by Thomas Davis
Sustainable development is a buzzword found in much environmental and some economics literature these days. Certainly the idea of sustainable development has become increasingly popular in the contemporary world. New books on sustainable development have been appearing with increasing rapidity since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June of 1992, and the number of articles appearing in professional journals has been expanding at what seems to be an exponential rate.
The questions are, what is all the fuss about? What is sustainable development anyway? And more importantly, why does sustainable development matter?
The word sustainable comes to us from the foresters of the 18th and 19th century in Europe. At the time much of Europe was being deforested, and the foresters became increasingly concerned since wood was one of the driving forces in the European economy. Wood heated homes, built homes and factories, became furniture and other articles of manufacture, and the forests that provided the wood were central to romantic literature and ideas.
Forests were best harvested from an economic standpoint using clear-cutting techniques. This meant that the loggers moved into a tract of forest and removed all of the trees in the tract. But the forests that grew back after clear-cutting did not always provide the wood fiber needed for the European economy. The foresters, and especially the German foresters, in response to this crisis developed scientific, or sustainable, forestry. The idea at the time was simple. If enough trees were planted to replace the wood provided by the trees that were harvested every year, and the growth rate of the entire forest was scientifically monitored to ensure this happened, then the forest would be sustainable. It would always grow enough wood fiber to replace the wood fiber lost to harvesting.
Thus, in this original idea, sustainable means that as a resource is used, it is replaced by growing additional amounts of the resource. In the modern context of the word, sustainable, this is a difficult context because there are many resources, such as oil or iron ore, that cannot be grown. Still, these resources, like the trees in Europe's forests, are finite. If all the oil is extracted, there will not be any more oil. Still, if humanity is to survive with a civilization for another 1,000 years, we are still going to need to heat our homes and fulfill many of the same purposes that oil now fulfills.
The word development, at least as it is used in the phrase sustainable development, has a different history. During the cold war the United States needed to respond to the Communist challenge in the Third World that said that communism would bring with it a new standard of living. Walt Rostow, a prominent U.S. government official and economist, developed a competing ideology that he called economic development. Under the Communist model societies that staged a revolution against the proletariat and threw off the shackles of capitalism would begin a transformation that would lead to economic equality between all people. All of the wealth of a nation could then be used to raise the standard of living and well-being of all the people within that society. The attractiveness of this model to the poor people of the Third World is obvious. It promised masses of people a significantly better way of life.
Rostow's answer to this challenge was that it was the civilized world's task to economically develop the Third World. Rostow, and then the U.S. government and the governments of Western Europe and Japan, believed that all the civilized world had to do was to prime the economic pump of capitalism in the Third World, and just like a real pump, when enough dollars were inserted into an economy, the Third World economy would take off. This would eventually result in a better standard of living, a developed rather than a developing society, and a world safe for democracy and capitalism. Thus, according to this model, the poor would be much better off in the long run by embracing democracy and capitalism. If the Third World country would remain anti-communist, they would receive foreign aid , at some point in the future, take off and become equal to the economies of Western Europe, the U.S. and Japan.
Thus, development, in the context of sustainable development, means that the Third World's economies will become equal to the developed world's economies. This, in turn, will alleviate poverty and suffering in poor countries and make the world more equitable for all human beings.
A Short History of Sustainable Development as a Policy Concept
There are a number of important antecedents to Our Common Future, the report by the United Nation's Brundtland Commission (1987) that marks the beginning of the sustainable development concept that has generated all the literature and recent commentary. Divergent economic theorists like E.F. Schumaker of Britain, environmentalists like Barry Commoner and Lester R. Brown, population analysts like Paul Ehrlich, politicians like Willy Brandt of what was then West Germany and Jimmy Carter of the United States, discussions within the United Nations and United Nations agencies, and a number of environmental organizations spread throughout the world all played roles in formulating ideas that became part of the Brundtland Commission's message. But even though many of the concepts of sustainable development existed before Our Common Future was published, the Commission's report, appearing in 1987, started the process of making sustainable development an important issue on the world stage.
