are stimulated by seeing desirable objects, drives human activity. This in turn means that individuals choose between satisfying various needs, with each person having an internal hierarchy of needs and endeavoring to calculatively obtain the best possible result in relation to goods that are in short supply. The existence of an infinite number of these needs places limits on any given single need at any particular moment; accordingly aggregate needs are infinitely expandable, but are rendered calculable by individuals making hierarchical choices that limit particular needs, This desocialized model of need also incorporated optimism about the functional substitutability of goods, assuming on the basis of this model that scarcity of a given 286 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY Sustainability good (e.g., oil) would generate incentives to develop resource substitutes for that good (e.g., ethanol) and so absolute external scarcity could be kept at bay. This new theory came to dominate twentieth-century academic economics, pushing the consideration of external limits into the background (Xenos 1989). The concept of hard external limits to economic expansion of a sort not amenable to technological fixes or resource substitution resurfaced with the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al. 1972). This report examined five variables—world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion—and ran these through successive computer simulations to explore possible outcomes of exponential growth combined with finite resources. The simplified models, though not aimed at explicit predictions, consistently manifested feedback loops producing dire consequences before 2100, suggesting a rate of nonrenewable resource depletion rapid enough to portend exhaustion within a little more than a century, with no likelihood of any technological rescue. The book popularized the idea of physical limits to growth and paved the way for concepts of sustainability based on that prospect. This work was still haunted by the specter of population growth, but since that time most sustainability-oriented environmentalists have increasingly emphasized the dangers of overconsumption and downplayed those of overpopulation. Nevertheless, the argument that continuous population increase will eventually place strains a depleting natural resource base, even in the most egalitarian social arrangements, remains part of environmentalist discourse. Accordingly, cornucopian and market-based critics of environmentalism such as Julian Simon (1996) and Bjorn Lomborg (2001) have characterized sustainability arguments as neo-Malthusian. FORESTRY AND SUSTAINABLE YIELDS Forestry has also informed modern ideas about sustainability. The work of the American forester-conservationist Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946) has been a major influence. Echoing Mill, Pinchot combined theories of resource scarcity with an anthropocentric utilitarian moral concern for human welfare. For Pinchot the forester’s mission was ‘‘based on the elimination of waste, and directed toward the best use of all we have for the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time’’ (Pinchot 1914, p. 25). In his autobiography Breaking New Ground (1947) Pinchot recounts that, upon his return to the United States in 1890 after a period of forestry training in Europe, he was horrified at American lumbermen’s wastefulness. He and his allies, pointing to the dangers of timber famine, established a national U.S. Forest Service based on principles of efficient harvesting of resources through scientific forest management and replanting, and the prevention of fire, theft, improper use, and destruction. These practices aimed at preserving the resources in perpetuity. This mandate came to include economic and longterm social-justice concerns, as manifested in Pinchot’s concerns about the theft of timberland land from Native Americans and his campaign in 1908 and 1909 to introduce systematic forestry on American Indian reservations. He claimed that this last measure, within eighteen months, ‘‘saved large sums of money to the Indians, gave many of them profitable employment, and by the introduction of Forestry promised to make that employment permanent’’ (Pinchot 1947, p. 412). Although these arrangements were truncated in 1909 by political dispute, they were resurrected in the mid-1930s under Forest Service head Ferdinand A. Silcox as the Indian New Deal, reviving ideas of social service in forestry that are still influential. Thanks in large measure to the precedents set by Pinchot’s work, the range of functions included as legally mandatory in forest planning have expanded. The Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960 formalized the U.S. Forest Service range of duties by requiring forest planning to consider issues such as outdoor recreation, location in relation to human settlements, watersheds, and fish and wildlife preservation in addition to the more familiar concerns about timber and grazing. In each case the operative principle is ‘‘sustainable yield’’—the amount of a resource that can be extracted without undermining the natural system’s core capacities to maintain or improve upon its full range of services. Pinchot’s original conception of forestry was anthropocentric and geared to economic development; a raft of other issues, however, has arisen in the past forty years. One major source of controversy is clear cutting, the clearing and replanting of an entire area of forest as opposed to selective felling in a given area. This practice, which had become dominant in the U.S. Forest Service by the late 1950s, is supported by timber interests (for whom it can be more profitable) and by many foresters, but most environmentalists regard