Ethical issues ignored in sustainability education, research
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Just about everyone agrees that sustainability – cutting energy use, reducing carbon emissions and, in general, keeping the Earth green – is a good thing. But why do we think that? Do we support sustainability for the right reasons?
These are among the questions that Michigan State University’s Michael Nelson addresses in a paper published this month in the journal Bioscience titled “Sustainability: Virtuous or Vulgar?”
Specifically, Nelson and co-author John Vucetich of Michigan Technological University argue that the issue of ethics is a vital component in the teaching and research of sustainability, but one that is sorely lacking.
“This debate,” they write, “has almost entirely neglected a fundamental dimension of sustainability – the ethical dimension. Lack of attention to the ethical dimension of sustainability is stifling progress toward sustainability.”
Or, as Nelson puts it: “If we don’t know where we’re going, we won’t know when we get there.”
Nelson said that from the educational perspective, it’s important that all aspects of sustainability are covered.
“Everything we do sends messages to our students,” he said. “We see our students as people who will go out and do important things in this world. It’s important how we nurture that.”
The ultimate question, the authors say, is this: “Do we care about ecosystem health because ecosystems are intrinsically valuable, or do we care about ecosystem health because it serves human interests?”
While a question such as this is difficult to answer, Nelson said that “we are unlikely to achieve sustainability without knowing what it means.”
In their paper, Nelson and Vucetich consider the most widely appreciated definitions of sustainability, which indicate at least roughly that sustainability is “meeting human needs in a socially just manner without depriving ecosystems of their health.”
While the definition seems quite specific, it could mean anything from “exploit as much as desired without infringing on the future ability to exploit as much as desired” to “exploit as little as necessary to maintain a meaningful life.”
“From a single definition rises two wildly disparate views of a sustainable world,” said Vucetich. “Handling these disparate views is the inescapable ethical crisis of sustainability.”
“The crisis results from not knowing what we mean by value-laden terms like ‘ecosystem health’ and ‘human needs,’” Nelson said. “In other words, is ecosystem health defined by its ability to meet human needs only, or does ecosystem health define the limits of human need?”
Nelson is an associate professor with appointments in MSU’s Lyman Briggs College and the departments of Fisheries and Wildlife and Philosophy. Vucetich is an assistant professor in MTU’s School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science.
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Plants and animals don’t have rights. We’ll know when to give them rights when they start showing up at protests demanding their rights.
Hopefully, ethics will truly be on the table, including questioning the consensus that sustainability is “good”, questioning that carbon emissions should be reduced and questioning whether most extinctions really reduce “ecosystem health”.
How do we get this type of balance into existing educational systems without significant retraining and reassignment of teachers. The teachers naturally attracted to these subject fields seem to come with a built in bias, perhaps they helped form the “consensus”.
“Sustainable” is a matter of definition – both from the ethical point of view “why is it holy?” and from the practical, “what really does it mean?”
This evening I was talking to a friend about the use of water, its harvesting and the “morality” of its use. I live in Sydney – much discussed here currently, where the the average annual rainfall – 48″ often comes in fits and starts. The pre PC approach was to build a dam wherever it was possible – and there were a lot of possibilities – and effectively average out the “fits and starts”. With the ascendance of the Green (heresy), this became an immoral approach and almost everthing became “unsustainable” – really up to and particularly, the humans themselves. (I’m stll trying to work out who Gaia is there for. The 3 eared, banded, red-green frog?)
But we in Sydney, had an approaching emergency, because the believers stopped building dams and mostly because the population soared (only the immigrant refugees are sustainable of course – the natural growth is immoral and profiligate!), and we went and bought a desalination plant and then the heavens (are we allowed to use that word?) opened up and we have (more expensive – but not overpriced) water coming “out of our ears”. So gardens are in, sprinklers are ok – (all right we won’t use them at midday) and so on.
So practicality – an abundance of fresh water, must create a dilemma for those miserable, mean-spirited (invariably AGWers) who think that it is immoral to live in comfort surrounded by beauty.- “Unsustainability!”
I actually believe that if we can afford it, we should live as comfortably as possible. It is immoral NOT to! It is pleasant for us to use – and pay for, water . There is no shortage of water on Earth (not Gaia) and if we can afford to separate the H2O from its accompanying salts we should.
