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Chapter 1
Foundations
Sustainability and the requirements for getting there
Robert B. Gibson
Introduction
A diligent consumer arrives at a market looking to buy a couple of tomatoes. He checks out the available options and applies his usual tomato-choosing criteria: which tomatoes are local, organic, cheap, potentially tasty, and ripe but likely to last a few days? None has all of these qualities, so he considers what compromise he will regret least. He flirts briefly with going a few kilometres down the road to another market that may have a better selection, and decides against it. He picks from whatâs at hand, pays and departs. Maybe the process has taken two minutes, mostly to see whatâs available. A less deeply engaged tomato consumer follows. She is inclined to be satisfied with round and red, and chooses more quickly. But she then moves on and lingers thoughtfully over what fruit to buy for the grandchildren.
Both shoppers have compared alternatives and made decisions based in part on concern for the future wellbeing of others as well as themselves. They had at least a rough idea of the qualities to be sought and maybe they had to make a trade-off decision. If we scale that common practice up a few notches, add some guidance about key considerations, and ensure that the concern for wellbeing extends to future generations, we are comfortably in the world of sustainability assessment applications and opportunities.
An essentially simple notion underlies sustainability assessment. It is to enhance our prospects for lasting wellbeing, mostly by introducing a little more rigour, humility and foresight in our decision making. A few basic steps are required. We need to take care in considering our situations and aspirations, and in identifying and comparing our options and their implications. Trying to recognize all the key factors affecting progress towards desirable futures is important. So is accepting that there is much we do not understand and cannot predict. While we may not often do these things well, the concept is familiar and agreeable. Virtually everyone is in favour of lasting wellbeing and many of our decisions, probably most of our better decisions, reflect some effort to act on that preference.
In any given day, each of us makes a multitude of conscious choices that involve seeking preferable future results. Buying tomatoes and fruit is a minor example. The parent choosing when to intervene in a squabble among the children is considering consequences beyond the moment. So are gardeners selecting seeds, neighbours arranging to share tools, and employees deciding whether or not to challenge the latest edict from the boss. Some of these choices may be more or less habitual or otherwise made without much immediate evidence of anticipatory thinking. But even these may be built on years of deliberation, and to some extent reflect what each chooser has picked up so far in a life of learning and evaluating situations, aspirations, options and implications. That we can learn, look ahead and make conscious decisions to enhance prospects for lasting wellbeing is among the distinguishing characteristics of our species. Sustainability assessment is about improving our performance in being what we are and doing what we do.
Serious sustainability assessment applications, however, are not simple. While the basic steps and requirements are reasonably straightforward, the world in which they are to be applied is infinitely complex. All of the key considerations â what we most need for lasting wellbeing, what opportunities are available and what perils loom â depend on a host of factors that interact at many scales, differ from place to place and change from one day to the next. What we do and do not understand about all this also shifts.
Such complexities are not new. They have characterized our world through all of human biological and cultural evolution. For millennia in this richly difficult world, we have been seeking lasting wellbeing and attempting to apply suitably thoughtful approaches to decision making. What we are examining in this chapter and this book is only the latest phase of work long in progress.
Admittedly, sustainability assessment has become in some ways increasingly challenging. Sustainability assessment applications today must address global as well as local and regional issues. The pursuit of lasting wellbeing now faces problems and possibilities that affect planetary as well as community foundations for desirable futures, and the issues and response options at the large and small scales are fully entwined. Moreover, sustainability assessment applications themselves add to the dynamics. They are agents of big change. While their role is fundamentally positive, it is also subversive. It involves reversing unsustainable trends by identifying and favouring alternatives to the conventional undertakings, and ultimately to the established structures and interests that represent unsustainable business as usual. Sustainability assessment applications generate opposition as well as optimism.
These, then, are the two colliding realities of sustainability assessment application. The essentials are simple, familiar, attractive and crucial, but the agenda is highly ambitious and immersed in complexities. This chapter is mostly about the ambitions and the complexities. It reviews the essentials in and behind sustainability assessment, considering especially what we have been learning over the past decade.
In all this, however, the essential simplicity, familiarity, attractiveness and importance of the basic ideas and agenda remain. The following discussion respects and explores the challenges. But it also aims to dispel unnecessary confusion and clarify the agreeable essentials. This book is about embracing the challenges of sustainability and the complexities of the real world of practical initiatives. But it is also about how to make the practice of sustainability assessment application easier, by providing guidance on workable approaches and documenting lessons from experience.
In this chapter, we start with the foundations. The first book, Sustainability Assessment: Criteria and Applications (Gibson et al., 2005), told a more detailed story about the background to and fundamentals of sustainability. It also drew from the insights and experience already available then to identify the basic requirements for progress towards sustainability. The discussion here incorporates an additional decade or so of experience and evidence. But the main changes have mostly been additional grounds for the earlier conclusions and more pressing reasons for effective responses. The chapter ends with a reiteration of the original set of sustainability-based criteria for sustainability assessment that have provided the basis for the application stories which are the main contributions of this book.
Lasting wellbeing
The word âsustainabilityâ achieved public prominence and official approval in the mid-1980s after release of the Brundtland Commissionâs report, Our Common Future (WCED, 1987). The word was then almost immediately sent madly off in all directions by narrow enthusiasts, cynical manipulators and happy promoters of snake oil and mirage. Any other substitute term would have met the same fate. That is what happens to words for concepts that become popular and potentially popular.