The Commission identified a number of "common challenges" facing the earth: Population and human resources, food security, species and ecosystems, energy, industrial development, and urbanization. In the context of these challenges they discussed international environmental problems, what successes had been registered in trying to address those problems, the scope and nature of the environmental problems still facing the world community, and the role of the world's economic systems in developing solutions to these problems and providing long-term relief for what they perceived to be the related problems of poverty and underdevelopment.
In the process of describing these challenges and proposing potential policy directions the world community could take to address the problem they had identified, the Commission presented and defined the phrase, sustainable development (World Commission on Environment and Development, p43). "Sustainable development requires meeting the major needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to satisfy their aspirations for a better life." However, "living standards that go beyond the basic minimum are sustainable only if consumption standards everywhere have regard for long-term sustainability" (World Commission on Environment and Development, p44).
Thus, sustainable development, as a concept, has two primary pillars: Economic development and the consumptive use of the world's natural resources in ways that are sustainable. We have to consume, in other words, with the realization that resources are finite, and part of our job as human beings is to preserve the human future on this planet into a limitless future. In this concept of the limitless future, the Commission also called for what it termed "equity and the common interest." The Commission declared that "ecological interactions do not respect the boundaries of individual ownership and political jurisdiction." Nor has the local nature of human interaction with the environment been confined, as the result of the creation of ever more sophisticated technologies, to local environmental effects. "Rapid growth in production has extended it [production] to the international plane, with both political and economic manifestations. To the Commission "the enforcement of common interest often suffers because areas of political jurisdiction and areas of impact do not coincide" (World Commission on Environment and Development, pp. 46-47).
In addition, the Commission continues, there is currently an inequitable distribution in resource consumption:
The search for common interest would be less difficult if all development and environment problems had solutions that would leave everyone better off. This is seldom the case, and there are usually winners and losers. . . 'Losers' in the environmental/development conflicts include those who suffer more than their fair share of the health, property, and ecosystem damage costs of pollution (The World Commission on Environment and Development, p. 48).
This inequitable distribution is of increasing concern because, "as a system approaches ecological limits, inequalities sharpen," and "hence, our inability to promote the common interest in sustainable development is often a product of the relative neglect of economic and social justice within and amongst nations" (The World Commission on Environment and Development, p. 49). In other words the winners in the battle to consume from the earth's many commons create a dilemma for those who recognize the need for sustainable use since efforts to preserve the commons' various assets, as the system approaches ecological limits, increases both economic and social injustice "within and amongst nations."
The Commission then outlined a series of "strategic imperatives," or "critical objectives," inherent in their concept of sustainable development. These included:
reviving growth;
changing the quality of growth;
meeting essential needs for jobs, food, energy, water, and sanitation;
ensuring a sustainable level of population;
conserving and enhancing the resource base;
reorienting technology and managing risk; and
merging environment and economics in decision making (World Commission on Environment and Development, p. 49).
The Responses to Our Common Future
Generally, as Michael Carley and Ian Christie have pointed out, there have been two primary responses to the Commission's sustainable development initiative, along with many variants on common themes. One approach calls for continued economic growth with the growth made more environmentally sensitive "in order to raise living standard globally and break the link between poverty and environmental degradation," and the other calls for radical changes in the world's economic order (Carley and Christie, p. 42).
A good example of the reactions of those calling for economic growth with environmental responsibility is the report, "Choosing a Sustainable Future," released by the National Commission on the Environment. The report begins with a warning that "if America continues down its current path, primarily reacting to environmental injuries and trying the repair them, the quality of our environment will continue to deteriorate, and eventually our economy will decline as well." Then the report's message is presented:
If, however, our country pioneers new technologies, shifts its policies, makes bold economic changes, and embraces a new ethic of environmentally responsible behavior, it is far more likely that the coming years will bring a higher quality of life, a healthier environment, and a more vibrant economy for all Americans (National Commission on the Environment, 1993, p. xi).