it as abusive to forestlands, especially because of habitat loss, even if the species affected may be ecologically unimportant to the system’s productivity. This controversy is an example of how anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric conceptions of nature’s value can result in practical differences even when there is agreement among the parties about the goal of sustaining the long-term use of natural resources. The problem is most pronounced in areas where clear cutting might affect vulnerable species; not surprisingly, then, the first wave of organized opposition to Forest Service clear cutting occurred around the same time as the passage of the Endangered Species Act (1973) and the 1975 Convention on International Trade in Endangered ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY 287 Sustainability Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which sought to integrate balanced species use with conservation. The latter was the first major international agreement in which the idea of sustainable use was implicit, though the phrase was not used; the convention does not expressly promote sustainable use by defining the term or demanding particular practices, but it does seek to prevent destruction and unsustainable use. SUSTAINABILITY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Both political economy and forestry were prominent influences on the ideas sustainable development discussed in the 1987 WCED Report Our Common Future (often known as the Brundtland Report after its chair, the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland). Though it did not coin the phrase ‘‘sustainable development,’’ the report furnished its basic definition as development that ‘‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’’ (WCED 1987, p. 8). It drew upon earlier precedents by linking sustainable use of resources to intergenerational, intragenerational, and international distributive justice and poverty relief, noting the extent to which poverty causes ecological depletion and linking these points to conservation concerns. The WCED sustainable-development model is, however, clearly anthropocentric, embracing technological optimism and suggesting a new kind of economic growth rather than questioning or rejecting the very idea of growth. The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro built upon this report in forging the Convention on Biological Diversity, the first treaty to expressly promote the idea of sustainable use as an international ideal. A concern with yield is an important but not sufficient element of a practice of ecologically sustainable development. Ecological sustainability implies the satisfaction of three conditions in human interactions with nature: (1) Rates of use of renewable resources must not exceed their rates of regeneration; (2) rates of use of nonrenewable resources must not exceed the rate at which renewable substitutes can be developed; and (3) rates of pollution emission must not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment (Jones 2003). Human impacts in these areas may be measured by using ecological footprint analysis, as developed by Wackernagel and Rees (1996). VARIETIES OF SUSTAINABILITY The concept of sustainability poses two major questions: What is to be sustained? Who or what should be the beneficiary of sustainability? In anthropocentric theories the sustaining of ecological systems aims at the flourishing of humans; indeed, some argue that a sufficiently broad conception of human fulfillment coupled with a recognition of human ignorance may lead to a policy convergence between anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric views (Norton 1991). For example, the loss of a species in a given ecosystem might superficially appear unimportant within an anthropocentric view of policy, but if the complexity of ecosystems and the possibility of human error are used to mandate caution, the sensible policy course may still be to avoid risking any possible unforeseen impacts of the loss, thus mandating the same policy as that which would come from a nonanthropocentric perspective. Alternatively it can be argued that, if some species are unnecessary to human continuity and one allows some resource substitutability (for example, moving away from consuming scarce Atlantic cod supplies and towards using more plentiful and functionally equivalent European haddock), then only natural capital critical to human survival need be sustained for future generations (Dobson 2000); such a view might call for the complement of a nonanthropocentric perspective to justify the protection of areas of nature not critical to human well-being. A quandary of intergenerational justice is that granting equal resource access to every generation without calculating an endpoint yields absurd conclusions: Finite resources must be divided among an infinite number of claimants, and so ‘‘no one gets anything at any time’’ (Laslett and Fishkin 1992, p. 6). Some argue, therefore, for a compromise between discounting the future (i.e., measuring the entitlements of future people as becoming progressively smaller and less important the further away they are from us in time) and the need to impose legitimate limits on the present generation. One option is a ‘‘just savings’’ solution in the manner of John Rawls’s justice theory (Wissenburg 1998), whereby people of all generations are regarded as morally equal and equally entitled to a particular basic set of opportunities, thus creating an obligation for each generation to pass on that set of opportunities to the next generation. Alternatively, a moral appeal may be made to future generations’ vulnerability, arguing that this vulnerability creates obligations for the current generation (Goodin 1985; Cowen and