Sustainability 2 The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series Understanding Beliefs, Nils J. Nilsson Computing: A Concise History, Paul Ceruzzi The Conscious Mind, Zoltan L. Torey Crowdsourcing, Daren C. Brabham Free Will, Mark Balaguer Information and the Modern Corporation, James Cortada Intellectual Property Strategy, John Palfrey The Internet of Things, Samuel Greengard Memes in Digital Culture, Limor Shifman MOOCs, Jonathan Haber Open Access, Peter Suber Paradox, Margaret Cuonzo Sustainability, Kent E. Portney Waves, Fred Raichlen 3 Sustainability Kent E. Portney The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 4 © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the Library of Congress. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-52850-4 (paperback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-262-33141-8 (retail e-book) 5 Contents Series Foreword 1 The Concepts of Sustainability 2 Sustainability and the Roots of Controversy 3 Sustainability and Consumption 4 Sustainability in the Private Sector: The Role of Business and Industry 5 Sustainability and Governments: The Importance of Public Policies 6 The Special Case of Sustainable Cities 7 Sustainability and the Future Glossary Bibliography Further Readings Index 6 Series Foreword The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers accessible, concise, beautifully produced pocket-size books on topics of current interest. Written by leading thinkers, the books in this series deliver expert overviews of subjects that range from the cultural and the historical to the scientific and the technical. In today’s era of instant information gratification, we have ready access to opinions, rationalizations, and superficial descriptions. Much harder to come by is the foundational knowledge that informs a principled understanding of the world. Essential Knowledge books fill that need. Synthesizing specialized subject matter for nonspecialists and engaging critical topics through fundamentals, each of these compact volumes offers readers a point of access to complex ideas. Bruce Tidor Professor of Biological Engineering and Computer Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 1 The Concepts of Sustainability This book is about the concepts of sustainability, their intellectual foundations and underpinnings, how associated concepts have been applied in various contexts, and the many controversies that have resulted. It seeks to take a broad view of the ideas of sustainability rather than to delve deeply into any one version. This chapter provides the conceptual foundations in an effort to show that, even though “sustainability” may seem an impossibly ambiguous term, since the mid 1980s it has come to have a number of specific meanings. Moreover, this chapter seeks to provide a fairly comprehensive overview of a number of variations and applications of the concepts of sustainability, including their applications to countries, businesses, governments, communities, cities, and people. The idea of sustainability began to make its way into the academic lexicon sometime in the mid 1980s, and since that time it has gone through substantial evolution. Even in the United States, where the idea of sustainability has not taken hold as firmly as it has in other parts of the world, there is still substantial interest in its applicability. Daniel Mazmanian and Michael Kraft (2009) suggest that the US has begun to enter a “third epoch” or period of environmental concern. If the first epoch was focused largely on federal command-and-control regulation focused on remediating and preventing environmental damage, and the second epoch on achieving greater economic efficiency in environmental protection, the third epoch is focused more broadly on sustainability. According to Mazmanian and Kraft (ibid.: 15), “the realization by a growing number of individuals and opinion leaders from many walks of life that a fundamental transformation in the way Americans relate to the environment and conduct their lives is becoming the hallmark of the third environmental [sustainability] epoch.” This chapter is meant to 8 present a foundation for understanding the third epoch by providing a brief overview of the early usage of the term “sustainability” in the academic world and in common discourse, and to provide a sense of what the term tends to mean in current practice. For most students of sustainability, an understanding starts with the definition provided by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 when it stated that sustainability is economicdevelopment activity that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987: 39). That definition provides a convenient point of departure for a broad understanding of this fairly abstract concept. Indeed, sustainability and its close cousins, such as sustainable development, sustainable ecosystems, and others discussed below, are perhaps best thought of as general concepts whose precise definitions have yet to be fully explicated. This does not, however, suggest that the idea of sustainability is meaningless. It is clear that, at its core, sustainability is a concept that focuses on the condition of Earth’s biophysical environment, particularly with respect to the use and depletion of natural resources. It is not the same as environmental protection. It is not the same as conservation or preservation of natural resources, although some have argued that this is where the roots of sustainability can be found (see, e.g., Farley and Smith 2014). It is more about finding some sort of steady state so that Earth or some piece of it can support the human population and economic growth without ultimately threatening the health of humans, animals, and plants. The basic premise of sustainability is that Earth’s resources cannot be used, depleted, and damaged indefinitely. Not only will these resources run out at some point, but their exploitation actually undermines the ability of life to persist and thrive. For example, as water resources become increasingly depleted or polluted, the health of humans, animals, and plants will inevitably be compromised. Perhaps the most important distinction between traditional ideas of environmental protection and sustainability is that the former tends to focus on environmental remediation and on preventing very specific environmental threats whereas the latter tends to be far more proactive and holistic, focusing on dynamic processes over the long term. Of course, the premises of sustainability raise substantial controversy in that they stand in sharp contrast to the assumptions that underlie theories of economic growth. That issue will be examined later. For present purposes, a look at some of its intellectual foundations demonstrates how varied, and yet how 9 broadly applicable, the concept is. Some have traced the essential seeds of sustainability to ideas put forth by Thomas Malthus late in the eighteenth century. Malthus argued that population growth would eventually outstrip Earth’s ability to support that population. The result, as foreseen by Malthus, would be a catastrophic collapse of human and natural systems. To Malthus, the only effective way to avoid catastrophe and to become more sustainable would be to control population growth. Of course, the fact that the absence of controls on population growth did not lead to catastrophe produced an alternative view that technology and technological advancement would result in improvements in the efficiency of systems supporting human populations. Moreover, the alternative view suggests that these improvements would enable human population growth to continue well into the future (Rogers, Jalal, and Boyd 2008: 20–22). The Three E’s of Sustainability Many of the notions about sustainability that are largely taken for granted today originated in the work of the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development, often referred to as the Brundtland Commission. In 1987, the report of the Brundtland Commission described sustainability as having three co-equal parts or elements, all of which start (in English) with the letter e: environment, economy, and equity. Sometimes described as three overlapping concentric circles (see figure 1.1), or as three pillars holding up the concept, these elements have formed the basis for disaggregating and elaborating sustainability. The argument is that sustainability can be achieved only by simultaneously protecting the environment, preserving economic growth and development, and promoting equity. The essential point, according to this broad concept, is that sustainability is about achieving results related to all three pillars, and that achievement in one pillar cannot and should not be accomplished by sacrificing another. In other words, it rejects the notion that there is necessarily a tradeoff between economic growth and the environment or between economic growth and equity. Sustainability can be achieved only when economic growth, environmental protection and improvement, and equity go hand in hand. 10 11 Figure 1.1 The three overlapping elements of sustainability. In many ways, the Brundtland Commission was simply articulating ideas that had been developing for years. Indeed, other efforts have been made to provide a more focused sense of where the ideas related to sustainability came from, and these efforts provide clarifications as to what the concept means in different contexts. Two different efforts to explicate the ideas and the intellectual foundations of sustainability are found in works of Becky Brown et al. and in those of Charles Kidd. (For a summary, see table 1.1.) Table 1.1 A summary of the foundations and definitions of sustainability. Six roots of sustainabilitya Points of emphasis Six definitions Points of emphasis of sustainabilityb Ecological/carrying capacity Maintenance of natural systems so that they can support human life and wellbeing Resource/environment Promoting economic growth only to the extent and in ways that do not cause deterioration of natural systems Biosphere Concern with the impacts of humans on the health of the Earth and its ability to support human populations Critique of technology Rejection of the notion that science and technology, by themselves, will protect and save the Earth No growth–slow Limits to the ability of the Earth to growth support the health and well-being of ever growing populations Ecodevelopment Adapting business and economic development activities to realities of natural resource and environmental limits Carrying capacity Optimum and maximum ability of Earth’s systems to support human life and well-being Sustainable use Maximum sustainable yield from of biological natural systems, such as forests and resources fisheries Sustainable Maintaining productivity of farming agriculture during and after disturbances such as floods and droughts Sustainable Renewable alternatives to fossil fuel energy reliance to produce heat energy Sustainable society and economy Sustainable development Maintaining human systems to support economic and human well-being Promoting economic growth only to the extent and in ways that do not cause deterioration of natural systems a. from Kidd 1992b. from Brown et al. 1987 b. from Brown et al. 1987 Brown, Hanson, Liverman, and Meredith (1987) made an effort to compare and contrast different meanings and intellectual roots of the general concept of sustainability for the purpose of working toward a common understanding. Similar to other typologies of sustainability, 12 that of Brown et al. emphasizes the specific targets of sustainability— i.e., exactly what is it that is supposed to be sustained. These concepts and definitions of sustainability have been used to convey many different expressions of environmental priorities, each emphasizing some particular aspect or set of results that should be sustained. Brown et al. focused on “sustainable biological resources use,” “sustainable agriculture,” “carrying capacity,” “sustainable energy,” “sustainable society and sustainable economy,” and “sustainable development.” Ultimately, they suggested, these six meanings converge around two major aspects or sets of results: those that emphasize ecology and those that emphasize economics. Sustainable biological resource use, according to Brown