Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
People have this idea that sailing is cheap, because of the low fuel costs. But blue-water sailors have a saying that goes like this:
The wind is free … but everything else costs money.
Reading the various pronouncements from the partygoers at the Durban climate-related Conference of Parties, I was struck by the many uses of the words “sustainable development” and “sustainability”. It’s pretty confusing. Apparently, paying high long-term subsidies for uneconomic energy sources is sustainable … who knew?
Anyways, I got to thinking about how I’ve never been sure what “sustainable development” means, and of how much it reminds me of the sailors saying. One of the first uses of the term was in the UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report, which said:
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
I never understood that definition. How could I use a shovel to turn over the earth for my garden, for example? Every kilo of iron ore that is mined to make my shovel is a kilo of iron ore that is forever unavailable to “future generations to meet their own needs”. It’s unavoidable. Which means that we will run out of iron, and thus any use of iron is ultimately unsustainable. My shovel use is depriving my great-grandchildren of shovels.
Oh, sure, I can recycle my shovel. But some of the metal will inevitably be lost in the process. All that does is make the inevitable iron-death move further away in time … but recycling doesn’t magically make iron extraction sustainable.
Figure 1. Example of unsustainable development.
And if me using a steel shovel to dig in my own garden is not sustainable … then what is sustainable? I mean, where are the “peak iron” zealots when we need them?
So other than sunlight, wind, and rainbows … just what is sustainable development supposed to be built of? Cell phones are one of the most revolutionary tools of development … but we are depriving future generations of nickel and cadmium in doing so. That’s not sustainable.
Here’s the ugly truth. It’s simple, blunt, and bitter. Nothing is sustainable. Oh, like the sailors say, the wind is free. As is the sunshine. But everything else we mine or extract to make everything from shovels to cell phones will run out. The only question is, will it run out sooner, or later? Because nothing is sustainable. “Sustainable Development” is just an airy-fairy moonbeam fantasy, a New Age oxymoron. In the real world, it can’t happen. I find the term “sustainable development” useful for one thing only.
When people use it, I know they have not thought too hard about the issues.
Finally, there is an underlying arrogance about the concept that I find disturbing. Forty percent of the world’s people live on less than $2 per day. In China it’s sixty percent. In India, three-quarters of the population lives on under $2 per day.
Denying those men, women, and especially children the ability to improve their lives based on some professed concern about unborn generations doesn’t sit well with me at all. The obvious response from their side is “Easy for you to say, you made it already.” Which is true. The West got wealthy by means which “sustainable development” wants to deny to the world’s poor.
Look, there could be a climate catastrophe in fifty years. And we could hit some sustainability wall in fifty years.
But when a woman’s kids are hungry, she won’t see the logic of not feeding them to avoid “compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”. She won’t understand that logic at all.
And neither do I. Certainly, I think we should live as lightly as possible on this marvelous planet. And yes, use rates and R/P ratios are an issue. But nothing is sustainable. So let’s set the phrase “sustainable development” on the shelf of meaningless curiosities, go back to concentrating on feeding the children we already have on this Earth, and leave the great-grandchildren to fend for themselves. Everyone says they’ll live to be a thousand and be a lot richer than I am and have computers that can write poetry, so I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
w.
PS—Theorists say that it’s not enough that development be sustainable in terms of the environment. They also demand sustainability in three other arenas: social, economic, and cultural sustainability.
Socially sustainable? Culturally sustainable? We don’t even know if what we currently do is culturally or socially sustainable. How can we guess if some development is culturally sustainable?
I swear, sometimes I think people have totally lost the plot. This is mental onanism of the highest order, to sit around and debate if something is “culturally sustainable”. Like I said … let’s get back to feeding the kids. Once that’s done, we can debate if the way we fed them is culturally sustainable.
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Matt Skaggs says:
December 22, 2011 at 2:38 pm
When you agree with me my work is intriguing, but when you disagree with me, I somehow have nothing to offer … funny how that works. I fear that your advice, that I should stick to topics where I agree with you, will go unheeded …
If you have something to say about “sustainability theory”, whatever that might be, how about you just say it?
And regarding “zero growth” … what on earth does that mean on a planet where forty percent of the people live on less than $2 per day?
w.
R. Gates says:
December 22, 2011 at 3:57 pm
There is always the balance between quantity or length of life and quality of life. Though you can extend the “life” of a love one with technology long after nature, in her mercy, would have taken them, it doesn mean that you should. There is a reason why they call pneumonia the “friend of the elderly”.
Alright, Gates, then we won’t treat you for Pneumococcal Pneumonia or immunize you against it, either. And by inference, your same meta-ethic above should apply to you in regard to all of the other causes of pneumonia and, indeed, to everything else under the sun now treatable or preventable – age also not necessarily having anything to do with evaluating the “quality” of a person’s life, as is already well demonstrated when it comes to the matter of freely aborting even their possible existence as a “person”.