In other words, if we keep our heads, recognize the seriousness of the environmental crisis, and then act boldly to meet the various challenges of that crisis, we can not only turn around the quality of the environment, but we can keep a vibrant economy as well. We do not have to choose between an environmentally healthy and economically robust nation. We can have it all. We are smart enough, have the ability to develop enough new technologies, and can change our behaviors enough to confront all the problems facing us and create the optimal solutions.
A more radical approach to sustainable development was published by Lester W. Milbrath in a book entitled Envisioning a Sustainable Society, released only two years after publication of Our Common Future. Calling for: an end to the idea of a growth economy, an end to the culture that always accepts scientific advancement as a positive good, and the beginning of a society that learns its way to an infrastructure designed for sustainability, among other proposals, Professor Milbrath begins his last chapter by saying that
Anyone who calls for a massive transformation of society is bound to be an impractical dreamer. I am calling for people to transform the most basic of all relationships, their relationship to nature. The changes I have proposed will surely be difficult to adopt. Yet, modern society's only choice is to change (Milbrath, 1989, p. 352).
Both Milbrath's dreams and the work of the National Commission on the Environment are idealistic and formed from an intellectual, rather than an observation, base. Much of the sustainable development literature has similar flaws. Milbrath's thesis that "modern society's only choice is to change" is repeated over and over again in a multitude of ways in the literature. The authors catalog the planet's or nation's or region's environmental ills in substantial detail, then they culminate the case they have built, using statistics, charts, graphs, scientific research, and sometimes social science or anthropological research, by concluding that the environment's deterioration is guaranteed to continue and that this fact makes change, whether it is within a more conservative, mainstream approach such as that presented by the National Commission on the Environment, or a more radical structure such as presented by Milbrath, inevitable. We are in trouble, and something positive must be done.
The Earth Summit
After, and in the midst of the literary ferment arising from the Brundtland Commission report, including some powerful, deep ecology work by poets and essayists like Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder and novelists and essayists like Edward Abbey, the Earth Summit was proposed and planned by the United Nations. Called the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), it was held from June 3rd through June 14th in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. One hundred and fifty nations sent representatives, 1,400 non-governmental organizations were in attendance, 8,000 journalists covered the event, and thousands of Brazilians attended one or more sessions. At the same time a major gathering of non-governmental organizations conducted what was billed as "The Global Forum" only 40 kilometers from where the Earth Summit was meeting.
The major accomplishments of UNCED centered around the creation of United Nation's organizations formed either at the Summit or as the result of the process of preparing for the conference. The most important of these bodies is the Sustainable Development Commission that was given the task of furthering the work of creating sustainable development policies and procedures throughout the world. Other bodies were created out of "conventions" passed at the Summit on climate change and biodiversity. These particular organizations are to be dedicated to developing scientific and technical advice related to the development and implementation of international treaties. The basic ideas are that treaties entered into by the world's nations should, in the future, make sure that treaty provisions do not contribute to climate changes that have the potential to harm life on the planet earth and should help protect the planet's biodiversity. The Planet Earth Council and the Business Council for Sustainable Development were also created as the result of the Summit.
In addition to the UN organizations created, the Summit also considered and adopted treaties on climate change and biodiversity and a non-binding statement of forest principles. The treaty on climate change was signed at the Conference, but the treaty on biodiversity was resisted by the United States government until Bill Clinton became President, after which the biodiversity treaty was completed, although it has still not been ratified by the U.S. Senate. The non-binding statement on forest principles was signed at the conference (Haas, Levy, and Parson, 1992).
The Summit also adopted the Rio Declaration that includes 27 principles. These principles, though very general, are especially significant since they represent a series of difficult-to-reach compromises between industrialized and developing countries. Much of the developing world feels that the industrialized countries have used up the world's environmental resources in their pursuit of development and now wish to protect what environmental resources are remaining at the expense of the possibility of economically improving the lot of poor nations. These principles, then, provide a framework for the world's diplomats in their efforts to improve both environmental and economic conditions around the world. The Rio principles included:
a state's sovereign right to exploit its own resources in accordance with its own policies, without harming the environment elsewhere (principle 2); the right to development (principle 3); environmental protection as an integral part of development (principle 4); sustainable development that requires reducing 'unsustainable patterns of production and consumption' and that promotes 'appropriate demographic policies' (principle 8); access to information and citizen participation (principle 10). . .and the polluter pays principles, including the internalization of costs and the use of economic instruments (principle 16) (Parson, Haas, and Levy, 1992, p. 12).
