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-November 19, 1998-
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, PART 2
In his excellent short book, BEYOND GROWTH,[1] economist Herman Daly says that every economy faces 3 problems: allocation, distribution, and scale.[2] What do these terms mean?
Allocation refers to the apportioning of resources among different products --in other words, deciding whether we should produce more corn, more cars, more bicycles, more jelly beans, or more hospitals. Because resources are limited, we can't have everything, so we must allocate our resources in some way to provide the goods that people want and can afford to pay for. The way we do this is "the market" which sets relative prices for goods.[3] Prices act as signals that cause people to put more (or fewer) resources into creating particular products that other people are willing and able to buy.
The second problem faced by every economy is distribution --apportioning goods (and the resources they embody) among different people, not among different products. Nearly everyone agrees that goods should be distributed in a way that is fair (though we may disagree on the precise meaning of "fair"). If you don't believe this statement is true, think of an extreme case. If one person received 99% of all the benefits provided by the U.S. economy, and all other citizens had to divvy up the remaining 1%, almost everyone would agree that this was an "unfair" or unsatisfactory distribution of benefits. The vast majority of people would say, "There is something wrong with this picture." This extreme example is intended to show that nearly everyone agrees that there are "fair" and "unfair" distributions of goods. What is a "fair" distribution --and how we should achieve it --are the main questions that give rise to "politics."
Unfortunately the market cannot solve the problem of fair distribution. Left alone, a market economy tends to create inequalities that grow larger as time passes. Both the economic successes and failures of individuals tend to be cumulative --the successful tend to succeed again and again while the unsuccessful tend to remain unsuccessful. Marriages tend to result in further concentration of wealth. Furthermore, as Daly says, dishonesty and exploitation are not necessary to explain inequality but they certainly contribute to it.[4] None of these statements is absolute --you can point to many individual exceptions to each of them --but the tendencies that they describe are well-recognized.
No, the market cannot solve the problem of unfair distribution. This problem must be solved by people deciding what is fair, then making public policies intended to achieve a fair distribution. After those decisions have been made, then the market can allocate resources efficiently[3] within the politically-established framework of fairness.
The third economic problem is the problem of scale --how large can an economy become before it begins to harm the ecosystem that undergirds and sustains it? Here again, the market does not --cannot --provide any answer. The market offers no mechanism for deciding what is a desirable scale or for achieving that scale. You can have an efficient allocation of resources[3] and a just distribution of benefits, yet still have an economy that grows too large and consequently damages the ecosystem. (Each of the three problems --allocation, distribution, and scale --is separate and each must be solved separately.)
The ecosystem provides us with two major services --it provides resources that we can use (such as air, trees, copper deposits) and it provides a place to discard our wastes. Within limits, the ecosystem can regenerate certain resources (air and trees, for example), and it can absorb a certain amount of wastes, recycling them via the services of the detritus food chain. (See REHW #624.) Unfortunately, it is quite possible for the economy to grow so large that it exceeds the capacity of the ecosystem to regenerate itself and/or to absorb our wastes. At that point, the economy has grown unsustainably large and further growth will diminish the carrying capacity of the planet --the capacity to support life, including human life.
As we saw last week (REHW #624), there is abundant evidence that the human economy, worldwide, has already grown so large that it has exceeded some of the ecosystem's capacity to regenerate itself, and has already grown so large that it has exceeded part of the ecosystem's capacity to absorb our wastes. These problems first appear on a local scale (the U.S. has nearly exhausted its reserves of tin, nickel, chromium, petroleum, and many other mineral resources,[5] and many U.S. cities are presently unable to provide their inhabitants with healthful air because of waste gases from automobiles). Eventually economic growth reaches a point at which local problems become global. For example, in recent years we discovered that we had inadvertently damaged the Earth's stratospheric ozone layer with our CFC wastes, and that most of the world's marine fisheries have been severely degraded by overfishing. We are now making similar unhappy discoveries at a steady (or perhaps accelerating) pace.
