Sustainability:

Recent or modern concept ?

Or a natural, former way of life which we need to rediscover?

Let’s see…

Someone once said that in comparison with the cave-man we are hardly ‘civilised’: the caveman ‘worked’ (for himself, his family and community – not for employers and corporate shareholders!) for barely two hours a day to hunt & feed and clothe himself.  More than that – he did it HIS way: what, when, how and where he felt like – whereas today we commute for hours to a place of work, work 8 hours or so, then commute home with a loaded briefcase only to get bombarded by work emails ‘til late at night. Take a relatively recent civilisation / culture: the plains Indians of North America or the Aboriginees of Australia.  They lived a sustainable life since time immemorial with an acute and sensitive understanding of their impact upon the environment.  In 1854, Franklin Pearce, the then President of the USA, wanting to avoid bloodshed and cost in the colonisation of the West Coast, offered to buy the Indian lands in the North West from Chief Seattle.  We have a record of Chief Seattle’s reply.  [Although there is some doubt about the authorship of what has come down to us], it still represents a beautiful and accurate perception of one culture of another’s approach to life and the land.  Everyone should read this and challenge themselves.

Let’s read it together and consider whether we might not just recognise some supposedly ‘modern concepts’ like ‘Gaia Theory’ [Professor James Lovelock: ‘Gaia’ ,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis (Earth)] and the Polluter Pays Principle……

http://www.essentia.com/book/history/chiefseattle.htm. 

We think that we are discovering something new in our age, but evidently according to Chief Seattle’s Reply, above, we are sorely mistaken: it is something we had lost!  Perhaps ‘lost‘ is the wrong word – ‘snuffed out’ by unnbridled greed might be more accurate…

Let’s look at a few of Chief Seattle’s assertions:

• « How can you buy or sell the land?… The idea is strange to us ».  [TJ. Barely 100 years ago Communism questioned this and anti-capitalists are doing so now too… and look how crazy it has become: want to ‘own’ a plot of land on the Moon or Mars???.  The Earth was here 4.5 billion years before us, brought life about, nourishes us and provides for us and will outlast us… how can we possibly own it!?]

• « We are part of the Earth and it is part of us ».  [TJ. A line almost straight out of the Brundtland Report / World Commission on Environment and Development / Notre Avenir à Tous which codified the modern vision of sustainability]

• « One portion of the land is to him (the ‘White Man’) the same as the next … for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The Earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on…. His appetite will devour the Earth and leave behind only a desert. …. He kidnaps the Earth from his children ». [TJ.  The modern concept of ‘over-development’ and the need for a careful calculation of ‘carrying capacity’ are perhaps features of this modern landscape. Just like the tourism industry. About the time when I was born, Torremolinos was just a small, sleepy, Spanish fishing village. Now look at it: high-rise, concrete over-development with zero Spanish culture, German and English spoken, Eastern European migrant workers and no Spanish residents or culture to speak of… We develop.  We over-develop. We ruin. We move on to spoil somewhere else …   But there is not enough space on the planet to continue this even for the foreseeable future!].

• Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of Earth. Man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.  Contaminate your bed and you will one day suffocate in your own waste. [TJ. THE ULTIMATE ‘Polluter Pays Principle‘!]

• The end of living and the beginning of survival. [TJ.  Look at Mark Lynas’  book and the National Geographic film ‘Six Degrees‘.  There are mini-videos for each degree!  IMHO 3°C is enough to make you think of survival rather than life… by 4°C , according to Lynas and the science he has reviewed, ‘Life‘ has become largely a memory and Survival a desperate daily quest for the remaining inhabitants of Planet Earth. …. and we are already on the threshold of 1.5°C and heading for 2°C perhaps even in my lifetime.].   This bears repeating: The end of living and the beginning of survival. I have to tell you that you can forget all the horror stories and films
  : those words are the most chilling I have ever read and am ever likely to…  I can only hope that humanity never sees that point, but already there are those who see the ‘tipping-point‘ being upon us and little chance of avoiding Chief Seattle’s stark prognosis unless we awake from our ignorance and over-confidence.

It’s a Big Challenge … but we’ve had them before and overcome them.

In one sense it is almost pointless asking the Q Where did it all go wrong?. We are ‘here‘ and we (and future generations) have to deal with it.  You know the old joke about the Englishman in a car in rural Ireland?  He’s lost and asks a farmer: ‘How do I get to Tipperary?’…. The farmer replies: ‘Well, I wouldn’t begin here for a start!’. Like the car driver – we don’t have any choice.