The major question that has to be asked about the Rio principles is whether they are substantive enough to lead to any significant changes in the world's approach to either environmental or economic conditions. In the end the world's governments are still centered on the concept of national sovereignty. Thus, inevitably, each nation-state will interpret the Rio principles in light of their national interest rather than in the earth's interest. The principles are general in nature because that was the only way the diplomats could convince a large enough set of signatories to affix their signatures to the final document. Therefore, even though the principles are significant, their long-term success at improving conditions on the ground, in the air, and in water is yet to be determined.
After the Earth Summit the literature and discussions about sustainable development exploded. Newspapers, business magazines, science journals and magazines, popular magazines, television, radio, and a host of other forums and conferences centered on a discussion of sustainable development. In some parts of the world, such as in New Zealand, sustainable resource management concepts designed to improve the environment while, at the same time, helping New Zealand meet economic goals, were adopted into new legislation (Robertson, 1993). The first stirrings of a national sustainable development policy in the United States were also felt when President-elect Bill Clinton declared in December of 1992 that "our future depends on maintaining a sustainable environment, and in so doing we can create economic opportunity" (Appenzeller, 1993).
The Skeptics
There are those, of course, who question the whole sustainable development concept. Stephen R. Dovers and John W. Handmer, writing in Environmental Conservation, discovered what they described as eight "obvious" contradictions in the new movement. "The apparent ease with which these [eight contradictions] can be classified should not be allowed to hide the fact that, within each there exist many levels and tensions" (Dovers and Handmer, 1993, p. 217). At the heart of the Dovers and Handmer criticism is a sense that the sustainable development discussion to date has been more rhetoric than an honest attempt to deal with facts and numbers. They admit that humans can live with logical inconsistencies and still work toward solutions, but overall they are pessimistic in that ". . .our numbers, per caput consumption, and total load on The Biosphere, continue to increase." They are afraid that the contradictions they see in the sustainable development movement "are perhaps insurmountable in any morally-defensible way," and that "the magnitude of the problems of environment and development can be overwhelming enough, let alone when matched with the magnitude of the cultural and political obstacles to change" inherent in the concept of sustainable development. In other words, they are afraid the contradictions within the various ideas that make up sustainable development as a concept are both too profound and insurmountable to overcome (Dovers and Handmer, 1993, p. 221).
Professor Stanley Temple of the University of Wisconsin--Madison questions the very use of the phrase, sustainable development, pointing out that the
word sustainable has been used in too many situations today, and ecological sustainability is one of those terms that confuse a lot of people. You hear about sustainable development, sustainable growth, sustainable economies, sustainable societies, sustainable agriculture. Everything is sustainable (Temple, 1992).
The result of the overuse of the word, sustainable, in Temple's view, is that it has come to mean too much and nothing at the same time. Therefore sustainable development as a concept is too largely drawn to have any particular usefulness.
This discussion does not any more completely describe the criticisms of sustainable development than the description of the work of the World Commission on the Environment and Development, Lester W. Milbrath, and the Earth Summit provides a complete picture of the sustainable development movement. It only provides some of the flavor of the total discussion.
The major point to be derived from reading the literature critical of the idea of sustainable development is that this is a movement that is more ethereal than concrete. There are a lot of discussions about the pending doom of biosphere if the environment is not protected more vigorously and efficiently than in the past in the pro-sustainable development literature. There is a call for economic and resource equity between the peoples currently living on the earth and between living generations and unborn generations. But, as the critics are pointing out, there is a lot of fuzziness that does not make the concept of sustainable development concrete. The word sustainable, as Temple points out, has become a buzz word that is used to the point of distraction. What does it really mean? Does it mean that resources must be protected at all cost? Should they be protected to the seventh generation, as would be the position of many Native Americans in the United States? Or, as the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin contends, should resources be protected forever? And which resources should be protected? Are we really going to try to live without oil or a whole host of useful mineral resources? What, exactly, does sustainable mean in the context of sustainable development?