Economists, and business and political leaders, acknowledge only two of the three economic problems outlined above --the problems of allocation and distribution. The problem of scale --caused by growing quantities of materials and energy flowing through the economy (see REHW #624) --the problem of scale has still not been acknowledged by most economists, business people, or politicians. To them, continued growth can only be good. The vast majority of them deny that the scale of the economy must be kept comfortably within the regenerative and absorptive limits of the ecosystem (if they have thought about it at all).
There is a deep and abiding reason for their denial. For the past 400 years, growth has been the central organizing principle of all European societies, and especially of American society. Economic growth has substituted for politics, deflecting attention away from the contentious problem of fair distribution: even a small slice of the pie will grow larger each year if the total pie keeps growing larger. Thus growth has allowed us to avoid confronting difficult ethical questions about the fair distribution of income and wealth.[6] So long as the pie kept growing we could accommodate the rising demands of slaves, farmers, immigrants, industrial workers, women, and so forth.
As William Ophuls has said, "We have justified large differences in income and wealth on the grounds that they promote growth and that all would receive future advantage from current inequality as the benefits of development 'trickled down' to the poor. (On a more personal level," Ophuls says, "economic growth also ratifies the ethics of individual self-seeking: you can get on without concern for the fate of others, for they are presumably getting on too, even if not so well as you.) But if growth in production is no longer of overriding importance the rationale for differential rewards gets thinner, and with a cessation of growth it virtually disappears.... Since people's demands for economic betterment are not likely to disappear, once the pie stops growing fast enough to accommodate their demands, they will begin making demands for redistribution," Ophuls says.[6]
The end of growth will change American (and European) politics fundamentally, forcing us to confront basic ethical questions of economic fairness. For this reason, the environmental dangers of growth are ignored by those who think they have the most to lose --our business and political leaders (and their academic support staff, the mainstream economists).
Now stay with me as we probe a little deeper into growth. This may seem obscure, but it is important.
Growth --the central organizing principle of our society (we could also call it the main ideology of our society) has been grounded in an ethical principle developed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham and elaborated by John Stuart Mill in the 1830s. Bentham argued that the goal of public action was "the greatest good for the greatest number" --a goal that most people would probably embrace today without thinking about it very carefully.
Now that the end of growth is in sight (because we have begun to hit nature's limits), we can no longer pretend that we can achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.[7] Confronting the limits of the planetary ecosystem, we are forced to ask, how much good can we achieve for how many people for how long? As Daly says, we can have "the greatest good for a sufficient number" or we can have "sufficient good for the greatest number" but the "greatest good for the greatest number" we cannot have.[8] Daly favors seeking "sufficient good for the greatest number" --meaning the greatest number of humans that can be supported year after year into the indefinite future. If your goal is to maximize human welfare, this is the formula that does it. If we live sustainably, without exceeding the planet's capacity for regeneration and the absorption of waste, billions or trillions of humans will ultimately be able to enjoy the good life on planet Earth, world without end. The alternative (which is the path we are presently on) is to load up the planet with 12 to 20 billion people in the next century until the ecosystem collapses, thus diminishing the carrying capacity of the planet and greatly reducing the total number of humans who can ever enjoy a good life on Earth. If you want to maximize human enjoyment of the good life, the choice is clear.
An essential step toward sustainable development --offering the greatest number of people a sufficiency of resources for the good life --will be policies explicitly aimed at reducing huge economic inequalities. Growth will no longer substitute for ethical public policies.
One of the main features of the modern world that creates and sustains inequality is the high human birth rate. An abundance of people provides a pool of cheap labor to do the world's work. A high birth rate creates steady pressure driving wages down. In ancient Rome the word "proletariat" meant "those with many children" and the main role of the proletariat in Roman society was to procreate to serve the patricians. Failure to help people control their own numbers --then as now --is a implicit cheap labor policy. A high birth rate tends to maintain inequality, and a reduced birth rate has the opposite effect, tending to equalize incomes and wealth.