et al., focuses on the “maximum sustainable yield” from natural systems, such as forests and fisheries. The challenge is to identify an optimum level of growth of the natural resource to achieve the maintenance of a constantly renewable stock of that resource. In forestry, this means harvesting trees at a rate that allows a forest to continue to produce trees. In a fishery, it means extracting fish at a rate that allows the fish population to maintain a particular size. Clearly, if a forest is overharvested, or if a fishery is over-fished, the resource will fall into decline and may disappear. Sustainability in the context of agriculture shifts the focus from working tirelessly to grow more and more of a crop to working to ensure that the land can produce at least a certain amount of a crop indefinitely. These two goals sometimes come into conflict when efforts to maximize crop yields in the short run lead to practices that threaten the ability of the land to produce over a longer period. According to Brown et al., sustainable agriculture also involves efforts to ensure that farming remains productive during and after major disturbances (Conway 1985). By that definition, sustainable agriculture would involve efforts to bounce back from pest infestation or diseases, whereas unsustainable agriculture would involve practices that make crops more susceptible to these disturbances. Carrying capacity approaches to sustainability focus on the ability of an area of land to support human populations. Sometimes carrying capacity is concerned about the entire planet, sometimes it is concerned with countries or regions of the globe, and sometimes it is concerned with much smaller geographic areas such as cities, watersheds, ecosystems, or river basins. When the demands on the natural systems of these geographic areas move beyond the carrying 13 capacity of that area—for example, when populations of animals exceed the capacity to support them—species collapse will occur. The central problem from the perspective of carrying capacity is that population growth itself inevitably leads, in a Malthusian sense, to increasing scarcity of the very resources needed to sustain life. In the vast literature encompassing research on carrying capacity, some analyses distinguish between “maximum carrying capacity” and “optimal carrying capacity.” The difference is that maximum carrying capacity tries to understand the largest number of people that can be supported in a geographic area, whereas optimal carrying capacity tries to understand how large a human population can be supported without putting the area at risk of collapse. Ophuls and Boyan (1992) suggest that the optimal carrying capacity of an area might be as little as half of an estimated maximum capacity. Efforts have been made to differentiate “maximum carrying capacity” from “optimum carrying capacity”—the former referring to the largest population that, though theoretically sustainable, would place Earth at a threshold that would be vulnerable to even small changes in the environment, and the latter to a smaller, more desirable population size that would be less vulnerable to environmental disruptions (Odum 1983). Coupled with the notion of a limited carrying capacity is the idea that human activity, as currently practiced, is largely unsustainable. In other words, most human activity depletes, rather than replenishes or sustains, the resources that have the capacity to support life. When people engage in rational economic behavior, they contribute to the depletion of those resources. Markets, the argument goes, more often than not create incentives for resource depletion and thereby undermine Earth’s carrying capacity. This is especially true of “commons” resources, including much of Earth’s air and water. But human behaviors, whether market-driven or not, often contribute to diminishing Earth’s carrying capacity. Even for those who believe that technology can intervene, there is concern that the net balance between what technology can do to enhance Earth’s carrying capacity is more than offset by humans’ abilities to deplete it. Of course, not everyone accepts the notion that Earth’s carrying capacity is finite. As will be discussed in greater detail later, optimists suggest that technology makes continuous expansion of Earth’s carrying capacity possible or even likely. Sustainability, then, is often associated with maintaining Earth’s carrying capacity, usually through alteration of individual and 14 collective human behavior or through the application of new and developing technologies to minimize the effects of those behaviors. Behaving in ways that reduce the rate of population growth and finding alternatives to depleting natural resources are certainly consistent with the idea of sustainability. In terms of human behavior, however, what may be required to maintain Earth’s carrying capacity is not well understood or agreed upon, and may in fact be inconsistent with basic values that are prevalent in the industrialized and industrializing countries. Arguing that sustainability is as much an ethical principle as a set of environmental results, Robinson, Francis, Legge, and Lerner (1990: 39) suggest that “sustainability is defined as the persistence over an apparently indefinite future of certain necessary and desired characteristics of the socio-political system and its natural environment.” What this means is that maintaining Earth’s carrying capacity is largely a function of the social and political values that define and prescribe human behaviors. Achieving sustainability, then, apparently requires some types of socio-political characteristics and values rather than others. Sustainable energy, as the concept has evolved, does not represent an effort to repeal the physical law of entropy. Its focus is primarily on moving toward producing electricity and powering machinery through means other than burning fossil fuels. Some early proponents of sustainable energy advocated this approach because of concerns that the world will run out of fossil fuels and that there will be serious or catastrophic consequences unless preparations are made to find alternatives. More recently, the focus has shifted because of concern that the amounts of fossil fuels being burned to generate energy are too large. In other words, reliance on fossil fuels was once considered unsustainable because the world would deplete those resources, but today such reliance is considered unsustainable because of the environmental consequences of burning those resources. Now that the issue of global climate change has emerged, it is clear that the burning of fossil fuels is the primary culprit in the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Since fossil fuels are projected to be readily available for many decades, finding sustainable alternatives has become an imperative. Waiting for fossil fuels to become depleted as a solution to climate change will not be adequate. Burning the fossil fuels already known to exist will allow the emission of far more carbon than can be tolerated. As a result, those interested in climate protection advocate sustainable energy as a means for reducing carbon emissions. This inevitably means that sustainable 15 energy must increasingly move toward increased reliance on solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and sometimes nuclear sources of electricity generation. This emphasis on renewable energy sources is a somewhat more narrowly defined version of the idea of sustainable energy. Another more sweeping concept focuses on reducing the energy demands created by the production of consumer goods. Sustainable society and sustainable economy focus on a broad array of efforts to maintain social conditions and economic and human well-being. Based mainly on the idea that there are limits to how much traditional economic growth the Earth and its natural resources can support, this focus often advocates greatly reduced or even zero world population growth. The focus in this definition is on society and social conditions rather than the environment or aspects of the environment, per se. It engages a number of issues not readily incorporated into other definitions, including the question of whether economic well-being is the same as human well-being (does higher economic growth really translate into better quality of life?), and a variety of issues related to the third leg of sustainability, equity and justice. Equity and justice are, in the first order, concerned about the widening gap between haves and have-nots, and about what the widening of this gap might imply for the quality of the environment broadly and for the propensity of have-nots to experience a different relationship with the environment than haves. The final definition discussed by Brown et al. is sustainable development. Sustainable development, perhaps significantly overlapping with sustainable economy, focuses on whether and to what extent there is an explicit tradeoff between economic growth and environmental protection. The idea of sustainable development is that the biophysical environment and its ecological services represent important and perhaps irreplaceable factors of economic production. If the environment and those services are diminished and degraded, economic growth is undermined. As will be discussed more fully below, the idea that depletion of natural resources by itself would undermine economic growth is not readily accepted in mainstream neo-classical economics. Sustainable development, according to Brown et al., also incorporations notions of ecodevelopment, the perspective that prescribes greater attention to the most efficient use of natural resources by business and industry. A similar effort to outline and contrast different definitions of sustainability is found in the work of Charles Kidd. Kidd (1992) 16 argues that at least six different historical intellectual “strains of thought,” perfectly analogous to the “intellectual roots” identified by Brown et al., underlie the current concept of sustainability. Each strain has its own “slant” or articulation of particularly important issues. He links the concept of sustainability to the “ecological/carrying capacity” strain of thought, the “natural resource/environment” intellectual root, the “biosphere” root, the “critique-of-technology” root, the “no growth-slow growth” foundation, and the “ecodevelopment” strain (ibid.). According to Kidd, one of the most important intellectual foundations of sustainability is found in the ecological carrying capacity strain of thought. As also described by Brown et al., this view, which is deeply grounded in the discipline of ecology, suggests that an ecosystem has a finite capacity to sustain life. The capacity of an ecosystem to support and sustain life is affected by many natural and human factors. Although ecologists have traditionally focused on natural factors, the role of humans in undermining the sustainability of ecosystems has become central to the field. As the resources are depleted, the ecosystem becomes less and less sustainable. The challenge, of course, is to understand what species and population sizes of life an ecosystem can sustain. Fishing provides a good example: left to their own devices, humans are inclined to overfish, often creating what is referred to as a “tragedy of the commons.” The resource/environment strain of thought points to depletion of natural resources as the primary challenge of sustainability. Grounded in theories of the limits of growth, the resource/environment strain simply posits that resource depletion and deteriorating environment will undermine economic growth itself. The biosphere strain of thought is based on the notion that human activity has the ability to affect the health of the entire planet, a notion that was somewhat foreign before the early years of the twentieth century. The critique of technology strain of thought focuses its attention on the roles that technology and technological innovation have played in promoting rather than avoiding environmental degradation, particularly when technologies are brought to bear on symptoms of problems rather than on fundamental issues. This notion has been expanded to include concern that even when technologies are deployed in an effort to improve