Ecological Sustainability in Question

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Ecological Sustainability in Question

Excerpts from: Notes on the Sustainability Conundrum by, William E. Rees

“The Basic Concept: From my perspective, sustainability is a relatively easy concept to grasp in terms of basic characteristics and criteria. (Implementation is quite a different matter.) To begin, sustainability is a state of being characterized by relative permanence. Something is sustainable if it is functioning in a way that ensures it will be (or at least could be) around for a very long period of time. Any sustainable entity must therefore act to ensure its own structural integrity, normal functioning and self-production. By definition, it does not engage in activities that significantly damage the basis of its own existence. If the entity is human society, a very long period of time implies a time scale of at least several centuries.”

“In the modern world, this requires a shared value framework or enforceable agreement that protects essential natural capital and the life-support service it provides.”

“Ecological sustainability recognizes that both individual human beings and their societies/economies are biophysical entities. That is, they are living entities that function as complex, far-from-equilibrium, self-organizing systems (or dissipative structures ) within the overlapping hierarchy of self-organizing systems that make up the ecosphere.”

“…all subsystems develop and maintain their internal order at the potential expense of increasing the disorder of their host systems in the SOHO complex. Each subsystem is thermodynamically positioned to consume its host system from within (i.e., to function as a parasite on its host). … an unsustainable relationship exists if the material demands of a subsystem exceed the productive and assimilative capacities of its host. (When this occurs at the level of a tissue or organ subsystem of an individual organism, we define the now pathological relationship with the host as cancerous.)”

“Many people will protest that when dealing with humans economic, social, and cultural criteria are also important. No argument here except to say that a case can be made for the primacy of ecological factors. On the simplest level, the ecosphere would certainly be sustainable in the absence of human economy/society. However, there can be no society/economy in the absence of a functional ecosphere.”

“…for human behavioural reasons, society is unlikely be able to satisfy this prerequisite, (a reasonable degree of equity/equality), because of the very social climate that makes it essential to do so, largely due to advances in destructive technology.”

“My preferred definition of a sustainable society is a society characterized by functional democracy, social justice and reasonable equity and whose citizens are committed to living within the means of nature. Judging by the criteria implicit in this definition, global society is presently wildly unsustainable. The world economy is growing at about 3% per year. Meanwhile, the scale of economic activity is already such that a significant proportion of global production/consumption is derived not from the sustainable income but rather from the liquidation (depletion) of natural capital stocks.”

“The evidence is seen in widespread deforestation, land degradation, desertification, fisheries collapses etc., all of which imply rates of consumption in excess of the ecosphere s (self)productive capacities. Similarly, ozone depletion; greenhouse gas accumulation; air, water and soil pollution; the toxic contamination of food supplies, etc., imply rates of waste discharge in excess of the assimilative capacity of affected ecosystems. The economy is consuming the ecosphere from within dissipating its structure and undermining its functional integrity as any ill-adapted parasite would its host. We have collectively overshot the long-term carrying capacity of the Earth.”

“Meanwhile, the both the benefits and costs of growth are inequitably distributed. A mere 20% of the human population presently accounts for about 86% of private consumption and the income gap is widening. In 1970 the richest 10% of the worlds citizens earned 19 times as much as the poorest 10%. By 1997, the ratio had increased to 27:1. At that time, the wealthiest 1% of the world's people commanded the same income as the poorest 57% and just 25 million rich Americans (.4%of the world s people) had a combined income greater than that of the poorest 2 billion of the world s people (43% of the total population).”

“The relatively impoverished have, of course, always suffered the greatest consequences of local environmental decay. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the urban poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and the otherwise marginalized those who have neither the power to control nor the resources to avoid noxious hazards in the workplace or in their homes have borne the greatest ecological costs of material growth. Today we see this eco-apartheid extended to the global scale. In recent years, environmental refugees people fleeing ecological decay, crumbling landscapes, flooding lowlands and the consequences of increasingly violent storm events have come to outnumber political refugees.”

“Material Flows Analysis: Environmental scientists argue that to restore ecosystemic integrity and stability will require a 50% reduction of material and energy throughput in the global economy by 2050. This rises to 80% in high-income consumer societies. Greater shrinkage in material consumption by the rich is required to create the ecological space for necessary consumption growth by the poor. Efficiency gains offer only a partial solution.”

“The average Canadian/American requires the goods and services of between 8 and 10 hectares of productive ecosystems to support his/her consumer lifestyle. This is four to five times his/her equitable share of global ecological and economic output. There are only about two hectares of ecologically productive land and waterscape per capita on Earth.”

“…the crude sustainability of the (metropolitan) population is determined more by what happens outside than within the region; second, they show again that the material lifestyles of the high-income regions and countries are not sustainably extendible to the rest of humanity. For every ecological deficit there must be a surplus somewhere else. The ecological surpluses of the developing world have already been taken up by the ecological deficits of the rich countries.”

“Unsustainability is neither an environmental nor technical nor economic problem. It is the product of humanity's spectacularly successful evolutionary strategy. Formerly adaptive, this strategy has become dysfunctional under prevailing conditions of continuous population growth and rapid technological innovation. In short, unsustainability is an emergent property of the interaction of technological society and a finite ecosphere.”

“A Final Daunting Thought: No individual or country can be sustainable on its own. Unsustainability is the ultimate common-property/public good problem. It can be solved only through mutual coercion mutually agreed upon.”

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