Strongly Sustainable Societies

Organising Human Activities on a Hot and Full Earth

Karl Johan Bonnedahl, Pasi Heikkurinen, Karl Johan Bonnedahl, Pasi Heikkurinen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351173629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

The response of the international community to the pressing socio-ecological problems has been framed around the concept of 'sustainable development'. The ecological pressure, however, has continued to rise and mainstream sustainability discourse has proven to be problematic. It contains an instrumental view of the world, a strong focus on technological solutions, and the premise that natural and human-made 'capitals' are substitutable. This trajectory, which is referred to as 'weak sustainability', reproduces inequalities, denies intrinsic values in nature, and jeopardises the wellbeing of humans as well as other beings.

Based on the assumptions of strong sustainability, this edited book presents practical and theoretical alternatives to today's unsustainable societies. It investigates and advances pathways for humanity that are ecologically realistic, ethically inclusive, and receptive to the task's magnitude and urgency. The book challenges the traditional anthropocentric ethos and ontology, economic growth-dogma, and programmes of ecological modernisation. It discusses options with examples on different levels of analysis, from the individual to the global, addressing the economic system, key sectors of society, alternative lifestyles, and experiences of local communities.

Examining key topics including human–nature relations and wealth and justice, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental and development studies, ecological economics, environmental governance and policy, sustainable business, and sustainability science.

1
The Case for Strong Sustainability

Karl Johan Bonnedahl and Pasi Heikkurinen

The Earth, increasingly hot and full

This book is written after three decades of global policy and discourse on sustainable development (SD). Regrettably, these decades did not meet the iconic Brundtland Report’s call to display ‘environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by the year 2000 and beyond’ (WCED, 1987: Chairman’s foreword). Instead, humanity’s combined efforts have made an already strained Earth even hotter and fuller.

Not only has the atmospheric level of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, risen sharply due to human activities, but even its growth rate has been increasing (NOAA, 2018). The level is now the highest in at least 800,000 years (Scripps, 2018; Tripati, Roberts, and Eagle, 2009), and it is approximately 50% above the pre-industrial average of the Holocene (Steffen, Grinewald, Crutzen, and McNeill, 2011). As a response to these anthropogenic emissions, the Paris agreement recognised ‘that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet’ (UNFCCC, 2015, p. 1), using ‘urgent’ or ‘urgency’ five times in its first section. Even this relatively successful attempt to approach climate change is, however, very inadequate. It was built on voluntary commitments, so-called nationally determined contributions. These notyet-proven promises were admitted to stay far below the real reductions needed in order to keep estimated increases of global average temperature at a level where planetary changes and risks, by much less certain estimates, were expected to be manageable (less than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels). Leading climate researchers therefore point at ‘political short-termism’; they declare that ‘alarming inconsistencies remain between science-based targets and national commitments’, and they propose rapid scaling up of CO ₂ removal by technical means, so-called carbon capture and storage (CCS) (Rockström et al., 2017, p. 1269).

Concerning the second term in the book sub-title’s description of the state the Earth is in, we follow Daly’s (2005) use of ‘full’ to signify the global expansion and dominance of humans and human activities, which on a steady rise clearly crowd out other species and make spaces unaffected by human activities rare (Gallagher and Carpenter, 1997). From an anthropocentric perspective, this is often addressed as a problem of biodiversity loss, which has undesired consequences on human societies, e.g. in terms of lost pollination, decreased possibilities to produce medicine, and loss of recreational values (Cardinale et al., 2012). Caused by humans via habitat loss and climate change, another description is one of the emerging sixth mass extinction of species (Barnosky et al., 2011; Wake and Vredenburg, 2008; WWF, 2016). Further, human domination on Earth can also be understood through comparing the biomass of different species. Even if we would imagine sustainable lifestyles, this impacts on the use of land, energy and other planetary resources. By the year of 2000, the total biomass of humans and our domesticated animals – mainly animals that we subordinate into our food production systems – was estimated to be more than thirty times greater than the total biomass of all wild terrestrial mammals (Smil, 2011, p. 618).