the environment, this only delays degradation, or shifts the degradation to a different form or to a different part of the world. For example, in a period of drought new technologies might be developed 17 to dig deeper wells and extract more water as a result. But developing and deploying such technologies will not represent a solution if the fundamental problem is water shortage; technologies merely delay efforts to address the fundament problem, and perhaps deplete someone else’s water in the process. Perhaps of equal concern to the critique-of-technology strain is that the mere expectation that technology will somehow be developed delays more direct action. An example of this might be related to climate change. Some place great hope in the notion that carbon emissions can be captured and sequestered underground or under the sea as an alternative to reducing carbon emissions. There is no known way to accomplish this on a large scale, and yet the mere hope seems to undermine action to reduce carbon emissions. The no growth–slow growth strain of thought points to the argument that from a global perspective there are limits to the Earth’s carrying capacity. Relying on the same logic found in the ecological/carrying capacity root but applying it to a larger scale, this line of thought simply says there are natural limits to growth. Although this idea could be applied to economic growth and its limits, the focus here is on population growth. Finally, the ecodevelopment strain of thought focuses on the need to reconcile social, economic, and political objectives with the realities of natural resources and the environment. This line of reasoning was crystallized in 1977 by Ignacy Sachs, and by 1981 the idea had taken intellectual hold—see, e.g., Riddell 1981. In the words of Sachs (as quoted on page 12 of Kidd 1992), ecodevelopment requires “harmonizing social and economic objectives with ecologically sound management, in a spirit of solidarity with future generations.” As Brown et al. describe it, Kidd’s understanding of the concept of sustainable development, to a large degree, shifts the emphasis away from mere concern about the environment to include explicit concern about economic development. The argument often put forth is that the wrong kind of economic development not only depletes Earth’s resources and damages its ecological carrying capacity but also, in the long run, undermines economic growth. Unsustainable economic development is just as much about being unable to sustain economic growth as it is about exceeding Earth’s ecological carrying capacity. The concept of sustainable economic development essentially turns traditional understandings of economic growth on their head. Such traditional understandings take it as given that promoting economic 18 growth requires developing natural resources. Economic growth is important because it represents improvement in the standard of living, and improvement in the standard of living is synonymous with improvement in the human condition, human well-being, or social welfare. According to this view, deeply rooted in neoclassical economic theory, growth in a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) is required for improvement in that country’s well-being. In order for GDP to grow, natural resources must be used even if the result is an inevitable increase in environmental degradation. Thus, this view accepts the notion that there must be a tradeoff between natural-resource depletion and environmental degradation, on one hand, and improvement in the human condition, on the other. Sustainable economic development challenges the idea of such a tradeoff. One perspective suggests that such an understanding of the relationship between economic growth and the quality of the biophysical environment is a mere artifact of the use of GDP as the primary measure of economic growth and, ultimately, of human wellbeing. According to this view, unless measures of GDP are modified to account for the value of the degradation of the environment, GDP is a badly flawed measure of human well-being (Daly 1973, 1991, 1997). This idea seemed doomed from the start, overwhelmed by the power of traditional economic thought. But in 1992, Robert Solow, a distinguished professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, delivered a lecture for the organization Resources for the Future in which he put forth the idea that GDP is “not so bad for studying fluctuations in employment or analyzing the demand for goods and services.” “When it comes to measuring the economy’s contribution to the well-being of country’s inhabitants, however,” Solow commented, “the conventional measures are incomplete.” (See Solow 1993.) By 2006, with the release of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (Stern 2006), mainstream economists had largely accepted the idea that economic growth, as traditionally defined, is not the same as human well-being, that the relationship between traditional economic growth and human well-being needs to be better understood, and that the loss of ecological services (especially common-pool resources such as clean air and clean water) has the potential to undermine that well-being. The linkage between sustainability and economic development writ large began to emerge as an important policy issue in the 1970s, when a number of international development programs, including those 19 operated by or with the assistance of, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and US Agency for International Development (USAID) came under fire for using their extensive financial resources to inadvertently promote environmental degradation under the guise of economic development in developing countries. Many non-governmental organizations took great issue with these development programs, suggesting that they ought to become much more sensitive to the indigenous peoples and their environments in places where the financial resources of aid organizations were being used (Fox and Brown 1998). By the late 1970s, the idea of pursuing environmentally sensitive economic growth (or ecodevelopment, as Ignacy Sachs called it) had found its way into the works of the United Nations Environmental Programme (Kidd 1992: 18). Sustainable development achieved elevated recognition and legitimacy in the late 1980s, when the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development—also known as the Brundtland Commission, after its chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway—issued a report titled Our Common Future. That report was designed to create an international agenda for protecting the global environment, or, as was stated in the report, to sustain and expand the environmental resource base of the world. In the process, it put forth the very general notion that sustainable development consists of economic-development activity that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987: 39). Beyond that, the report is rather short on details and specifics. Its contribution to the conceptual foundations of sustainability emerges from what might be called cross-generation concerns, and the idea that economic development should be viewed over a longer period than is usual. Capturing this cross-generation concern in the US context more than twenty years ago, the National Commission on the Environment put forth a similar set of conceptual definitions. The 1993 report of that commission suggested that the United States should pursue “a strategy for improving the quality of life while preserving the environmental potential for the future, of living off interest rather than consuming natural capital.” “Sustainable development,” the report continued, “mandates that the present generation must not narrow the choices of future generations but must strive to expand 20 them by passing on an environment and an accumulation of resources that will allow its children to live at least as well as, and preferably better than, people today. Sustainable development is premised on living within the earth’s means.” (NCE 1993: 2) The discussions of sustainable development cited above provide a basic conceptual framework to organize thinking about sustainability, but of course there are many questions left unanswered—questions whose answers are useful for formulating specific applications or measuring results. For example, what exactly is included under the rubric of “natural capital”? In other words, what is it that needs to be sustained? Is it just natural resources? If so, which resources? Is it human resources? Is it environmental quality, more broadly defined? Is it ecosystem health? Is it some even more broadly defined quality of life? Does it matter who owns the natural capital? Are there necessarily distributional considerations—for example, does it have to apply to all people? Are sustainability initiatives really anti-growth —in other words, does advocacy of sustainability really mean the same as promoting no growth? Is advocacy of sustainability really a position in opposition to economic growth as commonly defined? In the conceptual literature, there is a clear sense that sustainability is not, in itself, anti-growth. Although there is a distinct element of no-growth sentiment in the no growth–slow growth strain of intellectual sustainability thought described by Kidd (1992: 9–12), sustainability is more about the search for peaceful coexistence between economic development and the environment. It is about finding ways to promote growth that are not at the expense of the environment, and that do not undermine future generations. Indeed, the implication is that protecting and improving the bio-physical environment of a city or community need not undermine or preclude economic growth. In recent years, this idea has been taken a step further to suggest that the pursuit of sustainability in cities and other smaller geographic areas may well be a new pathway toward global growth and livability. For example, there is growing evidence that cities that successfully adopt and implement sustainability-related programs and policies experience higher rates of economic growth than cities that don’t do so. To take the argument full circle, William Rees suggests that the energy waste cannot be “decoupled” from economic growth and development, and that any argument to the contrary is an illusion. He suggests that there cannot be sustainability as long as economic 21 growth is defined in a way that is based on consumption: [E]conomic growth (rising disposable income) has historically stimulated increased personal consumption. This results in increased energy and material throughput and consequent ecological damage. The reason is simple: the human enterprise is a growing sub-system of a non-growing finite ecosphere. Any diversion of energy and material resources to maintain and grow more humans and their ‘furniture’ is irreversibly unavailable to non-human species (what we get, they don’t). Biodiversity declines as humans displace other species from their habitats and appropriate ‘primary production’ (nature’s goods and services) that would otherwise support other species. Meanwhile, the increased production/consumption for humans adds to the pollution load on natural ecosystems. As noted, these trends can actually be accelerated by technological improvements that increase access to resources or improve efficiency (both of which tend to lower costs and prices). (Rees 2012) The Targets of Sustainability The conceptual underpinnings of sustainability sometimes obscure the practical issues that sustainability efforts must confront. These efforts have converged toward an understanding that focused on a small number of targets, including addressing climate change, protecting water supplies and systems, being prepared for the consequences of environmental changes that are predicted to occur, and finding alternatives to avoiding the disposing hazardous and toxic materials in the water and underground. For several decades, evidence has been mounting that global temperatures are rising, and that the release of carbon into the atmosphere, mainly as a result of burning fossil fuels, plays a very significant role in the rise. Controversies surrounding this evidence are discussed more fully in chapter 2, but efforts to move toward sustainability