Therefore, according to you, Gates, you should at least do yourself a favor and construct a living will to this effect immediately!
After all, you surely don’t want to wait around chancing the possibility that Obamacare might not come into full effect to do these same kinds of things for you but more slowly and haphazardly, by “law” and mere bureaucratic death panels, “cost containment” principles, and someone else’s calculation of your own “complete life” value, right?
But even much more urgently important to many people like you, you need to act very quickly in order to more immediately lower society’s overall expenditures and the use of critical resources, whose use would otherwise threaten sustainability!
In the same light, Gates, if you really do want to go back to the Stone Age in general, so as to rely on the beneficence of your friend, Nature, to take better care of you and your lifestyle, you must get with it now on all fronts!…Hey, the way a lot of green Environmentalists are also talking about their own roles in CO2’s potential “destruction of creation”, you should even have plenty of company!
Aynsley Kellow says:
December 22, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Thanks, Aynsley, your work is always interesting.
w.
‘Sustainability’, as defended here by some, and as used by certain NGOs, is simply the modern, latest form of the romanic ‘back to nature’ call, starting with Rousseau and trailing through the literature ever since.
It is something the urban elites cherish, as a dream of the good life in beautiful thatched cottages, clad in climbing roses, where the sun shines during the day and the rain comes at night, and where everything grows without any actual work.
It is most certainly not something dreamt of by those who actually farm, Wendell Berry and A physicist notwithstanding.
‘Sustainability’ has a dark basis, which is the Malthusian concept, beloved by certain AGW proponents, of overpopulation as the evil which must be eradicated.
Given the very finite land available for farming – how many city dwellers would be able to live ‘sustainably’, according to the precepts of Berry? You do the maths … and ask yourselves what should happen to those who cannot be accommodated.
There is one other thread associated with ‘sustainability’, which never gets talked about. That is the longing of the proponents of this ‘back to nature’ call for a feudal society, where said proponents will of course form the new feudal elites.
Those who still think ‘sustainability’ is a lovely idea ought to surf the net and find out a bit more about the infamous ‘Blut und Boden’ ideology and what that would have meant in practice, had its application not been prevented by certain events.
“My whole life is unsustainable. In fact, I’m quite certain it will end badly.” -Layne Blanchard
I am 48 years old.
When I was 13, a great many “experts” predicted a great many different calamities to happen in the next 30 years based on “population bomb” theory.
Thirty five years later, nothing has changed.
Yet the theory is as revered as ever, untouched by 35 years of abject failure because the experts KNOW that they’ll be proven correct, just maybe in the next 35. Or maybe the next after that. Or…
And that is what hubris gets us – nothing.
R. Gates;
Nice reductionism. You could break an apple down to the individual elements…so much carbon, oxygen, etc., but it would not tell you about what the essence the apple is. If you cannot see that the Earth and all the systems of minerals, oceans, atmosphere, magnetosphere, etc., add up to a life sustaining whole, then I feel very sorry for you and leave you to contemplate your pile of dead elements that once was an apple and the notion that the whole is far more than the sum of the parts.>>>
Actually what that would leave me with is a good understanding of what elements are required to grow apples. Combined with an understanding of the bio-chemical processes of the growing process, I can now understand what elements the soil should be enriched with to enhance the growth of apples.
While you are wailing away about the “essence” of the apple and waving your arms about the “life sustaining whole” that you claim I cannot see… I’m doing exactly what you accuse me of and as a result supplying the world with more apples, bigger apples, disease free apples, delivered around the world fresh, as needed, when needed, and from less land than would othwerwise be needed, and on land that otherwise would be barren.
Which world do you want to live in R. Gates? My world where there’s plenty of fresh apples at a reasonable cost and the most likely cause of death is old age? Or your world where the “essence” of the apple is some sort of mysterious part of the “life sustaining whole” and fresh apples are so rare that that you grow up stunted due to nutritional deficiencies and die an early death from starvation or plague.
Contemplate away R. Gates on your essence of life while the rest of us work our butts off to ensure you have food on your plate. You don’t want our kinda food, don’t eat it. But stop insisting that we have to starve to death with you.
BTW, nice try avoiding all the other points I made. Shall I re-post them to remind you of all the issues I raised which you carefully ignored while introducing the boneheaded idea that breaking the apple down into itz componants was something sad and useless?
EARTH FIRST! We’ll mine the other planets later.