Parfit 1992; Dobson 2000). Even in purely anthropocentric terms the details of such options still need calculation, and here the distinction between weak and strong sustainability becomes significant. Weak sustainability espouses the substitutability of natural capital (i.e., naturally occurring goods that have beneficial economic effects, such as the ability of forests to produce oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide) for humanmade capital (i.e., human products that may have 288 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY Sustainable Agriculture functionally similar economic effects to such naturally occurring goods). Weak sustainability maintains that so long as an even stock of total capital is maintained, economic growth can be beneficial and consumption rates maintained. In some formulations an even stock of welfare functions is to be maintained, and so the issue becomes still clearer: a choice between sustaining either a particular list of goods or a particular level of human welfare. Strong sustainability insists on treating natural capital independently of human-made capital, rejecting the idea that natural capital (i.e. naturally occurring economically beneficial goods) can always in principle be substituted by man-made equivalent goods, and so strong sustainability theory advocates sustaining particular natural goods and processes (i.e., physical ‘‘stuff’’) rather than undifferentiated total capital or welfare (i.e., abstract measurements of welfare held at a particular level). Although weak-sustainability has been more popular among thinkers stressing the range of future individual choices, Bryan Norton has supported the strong-sustainability perspective by a series of highly ingenious arguments concerning future human options and collective goods, maintaining that future people’s opportunities for living fulfilling lives mandates strong rather than weak sustainability (Norton 2005). SEE A LSO Brundtland Report; Convention on Biodiversity; Environmental Law; Future Generations; Intergenerational Justice; Limits to Growth; Norton, Bryan; Pinchot, Gifford; Population; Resource Management; Sustainable Development; U.S. Forest Service. Laslett, Peter, and James Fishkin, eds. 1992. Justice between Age Groups and Generations. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lomborg, Bjorn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. London: Cambridge University Press. Malthus, Thomas R. 1999 (1798). An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: Oxford University Press. Meadows, Donella H.; Jorgen Randers; Dennis L. Meadows; and William W. Behrens. 1972. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. Mill, John Stuart. 2004 (1848). Principles of Political Economy. New York: Prometheus Books. Norton, Bryan G. 1991. Toward Unity among Environmentalists. London: Oxford University Press. Norton, Bryan G. 2005. Sustainability. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pinchot, Gifford. 1914. The Training of a Forester. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Pinchot, Gifford. 1947. Breaking New Ground. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Simon, Julian L. 1996. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wackernagel, Mathis, and William Rees. 1996. Our Ecological Footprint. London: New Society. Wissenburg, Marcel 1998. Green Liberalism. London: UCL Press. World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). 1987. Our Common Future. New York: Oxford University Press. Xenos, Nicholas. 1989. Scarcity and Modernity. London: Routledge. Piers H. G. Stephens BIBLIOGRAPHY Beckerman, Wilfred. 1995. ‘‘How Would You Like Your ‘Sustainability’ Sir? Weak or Strong? A Reply to My Critics.’’ Environmental Values 4: 169–179. Cowen, Tyler, and Derek Parfit. 1992. ‘‘Against the Social Discount Rate.’’ In Justice between Age Groups and Generations, eds. Peter Laslett and James Fishkin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Daly, Herman E. 1992. Steady State Economics. 2nd edition. London: Earthscan. Daly, Herman E. 1995. ‘‘On Wilfred Beckerman’s Critique of Sustainable Development.’’ Environmental Values 4: 49–55. Dobson, Andrew. 2000. Justice and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engels, Friedrich. 1973 (1844). ‘‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.’’ In Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1843-44. Vol. 3. London: International Books. Goodin, Robert E. 1985. Protecting the Vulnerable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, Alan. ‘‘Ecological Sustainability’’ at Hunter and Central Coast Region: Education for Environmental Responsibility. Available from http://www.rumbalara.eec.education.nsw. gov.au SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE At the beginning of the twenty-first century there are renewed threats of the starvation of millions, not due to warfare but to straightforward imbalance between food production and consumption. As seen frequently in Bangladesh, starvation will occur not first in overcrowded inner cities but in the very fields where food is grown. Sustainable agriculture is the technical name given policies and agricultural systems whose bottom-line goal is the prevention of such systemwide failures of agriculture. Agricultural sustainability is defined as the ability to provide sufficient, healthful, and accessible food supplies into the indefinite future for the populations that depend on the systems. Agricultural sustainability has two more particular meanings: 1) sustainability in the goal of agriculture, where it implies a permanent ability to feed its constituent populations; and 2) sustainability in the means (or tools) that actual agricultural systems use to ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY 289