inevitably involve issues of climate change mitigation. Mitigation focuses on actions to reduce the extent to which global temperatures will rise, and to avoid the consequences associated with temperature increases, particularly sea-level rise (due primarily to melting of polar ice) and increasingly intense and destructive extreme weather events. Climate change mitigation requires, first and foremost, that carbon emissions into the atmosphere be drastically reduced. Underlying this focus on carbon is the notion that carbon emissions represent the number-one threat to Earth’s ability to sustain life. Yet the prospects for reduced global carbon emissions seem dismal. The global economy has seen developing countries, especially China and India, increasing their carbon emissions at high rates. The dynamic at work provides little solace to those wishing to see global carbon emissions decline. Developing countries often assert a right to pollute in order to grow their economies and to improve the standards 22 of living for their residents much as the developed industrial countries did during the twentieth century. Many developed countries, including the United States, refuse to accept the idea that the burden of carbon reduction should fall on them. As a result, efforts to reduce carbon emissions seem doomed. In recent years, attention to climate has focused on the impacts of rising temperatures and sea-level rise in what is often referred to as climate adaptation. If the carbon that has already been emitted into the atmosphere will unavoidably push global temperatures and sea levels higher, and if efforts to curtail carbon emissions continue to be ineffective, then efforts will have to be made to understand and prepare for these consequences. Particularly in coastal areas, which are especially vulnerable to sea-level rise, concern has shifted to the promotion of resiliency. Resiliency means a number of different things in different contexts, but generally it refers to efforts to protect people from the consequences of sea-level rise and extreme weather events, and to ensure that when such events occur people can recover quickly. Sustainability isn’t just about reducing carbon emissions and reliance on fossil fuels. It is also about other natural resources, most notably water and land (soil). Partly because of the frequency and duration of droughts, regardless of their cause, and partly because of rapid urbanization of populations around the world, attention has turned to a wide array of issues related to water. The United Nations has estimated that nearly half of the world’s people lack access to clean drinking water, a fact that has serious consequences for the health of affected populations. Moreover, while sea-level rise continues, depletion of supplies of fresh water seems rampant. From the disappearance of the Aral Sea (illustrated in figure 1.2; also see Howard 2014), the apparent disappearance of some 28,000 rivers in China (Hsu and Miao 2013), the rapidly falling water levels in the Ogallala Aquifer in the United States (Konikow 2013), and many other examples, it seems clear that existing water supplies and present practices of water use are not sustainable. Slowly, awareness about the need to address the long-term availability of water is growing, and this has led to improved understandings of hydrology (including the dynamics of water supplies, flows, diversion, and recharge), water demands and usage, tradeoffs (for example as between urban population and agricultural use, as well as the “nexus” between water usage, energy production, and agricultural needs), and water 23 governance (including water management and the potential for transboundary conflict and cooperation). Aspects of sustainability related to agriculture and food are discussed more fully below. 24 25 Figure 1.2 By 2000 (left), the Aral Sea had already shrunk to a fraction of its 1960 extent. Further irrigation and dry conditions in 2014 (right) caused the sea’s eastern lobe to dry up completely for the first time in 600 years. Photograph by NASA Earth Observatory; reprinted with permission. A third approach to sustainability focuses on trying to reduce and limit the amounts and types of toxic materials placed in the environment largely in the form of substances and materials disposed of as by-products of various human and industrial activity. Although the United States has, since the mid 1970s, enacted federal and state laws to regulate the production and disposal of solid and hazardous wastes, the air, land, and water continue to face degradation as a result of disposal practices. Coping with toxic materials in the water and land from past disposal practices has proved a challenge. Whether in existing Superfund sites or brownfields or in international ocean waters, increasing amounts of hazardous materials undermine efforts to achieve sustainability. This has given rise to efforts to prevent the production of toxic and hazardous materials in the first place. The National and International Context of Sustainability The Brundtland Commission’s report served as the foundation for the discussions and negotiations on sustainable development that took place at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in June of 1992. One of the results of the Earth Summit was the passage of a resolution often referred to as “Agenda 21,” a statement of the basic principles that should guide countries in their quest of economic development in the twenty-first century. Perhaps because of the importance of the United Nations in promoting the idea of sustainability, particularly as a result of the Earth Summit and the associated resolution, the “country” has become the locus of efforts to become more sustainable. A number of research efforts have been made to try to document the sustainability of countries for the purpose of comparing experiences. With a focus on environmental quality and a variety of other objective measures of the quality of life, the Environmental Performance Index project at Yale University produces an assessment of how countries rank (EPI 2014). The Environmental Performance Index on which these 26 rankings are based takes into account a variety of measures of environmental health and ecosystem vitality. As of 2014, the Environmental Performance Index showed that the most sustainable countries are Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Australia. Among the 178 countries assessed, Haiti, Mali, and Somalia are the least sustainable. The United States ranks 33rd, one place ahead of Malta and one place behind Belarus. Figure 1.3 provides a graphic representation of these assessments for the fifteen best-performing and the fifteen worst-performing countries. The EPI project also provides an estimate of the change experienced by countries over ten years, and these results for the fifteen countries with the largest change and the fifteen with the least change (including those that experienced negative change) are shown in figure 1.4. As might be expected, many of the countries that showed the greatest improvement in their environmental performance are countries that did not score well in the earlier period. Niger, Timor, Kuwait, Djibouti, and Sierra Leone all improved their environmental performance by 20 percent or more. Jordan, Zambia, Brunei, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain all saw their environmental performance get worse over the ten-year period. 27 28 Figure 1.3 The fifteen countries with the highest and lowest scores on the Environmental Performance Index in 2014. source: EPI 2014 29 30 Figure 1.4 The fifteen countries with the largest and smallest changes in their scores on the Environmental Performance Index between 2005 and 2014. source: EPI 2014 Global sustainability may require a great deal of international cooperation and coordination, and in practice such cooperation has rarely materialized. Instead, discussions among countries concerning which country will do what and when to move toward sustainability have pitted country against country, and have highlighted significant differences in positions, cultures, and goals. Nowhere is this truer than in efforts to mitigate climate change. In the face of mounting evidence presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see IPCC 2014), the industrial democracies (particularly the United States) have refused to participate in any treaty that would require them to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels, a goal set to as a result of estimates of what levels of carbon emissions are sustainable. Developing countries, particularly China, have asserted the right to pollute in order to grow their economies. The argument is that the developed industrial democracies of today grew their economies during the twentieth century largely by emitting greenhouse gases and by polluting. Developing countries assert that they should not see their economic growth curtailed as a price for the excesses of the developing countries. In short, developing countries have difficulty accepting, in practice, the fundamental premises of sustainability. The international conflicts and disagreements associated with the pursuit of are discussed in more depth in chapter 2. Variations on a Theme Even with the conceptual underpinnings of sustainability, there are many unanswered questions, particularly about what these concepts might imply for specific kinds of places or venues of human activity and behavior. What does sustainability mean for businesses and industry? What might sustainability imply for farming and agricultural practices? What is the connection between sustainability and government, governance, and public policy? Does the challenge of becoming more sustainable fall only to nation-states, or does it have implications for smaller geographic areas? Such questions are 31 addressed in some of the myriad variations, manifestations and instantiations of the concept. Sustainable Energy According to Brown et al., one special area that has gotten attention is what is sometimes referred to as “sustainable energy.” This may seem to be a misnomer in the sense that energy is, by definition, sustaining in that it conforms to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law of physics states that energy can change form (from potential to kinetic and vice versa) but cannot be created or destroyed. Sustainable energy is largely about what natural resources are used to produce energy in particular forms, how efficiently this process is, and to what effect on the environment. Thus, the focus tends to be on replacing the use of fossil fuels for producing heat energy that is used to generate electricity, to heat buildings, for various industrial purposes, and to power motor vehicles. Primarily because the burning of fossil fuels has the effect of causing the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, sustainable energy seeks to increase reliance on other energy forms to avoid this problem. Indeed, moving away from reliance on fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources is the cornerstone of what would be required to mitigate climate change, even if the prospects for doing so are quite limited. A second aspect of sustainable energy involves the broader issue of “energy throughput,” meaning the amount of energy it takes to produce a certain amount of goods. As an aggregate measure of energy efficiency, the relationship between energy throughput and sustainability has been discussed in at least two contexts. First, it has been used to convey the idea that businesses and industry need to become far more energy efficient if they are to contribute to greater sustainability, as discussed below. Second, it has been used to argue that sustainability can be achieved only by reducing energy consumption, which requires reducing consumption of other goods and which may well require acceptance of less economic growth (Rees 2012). Sustainable Business Although business and industry are often thought of as enemies of the environment, the Brundtland Commission report and the 1992 Earth Summit both understood that businesses have the capacity to alter what they do and the way they do it to become much more efficient in 32 their use of resources. Two business organizations, the Business Council for Sustainable