While lifestyles of the latter, wild animals, would come as close as we can get in order to describe ‘sustainable’ ones, i.e. the lives in approximate balance with surrounding biophysical circumstances (Bonnedahl and Caramujo, 2018), the imprint of the human species is clearly on a very different level, far beyond what would be needed only for biological reasons (Krausmann et al., 2013; Schramski, Gattie, and Brown, 2015; Steffen et al., 2011; Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney, and Ludwig, 2015a; Vitousek, Mooney, Lubchenco, and Melillo, 1997). Through the commonly used measure of ecological footprint, we can say that an average human uses almost three hectares of the planet’s biocapacity, which is problematic due to the availability of much less than two per human (WWF, 2016). The numbers, of course, get even more dramatic when data from the rich Northern hemisphere and the global consuming class is analysed. This imbalance between the human use of resources and their availability has increased over time, and space and resources accessible for other species than our own, and for future humans, has become smaller (Schramski et al., 2015).

Addressing the massive human imprint on the globe, McKibben (1989) declared ‘the end of nature’ already at the infancy of the sustainable development discourse. Two years earlier, the Brundtland Report had recognised that ‘sustainable development can only be pursued if population size and growth are in harmony with the changing productive potential of the ecosystem’ (WCED, 1987: Overview, §29). Human population, however, increased by 50% over the following thirty years (UN, 2015b), and the annual nominal increase, mentioned as problematic in the report, remains approximately the same when this book is written: 80 million people (WCED, 1987: Chapter 4, §1; UN, 2015b).

Any optimistic observer focusing on the falling relative growth rates, and a flattening of the curve at its top (see Figure 1.1), still has to accept the significant rise in real numbers (80 million per year means more than 200,000 per day; 9,000 per hour), and the massive aggregate impact that a population would have already at levels much lower than today’s. In 1970, around the time when humanity’s total ecological footprint was turning into overshoot (passing the Planet’s regenerative capacity, and in that sense moving the human collective into a definite and deteriorating unsustainable state), the global population was close to 3.7 billion (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, and Behrens, 1972; Meadows, Meadows, and Randers, 2002). This number had doubled in 2015, the year of both the Paris agreement and the 2030 Agenda (GFN, 2018; UN, 2015a; 2015b). Maybe as a coincidence, just at the beginning of the overshoot, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a pioneering sense-maker in economics, proposed that the question regarding how many people the Planet could host was not the interesting one: What we should ask is for how long the Planet could support any given global population (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971/1993, p. 83).

Figure 1.1 Global human population, year 0–2100 (UN 1999, 2015b; medium fertility variant projections). It is estimated that the first billion was reached in 1804, no. 2 in 1927, no. 3 in 1960, no. 4 in 1974, no. 5 in 1987, no. 6 in 1999 and no. 7 in 2011. The projection for 2030 is 8.5 billion.

The basis for his analysis was one that still is key in the discussion on ‘weak’ vs. ‘strong’ sustainability. According to the latter, which holds the main empirical support until now, a higher level of economic development translates to a higher rate of transformation of nature’s resources; a depletion or qualitative degeneration of the so-called ‘natural capital’. And

[t]he upshot is clear. Every time we produce a Cadillac, we irrevocably destroy an amount of low entropy that could otherwise be used for producing a plow or a spade. In other words, every time we produce a Cadillac, we do it at the cost of decreasing the number of human lives in the future.

(Georgescu-Roegen, 1971/1993, p. 85)

The aggregate overconsumption of human societies is not only a matter of transgressing a point where ecological footprint is estimated to equal available biophysical capacity. It should be noticed that the journey towards that point, as well as towards situations where also other environmental indicators turn red, is possible only for a relatively limited time. Industrialisation, which combined the science, technology and fossil energy sources, has made it possible, and as the term reveals, overconsumption took off during ‘the Great Acceleration’; a period which also defines the beginning of the Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2015a). This new epoch of human dominance is certainly radical in impact but very marginal in time, soon becoming a short chapter in the geological history of Earth. As one of the major factors determining human consumption of planetary resources, population growth is illustrated in Figure 1.1.

