Sustainability

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UraelIVVV

Humanities

phil philosophy 332

San Diego State University

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The report should include a summary and a critical address of the discussion topic. The submissions must be of one-page in length (about 500 words), typed, single spaced, with one-inch margins, using Times Roman 12pt font. There are 2 parts to the report requirements, first part a summary and the second part a response. Summarize the article and present the arguments, the facts, conclusions and the reasoning. It is important to demonstrate your understanding of the issue and present all sides. As for your response, show your critical analysis of the issue. Here you may introduce or incorporate other ideas to defend your position. You are encouraged to use the discussion questions to guide you with what you want to say and the positions you want to defend.

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4 Sustainability and Responsibilities to the Future in som intuitively tainable A simple Putting only the savings geting princip palang incom spent event goos. Simil tion eati ints rig pr th m e 793 DISCUSSION: Sustainability: Fad or Future? It would be difficult to find almost any commission that studied questions of institution in contemporary culture that economic development, environmental has not in some way attached itself to the protection, and future generations in the idea of sustainability. We find sustain- 1980s. Named for its chairman, former able" used to modify: agriculture, archi- Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem tecture, business, buildings, construction, Brundtland, the Brundtland Commission communities, consumerism, development, focused on long-term strategies that economics, ecosystems, forestry, market- might help nations achieve economic ing, investing, transportation, and on and development without jeopardizing the on. The concept of sustainability is every earth's capacity to sustain all life. The where. Thousands of corporations, for Brundtland Commission published its example, have replaced the traditional findings in 1987 in a book titled Our corporate annual report with an annual Common Future, which offered what has sustainability report. But one should be become the standard definition of sus- leery when any idea is so ubiquitous, tainable development: sustainable especially when it was originally intro development is development that meets duced as a critical alternative to the status the needs of the present without quo. Has "sustainability" lost its meaning? compromising the ability of future gen- Is it only a passing fad, or worse, is it a erations to meet their own needs." smokescreen behind which anything Beginning with this report, the concept of goes? sustainability and sustainable develop As most commonly used today, the ment has guided much of the world's concept of sustainability is about 30 years thinking about global economic growth old. It is traced to a United Nations and development 74 CHAPTER 4 SUSTAINABILITY AND RESPONSIBILITIES TO THE FUTURE 75 In some ways, sustainability is an intuitively clear idea. A practice is sus tainable if it can continue indefinitely A simple example comes from finance Putting money into savings and spending only the interest generated from those savings exemplifies a sustainable bud. geting practice. Spending down the principal, as well as spending the princi pal and the interest, is unsustainable. The income will decrease as the savings are spent, and thus the income will run out eventually. Aesop's fable about the goose that laid the golden egg captures a similar insight. Limiting your consump- tion to the golden eggs is sustainable; eating the goose itself is not. Sustainability also has a certain ethical intuitiveness. As discussed in Chapter 2, rights are sometimes explained in terms of protecting those central human interests that we identify as needs. In this sense, we might explain human rights in terms of every person having a right to what she needs. Therefore, the Brundtland Com- mission's definition of sustainability seems simply to assert that this same human right should be extended not only to every person presently alive, but to future generations as well. Sustainability in this sense seems just another way to say that equal opportunity should extend to people not yet living. Similarly, the Brundtland Commission's economic goal had a certain intuitive appeal. Economic development as prac- ticed throughout the twentieth century, if not throughout most of human history, treated the productive capacity of the earth as if it were infinite. But in the late twentieth century, all signs are that human consumption is approaching the limits of that productive capacity. It is as if we are beginning to look hungrily at the goose itself rather than just at its eggs. The Brundtland Commission's call for sus tainable development, rather than simple unrestricted growth, was a call for us to dial back on both the quantity and quality of our consumption Sustainability is thus often character ized in terms of three fundamental cate- gories, frequently called the three pillars of sustainability or the triple bottom line." Sustainability has an economic dimension that concerns production and distribution of goods and services to meet human needs. Economic sustainability implies that we not use productive resources, such as capital, labor, and nat- ural resources at rates faster than those at which they can be replenished. But sus tainability also has both an environmental dimension and ethical dimension that restricts this economic activity to activities that do not degrade the biosphere in such a way that