Equally difficult questions can be raised about the word, development, in the sustainable development context. The Brundtland Commission appears in Our Common Future to want to primarily improve the economies of the Third World so that the living standards of those living in countries mired in poverty can be raised to a more acceptable level. Development in Europe, Japan, the United States, and in places like Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and other rising economies, has a much different meaning. Neo-classical economists like Milton Friedman believe passionately that the free market demands that all people in all places at all times have the right to improve their economic well being. In his book, Free To Choose, written with his wife Rose Friedman, is the declaration that
The two ideas of human freedom and economic freedom working together came to their greatest fruition in the United States. Those ideas are still very much with us. We are all of us imbued with them. They are part of the very fabric of our being. But we have been straying from them. We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else. We have persuaded ourselves that is safe to grant power, provided it is for good purposes.
Fortunately, we are waking up. We are again recognizing the dangers of an overgoverned society, coming to understand that good objectives can be perverted by bad means, that reliance on the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society (Friedman and Friedman, p. 297).
Are the great societies, as the Friedmans describe them, ready to limit their consumption, their pursuit of economic and human freedom, in order to guarantee equity between either current populations or future generations if that is a necessary pre-requisite of achieving the ideal of sustainable development? Can the idea of economic freedom be maintained in a sustainably developed society? A society that can sustain its use of natural resources and the environment forever? Or is the whole idea of sustainable development a buzz-word pipe dream conjured up by idealists who fail to realize that the world and humankind are realities?
The work of the idealists like Milbrath is both entertaining and a dead end road. The entertainment value derives from the power of speculations about the future. But in the end fiction, although it may give insights into realities, cannot resolve the conflicts and contradictions that are part of both the human and the earth's condition. No blueprint of Shang-gri-la will bring Shang-gri-la into existence. No road map to Shang-gri-la will lead to the creation of paradise. The task of those who believe that the idea of sustainable development is more than a pleasant fiction is to construct a model of sustainable development based upon the characteristics of an observable model, even if the model is incomplete in that it is not as fully sustainable or as fully developed as the proponents of the sustainable development concept would desire. The value of such a model is that it can be used to eliminate some of the fuzziness surrounding the idea of sustainable development and can also be used to encourage policies and practices that can, really, lead to a more sustainable developed world.
Conclusion
This is only the lightest of introductions to the idea of sustainable development and the controversies surrounding the idea. Sustainable development has a legion of practical problems that stand between the world today and its eventual realization. To those that believe the free market is the answer to all of the world's problems, sustainable development is a dangerous notion that can bring the prosperity of the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan crashing into a prolonged economic dark age. To environmentalists who are worried about concepts like the carrying capacity of the earth and the long-term needs of human survival, sustainable development is a shining promise that must be reached if the world is saved. For those in poor countries who are desperate for a more equitable distribution of wealth, it is an idea with enormous appeal.
One important note to make is that not even all of those who are quoted as critics of one aspect or another of the sustainable development concept are opposed to the concept. In some cases their comments are designed to move the discussion forward by applying critical thinking to the problems inherent in the idea of sustainable development. In other cases, such as that of the Friedmans, it is safe to assume that they find the whole idea of sustainable development dangerous and in need of serious revision.
The work of the Menominee Sustainable Development Institute is to look at sustainable development through the prism provided by Menominee efforts to sustain their Forest and society for the last century or so in the face of steadily increasing assimilation pressures by both the U.S. economy and U.S. society. This prism provides clues about the kind of values, economic system, and social order might be necessary if a sustainable world is to be created. It also provides clues about what kind of path might be taken by the modern world toward sustainable development. This home page is dedicated to examining all of the issues raised by Menominee's efforts to create a society based on sustainable development. Comments to the home page are always welcome.
Partial Bibliography