An unfortunate result, still evident today, is the common three-headed excuse for inaction and inept effort â that sustainability is a vague concept, that there is no agreement on what it means, and that there is, consequently, no practical way to apply it. Those claims are no longer supportable. While important debates continue, the essentials have been evident for well over a decade. Our first task, therefore, is to rescue sustainability â the term and the idea â for mature discussion. We can begin by treating sustainability as current language for lasting wellbeing and exploring what pursuing lasting wellbeing entails.
Let us assume, if only on the basis of precious belongings found carefully placed in the graves of our earliest ancestors, that wellbeing into the future, even after death, has been among our preoccupations since the beginnings of human consciousness. The particular wellbeing considerations have certainly varied from place to place and changed over the millennia. Always, however, the key challenges have been about establishing viable relations with the environment of ecological systems and other people.
When at first we were nomads spreading from east Africa to the rest of the planet, we pursued lasting wellbeing by trying to learn enough about making a living in new places to avoid wrecking them, and enough about getting along with others to avoid mutual slaughter, to reproduce and to learn more. Those who failed badly enough left the gene pool. Apparently we failed quite often, especially when we moved to unfamiliar ecosystems or experimented with new technologies. The extinctions of megafauna in the Americas (probably) and large flightless birds in the South Pacific (certainly) are testament to that. So is the salt loading of Mesopotamian soils under early irrigation agriculture. We did learn, but in many places, we learned the hard way.
Much of what we face today seems quite different. We have highly advanced science. Our means of livelihood, governance demands, technologies and modes of understanding have changed mightily. Our numbers, and our capacities for mayhem as well as for comfort and convenience, have hugely increased. While the old challenges were mostly local and regional and left plenty of biophysical resources and resilience, at least at a planetary scale, we now occupy, exploit and mostly degrade the whole biosphere. The operations and dependencies of global political economy deliver impressive benefits, but they also press against capacities of biophysical systems and generate social, cultural and political tensions.
And yet the underlying story is still the old one of learning how to make a living and to get along with others. Most of us still do that mostly at the local and regional scale and most of our global effects are the accumulations of local and regional ones. Whatâs new is that the big challenges for livelihoods and getting along â for social creatures in a biophysical environment â are now also global. Our systems of organization and impact and our venues for the exercise of power are now global as well as local and regional. And because the bigger and smaller systems are interdependent, we have ecological and social learning to do and apply at multiple scales. We have not had to do that before. We lack crucial learning; the stakes have risen and the room for manoeuvre has shrunk.
Sustainability and development
The great acceleration of human extractive, productive and consumptive activities began mostly after World War II (Steffen et al., 2015). Concerns about the ecological side effects, socio-economic inadequacies and long-term viability of this acceleration emerged soon thereafter (Carson, 1962; Boulding, 1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, these concerns led to public discussion, at least in the wealthy countries, of the costs of and limits to growth (Mishan, 1967; Meadows et al., 1972; Schumacher, 1973; Hirsch, 1977) and the failures of development to defeat poverty or to avoid ecological devastation (Pearson, 1969; UN, 1972; Brandt, 1980).
By 1982 these themes were sufficiently salient that the United Nations established a 21-member commission to examine the relationship between environment and development. Chaired by Norwegian premier Gro Harlem Brundtland, the World Commission on Environment and Development reviewed the state and trajectory of the planet, and concluded that environment and development challenges were so big and so fully linked that they had to be addressed together by what amounted to a new approach to global and local economy (WCED, 1987).
The proposed solution â sustainable development â was a brilliant combination, capturing the commonly competing but inherently entwined requirements for progress towards lasting wellbeing. It was also remarkably bold, considering it was a product of a large international committee with representatives of Cold War combatants and other mutually aggrieved parties. Nonetheless, the notion was immediately welcomed by conventional powerholders, perhaps because it incorporated a reassuring ambiguity, seemed to offer a more agreeable alternative to limits to growth, and could be taken as an authorization of more development. Many conservation and social justice interests were doubtful (Sachs, 1999). Sustainable development was an oxymoron, they said. Development, as usually practiced and as likely to continue in the same hands, was not and could not be sustainable. At the outset, then, the hopeful prospects of sustainable development seemed likely to be trampled in a battle between the adjective and the noun.
It did not happen. The concept and the language of sustainable development are very much still with us. It is true that both understanding and implementation remain weak. Not much that has been labelled as development in recent decades is itself likely to be viable in the long run or to contribute generally to lasting wellbeing. Most achievements are less bad versions of practices that led to the initial concerns about unsustainability and inequity. The best work remains exceptional or marginal. But the inadequacies are understandable as an indication of the gulf between the prevailing devotion and approaches to conventional economic growth, and what is needed for sustainability. The debates about meaning and the struggles of implementation have been major sources of learning about what sustainable development entails and what resistance it is up against. Moreover, despite the entrenched resistance and slow progress, sustainable development is, thirty years after Brundtlandâs Commission, still increasingly referenced, included in rising expectations, and incorporated not only in promotional puffery but also in formal policies, guidance standards and legislative principles.
In retrospect, there are many possible explanations for the survival of the notion. Much can be attributed to sustainable developmentâs odd combination of ambiguity and ambition, to powerholdersâ early confidence that they had captured the idea and could control the agenda, and to the evident need for at least the makings of a broad response to pervasive anxieties about global as well as local futures. The most important factor, however, seems to have been that Brundtland and her colleagues were essentially right. Their formulation captured a fundamental truth that has been confirmed, buttressed and clarified by subsequent evidence and experience. The needs to respect biophysical limits and to address material deficiencies are now much better understood an...
