Sustainability

Empty Rhetoric or a Bad Idea?

One year Santa Clara University, where I at the time taught, sent the faculty an email urging them to introduce sustainability into one of their classes. I responded by asking if it was all right if I argued against sustainability in mine and suggesting that a program which consisted entirely of presentations on one side of an issue looked more like propaganda than education.

To the credit of the people who received my response, their response was not to tell me to shut up but to offer me a time slot in their program to present my views. I did so, with the title I have used for this post. The audience was tiny — so far as I could judge, the talks were mostly attended by the classes of the professors giving them, and I did not tell my classes to attend mine — but friendly. I recorded the talk and webbed it, along with the powerpoints I used.

The Argument

A quick search of the university’s web site failed to produce any clear definition of sustainability so I started with an interpretation based on the word itself and how I saw it being used — that it means doing things in such a way that you could continue doing them that way forever. If so, the idea that sustainability is an essential, even an important, goal strikes me as indefensible.

To see why, imagine what it would have meant c. 1900. The university existed. None of its students or faculty had automobiles. Many, presumably, had horses. Sustainability would have included assuring a sufficient supply of pasture land for all those horses into the indefinite future. It might have included assuring a sufficient supply of firewood for heating buildings. It would have meant making preparations for a future that was not going to happen.

The same is true today. Making sure we can continue our present activities into the indefinite future makes sense only if we believe that we will be doing those things into the indefinite future. Judged by what we have seen in the past and can guess about the future, that is unlikely. We do not know what the world of forty or fifty years hence will be like but it is very unlikely that we will be doing the same things in the same way and requiring the same resources to do them with.

When  I offered arguments along these lines on my blog, one commenter responded by informing me that:

The generally accepted definition comes from the Brundtland Report, which defines sustainable development as: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

There are two problems with this definition. The first is that implementing it requires us to predict what the future will be like in order to know what the needs of future generations will be. Consider two examples:

1. The cost of solar power has been falling. If that fall continues, in another couple of decades fossil fuels will no longer be needed for most of their current purposes since solar will be a less expensive alternative. If so, sustainability does not require us to conserve fossil fuels.

2. A central worry of environmentalists for at least the past sixty years has been population increase. If that is going to be the chief threat to the needs of future generations then sustainability requires us to keep birth rates down. A current worry in developed countries is population collapse, birth rates in many being now well below replacement; with the economic development of large parts of the third world that problem might well spread to them. Sustainability may require us to keep population growth up in order to protect future generations from the dangers of population collapse and the associated aging of their populations.

It is easy enough to think of other examples. Generalizing the point, "sustainability" becomes an argument against whatever policies one disapproves of, in favor of whatever policies one approves of, and adds nothing beyond a rhetorical club with which partisans can beat on those who disagree with them.

There is a second and related problem with the definition: whether it is to be defined by individual effects or net effects. If a particular policy makes potable water less available to future generations, with the result that many of them get drinking water in bottles rather than from the tap, but also makes future generations enough richer to more than pay the cost of that bottled water, is that policy consistent with sustainability?

Or consider the issue of global warming. Assume that it can be slowed or prevented, but at the cost of slowing the development of much of the world. To make the point more precise, suppose that global warming imposes an average cost on future generations of 10 utiles (or whatever unit you prefer to use to measure the ability of future generations to meet their own needs), but the policies that prevent it impose a cost of 20. Is permitting global warming sustainable? Is preventing it?

If we define sustainability in terms of individual effects, treating as unsustainable anything which makes future generations less able to meet any one of their needs, there may be no policies at all that are sustainable. Every barrel of oil or ton of coal that we consume is oil or coal that will not be available to our descendants. If, more plausibly, we define it in terms of net effects, then the demand for sustainability turns into the demand that we not follow policies that make future generations worse off than the present generation.

What policies make future generations better or worse off is one of the things people who argue about policy disagree about. It was obvious to a large number of intelligent and thoughtful people early in the past century that socialism made people better off; it is obvious to most such people now that it had the opposite effect. Similarly with current arguments over almost anything, from gay marriage to genetically engineered crops. "Sustainability" again becomes an argument for both sides, each interpreting it by its view of the consequences of the policies it supports or opposes.

Not only does the requirement of sustainability add nothing useful to the conversation, it takes something away. It implies that the one essential requirement is making sure our descendants are as well off as we are, that whether they end up better off than we are, as we are better off than our ancestors, is relatively unimportant. That impoverishes any serious discussion of policies that affect future generations.

A final problem with the definition is the use of the word “need.” It sounds as though it is describing something specific — I need X and Y but not Z — but it doesn’t. The important questions are of more or less, better or worse, not whether or not we meet the needs of future generations,¹ as becomes clear if you try to specify exactly what the needs of future generations are.

I am grateful to the commenter for providing me with a definition, but it did not alter my conclusion. To regard sustainability as a useful and important goal is indefensible.

1. I discuss the point at greater length in Chapter 9 of The Machinery of Freedom.