BUT…….  Even though the task before us is Herculean, we do have a spectacular, recent example of addressing and overcoming the seemingly impossible that can encourage us:

In living memory, President J.F. Kennedy said the following in his address to graduating students at the American University on 10^th June 1963:

“Our problems are man-made; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again. … Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

If ever there were a speech entirely in keeping with the challenge presented today by Global Warming / Climate Change and Sustainability, then surely this is it.  JFK was trying to ‘crack’ the nuclear arms race problem which had nearly propelled us into WW3 barely a few months before his speech. [Watch the amazing Roger Donaldson film ‘Thirteen Days’ (and read Bobby Kennedy’s book of the same name) should you want to know more about this. Trust me: it is spell-bindingly brilliant!].  Despite the seeming impossibility of the task, the world has, for the most part, dealt with massive nuclear build up through non-proliferation treaties and disarmament & verified dismantling programmes.  Now, as Kennedy said, we are going to have to: “Do it again”… Do we have enough in common between the world’s cultures, economies, religions and political systems to be able to do it again is the question…   Kennedy answers this effectively by saying that we have the capacity to if we want to … but do we want to enough???

So where did it all go wrong?

(TJ perspective)

• Money.  Until the invention of this facility of changing one thing into another, if we needed or wanted something we had to make it ourselves or share it or barter…. or steal it (war).  That is a slow process. Money speeded up the process enormously…. but we are stuck with it – we can’t uninvent it.

• Population.   Although Malthus wasn’t 100% correct in his population projections and describing the consequences thereof, he was perhaps the first to appreciate using mathematics that the rate of population growth would, at some point, become explosive and run way beyond the ability of resources to satisfy basic demand causing famine, poverty and potentially political unrest and war for basic resources (water & food & shelter & safety: the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid/heirarchy of needs).

• Insulation. The globalised, capitalist system in which we live provides a long and sometimes bewildering range of intermediaries between the supplier and the consumer.  Other than, perhaps a few vegetables in the garden – what DO we produce and use ourselves?  We know and we feel the time, effort and care in planting, husbanding and then finally eating our own produce, BUT with the insulating effect of intermediaries we have no idea at all about the impacts of our pruchases (sometimes on the other side of the planet) upon the environment, peoples and cultures.   Levi Strauss has quantified water use in all aspects of the production, care and disposal over the lifetime of a pair of 501 jeans: 3781 litres… that is about 3 x 6 person sized jaccuzzi/spa water volume….. others calculate that it can cost 6000 litres or more just in the production (not the lifetime care).  Then there’s the polluted water going into rivers directly….  Let’s do the figures globally… according to statisticbrain,  we make and sell 1,240,000,000 jeans annually… if one were to say just  1000 litres per jean = 1,240,000,000,000 litres!  And there are people in this world without enough water to drink!!!   The problem is that we simply don’t know our own impact on the environment because we don’t experience it directly anymore.   Some DO see it, however and are prepared to make a stand and lay down their lives…. this young woman, for example, who gave her life whilst protesting against the live export of veal calves from the UK to France and other European countries – poor beasts who had never seen the sun or felt and eaten outdoors in the pasture in their entire (and very short lives).

• Capitalism & growth…wants / needs.  The dominant production and economic system in which most of us live thrives on growth and is never satisfied.  If it were to be based only upon that which we actually need, the standard model wouldn’t generate enough increasing profit for the shareholders or create enough jobs – the system has to make us want what we don’t actually need: in a nutshell, that’s the role of Marketing. Take Fashion, for example. Q Why does it exist?  ANS. To make us want what we don’t need – so we buy and they can sell.  The problem is that there is no limit to this model – it doesn’t accept constraints or limitations: everything is fuel to its fire.

When did we start to notice we have a problem?

(TJ perspective)

1. Sciences and measurement technology.  WW2 provided a massive stimulus to new technologies and the sensitivity of our measuring equipment.  For the first time, within all scientific domains, the 50s and 60s provided massive evidence that we were:
   • depleting our natural resources well beyond their ability to regenerate
   • en route (and in the ‘fast-lane‘) to extinguishing the Earth’s non-renewable resources
   • having a discernable and unarguable impact upon the Earth’s natural systems: weather, climate, oceans etc
   • approaching a point in terms of growing demand and population where projections clearly suggest an end to fundamental resource availability: water and food….
   • now able to directly relate human illnesses to human-produced activities
2. Projections. N°1, above has resulted in the situation in which scientists are finding ‘feedback‘ mechanisms which are accelerating the rate of change. They are now able to see that their fields are all related and act together as if the Earth is a sort of living entity that can support life within limits (). The projections that they are producing now seem to be largely in agreement and very stark indeed: that we are fast approaching Planet Earth’s abilities to protect life..
3. Global politics.   Generating ‘have‘ and ‘have not‘ nations with the gap between the two becoming greater.  The richer nations keeping their own banks of resources and the 3rd World nations see their resources sold off to cover debts. I gather some companies now own more of the resources of certain nations than the nations themselves.  The UN felt that this was bound to lead to political tension.  Maybe desperate immigration from N African countries into Europe at the risk of losing lives and any hope of a reasonable economic future for hard-working individuals is just the tip of this iceberg.  The issue of the global sharing of resources has become a matter of international / global interest and policy.  We’re French.  Can we handle ‘égalité‘ and global ‘fraternité‘ in this context?  Are we ‘big‘ enough?
4. Natural events… and man-made catastrophies.  Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Ozone layer depletion, ice-field and glacier melting, sea level rise, hurricane strength and frequency increasing, El Nino and La Nina activity growing, choking smogs in major cities from Peking to Paris, chronic over-fishing, species extinction, sea water pollution, melting of the Himalayan ice-cap that supplies one third of the world’s population with water, increasing levels of Asthma, Fukushima….   All of these have created dramatic, global awareness for the last 50 years that something needs to be done and that we are the cause AND the potential solution.