Sustainability has become just another form of accounting. Carbon dioxide measurement and analysis is something humans are familiar with, and enables us to continue with business as usual while avoiding the other questions of sustainability.
It was the realisation that the Sustainable Development agenda – meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs – had been compromised by the carbon dioxide agenda that first made me sceptical of this movement.
“In other words, is ecosystem health defined by its ability to meet human needs only, or does ecosystem health define the limits of human need?”
… simple answer is, human needs cannot be met if ecosystems are unhealthy. But his question fails to encompass a number of things; what are human needs? Are these homogeneous across peoples and countries? Does a tribal agriculturalist need as much as a quantum physicist? How much are their needs defined by what they do, and how much does what they do offset the damage they may cause to ecosystems? Etc…
“Just about everyone agrees that sustainability – cutting energy use, reducing carbon emissions and, in general, keeping the Earth green – is a good thing. But why do we think that? Do we support sustainability for the right reasons?”
“Sustainability” seems to be the new favorite buzzword of the CAGW/CC greenie whackos. There was a time not too long ago that I would have said that of course we should support “sustainability”. But I now see it for what it really is; an all-encompassing feel-good term, meant to lull the masses into buying in to the greenie religion, which actually has very little to do with old-fashioned concern for, and caring about the environment. It is all part and parcel of the Big Lie, a Goebellian campaign to turn people into sheeple, using fear, guilt, and propaganda.
The only reason people buy in to greenie religion is because it makes them feel good about themselves; they, after all, are helping to “save the planet”. Or so they think.
What they are actually doing though is involving themselves in social engineering.
I pity the students who are exposed to the type of claptrap indoctrination Nelson and Vucetich dish out.
We stink at looking into the past and what the planet was doing before man.
Our errogance gives us the right to trap water and change the evaporation system. We remake the individual plant and animal life systems to meet our existance more pretty and comfortable.
The next evolutional change will be altered by man as before all continents were separate and the species grew with boarders to keep the evolving species apart.
We are just a small part of the PLANET’S EVOLUTIONAL CHANGE, not man’s.
Man is the only species to worry about time and climate.
All life exploits it’s surroundings as much as it possibly can, and pays no attention to the needs of its neighbors. Symbiotic relationships result from a struggle for survival and supremacy, not from any concern for the rights or health of the other. Ants couldn’t care less about aphids except as a source of food production, and so on. Plants constantly wage territorial battles. People are no different. We evolved in this violent environment (until proven otherwise ), not in some idyllic fantasy world. Everything has it’s time and everything dies.
“Sustainability” is just a feel good word to cover over the issue of saving our own arses from the potential extinction level event we have chosen to unleash on our planet.
Uugghhhhh!
Really, sustainaboility is a lie.
The solar system is not “sustainable”; life itself is not “sustainable” (we all die, at present); it’s not even clear that the universe itself is “sustainable”.
Based upon observation we can say that life expands to fill the space available; life forms grow and develop and propagate to maximize their own space. To not do this is to deny life.
Michael Lewis says:
July 6, 2010 at 3:38 am
“Sustainable” is a matter of definition – both from the ethical point of view “why is it holy?” and from the practical, “what really does it mean?”
______________________________________________________________
“Sustainability” is the code word for UN Agenda 21. As Wayne Hage stated: “If you can’t own (and use) property, you are property.” – that is the goal of the UN and “global Governance.
“Private ownership of land is not compatible with global governance.. as described by the United Nations….
The land policy of the United Nations was first officially articulated at the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I), held in Vancouver, May 31 – June 11, 1976. Agenda Item 10 of the Conference Report sets forth the UN’s official policy on land. The Preamble says:
“Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. The provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole. Public control of land use is therefore indispensable….” “ http://sovereignty.net/p/land/unproprts.htm
For those who think this is a “conspiracy theory” I suggest you look into the “Wildlands Project” MAP The green areas are reserved for human use.
