Sustainability 101: What is sustainability and why should we care?

According to a recent article in The New York Times, the Rochester Institute of Technology in September established the Golisano Institute for Sustainability in order to promote collaboration across scientific and other academic disciplines in studying the impact on the environment of production and consumption. As the name implies, the institute is largely privately funded by B. Thomas Golisano, founder of Paychex, an employee-administration outsourcing company.

Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Schlumberger and Toyota have donated money to the Stanford University Global Climate and Energy Project, while the Shell Oil Foundation finances the Shell Center for Sustainability at Rice University.

Dow Chemical, which, like more and more other large corporations, has a ‘vice president for sustainability’, is donating ten million dollars to the University of California, Berkeley, for a Sustainable Products and Solutions Center, and even Wal-Mart has pledged to help finance an Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas.

These and many other similar examples from around the world seem to indicate that sustainability is neither a marginal phenomenon anymore, nor a fad, but that mainstream businesses are recognizing that it is the direction our societies need to move in if we want to avoid environmental and economic collapse.

Of course, they also recognize that sustainability can benefit their bottom line by both opening new markets for them and by reducing their costs.

At this point one could ask the question whether, where sustainability is concerned, business follows the consumer or whether the consumer follows business. One could, but one won’t, because one does not want to be sucked into a discussion that has kept economists busy for two centuries, sustainability or not.

But what is this sustainability that everyone talks about?

According to various dictionaries and reference works, economic development or the use of natural resources are sustainable if they can be maintained at a particular level without causing damage to the environment or without depleting the resource.

Historically, the concept of sustainability in relation to the environment was developed in German forestry. It was first developed in the 17th century to limit the number of trees that could be cut down for firewood to the number of trees that could replace them. The German word for sustainability is Nachhaltigkeit, and it was first mentioned in an 18th-century treatise on forestry by Hans Carl von Carlowitz, meaning that trees should not be removed from a forest at a faster rate than they could be regrown. The English translation in this context was sustainable yield.

The current use of the word covers a much wider range of activities, and there is a real danger that its significance is in the process of being diluted to the point where it is nothing more than an empty shell, to be filled with whatever contents public relations departments, marketing firms and advertising agencies see fit. As has already happened with the terms ‘green’ and ‘natural’, to name but these.

A widely accepted modern definition of sustainability was introduced in the World Commission on Environment and Development’s 1987 report Our Common Future (also known as the Brundtland Report, after Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Norwegian prime minister who chaired the commission):

“Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable – to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept of sustainable development does imply limits – not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities. But technology and social organization can both be improved to make way for a new era of economic growth.”

Ten years later, a German parliamentary commission on the protection of humans and the environment (Enquête-Kommission des Deutschen Bundestages ‘Schutz des Menschen und der Umwelt’) presented the concept of environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and social sustainability (the three-columns model of sustainability). Interestingly, it was suggested to the commission by the German chemical industry federation.

The reasoning behind these three columns is that they not only constantly influence each other, but also depend on each other.

Environmental sustainability is directly derived from the original concept behind sustainability, i.e. to use our natural resources only as fast as they can regenerate.
Economic sustainability can be described as not living beyond our means. Any economic activity that mortgages future generations’ ability to fulfill their needs, let alone wants, is not sustainable. Social sustainability means organizing our societies in such a way as to minimize social tensions and conflicts.

Thus the three apparent pillars of our present economic and social model - pollution, pillage and poverty - are in blatant contrast to a sustainable society.

There is little doubt that we cannot maintain the status quo. Business as usual is not an option if we want to avoid the ecological, economic and social collapse of our society (human societies worldwide).

Pollution of our natural environment, air, soil and water, is responsible for health hazards all over the world. Pillage of our resources, mineral, vegetable and animal - including human, is creating a wasteland, not only for some distant future generations, but also for us, here, now. Poverty, abject living conditions, a growing chasm between rich and poor, lead to problems ranging from starvation and epidemics to illegal immigration and war.

According to Jared Diamond, professor of geography at the University of California, a person who lives in one of the industrialized western countries (that’s us, together with the Europeans, Japanese, Australians, Canadians, …) uses 32 times more resources than a person living in Africa. One billion people have an ecological footprint that is up to 32 times larger than that of the remaining five and a half billion people in the world.

This lopsided distribution of resources is not sustainable. While the earth might be able to support it, international relations won’t. Immigration pressures from south to north, from poor nations to rich ones are increasing, and so is resentment on both sides of the prosperity gulf (example from this side of the fence, the most wasteful nation in the world: the debate about illegal immigration in the U.S.).

