Sustainability: a discipline and a political agenda?

ABSTRACT

This editorial explores the state of sustainability research and thinking today. It describes how the subject has evolved out of the environmental movement of the 1970s into both an analytical agenda, typified by the work on sustainability science, and a normative agenda, typified by the work around sustainable economics and development. The author shows how the term sustainability is also used in two very different modes today: in a light mode focusing on how present practices can be adapted to create more sustainable economic and social systems, and a much more fundamental mode which questions much of the worldview underpinning free-market economies. The author goes on to suggest that most of today’s research around sustainability and disasters falls into the former category.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• risk
• economy
• systems

1. What is sustainability and how does it differ from older notions of environmental science?

Sustainability is one of those ideas that sounds self-evidently good, until you start digging into it. And precisely because it is difficult, contentious, fraught with value judgments and at its heart challenges so many of our accepted trues, it offers hope as an analytical and normative framework to break out of our old, and some would say doomed, ways of thinking.

The Brundtland Report (Brundtland, 1987), which really marked the start of sustainability politics as opposed to environmental politics, defined sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. So many questions! What are our needs, as opposed to wants, and who decides them? How long is the future, how many generations? Do we assume a status quo of science and technology or some formulaic device to improve our use of resources? And will our needs in the future be the same as today?

Of course, I’m being picky, because what I want to highlight is that there are two very different approaches wrapped up in sustainability. One is a holistic-science-based approach, which sees systems rather than processes, networks rather than individuals and fractal-like scales of analysis rather than reductionism. This is sustainability science, of which more is discussed later.

Second is a much more normative agenda. There is no scientific answer to what our ‘needs’ are or to how many generations of future needs we should be concerned about. This is the stuff of values, beliefs and politics. What sustainability does do though is shove ones face right into that basic political question: how do I trade off my individual desires, wants and aspirations against those which best serve the group/herd/community/nation/world? Freddy Mercury may sing ‘I want it all and want it now’ but how does that compromise the likely wellbeing of our children, grandchildren and so on?

2. On acceptable degrees of certainty

Sustainability also raises really uncomfortable issues around the degree of risk one is willing to live with. Back in the day which I marched with the other ‘Ban the Bomb’ groups, I had no doubt that the precautionary principle held good. Wikipedia’s definition of the principle is enlightening

If an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public, or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus (that the action or policy is not harmful), the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action that may or may not be a risk. (Wikipedia N.D.)

We don’t know the potential harm that will come from storing spent nuclear fuel rods; so, let’s err on the side of caution and not store spend fuel rods, thus don’t make them, thus don’t have nuclear power. Today, this sounds more like ‘if in doubt, do nothing’!

In science, we demand a high degree of uncertainty, usually at least a 95% chance that our findings are true. Health practice accepts a much higher degree of uncertainty. Interventions are routinely performed with only, say a 70% chance of success. The ‘do no harm’ principle in medicine is so prominent precisely because medical practitioners make life and death decisions with such low confidence of certainty. In law, it’s different again. In a criminal case proof needs to be ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, in a civil case the judge will be satisfied with a ‘balance of probabilities’ (Guidotti, 2015, p. 49). And finally, political activists, of all political shades, will often urge action solely on the basis of individual cases of credible evidence, and I have to say, post the political disruptions of 2016, on the basis of no evidence at all but solely a desire for something to be true. As scientists studying and seeking solutions to real-world problems through a sustainability approach, where do we stand? In this complex and chaotic world of half understood systems with uncertain and awesome consequences, can we risk ‘the balance of probabilities’ or be constrained by needing 95% certainties?

3. What is sustainability science?

The emerging discipline of Sustainability Science is trying to eat away at this dilemma. Kates (2011) describes Sustainability Science as

an emerging field of research dealing with the interactions between natural and social systems, and with how those interactions affect the challenge of sustainability: meeting the needs of present and future generations while substantially reducing poverty and conserving the planet’s life support systems.

Clark (2007) sought to describe Sustainability Science not by its internal workings but in its relationship to basic and applied science.

Sustainability science is thus most usefully thought of as neither ‘basic’ nor ‘applied’ research. Rather, it is an enterprise centered on the ‘use-inspired basic research’ that the late Donald Stokes characterized as ‘Pasteur’s Quadrant’ of the modern science and technology enterprise. The field reaches out beyond this core, however, to encompass relevant work in both the blue-sky theorizing of ‘Bohr’s Quadrant’ and pragmatic problem solving of ‘Edison’s Quadrant.’ In so doing, it serves the quest for advancing both useful knowledge and informed action by creating a dynamic bridge between the two.

At its heart then Sustainability Science is about systems and since natural systems are not bound by human constructed disciplines, it has no theoretical discipline boundary, it is all about trying to understand the complexity of the systems that affect mankind, connecting us and tying us into our natural environment.

Like any science, it seeks to be consistent with the findings of its predecessors, more fully describe the present and more accurately and completely predict the future. Oh, that it was that simple! Because we are dealing with human systems, that future is strongly influenced by people’s and societies’ values and views and thus sustainability goes beyond the confines of being a scientific study to being a value system positing a particular worldview, and one that is, in many ways, in conflict with the norms of today.

4. World views

Sustainability, when treated seriously, challenges a great deal of how most societies and economies conceive their world. We all carry in our heads a framework of ideas, theories, truisms and opinions, our shaping of what the world is like, how it works and how we want it to work. Psychologists call this our world view (Koltko-Rivera, 2004). Societies have world views, in which the broad-brush ideas that shape them are accepted by the vast majority of their citizens. At heart, Europe, North America and, by extension, those countries or at least their gated-community elites that embrace the free-market consumerism society hold the same worldview. (Mocombe, 2012) It is one shaped by the Christian protestant notion of man being given dominion over the world, reinforced in the eighteenth century and onwards by the increasing ability to exercise that dominion through the industrial revolution, supported by the theory of free markets with infinite growth and the accumulation of wealth as self-evidently good, and taken to its ultimate zenith in the consumerism and personal freedom revolutions on the twentieth century.

Sustainability challenges this worldview. In the sustainability worldview, we do not have dominion over the earth; we are an integral part of it. Sustainability here taps into the worldview previously dubbed deep ecology, a view which at times is best described as spiritual rather than scientific. Sustainability is clear that Infinite growth of personal wealth is neither theoretically possible not ecologically desirable likewise individual freedom is not the be all and end all of society; it is a property to be balanced with the public good and the needs and aspirations of future generations.

The sustainability worldview is thus far more challenging to Fukuyama’s (2006) End of History society, or the emerging ‘post-truth’ world of Donald Trump, than communism was, or any religion is.

5. Sustainability lite: efficiency and resilience

Not everyone in the sustainability movement finds it possible to go to this end point. Many stop short of challenging notions of growth and are uncomfortable advocating for reduced private freedom. At its lightest, sustainability is often promoted as an enlightened progression of the free market. Why would any captain of industry want to create waste material in their industrial process when that waste could be turned into a profit-line or not created in the first place? Thus, recycling becomes a logical efficiency. Why build an industry around an energy source which you absolutely know will eventually run out? Better to phase in the new renewable source and get a jump on the competition. Of course, there are questions over when you do this and for what reason. Switching to renewables because it’s good for society and will reduce global warming, is all well and dandy, as long as you don’t have to do it first when the switch is expensive and puts you at a disadvantage in the market.

A second Sustainability-light approach, much touted in the disaster prevention literature, is resilience. This draws on notions of resilience developed in the ecological, engineering and psychological literature. (Manyena, 2006) It is essentially a system-based approach, highlighting two properties of systems. (Klein, Nicholls, & Thomalla, 2003) First, their ability to absorb shocks without greatly altering the parameters of the system: think of the now common crumple zones and air-bag systems in cars, think of the apple tree, pruned every year and growing back more vibrant. Second, the ability to self-heal, to rebuild and recover often through redirecting resources internal within the system. Witness a Ponderosa Pine forest recovering from a wild fire, or a well-insured farmer recovering from a period of drought.

Politically resilience is a seductive road. It pushes the responsibility for survival onto the system being threatened and thus of course, also the responsibility for failure to thrive and survive. The whole ‘build back better’ mantra heard after the 2010 Haiti earthquake has a large dose of this responsibility shifting rhetoric in it. (Mannakkara & Wilkinson, 2014). It also begs the question of what scale of system should be resilience. Is it the individual household in Haiti, the country as a whole or the global economy it is a part of?

6. Too important for democracy?

Those who sign up for a sustainability approach to shaping our future are often overwhelmed by the enormity and complexity of the task to hand. How do we utterly transform our energy systems to halt and hopefully reverse climate change? How do we reverse planetary soil loss, having destroyed in hundreds of years what took, and will take, tens of thousands of years to create? How do we stop, or at least slow down the present and sixth mass extinction of species on earth?

How do we manage what we really do not understand? It is only in the past few years that the true complexity and utterly essential nature of our internal microbiome, the millions of bacteria in our guts, brains, blood and other organisms is becoming apparent (Yong, 2016), and yet with our antibiotics we carry out the local equivalent of full scale nuclear war on it, triggering an arms race with a community able to evolve, test and utilize defenses at a pace many thousands of times faster than we are able to in our laboratories.

This combination of crisis, complexity and uncertainty pushes some to despair of ever achieving enough change through consent. Klein (2015) in her book ‘This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate’ seems to almost give up on democracy in favor of a more Hobbesian benign autocracy. Her concern is one of time. Sure, people will eventually realize that major change is needed, but by then it will be too late. So many of the destructive processes we are feeding are, to all intents and purposes irreversible. In the end, entropy wins.

So, if a ‘government of national unity’ is not going to happen, how do we move forward? Maybe we need to take a leaf out of the military playbook and understand the difference between the battles and the war, the tactics and the strategy.

At the level of the battles, we know that rapid change in complex and chaotic systems leads to an increasing frequency of extreme events, extreme with respect to our human comfort zone that is. Battles to increase system efficiency remove some of that chaos. Tactics of resilience help us absorb some of the shocks and advocacy to whittle away at the old worldview and promote the new, may gradually win enough people over to achieve radical change by consent.

7. Moving forward

The papers in this edition explore some of these options from the use of video games to eat away of current worldviews, to the establishment of microgrids to render cities more resilient. Climate change, as a clear and present danger to our future looms large across all the papers, with contributions from Mexico and Bangladesh focusing in on survival in threatened local communities. The use of multi-stakeholder analysis to affect change is highlighted as is use of policy and regulation in Russian cities to promote resilience. All of these approaches fall within the broad church of sustainability.

If you care about, and only about, the environment, then be happy. Geological history tells us that the biosphere is incredibly resilient, having survived massive meteorite bombardment and periods where the entire surface of the plant froze. There is nothing we as humans can do to extinguish life on earth, it’s just that we, as a rather insignificant species, may not be part of that life.

If on the other hand you are rather attached to homo sapiens, then business as usual is simply not an option.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.