The Sustainability Mirage

Illusion and Reality in the Coming War on Climate Change

John Michael Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136551956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Développement durable

This thoughtful and original study throws important critical light on the dominant orthodoxies about sustainable development, and suggests a radically new direction. Foster argues compellingly that present approaches embody floating standards and bad faith, trapping societies into inaction. I suspect this is a seminal piece of work.
Professor Robin Grove-White, former Chair of Greenpeace UK

We all have a nagging concern that what international corporations and governments term 'sustainable' is not sustainable at all. John Fosters clear and beautifully written text shows the deep flaws in current approaches and proposes a reassessment of what true sustainability really implies.
Chris Goodall, Chair of Dynmark International and author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life

This comprehensive and yet very readable book will go a long way towards puncturing some of the glib environmentalisms of our moment, and perhaps towards helping us imagine deeper and more thoroughgoing alternatives that might actually work!
Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy and The End of Nature

'Brilliantly and ironically written, this book shades a bright light on most foggy areas around the concept of sustainability. Those fastidious obscure points do not fit properly in the reassuring technical solutions to Climate Change. Foster puts a name on those shapeless shadows that inevitably induce the sensation of something being wrong.'
Italian Insider

Sustainable development thinking got environmental issues onto the agenda but it may now be stopping us from taking serious action on climate change and other crucial planetary issues.

Sustainable developments attempted deal between present and future will always collapse under the pressure of now because the needs of the present always win out. Inevitably, this means movable targets and action that will always fall short of what we need. Ultimately, sustainable development is the pursuit of a mirage, the politics of never getting there.

To escape the illusion, we must break through to a new way of understanding sustainability by focusing on the deep needs of the present, not slippery obligations to the future. Rising to the carbon challenge now, not trying to micro-manage the longer term. Looking to the science for orders of magnitude and direction, not a gameplan. Harnessing the short-term dynamics of capitalism to the cause of learning our way forward.

This book outlines an alternative to the mainstream and offers the kind of bold new thinking on energy usage, governance, education and the role of enterprise that we need to win the coming war on climate change.

PART I

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT?

If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. – George Orwell

1

The Sustainability Horizon

With the publication of the Stern Report in 2006, we entered stirring times for sustainability. Any set of policy recommendations which manages to unite Shell UK, the TUC, Friends of the Earth and the Treasury in its favour must have a very great deal going for it. And indeed, there does seem to have been a sudden surge of interest in and concern about these issues – at least as far as they are represented by the need to mitigate or adapt to climate change. Probably now for the first time, there is the chance of real public recognition of global warming as an urgent problem, and of hard-nosed political work to address it. It helps, of course, that it is a Treasury economist who is now recommending action, rather than the merely academic and ‘green’ economists who have been recommending it for about two decades. The Report’s establishment pedigree, in fact, will surely give a major impetus to what has now become the standard prescription on climate change.

Just to summarize that prescription: governments rely on scientific prediction to steer their economies towards a low-carbon future, more or less directively depending on the particular national and sectoral circumstances. To this end they use a complex mixture of taxation, regulation and public investment in pursuit of a wide range of specific sustainability standards and targets. Corporations meanwhile recognize the business case for responding positively, raise their sights (with some government support) to the longer term and shift profitably into the new range of opportunities available. In the stark new light of realism both about climate trends and about the inevitably global-capitalist context for action, what else could we do? How could that possibly not be the way we must now go?

That kind of question is a warning sign that we may be in thrall to one particular way of looking at things. It is always a public service to try and think the unthinkable, even if all it achieves is to bring the grounds of our assumptions into view so that we can re-endorse them. But, of course, it sometimes achieves more than that – a kind of mental liberation, which can take us onwards in unforeseen directions. And thinking the unthinkable is an especially important public service to perform in this particular context. If the standard prescription for combating global warming were indeed workable, we might still just have time to implement it before things start to run potentially devastatingly out of control. But what we certainly don’t have time for is to find out ten or fifteen years down the line that it was never going to work.