Development and the World Industry Council for the Environment, merged in 1992 to form the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Perhaps because of the influence of the Swiss businessman Stephan Schmidheiny, who is credited with coining the term “ecoefficiency” (Schmidheiny 1992), businesses began to become much more conscious of the way they operate. The WBCSD is a CEO-led organization with chapters in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in Europe, in India, and in China. Although its mission is fairly broad, it is particularly interested in making internal business operations and decisions much more sensitive to their implications for the environment. Among the many innovations the WBCSD has advocated the “triple bottom line” approach, in which businesses report at least once a year on what they have done to reduce the direct environmental damages caused by their products, services, and operations, and indirectly by damages caused by their supply chains. Of course, the “triple” aspect of the triple bottom line refers to the three E’s or three pillars of sustainability. Businesses thus report what they have done to protect or improve the environment, to grow the economy through their own financial bottom line, and to improve equity. Such efforts include efforts to reduce or prevent the creation of toxic materials, especially as byproducts of manufacturing processes. Sustainability and Equity Perhaps the most challenging aspect of sustainability is the “equity” element. Many efforts to describe sustainability assert the importance of equity, and they seem to do so out of a fundamental assumption that an unequal world is an unsustainable world. This assumption has multiple roots, including concerns over different definitions of fundamental fairness, and practical concerns over whether those living in poverty particularly but not exclusively in less-developed countries will be forgotten and increasingly marginalized. These concerns notwithstanding, the conceptual work on sustainability hasn’t made entirely clear how equity relates to the economy and environment elements of sustainability. Andrew Dobson (1998, 2003) has questioned whether there necessarily is any connection between the environmental and economy elements, on one hand, and equity on the other. Comparing environmental concern with social justice and equity, Dobson writes: 33 [W]e cannot assume that these objectives are compatible, and their potential incompatibility raises issues of political legitimacy for them both … . It is just possible that a society would be prepared to sanction the buying of environmental sustainability at the cost of declining social justice, as it is also possible that it would be prepared to sanction increasing social justice at the cost of a deteriorating environment. (1998: 3) From this perspective, equity issues can be considered an element of sustainability only by assumption, not because there is necessarily any inherent connection with the other two elements. Equity issues have also become manifest in international efforts to address climate change, and have created tensions between developed (wealthier) and developing (poorer) countries. International climate negotiations have often stalled because of conflicting versions of what is fair and equitable. Developing countries see the developed countries as responsible for a greatly disproportionate share of environmental degradation, and therefore take the view that the developed countries need to take responsibility for their environmental impacts. The developed countries see developing countries as posing the greatest threat to sustainability in the future because many developing countries seek to retain the right to burn fossil fuels for energy. Sustainable Communities The idea of “sustainable communities” arose partly as a result of the work of the Brundtland Commission and partly as a direct result of understandings of the “social” and equity elements of the concept of sustainability. The intent underlying a focus on communities seems to have been to include a goal of building community as a form of social capital—a goal that is thought to be related to people’s well-being and to their ability to collectively come to grips with the daunting challenges associated with what might be required in order to become more sustainable. Sustainable communities consist of collections of people who, when interacting, develop a sense of community, sense of connectedness to others, and a sense of personal and collective well-being that tend to be missing or on the decline in modern society. Sustainable communities also present opportunities for people to discuss the environmental problems of the day and to come to new understandings of whether those problems should be addressed. Sustainable communities, as described in the literature, can take many different forms and can involve groups of people in many different contexts and settings. For example, a sustainable community might involve people of color who live in an impoverished neighborhood of a city and who interact with each other 34 over a concern about the disproportionate burdens they bear from environmental contamination (Agyeman, Bullard, and Evans 2003; Agyeman 2005). Ideas behind sustainable communities gave rise to the more specific concept of sustainable cities, presumably a special case or type of sustainable community (Portney 2013). Sustainable Cities Although most of the efforts to promote sustainability have focused on countries and their national policies, cities around the world have also taken great initiative to promote sustainability. The United Nations has been instrumental in facilitating an expanding role for cities and city governments. When the Brundtland Commission stated that cities in industrialized countries “account for a high share of the world’s resource use, energy consumption, and environmental pollution” (WCED 1987: 241), it argued that serious attention should be given to urban sustainability. Indeed, while higher population densities in cities promise to help keep their per capita energy use relatively low, they also give rise to an array of problems that impede sustainability. Clearly cities routinely send their solid and hazardous waste elsewhere, and import their water and energy from outside their borders. According to analyses conducted for the Siemens Corporation (Siemens AG 2009, 2011b), cities in Western Europe have tended to be at the forefront of achieving greater sustainability. As table 1.2 shows, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo appear to lead the way. Although most cities in the United States are rather far down the list (and it isn’t entirely clear that the indexes for European and North American cities are perfectly comparable), today at least 48 of the 55 largest cities in the United States have created sustainability programs. The cities that seem to have achieved higher levels of sustainability sometimes have done so as a result of natural advantages, but often cities achieve more sustainable results as a matter of design and public policy. Efforts by cities to work toward becoming more sustainable often go well beyond national programs and policies. This happens because cities sometimes recognize that they have some responsibility for addressing problems that uniquely occur with urbanization, or because the political environment is more conducive to local action than to state or national action. Issues associated with sustainable cities in the US and elsewhere are addressed in some detail in chapter 6. 35 Table 1.2 Western European and North American cities and sustainability. Copenhagen Stockholm Oslo San Francisco Vienna Amsterdam Siemens Green City Index 87.31 86.65 83.98 83.80 83.34 83.03 Zurich 82.31 Vancouver, BC 81.30 Helsinki New York 79.29 79.20 Seattle Berlin 79.10 79.01 sources: Siemens AG 2009, 2011b Sustainable Consumption At the heart of most notions of sustainability is the idea that there may well be limits to the amounts of materials and goods that humans can consume. Whereas mainstream economics is largely about promoting growth in consumption of goods and services, sustainable economic development is about understanding the implications of such growth for the ability of future generations to experience improved well-being. Indeed, the Agenda 21 document that came out of the 1992 Earth Summit and was agreed to by nearly all of the participating countries devoted an entire chapter (chapter 4) to the challenges of unsustainable consumption and the need to understand how patterns of consumption might be changed. Efforts to develop an understanding of these patterns of consumption and to elaborate how these patterns can be changed to become more sustainable have crystallized into a “sustainable consumption” movement. The concern with sustainable consumption is first and foremost about the impediments to altering what gets consumed, by whom, and with what environmental consequences. Murphy and Cohen (2001: 5) have argued that there is a need to integrate “the conventional view of consumption as the material throughput of resources (often with 36 pronounced environmental consequences) with an understanding of the political, social and cultural significance of these practices.” Prescriptions for the pursuit of sustainable consumption typically involve efforts to alter the behaviors of individual consumers, but also often focus on what governments and public policies need to address to influence these behaviors. It might be possible to build demand among consumers for more renewable energy; however, if public and private institutions are not responsive to these demands, changes in the patterns of consumption will be limited. Thus, the sustainableconsumption effort focuses both on individuals as consumers and on institutions (including governments) as vehicles enabling or limiting behavioral changes. Of course, any such prescriptions are bound to be fraught with debate and controversy (Cohen 2001: 21–38). Although much of the thinking on sustainable consumption seems to assume that there must be a role for governments and public policies, the focus on individual consumers is often motivated by the pursuit of ways to get people to make their own decisions with a goal of minimizing their environmental impacts. Of course, some argue that the only sustainable consumption is less consumption (Rees 2012). The issue of sustainable consumption is discussed in more detail in chapter 3. Sustainability and the Nonprofit Sector The public (government) sector and the private business sector have made important contributions to sustainability, and their efforts have been reinforced by activities in the nonprofit sector. Indeed, in many ways, at least in the US, the nonprofit sector has played a major role in advancing sustainability through the many functions it performs in civil society. As will be discussed in chapter 6, local nonprofit organizations have been instrumental in cities’ efforts to become more sustainable. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the nonprofit group Sustainable Seattle, Inc. played a pivotal role in influencing Seattle’s policies (Portney 2015: 276–277). In general, local nonprofit organizations affect a city’s sustainability policies by both advocating for specific programs and by operating their own programs. When a nonprofit group advocates the pursuit of specific policies and programs to public officials, it typically serves as a bridge between residents and elected officials, and as a mechanism to represent the 37 preferences of a segment of the population. When a nonprofit group implements a farmers’ market, a community garden, a tree-planting effort, a sustainability-indicators project, a neighborhood physicalfitness effort, an inner-city food bank, a car-pooling initiative, a bikesharing or bike-ridership program, or any of hundreds of other specific programs, the group is providing services that make significant contributions to city sustainability. Virtually every institution of higher education now has a sustainability initiative, and the effects of these initiatives undoubtedly spill over to surrounding areas (Rappaport and Creighton 2007). In many cities, publicnonprofit partnerships have been created to pursue energy-efficiency programs and even large-scale sustainable redevelopment, as with the Menomonee Valley Partners (2015), a nonprofit economicdevelopment corporation in Milwaukee dedicated to following principles of sustainable development. The importance of nonprofit organizations to sustainability is not limited to local actions. Many such organizations play important roles in national and international policy-making and advocacy processes. As will be discussed in chapter 5, the advocacy and programmatic roles of nonprofit organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) makes significant contributions to the pursuit of sustainability. In the United States, many nonprofit organizations provide funding sources for programs that promise to influence land use and development, energy conservation, and dozens of other sustainability-related decisions. They also provide training and educational programs to raise awareness and build skills among people who wish to work toward achieving greater sustainability. And in recent years research has shown that, particularly on issues of climate protection, international NGOs have evolved into networks that play an important part in creating governance mechanisms associated with advocacy of policies to reduce carbon emissions. In short, nonprofit organizations play important roles, sometimes working on their own and sometimes working with the private and the public sectors, to advance the cause of sustainability at the local, national, and international levels. The Tragedy of the Commons The consequence of excessive extraction of resources from a certain 38 area is almost universally thought of as being unsustainable by definition. For ecologists, the challenge is to understand what levels of extraction are sustainable. For economists, the challenge is to find the right way to price the resources so that they are not depleted beyond their sustainable level, and that usually involves the operation of private markets and associated privatization of resources. But many resources have natural or constructed characteristics that make it difficult to actually achieve any sort of private ownership or private markets. Often referred to as “common-pool resources,” these are resources that are available to everyone, or resources that cannot readily be individually owned or privatized. In the case of such resources, the challenge is how to avoid unsustainability. Many resources have these characteristics, including the air, some types of land (for example, land in public parks), ground water, and some surface water. When rational actors engage in competition for extraction of resources, they end up collectively extracting too many resources. This often creates the “tragedy of the commons,” a result in which the resource becomes completely depleted. Examples of this are overfishing of the North Atlantic, extraction of ground water in the Midwest and elsewhere, and timber harvesting in the Pacific Northwest. In short, the tragedy of the commons is a particular kind of unsustainability. The tragedy of the commons is often described in the context of cattle grazing on a common grazing area. As discussed by Garrett Hardin (1968), the problem starts when numerous ranchers can place as many cattle on a grazing area as they want. Acting rationally, each rancher seeks to earn more money by placing more cattle on the land. But at some point, the ability of the plant life to support the cattle begins to decline. The cattle then fail to gain as much weight as they once did. That, in turn, leads the ranchers to place more cattle on the grazing land to make up for the loss, exacerbating the problem. The incentive for an individual rancher is to place his cattle on the land before other ranchers do the same with their cattle. In the aggregate, the ability of the land to grow enough food declines to the point that no cattle can be supported, and everyone loses. This is the so-called tragedy. Of course, it isn’t difficult to imagine that the land could be privatized so that there is no common area and thus each rancher can become better off only by buying more land or by selling land to another rancher. Yet in many instances having to do with natural resources, common-pool resources cannot be privatized. 39 The traditional way of dealing with the tragedy of the commons is for government to adopt regulations that will prevent individual actors from behaving in a way that causes the resource base to collapse. Although that approach usually is able to protect a resource effectively, it also faces a difficult political context. The people and industries that are regulated persistently deny that there is a threat to the resource, claiming that imperious governmental agencies and “nameless, faceless bureaucrats” are imposing their will on them. The argument, of course, is that bureaucrats are putting the interests of fish ahead of the interests of people. Obviously, to the extent that protecting the fish might be said to be sustaining the populations of fish, people are likely to be better off. It is conceivable that those who would be regulated might consent to be regulated in order to be protected from themselves. This is what Hardin referred to as “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon.” In practice it almost never happens. Those who oppose regulations are often politically active, supporting candidates for office who agree with them. The second approach to dealing with a common-pool resource is simply to try to privatize it in such a way that all of the resource is owned by someone, and thus the resource can be bought and sold on a market. Theoretically at least, a market would determine a proper price—a price at which the resource would not be depleted. The problem with this approach is that many common-pool resources cannot readily be neatly divided into commodities. Ground water is very difficult to divvy up for private sale, because it resides in underground aquifers. Although an individual might, under existing laws, be entitled to withdraw a certain amount of ground water, the withdrawal might very well come at the expense of another owner of the water. Efforts to privatize municipal water supplies have also encountered problems such that the underlying market fails to produce either improved water quality, greater water access, or proper pricing to promote conservation (Robinson 2013). Similar efforts to create markets covering ocean fisheries have produced similarly disappointing results with respect to protecting the sustainability of the resource (Barkin and DeSombre 2013). A third way of trying to deal with the tragedy of the commons is to engage users of the resource. Elinor Ostrom conducted extensive research on forestry and other activities to examine whether it is possible to get those who use or extract a resource to come to a realization on their own that their behaviors are creating 40 unsustainable results, and to get them to come up with solutions voluntarily (Ostrom 1990; Ostrom and Walker 2003). Could, for example, a group of cattle ranchers engage in collective action to agree to limit the number of cattle each places on the grazing land? Mainstream thought suggests that this is an unreasonable expectation —that there are no short-term incentives for parties to reach such agreements. Ostrom’s answer is that it is possible for such agreements to occur, and that they depend in part on defining processes through which they can interact, develop trust, negotiate an agreement, and enforce that agreement (Ostrom and Walker 2003). This approach to managing and avoiding problems associated with common-pool resources has been applied to many situations, including those associated with water supplies. Efforts have been made to create new governance mechanisms to address water conflicts across national boundaries (Islam and Susskind 2013; Mirumachi 2013), across US states (Schlager and Heikkila 2011), and across other jurisdictions within watershed areas (Lubell et al. 2002; Sabatier et al. 2005) and estuaries (Schneider et al. 2003). The Concepts of Sustainability: A Summary This chapter reviewed a wide range of thoughts and practices related to sustainability. The concept of sustainability is generally understood to encompass a goal that, as put forth by the World Commission on Economy and Environment in 1987, “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It has become defined by the pursuit of three co-equal elements: economy, environment, and equity. The more precise meaning of sustainability, however, depends on contexts and intellectual fields. The concept has somewhat different meanings in the contexts of ecology, energy, environment, agriculture, population dynamics and demographics, and economics. In whatever context the particular definition might have served as the foundation for the concept, it is clear today that sustainability conveys the idea that there is not a tradeoff between what is good for the environment and what is good for the economy. This concept of sustainability, which denies an automatic tradeoff, is based on the notion that depletion of natural resources and environmental degradation conspire to depress economic growth and development. Sustainability brings with it the 41 notion that people and policies ought to be far more proactive and forward-thinking in terms of what it takes to maintain and improve the well-being of large and growing numbers of people. How equity should be defined and what role it should or can play in sustainability are less clear. Although the idea of sustainable communities often serves as a locus of advocacy for the equity element of sustainability, it isn’t entirely clear that this idea is broadly embraced, or even whether the empirical arguments made on its behalf are accurate. Competing notions of equity and fairness also find their way into international efforts to promote sustainability in which richer countries think it is fairer for poorer countries to curtail their future polluting activities and poorer countries think it is fairer for richer countries to bear this responsibility. To be sure, the equity element of sustainability represents an important part, and for some an integral part, of the underlying concept. The development of the concept of sustainability has given rise to efforts to address climate change through reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases and, more broadly, though the pursuit of environmental protection in ways that do not rely on command-andcontrol regulation. Particularly in the context of a recognized need to avoid the tragedy of the commons in situations associated with common-pool resources, market-based alternatives and civil-societybased alternatives have been offered. The remaining chapters in this book address many of these issues in more detail. Chapter 2 confronts the political challenges associated with efforts to promote sustainability, offering the view that either there is no need for sustainability in any form or the cost of pursuing sustainability (particularly in terms of lost personal freedoms) is not acceptable. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between unsustainability and consumption, looking at whether and to what extent consumption of material goods and natural resources must be curtailed to achieve sustainability. Chapter 4 examines the role of the private sector (business and industry) in efforts to become more sustainable, and looks at ways in which companies claim to have altered their internal operations in ways that are consistent with sustainability, ways in which companies have supported or opposed other efforts to work toward sustainability, and arguments that the concept of sustainability has been coopted by the private sector to the point where the concept bears little resemblance to any original intent. Chapter 5 addresses the question of whether there is an 42 appropriate role for government and public policy in the pursuit of sustainability, and compares and contrasts international, national, and subnational policies and programs. Chapter 6 takes a look at the special case of sustainability in cities, suggesting that many cities around the world seem to have the political will and capacity to enact sustainability policies even when their national governments and international initiatives have failed to do so. Chapter 7 looks to the future, examining the importance of time for sustainability itself and for all of the many things that will have to change if progress toward sustainability is to be achieved. 