America, the Environment, and the Global Economy
Spring 1997-- Global Human
Ecology:
America, the Environment, and the Global Economy
Question for Discussion: How
does David Orr define sustainable development? Is Orr's
definition of sustainable development significantly different
from Hawken's?
Reading: Orr, pp. 23-60
Quiz: How does David Orr define sustainable development?
Internet Sites and Documents:
What is Sustainability anyhow?
Sustainable Development Principles
Bellagio Principles: Moving Towards Sustainable Development
Sustainable Development and Sustainable Communities
PRINCIPLES OF SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOODS
The "Natural Step" to a Sustainable Future.
The Natural Step's progress
THE NATURAL STEP: Sweden's commonsense green
scheme comes to America
Paul Hawken: A Declaration of Sustainability
Survival: the Sustainable Society
Global Environmental Policy Research Tools
Technological Sustainability: Use science and technology and market solutions to create sustainable development without fundamentally transforming modern industrial civilization (p. 25)
Ecological Sustainability: the task of finding alternatives to the practices that got us in trouble in the first place; it is necessary to rethink agriculture, shelter, energy use, urban design, transportation, economics, community patterns, resource use, forestry, the importance of wilderness, and our central values. Sustainable development is a cultural process in which needs and their satisfaction arise from a vernacular culture.
Principles of Technological Sustainability:
1. To control and dominate nature in order to create wealth and abundance for human beings.
2. Human beings maximize their economic self interest and minimize their losses. Humans are economic maximizers that are incapable of the discipline implied by limiting consumption and resource use.
3. Economic growth is essential. Need economic growth to end poverty and protect the environment and achieve sustainable development.
4. Sustainability involves policymakers, scientists, corporate executives, banks, and international agencies finding and using the right policy levels to adjust prices to reflect true scarcity and real costs, and developing greater efficiency in the use of energy and resources.
5. Sustainability is a top-down process that does not require an active, ecologically competent citizenry and the effort to create such a citizenry through education is a diversion of scarce funds.
Principles of Ecological Sustainability:
1. Humans are limited, fallible creatures. "No amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
2. Requires active, informed, competent citizens, who will know in detail where they live and how they live.
3. Sustainability will not come from homogenized top-down approaches but from the careful adaptation of people to particular places. Sustainability is based on knowledge, livelihood, and living created by cultures living in particular places.
4. Nature is not just a set of limits to human action but a model for the design of housing, cities, neighborhoods, farms, technologies, and regional economies. (p.33)
5. There are real limits to the scale, size, and centralization of a human community and society. Large scale, complexity and chaos, and human error makes living in large, industrial cities and nations inherently dangerous and risk-filled.
How do we combine these two types of sustainable development: technological and ecological sustainability?
The larger question facing human civilization is this:
"Can we harness and control technology for the long-term benefit of humanity?"
Orr's Larger definition of sustainability:
The goal of a Sustainable Society based on the model of natural systems is not necessarily antithetical to technology. The question then becomes what kind of technology, at what scale, and for what purpose. We need to use technology to preserve and restore the environment and protect and support the people and cultures who live in specific places . (39)
David Orr would challenge Paul Hawken's definition of sustainability. While Hawken focuses on a top-down, technological, and economic strategy, Orr focuses on a bottom-up, cultural, and educational strategy for creating sustainable development. Unlike Hawken, Orr believes that we must make fundamental changes in our culture and society if we are to create a sustainable society. Orr argues that many of the basic cultural assumption of modern industrial civilization are flawed and must be critically examined. If we don't change our flawed cultural assumptions, no amount of technology, economic, or government reform will work to create sustainability. Orr contrasts the flaws of our modern industrial cultures by comparing the basic assumptions of technological and ecological sustainability.
Orr would tend to see Paul Hawken as an advocate of technological sustainability. Supporters of technological sustainability would tend to take the 1987 Brundtland Commission's definition of sustainable development:
"Development is sustainable if it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
Advocates of technological sustainability argue that only increased global economic growth can protect and restore the environment, end poverty and other social problems, and create a sustainable society. Orr argues that this is just more of the same economic growth and industrial domination and control of the environment that is already threatening the Earth. Finally, Orr concludes that top-down, government and corporate elite-led sustainable development will not work. Only cultural change from the bottom-up that grows out of people fundamentally questioning the basic assumptions of our modern industrial culture will lead to the creation of a sustainable society.