Small wonder, then, that so many of the world's people are denied the knowledge and the means for voluntarily eliminating unwanted fertility. In too many societies (including our own) the knowledge and means for voluntarily controlling fertility are as inequitably distributed as income and wealth. The wealthy have little difficulty controlling their numbers; the technologies are readily available to them. The poor find it not so easy. There is a reason for this.
--Peter Montague
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT--PART 1
The phrase "sustainable development" was coined by the World Commission on Environment and Development (the "Bruntland Commission") in 1987. The Commission defined "sustainable development" as material improvement to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.[1] This definition emphasizes an important aspect of our ethical relationship to the unborn, yet it remains too vague to be truly useful as a guide for human activity because we cannot agree on the meaning of "needs." We can't really know what the "needs" of future generations will be, and we can't even agree on what we ourselves "need" vs. what we merely want.
Fortunately, more useful definitions of "sustainable development" are coming into focus. By "more useful" I mean definitions that will allow us to reach agreement, thus giving us a common basis for action. In his book BEYOND GROWTH,[2] economist Herman Daly defines "sustainable development" as "development without growth --without growth in throughput beyond environmental regenerative and absorptive capacity."[2,pg.69] This is an important definition, worth examining.
First, let's look at "throughput." Throughput is the flow of materials and energy through the human economy. It includes everything we make and do. When we speak of "growth" we are talking about growth in throughput --people making (and throwing away) more stuff and using more energy to do it. The totality of the human economy is throughput. It is calculated as the total number of people multiplied by their consumption.
The "regenerative and absorptive capacity of the environment" refers to the ability of the environment to provide (a) materials for our use, and (b) places where we can throw our wastes. This gets a little more complicated. It refers to two things --(1) the ability of the environment to provide us with the high-quality raw materials we need to make things, and (2) the ability of the environment to break down our wastes and turn them back into raw materials, an essential service.
Let's take waste first. When we throw things away, nature begins to take them apart and recycle them. For example, when we throw away wood, natural agents (called "decomposers"), such as termites, begin to eat our wood waste and break it down into raw materials --carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and so forth. Creatures such as earth worms use the termites' wastes as raw materials for soil, which provides nutrients for new trees to grow. This is called the "detritus food chain" and it is essential to life on earth, though largely invisible from a human perspective. The detritus food chain is made up of insects, bacteria, funguses, and other creatures that most of us know little about. But without their workings, the world would become overloaded with wastes and biological processes would become clogged and stop working.[3] If you've ever visited a modern hog farm, you have an idea of what it means to exceed the capacity of the local environment to absorb waste. It is unpleasant and hazardous.
A second major benefit that nature provides for us is high-quality raw materials that we can use. Herman Daly calls these "natural capital," of which there are two kinds. The first kind of natural capital takes the form of a stock, a fixed quantity, such as oil or coal or rich deposits of copper. We can use these stocks of natural capital at any rate we choose, but when they are used up (dispersed into the environment as wastes), they will no longer be available for our use, or for the use of future generations. (The second law of thermodynamics guarantees that we can never take highly-dispersed atoms of, say, copper and gather them back into a highly-concentrated copper deposit. The energy requirements of such an operation are simply too great. If the second law didn't hold true, as Herman Daly says, we could make windmills out of beach sand and use them to power machines to extract gold from seawater. Unfortunately, the second law DOES hold true, and once we disperse highly-concentrated ores, we cannot afford to reconcentrate them.)
The second kind of natural capital takes the form of a flow. In general these flows are continuous (though human bungling can interrupt some of them). Examples include sunlight, the capacity of green plants to create carbohydrates by photosynthesis, rainfall, and the production of fish in the oceans. These forms of natural capital are endlessly renewable but can only be used at a certain rate --the rate at which nature provides them. Example: So long as we cut trees at a certain rate, and no faster, then nature will produce new trees fast enough to maintain a constant supply of cuttable trees. If we cut trees faster than that, nature will not be able to keep up with us and then people in the future will have fewer trees to meet their needs. The capacity of the Earth to support life will have been diminished. This is an example of exceeding the capacity of the ecosystem to regenerate itself.
