Peak Everything (16 page)

The first known European use of
sustainability
(German:
Nachhaltigkeit)
occurred in 1712 in the book
Sylvicultura Oeconomica
by German forester and scientist Hanns Carl von Carlowitz. Later, French and English foresters adopted the practice of planting trees as a path to “sustained yield forestry.”

The term gained widespread usage after 1987, when the Brundtland Report of the World Commission on Environment and De-velopment defined
sustainable development
as development that “meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
²
This definition of sustainability has proven extremely influential, and is still widely used; nevertheless, it has been criticized for its failure to explicitly note the unsustainability of the use of non-renewable resources, and for its general disregard of the problem of population growth.
³

Also in the 1980s, Swedish oncologist Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt brought together leading Swedish scientists to develop a consensus on requirements for a sustainable society. In 1989 he formulated this consensus in four conditions for sustainability, which in turn became the basis for an organization, The Natural Step.
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Subsequently, 60 major Swedish corporations and 56 municipalities, as well as many businesses in other nations, pledged to abide by Natural Step conditions. The four conditions are as follows:

Seeing the need for an accounting or indicator scheme by which to measure sustainability, in 1992 Canadian ecologist William Rees introduced the concept of the ecological footprint, defined as the amount of land and water area a human population would hypothetically need in order to provide the resources required to support itself and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing technology.
⁵
Implicit in the scheme is the recognition that, for humanity to achieve sustainability, the total world population's footprint must be less than the total land/water area of the Earth. That footprint is currently calculated by the Footprint Network as being about 23 percent larger than what the planet can regenerate, indicating that humankind is to this extent operating in an unsustainable manner.

In a paper published in 1994 (and revised in 1998), physics professor Albert A. Bartlett offered 17 Laws of Sustainability, with which he sought to clarify the meaning of
sustainability
in terms of population and resource consumption.
⁶
Bartlett's criticisms of the careless use of the term, and his rigorous demonstration of the implications of continued growth, were important influences on the present author's efforts to define what is genuinely sustainable.

A truly comprehensive historical survey of the usage of the terms
sustainable
and
sustainability
is not feasible. A search of
Amazon.com
for
sustainability
(January 17, 2007) yielded nearly 25,000 hits — presumably indicating several thousand distinct titles containing the word.
Sustainable
yielded 62,000 hits, including books on sustainable leadership, communities, energy, design, construction, business, development, urban planning, tourism, and
so on. A search of journal articles on Google Scholar turned up 538,000 hits, indicating thousands of scholarly articles or references with the word
sustainability
in their titles. However, my own admittedly less-than-exhaustive acquaintance with the literature (informed, among other sources, by two books that offer an overview of the history of the concept of sustainability)
⁷
suggests that much, if not most of this immense body of publications repeats, or is based on, the definitions and conditions described above.

As a contribution to this ongoing refinement of the concept, I have formulated five axioms (self-evident truths) of sustainability. I have not introduced any fundamentally new notions in any of the axioms; my goal is simply to distill ideas that have been proposed and explored by others, and to put them into a form that is both more precise and easier to understand.

In formulating these axioms I endeavored to take into account previous definitions of sustainability, and also the most cogent criticisms of those definitions. My criteria were as follows:

Here are the axioms, each followed by a brief discussion:

I have named this axiom for Joseph Tainter, author of the classic study,
The Collapse of Complex Societies,
which demonstrates that collapse is a frequent if not universal fate of complex societies. He argues that collapse is directly related to declining returns on efforts to support growing levels of societal complexity with energy harvested from the environment. Jared Diamond's book
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
similarly makes the argument that collapse is the common destiny of societies that ignore resource constraints.
⁸

This axiom defines sustainability by the consequences of its absence, i.e., collapse. Tainter defines
collapse
as a reduction in social complexity — i.e., a contraction of society in terms of its population size, the sophistication of its technologies, the consumption rates of its people, and the diversity of its specialized social roles. Often, historically, collapse has meant a precipitous decline in population brought about by social chaos, warfare, disease, or famine. However, collapse can also occur more gradually over a period of many decades or even several centuries. There is also the theoretical possibility that a society could choose to “collapse” (i.e., reduce its complexity) in a controlled as well as gradual manner.

While it could be argued that a society can choose to change rather than collapse, the only choices that would prevent collapse would be either to cease using critical resources unsustainably or to find alternative resources.