R. Gates says:
December 22, 2011 at 12:09 pm
“I like this post Willis. You’ve brought up some interesting notions– many of which I’ve thought long and hard about for many decades. Actually, in the very very long view of things you’re right– nothing is sustainable as times arrow and entropy certainly move in only one way across this universe and eventually all the useful energy will be gone, and our universe will be cold and quiet. But there may be other universe’s in this multiverse of ours, so somewhere else life and consciousness will likely carry one.
But to you point about sustainability. The lessons we can learn from nature are enormous. Somehow, for hundreds of millions of years the earth has found a way to sustain life. Despite meteor stikes and great extinctions, snowball earth’s and massive volcansim, life has found a way. Life has been sustainable. What lessons can we take from nature as to how to conduct our own life and civilizations?”
———————————————-
It is not that “the earth has found a way to sustain life”, life itself found ways to survive. that’s the simple fact. Life through evolution found ways to adapt and best use the resources that were available at the respective time. Actually not at all through “sustainable development”.
———————————————-
R. Gates says:
“1) Use only what you really need. Excesses of use lead to all sorts of imbalances. Lions don’t kill every gazelle. If they did, both would go extinct.
2) Use energy that is as closely associated with contemporary solar energy as possible. Wind, direct solar, food, etc. are all examples of “current solar” energy. This is in direct contrast to “old solar” in the forms of fossil fuels.
3) Build for reuse, and reuse to build. Everything that is manufactured should have a high degree of reusablility and everything that is manufactured should be made as much as possible from reused materials versus “virgin” materials. This is the way nature has done it for millions of years and it has worked pretty darn well. ”
———————————————-
Lions don’t kill thinking about preserving the gazelle. They don’t kill only when they are not hungry and too lazy to kill for nothing – would that help them? Help the species go hunting without eating? Each species thinks very egoistically only to what they need. Humans are different, we have passed that level.
What do I(we) really need? Do we need CERN? Do we need research? Do we need space agency? Do we need satellites? Do we need Internet? Do we need social networks? Do we need knowledge, literature, cinemas, theaters, science, medical treatment, anti-aging research, access to information? How to build rockets with solar energy? Moon flights? Flights to Mars? Who may decide what I really need? You? Some bureaucrat?
This ideology is very close to the failed communism ideology – work and deliver what you can use what you need – which ends in work for the workers to fulfilling the needs of the wealthy – which in case of communist were the apparatchiks.
The problem is the promoters of such ideology do not start it by themselves, build their own communities to live by their rules. No, they want us, they need us to work in their ponzi schemes. Well logically it wouldn’t work otherwise, it has been already proven.
Combating waste and pollution is right, recycling makes sense, the ideology that is packed with it, that I don’t buy. Maybe we need to reinvent environmentalism and clean it from ideology.
I agree that everything we extract from the earth is finite and that nothing lasts forever. But the phrase “Sustainable Development” needn’t be used as a straw man. The goal is to stop whole sale environmental destruction by conserving as much as we can for as long as we can while spreading the benefits of modern life to as many people as we can. And yes, that’s a tall order but we have a responsibility to those who come after us.
Conservation and cooperation is the best way to ensure a decent life for everyone.
Edo Japan is a good example of what sustainable development really means. It should be studied to see what lessons we can learn and apply in our time.
Lars P said:
“It is not that “the earth has found a way to sustain life”, life itself found ways to survive. that’s the simple fact. Life through evolution found ways to adapt and best use the resources that were available at the respective time. Actually not at all through “sustainable development”.”
——-
That is one way to look at it, but I think gets back to a reductionistic perspective where Earth is simply a convenient host for life, which is then more of a fungus that rides around on it. A broader perspective reveals the fact that life and earth co-evolve together, and indeed, with many studies indicating that life on earth may have even been “seeded” from organic compounds raining down in meteors. From this perspective Earth can be seen more like a fertile seed waiting to be fertilized with the basis of life. And from this, an even wider perspective opens up in which the very structure of the solar system and galaxies lend themselves to the creation of planets that become complex living organisms. Just as it would be impossible for a single cell in your body to recognize the fact that it is part of a larger whole, so too, it is difficult to see that we might be part of something larger. The notion of man versus nature, and the idea of a rugged individualist run strong in our culture, and certainly have their place, but in terms of “sustainability”, it is the recognition that there is an interconnected web of life on this planet in which balance and harmony of the parts is the key. Excesses in any area can disrupt that web and break the sustainability. A “rugged individualist” cell in your body is also known by another name which is cancer, and if enough of these exist in your body, your body becomes unsustainable.
Sailing a boat is like standing in a shower tearing up 100$ bills. (That’s racing. Cruising sailors only tear up 20’s and the shower comes and goes but you get the idea.)
R. Gates says:
December 23, 2011 at 7:35 am
“From this perspective Earth can be seen more like a fertile seed waiting to be fertilized with the basis of life.”