I want to argue in this book that unless we change our approach there is a very real chance of our finding out precisely that. Our standard model of sustainability, cashed out for policy purposes as sustainable development, is so far from being the unchallengeable way forward that it could now be about to mislead us dangerously, if not terminally.

The dominance of sustainable development

That said, the fact that we are where we are is a triumph for the environmental movement, from its more-or-less standing start forty years ago, and the sustainable development idea has been a centrally important aspect of this achievement. The mainstreaming of ecological awareness and concern has been achieved in an extraordinarily short time for such a huge shift in the conventional wisdom. Significant changes in the overall sense that societies make of themselves have tended in the past to occur very slowly and patchily, with the transition from a few isolated voices to a common consensus taking centuries. Certainly, with improving communications and growing economic integration, the pace of cultural and conceptual change has been speeding up, as we can see if we think in turn, for instance, of the Christianization of Europe, the Renaissance, and then the French, Industrial and scientific revolutions. But it is still very striking how swiftly – indeed, in historical terms, how precipitately – the ‘green turn’ has been promoted from the fringes to the centre of human affairs, and how readily an accommodating discourse has been found for it. The emergence of sustainable development thinking in response to the environmental crisis has been a phenomenon of utterly unprecedented rapidity.

There is no need here for a full historical account of the process by which this idea has established itself; but it is worth noting the principal milestones, if only to register the speed of our passage. Awareness of how attitudes and behaviour towards the non-human natural world shape our humanity is indeed a Western cultural inheritance going back to the Romantic movement and beyond. Influential traditions of thought about the way our relations to nature bore on our economic life (represented classically by Ruskin and Morris in England and Thoreau in America) then flowed on through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a consequence of this pre-history, when the conceptual seeds of sustainability discourse were sown by the early scientific environmentalism of Carson, Commoner and others in the 1960s and 1970s, they found a fertile soil principally in the US and Western Europe. As the evidence mounted that human impacts on the rest of the biosphere were causing trouble, these seeds began to sprout across the globe. Organizations like the United Nations took an interest, with a particular growth spurt coming from the UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. The term ‘sustainable development’ itself, as a policy idea for putting our newly perceived ecological responsibilities into practice, first achieved prominence in the World Conservation Strategy published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 1980. It then moved to centre stage in 1987 with Our Common Future, the report of the UN-sponsored Brundtland Commission, whence it served as the organizing principle of a further UN conference, this time on ‘Environment and Development’, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. As central to the agreements signed there (in particular, the Agenda 21 action programme), the sustainable development idea has since informed a huge and burgeoning volume of activity by central and local governments, non-governmental organizations, development agencies, community groups, business firms – and, of course, academics.

There are a range of definitions of the idea which has thus more-or-less burst upon the world, but what matters here is less definition than the broad topography of the sustainable development concept. The main features of this are twofold. In the first place there is recognition of a duty to strike some sort of balance between the present and future availability of natural resources for the human project. In the second place, there is the assumption that we can find ways of measuring our success or failure in striking that balance, such that policymaking can be designed to ensure the discharge of our future-respecting duty across society as a whole.

Thus, accepting a sustainability constraint on (especially) our economic activities means trying to work within the requirement that henceforth they must not derogate from the powers of the biosphere to regenerate resources and support for their continuance at an equivalent level, or for that of acceptable successor activities. The harvesting of a renewable natural resource, such as a fishery, for instance, will be conducted sustainably in the sense of this constraint when the annual catch leaves a sufficiently numerous breeding population in the sea for the stock to regenerate itself so that it can support the same level of take in the following season, and so on indefinitely. The activity of using a non-renewable resource, such as a fossil fuel, obviously cannot itself be sustainable in precisely the same way; but it can still be part of a sustainable energy economy, provided that we do not simply use up the coal or oil regardlessly, but invest enough of the revenues to build up alternative, renewable energy sources which can be phased in as the fossil fuels phase out in order to meet an agreed level of continuing energy demand indefinitely. (This is part of the point of the clause about ‘acceptable successor activities’.) Similar considerations apply where the resource on which an activity draws is the capacity of natural systems to absorb its associated discharges, for example of nitrates or greenhouse gases to water or the atmosphere respectively. Such activities are sustainable when they are structured to operate on a permanent basis within these naturally self-regenerating absorptive capacities (which will often, because of ecosystemic interdependence, mean those of a very wide range of interconnected environmental media).