Meanwhile, countries like China and India are striving to reach western material living standards – and justifiably so. This, however, is where our gravy train risks being derailed.

Jared Diamond calculates that when China, which now has less than one tenth the per capita consumption of the U.S., catches up with the U.S., world oil consumption will more than double from today’s level and world metal consumption will almost double.

He goes on to reason that if the whole developing world were to use resources on a level we Americans do today, it would be the equivalent of having a world population of 72 billion people.

It is doubtful that the Earth will be able to support that.

So, what are we to do? Prevent developing nations from developing? Preserve our material lifestyle by keeping the rest of the world appropriately poor? Continue business as usual from corporate quarterly report to quarterly report and election cycle to election cycle, while blissfully ignoring (if you’re a Democrat) or dismissing (if you’re a Republican) all indications of dangers ahead?

Unless we decide to show a callous disregard for the rest of the world and future generations (including ours), it is pretty obvious that we need to make some changes – worldwide, as a nation, in our communities, but also, and mainly, in our personal lives.

So far it seems that it’s the worldwide aspects that get the most attention, be it Al Gore’s Nobel Prize, the Kyoto Protocol or the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali.

Maybe that’s because they produce the least concrete results in terms of actually helping solve the problems on the ground. Sure, they keep thousands of officials busy, they allow politicians to polish their image (one way or another), they throw a bone to environmentalists to keep them distracted for a while with a false sense of achievement, but they are really nothing but a giant public relations circus, a subsidized ego-trip for politicians and officials who want to bask in a green limelight.
Best of all, though, from the politicians’ point of view, is that fact that, apart from some political posturing to suck up to the party faithful at home, the whole exercise is quite uncontroversial, simply because its effects are felt exactly nowhere.

It doesn’t matter by how much governments agree to reduce carbon emissions – if nothing changes in the way we do business and live our daily lives, it won’t happen.
Meaningful change will only happen if we want it and if we are willing to take the steps necessary to get there.

For example: International agreements to stop overfishing and polluting the oceans will only be effective if consumers on the ground (i.e. us) push the market towards sustainably raised or caught fish. How do we do that? By refusing to buy fish from polluted and polluting fish farms, by refusing to buy fish species threatened by extinction, by refusing to buy fish caught by destructive industrial trawling methods.
We vote with our purchasing power. It’s very effective. It’s why Wal-Mart is the biggest seller of organic produce in the country and why Anheuser-Busch makes organic beer. It’s also how special interest groups determine how politicians vote in Washington.

We cannot reasonably expect people in developing countries to keep starving at about the present rate so that we can maintain our lifestyle.

On the other hand, it is also not very realistic to assume that mainstream America is going to willingly make sacrifices in the name of sustainability.

But in a country where a person’s “worth” is actually expressed in dollars, where conspicuous consumption is the norm and where a majority of the people are chronically ill because they eat too much (of the wrong stuff) and don’t move enough, there should be a lot of opportunities and scope to live more sustainably without sacrificing quality of life. In fact, quality of life will most likely increase with a more sustainable society.

As Jared Diamond points out, in Western Europe per capita oil consumption is only about half of what it is in the United States, yet Europeans have a higher life expectancy and generally a higher quality of life.

To be sure, Europeans are going to have to change their way of life, too, and adopt more sustainable practices. But considering our wasteful and freewheeling ways, we could make quite a difference already with some quite painless changes in our everyday routines.

Simple things, like eliminating disposable cups, plates and flatware from our lives, for example. I understand that it’s un-American to be more than a quarter mile from home without carrying a plastic water bottle or to start a car engine without a cup of coffee within reach, but why do they have to be throwaways? In this country we eat more food and have more drinks using plastic throwaway dishes than re-usable ones. They are everywhere – at private parties, in office break rooms, in school cafeterias, in government lunchrooms, even at “sustainable” food festivals and conferences. Why? Selfish convenience, pure and simple. Let somebody worry about the clean-up. We could put a serious dent in our oil consumption and all its negative consequences if we eliminated plastic throwaway dishes and bottles.

We could also do really drastic things, like buy smaller cars. Or is it really necessary to start up an eight-cylinder engine to move a 4,000-pound truck to get a 175-pound person to the video store five blocks down the road? Wouldn’t a four-cylinder compact car achieve the same thing with much less waste of resources? Of course, one could also walk the five blocks, but we don’t want to take the whole sustainability thing to any ridiculous lengths.