The (first?) Tipping Point

This came in the late 1980s as a result of general recognition of the above – not least of the sudden rise in environmental sympathies and international environmental protection organisations such as Greenpeace. In fact, unwittingly, the French government appears to have accelerated this sympathy.  Prior to the ‘Rainbow Warrior Incident’ in a  New Zealand harbour, Greenpeace were considered an extremist group with foolhardy action like sailing into a nuclear test bomb site to stop the tests. However, after a French military team was apparently ordered to sink the Rainbow Warrior, things were different: not least because one person was killed and the frogmen were caught and admitted the action was Military/State -ordered.  That changed everything and by the late 1980s the ‘Environment‘ (heretofore an issue of little political consequence) had become a critical issue: Mrs Thatcher even made it the subject of her Mansion House Speech one year just after this event.

The World Commission on Environment and Development aka The Brundtland Report published in 1987  sought to find away to reconcile increasing global demand, decreasing global stocks of natural resources and the unfair sharing of such resources in the Report: ‘Our Common Future‘.   This report defined FOUR preconditions for making sustainability a reality. One of these was that businesses should subscribe voluntarily to a culture of moral responsibility for the use of the planet’s resources which goes beyond the strict requirements of the law.  To what extent is this within the bounds of prevailing and highly-competitive business culture? Friedmanites will instantly cite his: ‘The business of business is business’ maxim: the law defines the ‘pitch’ upon which business can be played – if the law wants to change this because society considers it to be important, then fine, but until then business can do what it wants on the legal pitch and should not be told to do more (i.e. to deny itself the opportunity to occupy part of the legal ‘pitch’). Friedman went further, suggesting that when businesses do not take on this extra moral responsibility they are still, in fact, being moral and socially responsible in that they are: creating and sustaining jobs; paying VAT and taxes on profits; training the workforce to a higher level; helping produce a ‘multiplier effect’; saving the state unemployment benefit costs and thus contributing significantly to society at large.  In such a type of business culture Brundtland’s additional moral responsibility to go beyond the confines of the law clearly has no role. It might even be deleterious in the sense that it could distract the business from its primary role.  But if business doesn’t adopt such a culture of voluntary responsibility, then one of the four pillars of sustainability has fallen… [If you want to learn about the other three: read ‘Our Common Future’ / ‘Notre Avenir à Tous’in your own language].

The other three key preconditions for sustainability according to Brundtland were:

• The gap between the rich and poor nations should be reduced
• Those in the richer nations should take the lead by living within the planet’s ecological means
• The world, its nations and its peoples should take a long term view.

Since then of course, we have had the famous Rio Summit of nations in 1992 which pledged to take on board this desperate need for action in support of the principles and practices of sustainability.  There have been successive summits, but after 25 years, the question is the same as for the Climate Change Panel (COP) – are we making enough progress or are we falling behind???

To help you, let’s look at climate for a minute – are we living within its means to support and protect us?

Climate Change Performance Index 2015. This is where the nations of the world monitor their progress against the targets to which they have all ‘signed up’. There are some surprises here.

 http://germanwatch.org/en/download/10407.pdf

• Scoring above 70% on the index: the TOP THREE: Denmark, Sweden and the UK (all N.European)
• France & Switzerland 64 / 65% (W. European)
• Poland & Bulgaria 54% (E. Europe)
• USA 52%, China 51%
• Japan, S.Korea, Malaysia, Singapore,  44% – 47% ( Far East / SE Asia)
• Australia 35% (Oceania)
• Saudi Arabia 24% (Middle East)

Such statistics seem to suggest that there may well be strong national / macro-regional cultural (as well as economic & political) reasons why climate change (the ultimate feature of sustainability, surely) compliance rates vary so much.  Unless we can strive to understand this and address it we can hardly call the approach a globally concerted effort to save the planet.

YOUR TASK.

Given the above information and links which I hope will serve to get you started:

Test Brundtland’s FOUR preconditions for sustainability (see above).

Take each term in turn and analyse our personal, business, societal and governmental activity and performance: to what extent are we in line with Brundtland’s conditions.  Where are the inhibitors at business, societal and governmental levels (we treated the individual earlier).

Work in teams or in pairs on the research, bring your findings to class for a plenary session.