“The Wildlands Project would set up to one-half of America into core wilderness reserves and interconnecting corridors (red), all surrounded by interconnecting buffer zones (yellow). No human activity would be permitted in the red, and only highly regulated activity would be permitted in the yellow areas. Four concerned conservative activists who now make up the board of Sovereignty International were able to find UN documentation that proved the Wildlands Project concept was to provide the basis for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. They used this information and this map produced by Dr. Michael Coffman, editor of Discerning the Times Digest and NewsBytes and CEO of Sovereignty International, to stop the ratification of the treaty an hour before its scheduled cloture and ratification vote. (See Congressional Record S13790 ) ” http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/articles2/wildlands_project_and_un_convent.htm
NOTE: The original link to the “Wildlands Project” organization with its “controversial” information is no longer available. I have substituted the more recent link with its watered down sugar coated message.
You will notice the mineral and oil reserves and prime farmland would be removed from the control of individuals. In the state of Massachusetts, just before I left in 1994, (and the reason I left) a proposal to place over half the state into the new “Conte Wildlife Refuge” was on the table. The original proposal, I have the hard copy in the attic some where, required:
All farmers and home owners to place before the board all their plans for the next growing season and receive permission to plant crops, put in fence posts, irrigate fields, spray insecticides and herbicides, build buildings….
Luckily it looks like cooler heads prevailed and the original proposal got watered down. And yes this is why I started looking into what was actually going on.
F. A. Hayek would have had something to say about this topic. I may consider it completely moral and fair to go to my KFC and get a bucket of chicken, but I think the chicken would regard it in another manner. Ethics is a slippery slope when applied by governmental edict.
The authors of this paper ignore the past 20 years of ecological science, because it gave up on the notion of ‘nature’s balance’ and therefore ecosystem ‘health’ in about 1990. Only those who adhere for ideological reasons to the notion of climax communities abandoned by ecological science still employ this kind of discourse. ‘Sustainability’ has a particular social and political meaning. It has meaning only when applied to human society. Nature is about change, perturbation and chaos — interspersed with occasional periods of stability that we interpret as the status quo, but are but a moment in the history of the earth. For those interested, I discussed this in a symposium at the Australian Academy of Science some years ago:
http://www.science.org.au/events/sats/sats2002/kellow.htm
The ugly truth about sustainability is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a ‘static’ system.
Why? Because if you’re honest about the various models being trotted out, their scalability for growth is minuscule when compared to the systems currently in use.
Sustainability only works if ‘means’ and ‘needs’ remain in balance. That means that the ‘needs’ side of the equation has to become very bit as ‘undynamic’ as the [new] ‘means’.
And no, the sustainability crowd aren’t exactly jumping out of their chairs to fully explain the implications of that bit ‘new reality’ that they would inflict on humanity.
That faction of the Green Movement is being ‘hidden in the attic’.
For the moment.
Just about everyone agrees that motherhood…is a good thing. But why do we think that? Do we support motherhood for the right reasons?
…the issue of ethics is a vital component in the teaching and research of motherhood, but one that is sorely lacking.
[This motherhood debate] has almost entirely neglected a fundamental dimension of motherhood – the ethical dimension….
Looking at their pie-chart (Fig. 2), I find it difficult not to conclude that the Establishment has already decided on maximum sustainable exploitation.
“Just about everyone agrees that sustainability – cutting energy use, reducing carbon emissions and, in general, keeping the Earth green – is a good thing”
Well, not me.
I think “sustauinability” is a load of hogwash.
“Do we care about ecosystem health because ecosystems are intrinsically valuable, or do we care about ecosystem health because it serves human interests?”
The answer surely is that it serves human interests. When the word “valuable” is used, we have to ask: to whom? To Nature? “Nature” is an abstraction, unless you factor in some sort of deity who might take a personal interest in the death of a sparrow, a golden toad, a bacterium, etc. Without the postulation of a deity, all you have is an equally abstract idea – “Nature” – meaning the totality of all living/non-living things, and this abstraction obviously does not care what happens to ecosystems – a supervolcano eruption or asteroid strike this century could play instant havoc with ecosystems all over the planet, triggering extinctions on a massive scale. Nature won’t care – it will just fill the gap eventually with whatever life forms will have been able to survive and adapt.
The answer is that humans ascribe value to ecosystems. Most often we give them value when they serve our interests directly – they provide food to eat, clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, monetary value, etc. But we also value ecosystems for aesthetic or sentimental or spiritual reasons. If the last giant panda died tomorrow, we would not be impacted materially, but many of us would feel the loss in a different way, as we would be greatly saddened and dismayed. Often there is a clash of values, and a choice to be made – unspoilt forest or farmland, for instance?