Within the sustainable development framework this sustainability constraint is formulated as applying specifically to our pursuit of ‘development’ – that is, to collective actions and policies designed to achieve present or short- to medium-term improvements in human welfare. In perhaps the best-known version of this, due to the Brundtland Report, we are to go on trying to meet present needs, but only in ways which do not jeopardize the ability of future human generations to meet their own needs. Historically, this formulation, from a large UN Commission, represented a compromise between its members from the poorer South, who didn’t want the roll-out of economic development abandoned, and those from the rich North who had the luxury of beginning to appreciate its downsides. The terms of this compromise were expressed, however, as the recognition of a constraint from the future. Overtly, this rests on what looks like a straightforward requirement of fairness. The needs of future peoples will be no less needs than ours are, so how could the mere fact that we are around now, and they are not, justify our behaving in ways which have the effect of privileging ours over theirs? More basically, though, some such constraint seems to be implicit in the idea of development itself. Once our most pressing survival needs are met, the aspiration to improve the human condition seems peculiarly empty unless the improvements are such as we can be confident of handing on to our children, and can hope that they will be able to hand on in turn to theirs.

The intended practicality of the constraint is the other crucial aspect of the framework. A requirement of fairness to futurity is merely aspirational unless we can derive from it some kind of criterion, or set of criteria, for adjusting the scope and methods of present development in the light of its anticipated ecological as well as its economic and social consequences.

Thus, for example, the Sustainable Development Strategy of the UK Government, Securing the Future, expresses these criteria in terms of two broad objectives or directing principles, neither of which is supposed to be sacrificed to the other in the framing of particular policies, plans and programmes. These objectives are, respectively, ‘living within environmental limits’ and ‘ensuring a strong, healthy and just society’. The former requires us to identify and respect those limits to present activity implicit in preserving natural resources and ecosystem functions unimpaired for ourselves and future generations; the latter links this process to the meeting of present and future human needs for wellbeing, equality of opportunity and social cohesion. The strategy is informed by the confident expectation that sustainability criteria cashed out in these terms and conforming to these broad objectives can be operationalized through the kind of economic and social management machinery available to modern democratic governments. It endorses three further, contributory principles for the use of this machinery: achieving a sustainable economy (combining prosperity and environmental efficiency), promoting good governance through public engagement and participation, and using sound science in a responsibly precautionary way.

The assumption in all this is that policies, laws and regulations carrying broad popular endorsement and steered by normal bureaucratic regimes, increasingly through the use of agreed measures and indicators scientifically grounded and objectively applied, can address the problems of adjustment now recognized. The construction of such a legal and regulatory framework is now a major concern of both local and national policymakers, its implementation a growing task of bureaucracies, and working within it an increasingly important feature in the calculations of business – especially, but by no means exclusively, in the West and North of the world. Meanwhile, vigorous agitation around the multiple pressure points for change provided by this emerging framework is carried on by a whole new layer of non-governmental agencies, citizen and voluntary activity worldwide.

In summary, therefore: over the course of the past half-century, we have seen the discourse of sustainable development achieve worldwide recognition and claim a growing moral and political authority. Although this process had been prepared for by deep cultural shifts in the post-Darwinian period – away from transcendental religious accounts of the world and towards a naturalistic view of humanity and a general outlook thoroughly informed by science – it has nevertheless achieved itself with historically startling swiftness. Sustainable development now defines the sustainability horizon, the framing for collective concern about the longer-term global future. It shapes both the arena and the direction of aspiration – a trajectory into the distance which humanity must now deliberately pursue if it wants to avoid the dangers of resource depletion, ecosystem damage and, especially, climate change.

