Discuss: Theses on Sustainability

Oh, I don’t know. From where I’m sitting in a small urban apartment breathing toxic traffic fumes and drinking chlorinated water, I’d say the life of a mid 18th century farmer doesn’t look half bad . . .

A connection here to I.A. Richards’ _The Meaning of Meaning_ from 1923:  “Words, as everyone now knows, ‘mean’ nothing by themselves.  It is only when a thinker makes use of them that they stand for anything, or, in one sense, have ‘meaning.  They are instruments.” 

That seems like useful information if we’re interested in understanding HOW words come to mean what they mean.  They are signs or vessels that we fill with meaning in different historical and cultural contexts.  So, I like Eric Zencey’s application here to “sustainability,” but I’d love to see it extended to “economy.”  (William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness” does something like this with the word “wilderness,” especially in the U.S.) 

Let’s rethink “economy” in similar ways.  That’s one thing I appreciate most about Orion; it highlights the connection between economies and ecologies.  Rethinking and re-inscribing sustainability and economy will ideally lead to a redefinition and new understanding of “progress” (which has implications for how we talk about or what we mean by “clean” and “fair”).

That’s social movement (not a social movement) - i.e., changes in how we talk and the way we think that ultimately lead to changes in the way we live our lives.

One of the most telling lines in this essay is the observation that “just as ecosystems evolve, so would the economy.”  I can see how unsustainable activities may give rise to selective pressure that will nudge our globalized economies onto a desirable path.  But it’s also clear that less desirable aspects of this economy, e.g., some global companies, are currently enjoying high levels of evolutionary “fitness.” I would welcome a follow-up that looks at this through a evolutionary lens.  Where is the variation that the evolution process requires?  How is this variation giving rise to consequences that affect the survival of economic activities?  And how are desirable and undesirable activities being passed from one generation to the next?

Glenn Sutter’s comment moves me to remark:  The companies that are enjoying “high levels of evolutionary ‘fitness’” worldwide may in fact be no so much winners in an evolutionary contest, but hothouse flowers, supported (like a rose in winter greenhouse) by vast unsustainable subsidies—from the draw-down of fossil fuels, from the draw-down of natural capital.  When subjected to the discipline of a market that values resources at their ecological (instead of their current market) cost, those companies would have to adapt to doing sustainable business in a sustainable world, or go the way of a hothouse flower exposed to real weather.

I too wonder where the statement “It’s time to harness the power of the markets…” came from. The other theses build on one another, sort of, but then this statement comes in from left field. Markets do not currently work, and I doubt if they can work when the sources of production are isolated from consumption by convoluted markets. What could possibly make them work except a return to simpler systems? The rich and powerful have become so by capturing the resources and energy of the earth for their own use. They will not give up this power and wealth, nor will they allow markets to include the real costs of such extraction. Until we have social and economic equity, markets are the problem and not the solution.

I’ll join the chorus of those objecting to the (currently politically correct) phrase “it’s time to use the power of the market… to do good.”  We’ve had too much of this from the political and economic establishment, and our current problems with unsustainability stem from this mindset.  What the rest of the article points to from my perspective is the moral imperative to bring the study (and practice) of economics into its proper role as a subservient discipline to ecology—rather than the other way around.  There is no sustainable economic system that exists outside a defined ecological system, and any theses on economics that doesn’t recognize this fact should be discarded.  From a biological perspective, species or ecosystems are only considered “successful” and sustainable if they practice evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) with their respective environments. Human civilization, let alone industrial human civilization, is a long way from coming anywhere close to achieving this.  We’ll need another million years or so of stable (i.e. mostly unchanging) societal practice to see how we do on this score.  We need to start thinking much bigger and acting much smaller.

Ken, I absolutely agree that we need a dramatic revision in the foundations of economic thinking; I’m an advocate for Ecological Economics, which does just what you propose:  sees economic activity in context (in thermodynamic and ecological context) as one form of activity within a larger system (the environment).  (The neoclassical model gets it exactly backwards, by seeing environmental values as a subset of economic values.)  But I think you are too harsh on the power of the market.  The market system, as presently constructed, is part of the problem, because prices lie to us about the true cost of things.  A carbon tax or a low-entropy tax would go a long way toward letting prices tell the ecological truth.  And then self-interested behavior (such as people pursue in economic markets) would no longer necessarily be unsustainable.  (Such a tax could be revenue neutral, and with a system of rebates could hold harmless those least able to pay it.)  The alternative, it seems to me, is to continue to hope that environmentally aware people can change the system through moral admonition—lecturing, hectoring, asking people to go against their own financial interest.  “If men were angels,” James Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.”  And if we could all be morally pure according to the moral vision of ecological sustainability, we’d have no need for environmental policy of any sort.  Information alone would do it.  But, given that information and moral admonition haven’t done the job of establishing our society on a sustainable basis, I think it’s time to try the power of self-interest through markets in which ecological cost is relfected in the prices of things.  Let me add a plug:  I’ve been working with some people who are holding the first-ever U.S. conference on adopting an alternative measure of well-being—an alternative to GDP, which counts environmental damage as a positive contribution to well-being.  The conference is sponsored by GNH USA, and will be in VT in early June.  You can find info about it on the organization’s web site.

Eric wears the same “green” blinders he perceives in others and engages in the very same greenwash, made all the more dangerous because of his apparent insights into cause and effect.

He identifies us as self-interested consumers (i.e. parasites) and accepts that identity (“consumers would still reign supreme”) as immutable as the laws of thermodynamics.

He places economy above ecology (“environmentalism must become an economic vision”) and proposes a variation of economic regulation (“a regulated and manipulated form of self-interest”) as the solution, even though self-interest is a very modern economic invention that has proven unsustainable as well as immoral.

He continues to engage in the destructive calculus that places wants and comforts over authentic human needs (“a high standard of living widely shared among its citizens”), ignoring that even a third-world material standard for all humanity is beyond the earth’s carrying capacity as we annually convert millions of species into yet more human biomass.

And, while grudgingly acknowledging the sustainability of the pre-petroleum cultures, he falls victim to the belief that we have a choice in the matter (“few of us would trade the comforts and freedoms we enjoy today”) and are masters of our fate. We are either servants of the web-of-life or we are heading toward extirpation.

The simple and obvious truth, for those who would take off the blinders, is that either we devolve to a very low footprint culture based on real need, mutual support and interdependence or Mother Nature does it for us.

We cannot rewrite the rules of this game and expect to “win”. We must stop playing the game.