But the idea of “intrinsic value” is a nonsense, to my mind. Always ask: exactly what kind of “value” are we talking about? And “valuable” – to whom?
I was a bit mystified by the phrase “ecosystem health” since some of the most publicized and contentious issues have been about spotted owls and snail darters. Was ecosystem health at stake if these species were lost? Since those same ecosystems had already lost grizzly bears, wolves, bison and mammoths over most of their range, I was left wondering whether there was any ecosystem health left to lose. Searching for some clarification, I found this definition:
“Ecosystem health is a transdisciplinary concept that bridges the natural, social, and health sciences. It can incorporate the human values and perceptions that are inseparable parts of management. A healthy ecosystem is defined as a social-ecological unit that is stable and sustainable, maintaining its characteristic composition,
organization, and function over time while remaining economically viable and sustaining human communities (Costanza 1992, Rapport 1998). The breadth of this definition indicates that ecosystem health is an integrative notion that acknowledges societal values in defining future desired conditions while relying on scientific criteria (Steedman 1994).”
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss2/art6/ES-2007-2092.pdf
Based upon this definition, perhaps the way to evaluate the impact of an extinction or reduction in range, is whether the overall composition of the ecosystem is changed in a way that can’t be stable for long periods of time.
Are ecosystems that are temporarily unhealthy, such as the Gulf where fisheries had to be suspended due to the oil leak lacking in “ecosystem health”, or are they robust and healthy since in all likelyhood they will weather the oil leak well and be fully recovered in a decade or so. It is conceivable that fish, shrimp and other stocks will boom in the next year or two due to the suspension of the fisheries, despite not yet being “safe” for human consumption. If the ecosystem is that robust and only modern developed nation adversity to risk prevents the usual consumption of the biomass is the ecosystem really “unhealthy”?
Given the complexity of the issues and the subjectivity of values, I doubt teachers are in a particularly qualified position to address the issues. Perhaps the teaching of ethics should be left to the parents since their values are as subjective as the teachers and the children are more naturally part of the parents ecosystem or studied at the graduate degree level where the most scholarly distinctions can be fully investigated.
I had an experience a few years ago that illustrates both the confusion and extreme thinking that underlies much public thinking about “sustainability.” My family and I had finished a wonderful tour of Jewel Cave in South Dakota’s Black Hills, one of the world’s largest and most magnificent caves. The park ranger who had guided our tour invited us to respond on the guest register to the questiom that was currently being asked of guests to the cave. “Only a small fraction of Jewel Cave has been explored,” the question read: “do you believe that the rest of it should be explored, or should it be left alone in a natural, virgin state?”
The question, I thought, was an excellent one. I answered that yes, Jewel Cave should be fully explored. My thinking was that nothing lives deep within the cave, so exploring poses no threat to wildlife. Since the cave is utterly dark, there is no real concern about marring its beauty, unless human beings are at some point to explore and observe the cave. I was satisfied that spelunkers are careful not to damage delicate cave formations, and don’t leave a trail of garbage where they explore. I wrote that “yes, the cave should be explored, as long as there are cavers who are willing to put forth the effort.”
After writing down my answer, I leafed through the responses of previous guests. I was a little surprised to find that about half of them indicated that they did not want the cave to be explored. They wrote things like “leave it the way God made it” or “respect the magnificence of this wonderful natural formation and leave the rest of it alone.”
Based upon what I have learned over the years, I now believe these responses reflect an increasingly common view of the natural world. It is a view based in a mystical reverence for untouched nature apart from not only human use, but apart from human presence and even observation. When considering the topic of “sustainability,” it is important to recognize the presence, if not the prominence, of such extreme opinions about the natural world.
Ken Smith
Ellendale ND
In the UK the fine for not sorting your rubbish for recycling is higher than the on the spot fine for shop-lifting !!!!
This article captures, almost perfectly, the reason(s) I “left” the environmental movement. (The left as well) And if these profs. think they need to start teaching morality now, then they have a long and hard slog ahead of them. I would posit that the time for instilling a sense of morality has long since passed. There is an old sage that goes something like; you know you are old when you start complaining about “those rotten kids!” Well, I guess I am getting very, very old! I am yet to encounter more than a handful of under thirty’s that aren’t completely self absorbed and borderline sociopaths! They didn’t get that way by eating too much mickey D’s! The education mill has been churning out nothing but vapid narcissists for decades now, thanks to all the hippies taking over academe. It’s Lord of the Flies +30 years.
