Defining Sustainability
INTRODUCTION: These essays were written in the summer of 2012 for a sustainability seminar when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We attended weekly talks by interesting people, with whom we had a chance to discuss the topic of the day. Afterward we wrote reflection essays. I was pretty depressed at the time due to worrying about my future and experiencing secondhand the toxic aftermath of the nihilistic frat boy lifestyle (one of these characters was sub-letting a room in our apartment and had his bros over all the time). Long nights of drinking, days of slothfulness, and a general disregard for the feminine mystique characterize the pursuits of these men-children. It’s no coincidence that I wrote a lot that summer; writing has meant different things to me over the years but at the time it gave me someone to talk to when I was surrounded by people that made me feel alone.
Man…that got heavy quick. This course gave me a great excuse to get out of the house that summer; it was so refreshing to meet people on the same wavelength, people thinking about our impact on the environment and trying to make things better! These essays don’t really stand on their own but I’m putting them here just so I don’t lose track of them.
It sure is difficult to define sustainability. It is a term that is used to mean so many different things that it often loses its meaning altogether. And when it loses its meaning, the level of discussion about broad policy and systems decisions is reduced to a similar meaninglessness. When someone says something or some action is sustainable, there needs to be something extra to go with that claim. There needs to be a well-developed argument that fits into a framework explaining in what way that thing or action is sustainable. When it fits into a larger framework, it is much easier to see the actual value it contributes to the given goals of that kind of sustainability.
So there should be goals for different kinds of sustainability. It is much easier to make these goals strictly quantitative, such as making goals for economic growth and job creation. And it is easy to make the goals strictly qualitative in the sense of simply reducing unsustainability. But then there is the question of whether reducing unsustainability really gets us closer to sustainability. Maybe the action itself will simply never be sustainable no matter the technological improvements in the future.
For example, if the entire world wants to drive their car on average 50 miles per day, and the best our future selves can do is to create cars that people like to drive achieve 100 miles per gallon, and only emit a small amount of greenhouse gases, then maybe there is or is not enough fuel, the type of which being whatever we have figured out to be the most efficient at that given future time, possibly found on Earth or in space, and then maybe there is or is not too many greenhouse gases causing cities to flood and an ice age to happen, to continue to allow all the people on Earth to drive their cars and move where they want to go.
So then there is the possibility that at least some people would not be able to move where they want to go. They would have to make a sacrifice to make this one action sustainable. And then we would all have to decide what is fair, what is equal, if only some people cannot move how they would like. We may decide to make a new system of mass transit to help all people move how they would desire. But if we don’t know how any of this would happen in the future, we can easily become paralyzed deciding if we should or need to build a new system of mass transit now, if we need to stop moving around so much, and so on.
What I am getting at here is that sustainability is inherently a universal concept. You can’t define sustainability because every person and every action is a part of a great interconnected system existing in the past, present, and future. Emphasis needs to be placed on achieving sustainability together. We need to decide what values are important to us. Is it important to make the economy grow? Is it important to protect the natural environment, for aesthetic purposes, or simply for our own needs? Do we really need more things? Can I do whatever I want whenever I want and still be a part of a sustainable society? What sacrifices do I need to make? I tend to disagree with the Marshall argument that our values and beliefs should not be incorporated into the concept of sustainability, in light of how different our values are, and how these vast differences may render the concept of sustainability meaningless. Instead I would argue our values, beliefs, aesthetic feelings, and morals are in fact incredibly strong sources to draw on to enhance arguments in favor of attaining their more fundamental definition of sustainability.
I am not just being vague for the sake of being vague. And I am definitely not being sarcastic or facetious. The way I see it, sustainability can be used to mean just about anything. And it is difficult to define anything. So instead of trying to do that, and trying to make a plan to achieve something that we don’t know what it is, I think we should all conciously decide to make changes for the better and do the best that we can. And we will have to decide as we go along how radical or how widespread these changes need to be, and if they are fair for everyone. I love hearing about goals to produce more renewable energy because these goals represent those changes for the better. I would not mind if someone put a wind turbine in my backyard even if it was noisy sometimes or made shadows in my house because I would know there is something in my backyard contributing to a better future.
I really identified with Ehrenfeld when he wrote, ‘If we are to see the possibility of flourishing realized, we must transform the cultural system at its roots. We can start by exchanging our model of determinate objective reality for one of complexity, accepting that the world and its subsystems cannot be reduced to a set of mathematical or analytic rules.’ The theme I am trying to make in this reflection is that it is important to embrace this complexity and to view the outcomes of our decisions through how they influence a greater system. You can’t make rules for sustainability, and you can’t separate the observer, ourselves, from the observed, our world. My own personal vision of sustainability includes taking care of the environment by not only reducing the consumption of resources, but also choosing the right resources to consume, for every person to make meaningful everyday decisions to take care of the environment, and for all of us to realize we are in this together and to make decisions so there is equality.
I made this reflection general because to me the definition of sustainability has to be general. But as an engineer, I believe it is also important to make some of these decisions I was talking about above with the support of specific data. I found the CO2 emissions for different types of transportation presented in lecture particularly interesting. And I was glad to see that riding a bicycle really is beneficial for reducing emissions, as I prefer to live close to campus, where I work, and ride my bike every day. And different frameworks that we use need to have specific language in them as well, as part of a complex systematic approach to sustainability. I agree with how the Natural Step idea frames its four main goals in terms of nature, and how our environment must not be subject to systematically increasing various things. To me, we are dependent on the natural world. We can’t dominate it as the objectivist thinkers would have us believe and just rely on technology to solve all our problems.