43 2 Sustainability and the Roots of Controversy Embedded in many of the underlying conceptions of sustainability are a variety of conflicting views and interpretations. The various conceptions of sustainability carry with them significant implications, many of which conflict with one another and (perhaps more important for this chapter) with social and political values that do not readily accommodate any conception of sustainability. This chapter focuses on a small number of these conflicts, especially those that have become the most politically salient in recent years. To the extent that moving toward becoming more sustainable requires accepting less individual freedom as such freedom is commonly defined, controversy seems inevitable. Much the same can be said if sustainability requires accepting less economic growth, less consumption, reductions in population growth, more government action, and a wide array of other changes. This chapter discusses two of these controversies with the understanding that they are merely immediate manifestations of inter-related challenges. Traditionally, attitudes among the public and among political leaders have not reflected serious opposition to the pursuit of sustainability. Certainly, various conceptions of sustainability have had their skeptics. Many opponents and proponents have questioned whether it is possible to protect the biophysical environment and still achieve greater economic growth, one goal of sustainable economic development. Others have argued that it isn’t possible to move to a low-carbon economy quickly enough to prevent or mitigate significant climate change. Many other such skepticisms surround the idea of sustainability, though for the most part these skepticisms have not become serious political issues. The controversies outlined here are those that have become political issues, at least in the United States. And at their root these controversies voice concern about the 44 role of the United States in the world and in the global economy. In the United States, efforts by governments to pursue sustainability policies and programs typically have met with political opposition only when it has become necessary to define specific initiatives in particular places. For example, when some cities have tried to promote denser residential housing in an effort to become more energy efficient, neighborhood associations and homeowners associations have expressed opposition. When some cities have tried to create bicycle-ridership programs, some business owners have objected to the loss of vehicular traffic. When cities have tried to require conversion of local taxi fleets to hybrid vehicles, some cab drivers and cab owners have resisted. But the political opposition to such programmatic efforts by cities remained fairly localized and sporadic, at least until around 2009. At the national level, efforts to address sustainability have never been taken seriously by Congress. Political opposition to proposals for sustainability is more palpable at the national level, and is founded on rigorous defense of status-quo understandings of what is good for the economy and for “jobs.” Most policy proposals that would advance the cause of sustainability never make it onto the national public agenda and are never directly addressed by Congress. An exception to this may have occurred during the Obama administration, when a number of specific policy changes, such as a decision to regulate carbon emissions under the existing Clean Air Act and a decision to promote energy efficiency through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block grant program, were made through regulatory or executive decisions. But the emphasis in this chapter is on the social and political challenges of moving the United States and other countries toward sustainability through their respective public policies, and on the implications of these challenges for subnational sustainability efforts. Understanding these challenges begins with understanding the role of the United Nations in promoting sustainability since the mid 1980s and perhaps since before then. The United Nations and Agenda 21 As was discussed in chapter 1, the impetus for the pursuit of sustainability has its roots in the United Nations. In view of the actions of the UN’s World Commission on Environment and 45 Development (the Brundtland Commission), the UN’s 1992 “Earth Summit,” and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (created under the auspices of the UN Environment Program), there is little question that sustainability has been a very high priority for the UN and for the vast majority of member countries. The cornerstone of the UN’s efforts was the adoption of “Agenda 21,” a resolution agreed upon at the “Earth Summit.” Agenda 21 is a voluntary, non-binding statement describing how countries can work toward implementing various aspects of sustainable development (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development 1992). More formally known as the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and ratified by 178 countries (including the United States), Agenda 21 was designed to provide a wide array of guidance to countries wishing to pursue sustainability. Chapter 28 of Agenda 21, titled “Local Authorities Initiatives in Support of Agenda 21,” spawned the “Local Agenda 21” process, the foundation of the international organization called ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability. (The abbreviation originally stood for International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.) Although the imprimatur of the UN gave international legitimacy to the idea of sustainable development, it also carried with it the roots of controversy in the United States. The US, perhaps more than any other country, has had a difficult relationship with the UN. Much of the difficulty is based on distrust of the UN and of the countries that are thought to control its agenda, and on the view that those countries see the US as evil or imperialist. Those who distrust the UN see Agenda 21 as an instrument for reducing the influence of the US in world affairs, and for imposing a radical (socialist) agenda on US domestic politics and policy. Sustainability (at least, sustainability as practiced in some countries) is seen as a product of social-democratic or democratic socialist countries, particularly those in Scandinavia. When advocates of sustainability point to successes, they often refer to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, even though they are often not at the very top of the list of the most sustainable countries. Nevertheless, the idea that democratic socialist countries have been able to achieve high levels of sustainability and the US is not able to do so gives many people the impression that sustainability must represent something of an anathema to free-enterprise capitalism. Therefore, if the UN advocates sustainability, so the argument goes, it must be bad for the US. This view sows the seeds of controversy and 46 political opposition in the US. The UN, Climate-Change Science, and Climate-Science Skepticism Skepticism about climate change has become a matter of political controversy. Again, the controversy cannot be divorced from the actions of the UN. In 1988, the United Nations Environmental Programme created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The purpose of that organization was (and is) to bring together scientists working on research related to climate change in order to scientifically understand whether and to what extent climate change was occurring. As the efforts of the IPCC progressed, the mission included efforts to examine the extent to which observed changes might be said to be attributable to human activity and efforts to scientifically assess the many possible links between carbon emissions and climate change. Since 1988, the IPCC has issued many reports documenting its findings, presenting the evidence as it is understood and delineating areas of greater or lesser uncertainty for further research. These reports are unequivocal as to the two main findings. The first is that global temperatures have been rising. The second is that much of the increase is attributable to human activities, particularly the release of carbon dioxide and other chemicals into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels. Responses to these findings are varied. Many people claim to be skeptical of the findings, suggesting that the scientific evidence is inadequate or insufficient to allow those conclusions to be drawn. For example, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma has often referred to climate change as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” (Inhofe 2012). Sometimes people who take this position are referred to as “climate skeptics” or “climate deniers.” Although objections to the IPCC’s conclusions are often couched in rejection of its science, it is more likely that such objections are rooted in understandings of the implications for policies and for the behavior of individuals. For those who are heavily invested in the current American way of life, the implications seem untenable. “Climate skeptics” seem to believe that the scientific community is deeply (and perhaps evenly) divided on the two main issues. Evidence of this division is often based on identifying a few scientists who disagree with the conclusions, or a few scientists who disagree 47 with one small piece of the larger scientific question. For example, for years “climate skeptics” pointed to the questions raised by Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley who articulated concern about some of the IPCC’s findings. Subsequently, Muller and some colleagues embarked on a huge independent project to analyze temperature data over a long period. Their findings suggested that global warming was more serious than even the IPCC had estimated, and that the observed warming could not be due to alternative explanations. In other words, they found that human activity was more clearly linked to global warming than had previously been reported (Muller 2012). This is but one example demonstrating how difficult it is for many people to come to grips with the apparent facts associated with climate change, and with the implications that these facts might have for the mitigation of climate change and for sustainability. Much of the debate has centered on what proportion of scientists “believe” that climate change is either caused or affected by human activity. Some have cited a finding that 97 percent of scientists believe that human activity plays a significant role in determining the magnitude of climate change. “Climate skeptics” have taken issue with this finding and with the research used to produce it, although they offer no alternative research to support the claim that this percentage is a “myth.” The central issue, however, is how much of the relevant scientific research presents findings that are consistent with and supportive of the inference that humans play a significant role in climate change, and the results seem clear. As is discussed extensively in the IPCC’s reports, substantial scientific evidence exists to support the inference. Ideologies and Values in Opposition to Sustainability The significant opposition to sustainability in the United States and in some other countries is not due entirely to distrust of the United Nations. It is deeply rooted in public values and political ideologies that clearly conflict with the values and ideologies implicit in the achievement of sustainability regardless of which of the many conceptions might be at issue. In many respects, a cluster of reinforcing values and beliefs conspire to call into question whether the pursuit of sustainability is worthwhile. This cluster of values and 48 beliefs includes fundamental adherence to the importance of individual liberties, belief in the efficacy of free markets, great distrust of governments (largely because of the belief that they impede individual freedoms