Shaking and shifting the so favourable Holocene period for earthbound life, recent and present human societies are consuming to the detriment of other systems, species and individuals. The excessive wealth of parts of the human population during this marginal period of Earth’s history is in the most explicit way made possible by the use of Earth’s stocks, not least the fossil sources of energy, but also other ‘non-renewable’ sources needed to produce human wealth (see Salminen and Vadén, 2015). Further, wealth is dependent on the unsustainable and ethically careless use of ‘renewable resources’; the exploitation and domestication of other species, and by overharvesting of other systems, such as the soils, the forests and the seas. In sharp contrast to the very late and modest reactions of policymakers and business leaders, or wealthy societies at large, a delay in the detrimental effect of our consumption can be expected, such as regarding the carbon sink functions of the oceans, land and atmosphere. Here, as the largest share of the human footprint can be attributed to ecosystem capacity that must deal with the extreme production of greenhouse gases, we also see the link between how human societies heat and fill the Earth.

Causes and responsibilities are, however, far from evenly distributed over the global human population. Rather, they mirror the distribution of wealth. Lifestyles are closely related to income, and so is the use of resources and environmental impact (Ulvila and Wilen, 2017). In high-income countries, the average per capita ecological footprint is roughly six times higher than that in low-income countries (W WF, 2016). Differences within countries and between sociodemographic segments are even greater, which has been recognised by research, e.g. illuminating climate justice (Chancel and Piketty, 2015). As climate change is mainly a result of cumulative build-up of atmospheric greenhouse gases over time, it is also worth considering the historical responsibility. While developing countries are catching up in this respect (which illustrates the deeply problematic term ‘development’), China’s and India’s cumulative shares 1850–2002 were only half of their annual share of global emissions at the end of the same period (Baumert, Herzog, and Pershing, 2005, p. 31). The cumulative shares of these two present population giants only summed up to 10% of total emissions, in contrast to the 55% of U.S. and EU combined (Baumert et al., 2005). Much of the sustainability problems that we have today can thus be framed as problems of overconsumption, of lifestyles, and even of high incomes: The problems of wealth.

Moving from wealth to wellbeing

While problems of poverty are central for sustainable development discourse as regards the present human population, the problems of wealth are not. Rather, the ‘development’ part of the conceptual SD pair remains firmly attached to growing wealth and to the expansion of any society’s economic activities, irrespective of their present level. The absurdity of the idea of infinite expansion in a ‘sustainable way’ does not hinder serious advocates of sustainable development to, repeatedly, present such claims. These preposterous claims manifest, for example, in the explicit and persistent growth goals, which can be found in the leading international policy documents, from the Brundtland Report to the UN 2030 Agenda (W CED, 1987; UN, 1992, 2015a).

Some of the attraction of this oxymoronic agenda of ‘sustainable growth’ can be explained by the careless use of terminology, obscuring, not least, important differences between wealth, welfare and wellbeing (Sanne, 2007). Without having basic clarity and preciseness in communication, attempts for SD could lead anywhere, but as the mainstream SD discourse is constructed, it consolidates key dimensions within present unsustainable societies (Bonnedahl and Eriksson, 2011). While we delve into this later, we will see problems with other related and often employed concepts, and a need for SD terminology that recognises values also from non-anthropocentric perspectives. For this purpose, ‘wellbeing in coexistence’ is proposed as a new key term for strongly sustainable societies. In Table 1.1, this concept is contrasted to the three related concepts mentioned previously, with examples given.

Table 1.1 Basic terminology for sustainable development (a)

Concept	Connotation	Application
Wealth	Private possessions, economic standing; summative aggregation from individual humans to societal level	Measured through economic units; money, GDP
Welfare	Features and service that enable functioning societies and good life with a societal focus (individual humans as users)	Education, health service
Wellbeing	Subjective perception of life quality by individual humans	Happiness
Wellbeing in coexistence	Human life quality with respect for all life of other actors, species and systems over time	Integrity of individuals and species; resilience of systems

Making these distinctions, we can see that SD must aim further than wealth, to which the qualitatively blind measure of growth mainly relates. Actually, any real attempt to address SD would need to recognise the irrelevance of aggregate quantitative growth as a goal for human societies, as well as its impossibility over time. While the promotion of wellbeing would be the relevant aim from an anthropocentric point of view, such attempts cannot be sustainable in an ecological sense if we do not at ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The case for strong sustainability
• PART I Roots of unsustainability
• PART II Ethical foundations
• PART III Public policy and urbanisation
• PART IV Business management and investment
• PART V Identity, needs, and wellbeing
• PART VI Reconnect to the Earth
• PART VII Conclusion
• Index