What is sustainable development? Is this a desirable goal for contemporary societies? Why/why not? In what ways does sustainable development offer a way out of our current ecological crisis?
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Printed in the United States of America 2 3 4 5 6 7 16 15 14 13 4 Sustainability and Responsibi I ities to the Future It would be difficult tofjnd almost any institution in contemporary culture that has not in some way attached itself to the idea of sustainability. We find "sustain- able" used to modify: agriculture, archi- tecture, business, buildings, construction, communities, consumerism, development, economics, ecosystems, forestry, market- ing, investing, transportation, and on and on. The concept of sustainability is every- where. Thousands of corporations, for example, have replaced the traditional corporate annual report with an annual sustainability report. But one should be leery when any idea is so ubiquitous, especially when it was originally intro- duced as a critical alternative to the status quo. Has "sustainability" lost its meaning? Is it only a passing fad; or worse, is it a smokescreen behind which anything goes? As most commonly used today, the concept of sustainability is about 30 years old. It is traced to a United Nations 74 commission that studied questions of economic development, environmental protection, and future generations in the 1980s. Named for its chairman, former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Brundtland Commission focused on long-term strategies that might help nations achieve economic development without jeopardizing the earth's capacity to sustain all life. The Brundtland Commission published its findings in 1987 in a book titled Our Common Future, which offered what has . become the standard definition of sus- tainable development: "sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future gen- erations to meet their own needs." Beginning with this report, the concept of sustainability and sustainable develop- ment has guided much of the world's thinking about global economic growth and development. · CHAPTER 4 SUSTAINABILITY AND RESPONSIBILITIES TO THE FUTURE 75 In some ways, sustainability is an intuitively clear idea. A practice is sus- tainable if it can continue indefinitely. A simple example comes from finance. Putting money into savings and spending only the interest generated from those savings exemplifies a sustainable bud- geting practice. Spending down the principal, as well as spending the princi- pal and the interest, is unsustainable. The income will decrease as the savings are spent, and thus the income will run out eventually. Aesop's fable about the goose that laid the golden egg captures a similar insight. Limiting your consump- tion to the golden eggs is sustainable; eating the goose itself is not. Sustainability also has a certain ethical intuitiveness. As discussed in Chapter 2, . rights are sometimes explained in terms of protecting those central human interests that we identify as needs. In this sense, we might explain human rights in terms of every person having a right to what she needs. Therefore, the Brundtland Com- mission's definition of sustainability seems simply to assert that this same human right should be extended not only to every person presently alive, but to future generations as well. Sustainability in this sense seems just another way to say that equal. opportunity should extend to people not yet living. Similarly, the Brundtland Commission's economic goal had a certain intuitive appeal. Economic development as prac- ticed throughout the twentieth century, if not throughout most of human history, treated the productive capacity of the earth as if it were infinite. But in the late twentieth century, all signs are that human consumption is approaching the limits of that productive capacity. It is as if we are beginning to look hungrily at the goose itself rather than just at its eggs. The Brundtland Commission's call for sus- tainable development, rather than simple unrestricted growth, was a call for us to dial back on both the quantity and quality of our consumption. Sustainability is thus often character- ized in terms of three fundamental cate- gories, frequently called the "three pillars of sustainability" or the "triple bottom line." Sustainability has an economic dimension that concerns production and distribution of goods and services to meet human needs. Economic sustainability implies that we not use productive resources, such as capital, labor, and nat- ural resources at rates faster than those at which they can be replenished. But sus- tainability also has both an environmental dimension and ethical dimension that restricts this economic activity to activities that do not degrade the biosphere in such a way that people are denied in the future an equal right to meet their own needs. There are three pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental, and ethical. From one perspective, the explosion of attention now paid to sustainability is good news. The optimistic view is that people worldwide have understood the call to sustainable practices and that global economic development is evolving in a way that is promising for the future. The hopes that were implicit in the Brundtland report seem to be coming to fruition . But skeptics remain unconvinced. Some who are sympathetic to the goals of Brundtland Commission, interpret the universal attention to sustainability and the explosion of businesses and countries that now identify with sustainability as an indication that something is amiss. To understand this skepticism we should ask, "What is being sustained?" It seems clear that some who have jumped on the sus- tainability bandwagon believe that the status quo is what we should sustain. To commit to sustainability means that I commit to finding ways to keep doing what I am doing. But, if sustainable development was introduced as an alter- native to the status quo, if the present patterns of consumption, production, and growth are what has led to the present predicament in which we find ourselves bumping up against the limits of growth, then it should be clear that not everything that we are presently doing can be "sustained." Some critics, for example, would argue that sustainability cannot be applied to the consumption patterns of industrial societies such as the United States, or to an energy industry built on fossil fuels. Finding consumer giants such as Walmart, or oil companies such as BP, claiming allegian_ce to sustainability 76 ' PART II ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AS APPLIED ETHICS convinces these critics that the concept has been severely corrupted. In a similar vein, other critics claim that sustainability is unjust if it implies that the path to economic development enjoyed by the western industrialized countries is no longer open to the devel- oping world . If sustainability means sus- taining the status quo for the present alignment of the world's economies, then countries such as China, India, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, and Indonesia decidedly are not in favor of sustainability. These critics interpret the West's call for sus- tainable development as the rich telling the poor that they should be satisfied with what they have and find another way to prosperity. Other critics doubt the very founda- tions of the sustainability movement. Sus- tainability is built on the assumptions that there are limits to growth, that we have a responsibility not to put future genera- tions at a disadvantage in meeting their needs, and that the best way to fulfil that responsibility is to adopt policies that limit growth. Each of these assumptions can be challenged. The sustainability movement takes as a given the assumption that resources are limited. But some argue that this misre- presents the nature of resources. Human beings do not value natural resources for their own sake, but for the services that they provide to us.