I will say it over and over: We live in a very dark age indeed.
“Sustainability” is a pet word of the current chattering classes, along with “ecosystem”, “robust”, “unprecedented”, “footprint”, “conservation”……. fill in your own extras. Discussion of its place in ethics is an example of diminishing returns. “Ethics” needs clarification of meaning,not obfuscation. It also needs practical demonstraion y those able to show it, that is, bold leadership from the front and not obscure backroom weasel wording.
Australia has had a Cabinet reshuffle in Parliament. We now have a “Minister for Sustainable Population”, Tony Burke. He sits near Minister Simon Crean, Minister of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations and Social Inclusion. What a job for a guy who spent most of his life in the Union movement, telling people how to make others behave ethically (that is, according to the ethics of union thuggery).
It’s all a philosophical mishmash of claptrap and euphemisms.
Joe Lalonde says: July 6, 2010 at 4:04 am
. . . Our errogance gives us the right to trap water and change the evaporation system. We remake the individual plant and animal life systems to meet our existance more pretty and comfortable.
Sounds like the man has a plan. ‘Errogance’ is a good word, too. I’ll add it to my spellcheck. Rant follows. <skip to next reply>
Bruce Cobb is right on about sustainability’s feel-good buzzword status. My own view of the concept is broad. I do agree that we ought to leave the world in a little better shape than we found it. We ought not to waste energy on useless things (thinking of govt paperwork pushers and govt picking winners like certain dinosaur car companies and things that require subsidies to survive).
How to accomplish? Not by mandating that we flood our environment with mercury from curly light bulbs from red China. Not by mandating water-saving toilets that take two flushes. Water isn’t destroyed by use (crops excepted). The only water that needs saving is that from aquifers, and there we should take no more than the recharge rate. That isn’t in the plan. Instead we save water in towns that are on the Mississippi river. No shortage there, oh, but we’re saving energy used in treatment plants. Wonderful. I had a clean, green nuke plant just up the road.
Should we wish, for some ethereal reason, to sequester carbon, let us sequester it in landfills, not pump it at unsustainable expense into underground storage. Let us chop down trees and sequester their carbon in houses and books and cellulose insulation for our attics. Let us not fear to leave a legacy of landfills and nuclear waste storage sites to posterity, for should the unlikely future of scarcity occur, those sites will have valuable mineable concentrations of resources.
Reduce energy use? Okay if done by increasing efficiency, not okay if done by reducing work output. Take away energy, you have the noble savage living in a hut and walking wherever he wants to go, which is probably to his half acre farm where his wife is pulling the plow. Low energy life sucks, but at least it is short. Quality of life has a direct correlation with energy use.
The current US regime has take fancy to telling everyone how they should live. It’s an uncomfortable change for Americans. We aren’t Amazon Indians who need to be protected from civilization (aluminum pots, t-shirts, bug repellent) whether they want protection or not. Nor are we Brits (with all respect), living shoehorned into antique rowhouses, who would like to build a nice house of their own, but are protected from this by the local council, which won’t issue a permit, and a national government that has placed millions of buildable hectares off limits. Preserves the character, good for tourists, bad for natives, coming soon to America. </rant>
Sorry for all that. Should have posted on RealClimate.
My question is this: What, exactly, is to be “sustained”? Is the present status–whatever it might be–the ideal, from which to depart in any detail is a disaster? I think the answer is obvious: We don’t know what the current status is exactly; it is probably far from ideal in many ways; the earth and its weather and climate are changing all the time, with or without humanity’s help. If we don’t know what status we want to maintain, it is very hard to maintain it.
The strategies of conserving, not wasting, using carefully, not messing things up–those strategies are good, so long as they do not interfere with the economy, jobs, and necessities of (human) life. My wife and I have been recycling since the 1960s, and we still do; we drive high-mpg cars (my 1991 Geo Metro still gets 54 mpg); we compost vegetable cuttings and peelings, etc. However, the “green” agenda that seeks to impose on us draconian controls and high taxes is simply wrong and un-American.