and free markets), and (particularly in the US) concern about subordinating or sacrificing national sovereignty to international governance. The issue of individual liberties permeates discussions of sustainability primarily because of the perception that in order to protect the biophysical environment some personal freedoms must be curtailed. Strong libertarians tend to believe in the primacy of individual freedoms even if the consequence is some amount of environmental degradation. Perhaps more important, libertarians tend to take the position that environmental protection and the pursuit of sustainability are acceptable only if they are the products of the exercise of individual freedoms without coercion or government intervention. Free-market issues are an extension of this libertarianism in which individuals and groups of individuals exercise their freedoms in pursuit of profit through interacting in competitive markets. Based on fundamental notions of neo-classical economics, this view sees the operation of such free markets as the only way to maximize aggregate social welfare and well-being. If sustainability requires markets to be restricted or constrained (as in the case of regulation of emissions of pollution into the atmosphere), it is seen as working against free markets. These ideas are reinforced by deep distrust of governments and governmental policies. Those who adhere to libertarian values share a general and almost universal view that governments get in the way of personal freedoms and that they impede rather than protect the operation of free and competitive markets, whether through restrictions on individual behaviors or through taxation powers. If government policies are designed to affect individual consumer choices, they represent an unacceptable restriction on individual freedoms. If government policy restricts land uses, as might be required to achieve greater sustainability, it is to be distrusted. Often these individualistic values are rooted in concern about erosion of national sovereignty. If the US was, perhaps more than any other country, founded on fundamental notions of individual liberty, then efforts to have the US conform to the values of other countries must be suspect. When the US engages in international agreements or treaties related to sustainability, it is interpreted as an unacceptable erosion of national sovereignty. These values and beliefs underlie various kinds of political opposition to sustainability 49 that appear to be more prevalent in the US than in the vast majority of other countries, and these values foment distrust of the United Nations as an organization committed to undermining the sovereignty of the United States. Manifestations of Political Opposition in the United States As has already been noted, skepticism about climate science in the United States is linked, in part, to distrust of the United Nations in some segments of the population. Certainly, a majority of Americans think the UN does a “poor job” in trying to resolve various problems (Gallup 2014). As was noted earlier, some in the US see the UN as an organization captured by anti-US interests and countries. Thus, in a sense, those who distrust the UN view anything that the UN endorses with great skepticism. Although these views are not representative of the general population in the US, they do reflect concern among a small but vocal and active minority. These views about the UN in general and Agenda 21 and sustainability specifically have provided the impetus for state-level efforts to make the pursuit of sustainability illegal. A legislative resolution in Tennessee, legislative proposals in Kansas, Missouri, New Hampshire, Maine, and Arizona, and laws enacted in Alabama and Oklahoma have been designed to prohibit the use of public funds for purposes related to policies and programs on sustainability. Tennessee’s Joint House Resolution 587, passed by a vote of 72 to 23, singled out Agenda 21, sustainable development, smart growth, and resilient cities programs as “destructive and insidious” (Tennessee 2012). That resolution and a resolution passed in South Dakota are nearly identical to the Resolution Exposing United Nations Agenda 21 passed by the Republican National Committee during its winter 2012 meetings (RNC 2012). In 2013, a bill to prohibit use of public funds to support any sustainability-related policies or activities was introduced in the state legislature of Kansas. In 2012, the Kansas House of Representatives had approved a resolution “opposing and exposing the radical nature of the United Nations Agenda 21 and its destructiveness to the principles of the founding documents of the United States of America.” The 2013 bill, HB 2366, contained the specific language quoted on page 70 below. No public funds may be used, either directly or indirectly, to promote, support, mandate, require, order, 50 incentivize, advocate, plan for, participate in or implement sustainable development. This prohibition on the use of public funds shall apply to: Any activity by any state governmental entity or municipality; the payment of membership dues to any association; employing or contracting for the service of any person or entity; the preparation, distribution or use of any kit, pamphlet, booklet, publication, electronic communication, radio, television or video presentation; any materials prepared or presented as part of a class, course, curriculum or instructional material; any current, proposed or pending law, rule, regulation, code, administrative action or order issued by any federal or international agency; and any federal or private grant, program or initiative. (Kansas 2013) The bill was sent to the Committee on Energy and Environment. It stalled there for the remainder of the 2013 legislative session, and it was not subsequently re-introduced. In 2012, Arizona’s legislature took up a similar bill, introduced in the state senate as SB 1507. This bill specifically targeted the UN’s sustainability-related activities: The state of Arizona and all political subdivisions of this state shall not adopt or implement the creed, doctrine, principles or any tenet of the United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development and the Statement of Principles for Sustainable Development adopted at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June, 1992 or any other international law that contravenes the United States Constitution or the Constitution of Arizona. (Arizona 2013) The Arizona bill came very close to passing. In 2012, Alabama became the first state to enact into law a ban on the pursuit of sustainability. Using language almost identical to that of similar proposals in other states, Alabama’s law prohibits the state and “all political subdivisions” from adopting or implementing sustainable-development policies or programs: The State of Alabama and all political subdivisions may not adopt or implement policy recommendations that deliberately or inadvertently infringe or restrict private property rights without due process, as may be required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to “Agenda 21,” adopted by the United Nations in 1992 at its Conference on Environment and Development. (Alabama 2012) In 2013, the Oklahoma state legislature enacted a law similar to the one passed in Alabama. That law, like those proposed in Kansas, Arizona, and Alabama, and with language identical to that found in the Arizona and Alabama bills, targeted Agenda 21 and sustainable development: The state or any political subdivision of the state shall not adopt or implement policy recommendations that deliberately or inadvertently infringe upon or restrict private property rights without due process, as may be required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to United Nations Agenda 21/Sustainable Development and any of its subsequent modifications, a resolution adopted by the United Nations in 1992 at its Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and commonly known as the Earth Summit and reconfirmed in its Rio+20 Conference held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. (Oklahoma 2012) The appendix to this chapter contains the full text of the bills and resolutions introduced or enacted in Tennessee, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alabama. In many of the states in which there have been legislative efforts to 51 ban the pursuit of sustainability, local officials and groups have expressed opposition to these legislative efforts. As Arizona took up the bill that would have banned its municipalities from pursuing sustainability, the League of Arizona Cities and Towns (2012) and the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry both came out in opposition to the proposed ban on local sustainability programs, and Mayor Greg Stanton of the city of Phoenix wrote an editorial for the Arizona Republic in which he extolled the virtues of sustainable development for the city (Stanton 2012). Stanton’s argument was simple: Phoenix was already investing in an approach to economic development that relied heavily on the idea that sustainability would make the city a better place to live and work. Where did the impetus behind these legislative efforts to ban public sustainability programs come from? As one commentator noted about the law enacted in Alabama, it doesn’t seem very likely that the average resident of that state knows or follows the activities of the UN. A blogger named R. P. Siegel suggested a possible source of the concern about Agenda 21: I bet you were surprised to learn that the folks in Alabama were so well informed that they actually followed the proceedings of the Conference on Environment and Development. Well, in fact they didn’t. What they do follow, apparently in large numbers is the Koch Brothers’ paid public relations organization, otherwise known as the Tea Party, which has made Agenda 21 a centerpiece of their outrage. (Siegel 2012) Indeed, a 2012 national public opinion survey sponsored by the American Planning Association asked more than 1,300 respondents whether they supported or opposed “United Nations Agenda 21.” Only 15 percent said they supported or opposed it; the other 85 percent said they had never heard of it. Among the 15 percent who had heard of Agenda 21, 6 percent said they opposed it and 9 percent said they supported it. Of course, the 6 percent who expressed opposition to Agenda 21 includes a significant number of vocal activists, and a large portion of those respondents reported identifying with the Republican Party (APA 2012: 22). The Organized Opposition: The Tea Party and Related Groups It is no coincidence that the various state legislative efforts to address Agenda 21 have nearly identical wording. The reason for this stems from the organized national efforts of a number of conservative and libertarian groups and individuals. These organized efforts are 52 motivated by the perception that Agenda 21 represents a serious threat to the American way of life. Many see the pursuit of sustainability as an effort to restrict freedoms and property rights. When, for example, policies are proposed to create more opportunities for people to use bicycles as a means of transportation or to expand public transportation, this is seen as an effort to take people’s cars away from them. Rather than seeing this as a way to enhance the choices of those who wish to use these transit options, as suggested by the mayor of Phoenix, these actions are seen as undermining existing freedoms. This is the basic tenet of the organized opposition as reflected in the Tea Party movement, a loosely knit nationwide effort to provide mechanisms for like-minded people to express their views about various public policies. There is no single organization or political party; rather, there are a number of groups that have taken up libertarian causes, including especially the organization called Americans for Prosperity (spearheaded by Charles and David Koch), the Washington-based Freedom Works, the American Policy Center, and the 9/12 groups launched through the efforts of the conservative commentator Glenn Beck. The activities of these national groups spawned the formation of like-minded groups in many states. As was s...
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