This has been, by any standards, a major achievement of political resourcefulness and international collaboration – perhaps the greatest since the establishment of the UN itself, and not even (as in that case) driven by the direct stress of world war. It is also in itself challengingly unprecedented. Never before have we been faced with having to devise a global regime for patterns of human life and work reflecting the real biogeophysical constraints under which we have now to operate as a natural species. Never before have we had to think of ourselves in that way, as a specific form of life with a global habitat and a mind-boggling technical reach. And yet we seem to be rising to the challenge. So the coming of sustainable development might seem to give grounds for real optimism. It ought surely to be encouraging that, even at this global level, we can recognize a common danger and move so comparatively swiftly to address it.

But – and it is a huge ‘but’ – such optimism is only well founded if the response really addresses the danger. If the sustainable development picture of what sustainability is about and how we should pursue it actually offers a deeply misleading model of our motivations and our understanding of the relations between present and future, the prospect is very much less reassuring. The argument I am going to develop through the book is that this is indeed the case. The sustainable development model provided a compelling in-principle picture of what was going wrong with the unbridled drive for technological progress. But because of its flawed structure, that model has an inherent liability to undercut and undermine itself when translated into a framework for practical action. Policy efforts deployed within this framework to address the now-recognized urgent problems of climate change (above all) could well therefore be frustrated by the inherent defects of the model on which they are being understood and defended.

Why, though, should we suspect sustainable development in that way? Why should we even incline to think of it as a structurally deficient policy model? One can dislike its economistic picture of the issues, and many people with green concerns have done so. Such concerns can spring from a love of the natural world and a shame at humans’ treatment of it which seem far away from the sustainable development language of resource usage and the management of natural capital – although undoubtedly having learnt that language was what got Greens listened to in the mainstream. But structural deficiency is much more than just the fact of an alienating discourse. What might prompt us to allege it?

I want to start from two major areas of concern which even people firmly committed to the sustainable development project will readily acknowledge. These are, firstly, the yawning gap between words and actions, between rhetoric and practice, in the field of sustainability politics; and secondly, the problematic compatibility of sustainable economies with a globally triumphant capitalism. I shall suggest that both these concerns, taken seriously, push us towards radically questioning the standard model.

The reality gap

The gap which has already opened up between the mainstream political rhetoric of sustainable development and the reality of change on the ground is very wide. It is indeed scandalously wide, if we recall what is at stake and how much warning people and governments have now had. After all, the Stern Report, while the most authoritative, is by no means the first set of injunctions from official sources about the need to alter collective and individual behaviour if lethal environmental damage is to be averted. UK governments since the later 1980s have actually been getting quite good at producing such injunctions. The quickest way to indicate the extent of the reality gap, in fact, is to look at what Securing the Future, the official UK Sustainable Development Strategy last updated in 2005, would actually commit us to if taken seriously, and compare it with what is happening – or, very much more typically, not happening – in practice.

This UK Strategy is a fair test case. It is the upshot of a development process led by governments of two (somewhat) different political complexions, extending over ten years or more and in its latter phases supported by extensive public consultation. In itself it is a comprehensive and well-argued document. Stripped to their essentials, the four ‘priorities for UK action’ identified by the Strategy are:

1 Sustainable consumption and production. The key here is ‘to break the link between economic growth and environmental degradation’.

2 Climate change and energy. A profound change in the way we generate and use energy, and in other activities that release [greenhouse] gases’ is recognized as necessary under this heading.

3 Natural resource protection and environmental enhancement. Acknowledging that natural resources are vital to our existence, the aim is simply ‘to ensure a decent environment for everyone’.

4 Sustainable communities. Embedding the principles of sustainable development at all levels will require communities to have ‘more power and say in decisions that affect them’.

No-one involved in pushing sustainability slowly towards political credibility over the last quarter-century could deny that having these things on the national agenda at least represents an offer to take the issues seriously.

The four priorities are of course closely interconnected. Consumption and production will be sustainable only to the extent that they minimize greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation, and only if communities have appropriate economic and social arrangements in place will such sustainable consumption and production be possible. So, taking all that interlinkage as read, what order of action (that is, broadly governmental action, though premised on appropriat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on notes
• Preface: Sustainability, Mirage and Reality
• Part I – What’s Wrong with Sustainable Development?
• Part II – Deep Sustainability
• Part III – Greening Our Luck
• Notes
• Index