people are denied in the future an equal right to meet their own needs. There are three pillars of sustainability economic, environmental, and ethical. From one perspective, the explosion of attention now paid to sustainability is good news. The optimistic view is that people worldwide have understood the call to sustainable practices and that global economic development is evolving in a way that is promising for the future. The hopes that were implicit in the Brundtland report seem to be coming to fruition. But skeptics remain unconvinced. Some who are sympathetic to the goals of Brundtland Commission, interpret the universal attention to sustainability and the explosion of businesses and countries that now identify with sustainability as an indication that something is amiss. To understand this skepticism we should ask, "What is being sustained?" It seems clear that some who have jumped on the sus tainability bandwagon believe that the status quo is what we should sustain. To commit to sustainability means that I commit to finding ways to keep doing what I am doing. But, if sustainable development was introduced as an alter- native to the status quo, if the present patterns of consumption, production, and growth are what has led to the present predicament in which we find ourselves bumping up against the limits of growth, then it should be clear that not everything that we are presently doing can be "sustained." Some critics, for example, would argue that sustainability cannot be applied to the consumption patterns of industrial societies such as the United States, or to an energy industry built on fossil fuels. Finding consumer giants such as Walmart, or oil companies such as BP, claiming allegiance to sustainability 76 PART II ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AS APPLIED ETHICS solar, which will create a market for solar, which in turn will creative et ciencies that will drive down the price of solar. From this perspective, the only resource we should value without hesit tion is human creativity and ingenuity. Importantly, these human characteristics are likely to flourish more in a society which is prospering, a society in which education and technology are expanding, a society which uses its resources for today, rather than saving them for tomorrow, so that we create added incentives and opportunities for creative solutions to today's problems. In short, we could best serve future generations by using our resources at present to support the most vibrant and creative society possible. convinces these critics that the concept has been severely corrupted. In a similar vein, other critics claim that sustainability is unjust if it implies that the path to economic development enjoyed by the western industrialized countries is no longer open to the devel- oping world. If sustainability means sus- taining the status quo for the present alignment of the world's economies, then countries such as China, India, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, and Indonesia decidedly are not in favor of sustainability. These critics interpret the West's call for sus- tainable development as the rich telling the poor that they should be satisfied with what they have and find another way to prosperity. Other critics doubt the very founda- tions of the sustainability movement. Sus- tainability is built on the assumptions that there are limits to growth, that we have a responsibility not to put future genera- tions at a disadvantage in meeting their needs, and that the best way to fulfil that responsibility is to adopt policies that limit growth. Each of these assumptions can be challenged. The sustainability movement takes as a given the assumption that resources are limited. But some argue that this misre- presents the nature of resources. Human beings do not value natural resources for their own sake, but for the services that they provide to us. There is no value in oil itself, for example; oil is valued only in so far as it can be used to provide us with energy for transportation, electricity, and heat. If we discover some substitute for oil, solar power for example, then all the oil reserves in the world will lose their value. In economic terms, natural resources are fungible; their value is equal to whatever substitute they can be traded for. Economics teaches us that as the supply of one resource declines, its price will increase which, in turn, will provide greater incentives for human creativity to find a substitute. For example, as the supply of oil declines, its price will rise, which will make alterna- tive energy sources such as solar power more competitive. Eventually, the cost differential will shift demand from oil to DISCUSSION TOPICS: 1. Can you think of a business or industry that is not sustainable? Why do you think it is not? How could it be made sustainable? 2. Should present generations sacrifice for the well-being of future genera- tions? Why or why not? Does posterity have rights, and do we have duties to people who do not even exist? 3. Do all presently living people bear the same degree of responsibility to future generations, or does that vary depending on such things as wealth or citizenship? 4. Do you consider your own lifestyle, or the lifestyle of your family. sustainable? 5. It is obvious that people can have such emotions as love, empathy, and compassion, and that they can be motivated to help, their children and grandchildren. It is also understand- able that we might feel such emotions for, and be motivated to help people living in distant lands, even if we don't know them personally. But can we feel such emotions for, and be motivated to help people living in distant future generations?
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