Growth, then, means quantitative increase in physical size. Development, on the other hand, means qualitative change, realization of potentialities, transition to a fuller or better state. On a planet such as Earth, which is finite and not growing, there can be no such thing as "sustainable growth" because growth will inevitably hit physical limits. Because of physical limits, growth of throughput is simply not sustainable indefinitely. But development CAN continue endlessly as we seek to improve the quality of life for humans and for the other creatures with which we share the planet.
To repeat, then, sustainable development means development without growth in throughpout that exceeds the regenerative and absorptive capacity of the environment. Sustainable development and the standard ideology of growth stand in contrast to each other and, in fact, are incompatible with each other.
Thus to be sustainable, the human economy (our throughput) must not exceed a certain size in relation to the global ecosystem because it will start to diminish the capacity of the planet to support humans (and other creatures). If the human economy grows too large, it begins to interfere with the natural services that support all life --services such as photosynthesis, pollination, purification of air and water, maintenance of climate, filtering of excessive ultraviolet radiation, recycling of wastes, and so forth. Growth beyond that point will produce negative consequences that exceed the benefits of increased throughput.
There is considerable evidence that the throughput of some parts of the human economy has already exceeded the regenerative and absorptive capacity of the environment. The problem of climate change and global warming is an example; it provides evidence that we have exceeded the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb our carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen oxide wastes. Many of the fresh water fish of the world now contain dangerously elevated levels of toxic mercury because we humans have doubled the amount of mercury normally present in the atmosphere --evidence that we have exceeded earth's capacity to absorb our mercury wastes.[4] Depletion of the ozone layer is evidence that we have exceeded the atmosphere's capacity to absorb our chlorinated fluorocarbon (CFC) wastes. This list can readily be extended.
There is also considerable evidence that we have already diminished several important stocks and flows of natural capital. The U.S. economy, for example, is now dependent upon oil imported from the Middle East because we have depleted our own stocks of oil. Most of the world's seventeen marine fisheries are badly depleted --a flow of natural capital that we have overharvested, in some cases nearly to the point of extinction. (See REHW #587.) This list, too, can readily be extended.
One particular limit seems worth noting at this point. In 1986, a group of biologists at Stanford University analyzed the total amount of photosynthetic activity on all the available land on Earth, and asked what proportion of it have humans now appropriated for their own use (mainly through agriculture)?[5] The answer is 40%. This leaves 60% for the use of non-humans. But the human population is presently doubling every 35 or 40 years. After one more doubling, humans will be using 80% of all the products of sunlight, and shortly after that, 100%. Don't get me wrong --humans are important. But I don't know very many people who think it would be smart to deny every wild creature access to the basic food and habitat resources of the planet just to keep the human economy expanding. Even if we thought we had the right to use 100% of the green products of sunlight for our own purposes, the human population would have to stop growing at that point because there wouldn't be any more sunlight to appropriate. That time is less than one human lifetime (70 years) away.
Thus we soon will reach --or more likely have already reached --the point at which growth of the human economy does more harm than good. What is needed under these circumstances is to stabilize total consumption, total throughput.
There are two basic rationales for doing this, one based in science and one in religion. Herman Daly offers both. We have heard the scientific argument, above, which says that the capacity of the Earth to support life is being --or soon will be --diminished by growth of throughput and that sooner or later we can only hurt ourselves and our children if we persistt on this path of unsustainability. The religious argument goes like this:
"I believe that God the Creator exists now, as well as in the past and future, and is the source of our obligation to Creation, including other creatures, and especially including members of our own species who are suffering. Our ability and inclination to enrich the present at the expense of the future, and of other species, is as real and as sinful as our tendency to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor. To hand back to God the gift of Creation in a degraded state capable of supporting less life, less abundantly, and for a shorter future, is surely a sin. If it is a sin to kill and to steal, then surely it is a sin to destroy carrying capacity --the capacity of the earth to support life now and in the future. Sometimes we find ourselves in an impasse in which sins are unavoidable. We may sometimes have to sacrifice future life in order to preserve present life --but to sacrifice future life to protect present luxury and extravagance is a very different matter."[2,pgs.222-223.]
--Peter Montague
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