A society that uses resources sustainably may collapse for other reasons, some beyond the society's control (an overwhelming natural disaster, or conquest by another, more militarily formidable and aggressive society, to name just two of many possibilities), so it cannot be said that a sustainable society is immune to collapse unless many more conditions for sustainability are specified than in this axiom. This first axiom focuses on resource consumption because that is a decisive, quantifiable, and, in principle, controllable determinant of a society's long-term survival.

The question of what constitutes sustainable or unsustainable use of resources is addressed in Axioms 3 and 4.

Critical resources are those essential to the maintenance of life and basic social functions, including (but not necessarily limited
to) water and the means and materials necessary to produce food and usable energy.

The
exception
and
limit to the exception
address the common argument of free-market economists that resources are infinitely substitutable, and that therefore modern market-driven societies need never face a depletion-led collapse, even if their consumption rates continue to escalate.
⁹
In some instances, substitutes for resources do become readily available and are even superior, as was the case in the mid-19
^th
century when kerosene from petroleum was substituted for whale oil as a fuel for lamps. In other cases, substitutes are inferior, as is the case with tar sands as a substitute for conventional petroleum, given that tar sands are less energy-dense, require more energy input for processing, and produce more carbon emissions. As time goes on, societies will tend first to exhaust substitutes that are superior and easy to get at, then those that are equivalent, and increasingly will have to rely on ever more inferior substitutes to replace depleting resources — unless rates of consumption are held in check (see Axioms 2-4).

I have named this axiom for Albert A. Bartlett because it is his First Law of Sustainability, reproduced verbatim (I found it impossible to improve upon).
¹⁰

The world has seen the human population grow for many decades and therefore this growth has obviously been sustained up to the present. How can we be sure that it cannot be sustained into the indefinite future? Simple arithmetic shows that even small rates of growth, if continued, add up to absurdly large — and plainly unsupportable — population sizes and rates of consumption. For example, a simple one percent rate of growth in the present human population (less than the actual current rate) would result in a doubling of population each 70 years. Thus in 2075, the Earth would be home to 13 billion humans; in 2145, 26 billion; and so on. By the year 3050, there would be one human per square meter of the Earth's land surface (including mountains and deserts).

Essentially the same thing is true with regards to consumption. Just one example: there are 330 million cubic miles of water on Earth and, while it is difficult to say just how much of that humans use annually (because many uses, such as fishing, are indirect), it would probably be fair to estimate that we use one million cubic miles. Let us assume that future humans will find a way to make all of the Earth's water usable, that human population stays as it is, but that per capita use of water grows one percent annually. By the year 2600 humans would be using every drop of water on the planet.

Renewable resources are exhaustible. Forests can be over-cut, resulting in barren landscapes and shortages of wood (as occurred in many parts of Europe in past centuries), and fish can be over-harvested, resulting in the extinction or near-extinction of many species (as is occurring today globally).

This axiom has been stated, in somewhat differing ways, by many economists and ecologists, and is the basis for “sustained yield forestry” (see above) and “maximum sustainable yield” fishery management. Efforts to refine this essential principle of sustainability are ongoing.
¹¹

The term “rate of natural replenishment” requires some discussion. The first clue that harvesting is proceeding at a rate greater than that of natural replenishment is the decline of the resource base. However, a resource may be declining for reasons other than over-harvesting; for example, a forest that is not being logged may be decimated by disease. Nevertheless, if the resource is declining, pursuit of the goal of sustainability requires that the rate of harvest be reduced, regardless of the cause. Sometimes harvests must drop dramatically, at a rate far greater than the rate of resource decline, so that the resource has time to recover. This has been the case with regard to whale and fish species that have been overharvested to the point of near exhaustion, and have required complete harvest moratoria in order to re-establish themselves — though in cases where the remaining breeding population is too small even this is not enough and the species cannot recover.

Axiom 3 is implied in the Natural Step's third condition.

No continuous rate of use of any non-renewable resource is sustainable. However, if the rate of use is declining at a rate greater than or equal to the rate of depletion, this can be said to be a sustainable situation in that society's dependence on the resource will be reduced to insignificance before the resource is exhausted.

This principle was first stated, in a more generalized and more mathematically rigorous form, by Albert A. Bartlett in his 1986 paper, “Sustained Availability: A Management Program for Non-Renewable

Resources.”
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The article's abstract notes: