1.5 Sustainability - A Brief History
History suggests that there have always
been people who have been concerned about the future welfare of humankind. This
concern has been based upon extrapolations of current activities and awareness
that past civilisations have collapsed when challenges have not been faced.
Depending upon your disposition you may regard those who are concerned about
sustainable development as wise people giving timely warnings; examples of
pessimists let loose; or down-right dangerous doom-mongers.
All these epithets have been attributed to
people who have issued such warnings. There are many theories as to why for
instance the Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Mayan and Polynesian civilisations
collapsed - you may be familiar with some of them from TV documentaries or
books? Among them are theories that the
pattern of human demands in those societies damaged their environmental support
systems. When combined with other external environmental changes and various
social, cultural, political and economic circumstances, this meant that those
societies could not adapt to the combination of changes in time and so could
not continue their ways of life (Clayton and Radcliffe, 1996; Ponting, 1991).
Such interpretations of these events acknowledge multiple causes and systemic
effects.
One of the better known historical figures
who predicted difficulties for the future was Malthus (1798). He noted that
whereas food production seemed to increase linearly with time, populations grew
exponentially. It does not take long for the exponential growth to exceed the
linear growth by a large factor, and thus predict large-scale starvation. Other
well-known classical economists, such as Ricardo and Mill (around 1800),
predicted that the scarcity of resources would eventually lead to the cessation
of economic growth – thereby earning economics the title ‘the dismal science’.
Observations of the (then) present that had implications for the future (our
‘now’) were also made. For instance in 1947 Mahatma Gandhi was quoted as saying
‘the earth has enough for everyone’s need but not for their greed’. Rachel
Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1965 made connections between use of pesticides
in agricultural development and diminishing numbers of birds with predictions
that this trend would continue unless farming practices were changed. In 1972 a
small book, Limits to Growth was published by an American group who used
systems dynamics to develop a model of the global economy. Their analysis
purported to show that even making optimistic assumptions about resource
availability and curtailing population growth, the world economy would collapse
within 50 to 100 years.
These historical examples of prediction are
useful in that they make it clear that, whilst concerns about the future may be
well founded, the future is unknowable and often turns out to be profoundly
different from the fantasies of both pessimists and optimists. Many of the
disasters forecast in the past have been avoided by technological developments.
Take for example the Victorian forecaster who calculated that if the growth in
horse traffic continued at the (then) current rate, by 1950 London would be
covered in three feet of horse manure each year! Motor cars replaced horse
traffic, so the problem of dung was avoided. Though it is perhaps arguable
whether this was more or less of a problem than the present congestion and
pollution due to motor traffic! The limited resources referred to in the Limits
to Growth model have been expanded many times by advances in technology making
it possible to extract oil from hostile environments and precious metals from
low grade ores, albeit not without various knock-on effects for communities and
their environments. The optimists point to these historical precedents and
assume that technology and the ingenuity and abilities of people will always
enable us to escape from the dilemmas currently forecast. Indeed from one
perspective the forecasts of future disasters are made precisely to encourage
people to avoid them – they are self-defeating forecasts.
But is this optimism justified? Are there
any reasons why current forecasts of future problems should be taken more
seriously than those made in the past? There are several factors that seem to
us to make the current position different in principle from the past.
This principle difference is that the scale
of human activity on earth is now approaching the same scale as the natural
cycles that occur around the globe. The use of fossil fuels over the last one
hundred years has changed the composition of the atmosphere. Human engagement
with other parts of ecosystems is causing hundreds of species to become extinct
each year and the effects of human activity are evident well beyond the
immediate locations in which we live. Many of the resources that were used to
drive industrial development in the 19th century are now exhausted or
uneconomic at present to remove, in the areas where they were initially
extracted such as tin in Cornwall (UK) and oil in Texas (USA). Water extraction
rates exceed the annual flow of some rivers. However they do not run dry
because wastewater is returned to them. Vickers (1965) noted that the River
Thames could once have been considered as an independent physical system, part
of the given environment and primarily a way in which water from a stable
catchment area found its way to the sea. He reflected on the effects on the
river of people’s activities (for example flood control, distribution of water,
pumping and use for transportation and sewage disposal) and predicted that the
Thames would virtually disappear within what he described as a human
socio-technical system. He felt it would become dependent on new physical
constructions, new institutions, and a new attitude to the use of water and the
regulation of the whole water cycle. His observations still seem very
appropriate in the context of sustainable development more than thirty years
later, as indicated by the following quote from Klaus Topfer, UN
Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of the United Nations
Environment Programme in 1998.
“At the beginning of the 18th century,
there were less than a billion people in the world sharing less than a million
cubic kilometres of freshwater. In 1900, there were about 2 billion people
sharing the same amount. Now there are more than 6 billion people and the
freshwater supply has remained constant.”
Another difference is that with the
increased scale of human activities comes an increase in associated effects and
disparities between rich and poor. For instance a vicious circle relationship
has been identified by many between poverty and environmental degradation.
Others have stressed the ‘effluence of affluence’ claiming that the underlying
cause of environmental degradation is wealth as opposed to poverty (Holmberg,
1991).
Increases in energy and resource
consumption in many parts of the world have also been increasingly inequitable.
This has led to differentials in capacity to trade due to differences in power
and bargaining positions in world markets. Concern about the future has led to
other activities besides prediction, particularly on the international stage.
There was increasing recognition among governments, business and industry,
non-governmental organisations and international agencies that action by one or
a few countries alone would be ineffective unless matched by others.
Content in this section is sourced from The
Open University on 21/02/2012 under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.
In 1987, as a result of recommendations from theStockholm
conference and Brandt Commission, the World Commission on Environment and
Development (WCED; also known as the Brundtland Commission, named after Gro Harlem
Brundtland, the then Prime Minister of Norway who chaired the Commission), produced
its report ‘Our Common Future’ in 1987 (World Commission on Environment and
Development (WCED), 1987 ). The Brundtland definition of sustainable
development became particularly well known.
“Sustainable development is development
that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs.”
What this definition succinctly emphasises
is that the core issue is one that involves trading some present consumption or
development or satisfaction with some aspect of the welfare or development or
satisfaction of future generations. This concern has deep emotional roots in
human beings, especially in people who have, or expect to have, children of
their own. Parents forego many types of current satisfaction in order to
provide for the future of their children – and this drive has clear biological
and evolutionary advantages. Issues that threaten the sacrifices made by
parents generally raise very strong emotional reactions – reflecting the high
commitment and value placed on this concern for the future.
The following short lecture (around 25
minutes long) discusses how the science of sustainability centres on the study
of biophysical limits and the extent to which human activities are
transgressing those constraints. It also provides an additional historical
context of sustainability.
This
video was sourced from OpenCourseWare on 21/2/2012 under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
In 1992 a major event was to shape the
future of sustainability and its place on the global development agenda. The
Earth Summit – the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development –
held in Rio de Janeiro was the largest gathering of heads of government that
the world had ever seen. 178 government delegations attended, there were also
around 50,000 non-governmental representatives and over 5,000 press and
thousands of civil servants (Lindner, 1997). From the Earth Summit conventions
emerged on climate change and
biodiversity; a set of guidelines of forest principles; a declaration on
Environment and Development and ‘Agenda 21’, an extensive international agenda
for action for sustainable development for the 21st century. Agenda 21 was
endorsed by all government delegations present and received a wide range of
input and support from NGOs.
After the Earth Summit the UN Commission for Sustainable
Development was established to promote the process of sustainability and to
address the issues and actions identified in Agenda 21. It includes social, economic,
conservation and resource management dimensions. Agenda 21 calls for radical
changes in the way many live their lives in order to address global issues,
ranging from protecting atmospheric, oceanic and freshwater resources to
conserving biodiversity, transfer of environmentally sound technology, managing
forests, wastes and biotechnology to combating poverty and protecting human
health. Stakeholders in Agenda 21 processes, which take place at a range of
different levels – from global to local, include nine overlapping ‘major
groups’ who identified themselves or were identified by others. These major
groups included women, children and youth, indigenous people, NGOs, local
authorities, workers and trade unions, business and industry, scientific and
technological community and farmers.
There were many more events at
international, regional, national and local levels that followed the Earth
Summit. In 2002 a further summit – the World Summit on Sustainable Development
(WSSD) – took place in Johannesburg, South Africa. Whereas the Brundtland era
focused on ‘North-South’ interactions and the realisation that we didn’t know
enough about the inter-relationships between ecological, social and economic
dimensions, WSSD focused more on political and social dimensions of sustainable
development and issues of participation, governance and the creation of networks
of stakeholders and partnerships.
Perhaps one of the most significant changes
between 1992 and 2002 was increased evidence of globalisation, particularly in
economic terms such as trade, finance and growth of multinational companies.
Besides conferences and events there are other aspects of this global view of
issues associated with development.
There are other fundamental reasons why
issues associated with sustainability arouse deep feelings within people. It is
not accidental that many of the examples of issues are associated with global
or international levels of decision making and action. It was one thing for the
coal fires in London to create smog (a mixture of fog and smoke) that caused
significant numbers of inhabitants to die of respiratory diseases. It is quite
another for the global use of fossil fuels to change the global climate so that
sea levels rise and threaten large parts of the world’s population with
flooding. Most of the interest in sustainability is not parochial – it is not
the inhabitants of Cornwall protecting the interests of the future inhabitants
of Cornwall. It is a concern for the future inhabitants of the globe as a whole.
Some of the latest thinking on what
sustainability actually is, comes from the Stockholm Resilience Centre (http://www.stockholmresilience.org/), and
in particular, from Johan Rockstrom. Rockstrom is a leader of a new approach to
sustainability, dubbed “planetary boundaries”. Working with a team of 29
leading scientists across disciplines, Rockstrom and the Stockholm Resilience
Centre identified nine key Earth processes or systems and marked the upper
limit beyond which each system could instigate a major system crash.
Climate change is one of the components but
so are other anthropogenic threats such as ocean acidification, loss of
biodiversity and chemical pollution. If Earth is a self-regulating system, it
is clear that human activity is capable of disrupting it. Rockstrom notes how
human growth has strained the Earth's resources but our advances also give us
the science to recognise this and change behaviour. These concepts are
discussed in the following 18 minute presentation, which you should watch now: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/johan_rockstrom_let_the_environment_guide_our_development.html
Content
in this section is sourced from The Open University on 21/02/2012 under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=4331