Unlike advocates of technological sustainability, Orr believes that sustainable development really requires an ecological sustainability approach. Instead of seeing nature and society as a machine which we can dominate and control, Orr argues that we should see them as living, interdependent organism. If we try to educate people and societies to imitate and model natural systems, then we can begin to create real sustainability. Because of humanity's limited knowledge, limited control, and limited responsibility, we must limit our efforts to control and remake nature. Instead, we need to redesign our cultures and use of technology to conserve "people, communities, energy, resources, and wildlife." By reducing the scale, size, and complexity of our cities, communities, and technology, we can create more sustainable cultures. Through education and the creation of an active, ecologically competent citizenry, we can help people learn to live well and adapt to particular places drawing from the knowledge and wisdom of their local cultures.
Orr now compares the fundamental assumptions of our modern industrial culture with what he calls a postmodern culture by comparing the international systems of nationstates with the biospheric systems that sustains and supports life on Earth. Here, Orr draws on what is known as the "Gaia hypothesis," which states that the Earth is a living biological system that is supported and sustained by the interaction and support of the the vast blanket of biological organisms on Earth. In other words, through the actions and interactions of global plants and animals in vast, interconnected ecosystems throughout the world, the Earth's atmosphere, temperature, climate, and ability to support life is balanced and stabilized by the Earth's green carpet of life. If we continue to destroy these ecosystems and damage this green carpet of life, what James Lovelock calls Gaia, then we will weaken and limit the ability of the Earth to support our modern industrial civilization. But Orr argues that the present system of global competing nations is doing just that--destroying the complex, interdependent fabric of life that supports our civilization.
Let's look at some of the major examples Orr uses to argue that are present global system of competing nationstates is undermining the larger biospheric system that supports them. Because of global competition nationstates must constantly increase their economic and military power in order to defend and expand their wealth. For example, the United States spent 8.4 trillion dollars on its military and defending its national security. And global military spending since 1960 has been over 16 trillion dollars. But as a result of increased competition between nationstates in the twentieth century over two hundred million people of died due to war, the greatest number in any century in all of human history. This military spending costs these nations a lot; instead of investing in protecting their environment, ending poverty, and creating a healthier society, they are forced to build weapons that provide no real long-term benefit for their citizens. Finally, as a result of this massive military spending, there are enough nuclear weapons in the world now to destroy all of human life and undermine the global environment. Can threatening to blow up the world really provide security and protect the environment? Orr concludes that "humane values, culture, and ecosystems are sacrificed for the sake of maintaining and preserving power within a pitiless international system."
Orr briefly surveys the rate of modern industrial civilization's destruction of global ecosystems. He argues that "energy use has risen by a factor of eight, disrupting geochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur...Since 1700 the decline of forested area is larger than Europe...Methane in the atmosphere has doubled. Heavy metals and toxics now exist everywhere in measurable quantities. Humans are causing a biological holocaust that is destroying life ten thousand times more rapidly than the natural rate of extinction." And, in addition to all this, we are currently witnessing the rapid increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by our global use of fossil fuels. And, of course, we are also experiencing the growth of a global ozone hole that is threatening global ecosystems. Orr observes that we have a set of vital signs for the global economy in terms of financial and stockmarket reports, but we don't have a set of "vital signs for the planet." By placing the health of our global economy and competing nationstates over the health of the global environment, Orr concludes we are threatening to destroy our future; without a healthy global environment, the global system of nationstates cannot continue to exist.
Orr's larger conclusion is that our current global industrial society is not sustainable, and is rapidly destroying the environmental foundation that supports it. We must transform our present global industrial civilization and make its values and institutions more compatible with the global biosphere that supports human life. If we don't question the basic cultural and political assumptions of our modern industrial culture, then we will continue to destroy the global environment and threaten our future. For Orr, the challenge is how to rethink our basic cultural assumptions about our place in the global environment, how much resources and energy we use, how much material consumption is necessary, how we pollute and waste environmental resources, and the importance of caution and humility in the presence in order to ensure the future. In order to rethink our basic cultural assumptions, we must educate and convince the peoples of the world that sustainability is vital for ensuring a healthy and secure human future and global environment. This is the larger problem of Orr's book: How do we create Ecological literacy and educate for sustainability?