I think you flipped the roles of seed and fertilizer there.
Lars P. said:
“Lions don’t kill thinking about preserving the gazelle. They don’t kill only when they are not hungry and too lazy to kill for nothing – would that help them? Help the species go hunting without eating? Each species thinks very egoistically only to what they need.”
——-
You missed the point. Lions hunt and eat gazelles out of pure instinct. This is beyond any sort egotistical reason, as that is a human construct. And in that pure instinctual response, the lion guarantees the survivability of both species.
Stephen Harris says:
December 23, 2011 at 6:25 am
I agree that everything we extract from the earth is finite and that nothing lasts forever. But the phrase “Sustainable Development” needn’t be used as a straw man. The goal is to stop whole sale environmental destruction by conserving as much as we can for as long as we can while spreading the benefits of modern life to as many people as we can. And yes, that’s a tall order but we have a responsibility to those who come after us.
Conservation and cooperation is the best way to ensure a decent life for everyone.
FYI on “sustainable development”, if you haven’t already read it:
Aynsley Kellow says:
December 22, 2011 at 5:20 pm
…readers might enjoy my earlier contribution on this subject:
http://www.science.org.au/events/sats/sats2002/kellow.html
DirkH says:
December 23, 2011 at 7:46 am
R. Gates says:
December 23, 2011 at 7:35 am
“From this perspective Earth can be seen more like a fertile seed waiting to be fertilized with the basis of life.”
I think you flipped the roles of seed and fertilizer there.
———
I agree that was a bit confusing, and instead of seed I should have said “egg” as I think Earth is more than just fertile ground, as the ground is simply a repository of moisture and minerals in which the seed grows, and hydroponics proves you don’t actually need the ” ground” at all. The relationship between organic compounds raining down on earth is more akin to the relationship between sperm and egg, where both are altered in the process and the life they create is more than the sum of the parts. in this sense, while we do call sperm “seed” they are actually not like seeds in the botanical sense, as they will not grow into a full organism without the other half.
“sustainability”=shibboleth
“climate change” = shibboleth
“sustainable culture”=shibboleth
“social justice”=shibboleth
“A Physicist”=shibbolethist
“Willis Eschenbach”=Shibbolethologist
R. Gates says:
December 23, 2011 at 7:35 am
Just as it would be impossible for a single cell in your body to recognize the fact that it is part of a larger whole, so too, it is difficult to see that we might be part of something larger….
The notion of man versus nature, and the idea of a rugged individualist run strong in our culture, and certainly have their place, but in terms of “sustainability”, it is the recognition that there is an interconnected web of life on this planet in which balance and harmony of the parts is the key. Excesses in any area can disrupt that web and break the sustainability.
Yes, Gates, it does depend upon how many neurons you have in your own “web”. Upon their connections, ability to learn and create, etc.. And, in your kind of case, upon the idea that yours are the one’s which know and should operate the whole damn place.
Btw, Gates, are you by chance vying for a pivotal role in making Obamacare’s central decisions, or merely to succeed Kim Jong IL in North Korea?
A la Adam Smith…The invisible fang!
Aynsley Kellow wrote:
“We must reject nature as providing norms which guide how we must live and accept instead that we are part of a living, changing system; we can chose to accept, use, or control elements to make for a habitable existence, both singly and individually.”
——
Very insightful. The term “norms” is a bit anthropomorphic though for what nature can provide, for certainly in terms of sustainability we can learn much from how natural ecosystems are sustained through balance and harmony of the parts, and nothing goes to ” waste” but is reused and recycled over various timeframes. In no way does this contradict the dynamic character of natural systems in that they are constantly in flux such that the ways in which balance is achieved and the very system itself changes greatly over time in response to internal and external forcings.
R. Gates says:
December 23, 2011 at 8:01 am
hydroponics proves you don’t actually need the ” ground” at all.
I think the Oceans, Lakes, and Rivers might have already proven that, Gates. But does this mean that you no longer live in mortal fear of CO2’s allegedly Catastrophic effects, resulting from its alleged role in Sea Level Rise? Or do we all still have to seek higher ground immediately, or else accompany you right back to the Stone age, asap, “before it’s too late!” ….You know, because of the Precautionary Principle, and all. And if the latter, could you please start me off in the right direction by telling me whether I should get out of bed or not in the morning, or at any other time?
LOL … Gareth, that’s an excellent common-sense post.
After all everyone knows folks who indulge in magical thinking, like “Maybe those bills won’t come due (that is, climate change won’t happen)”. And also “Surely my lottery tickets will pay off (space-flight and other magical technologies will arrive in time to save us)”.
We can all pity kids who inherit the problems created by parents who themselves never grew up … and who never faced their adult real-world responsibilities.
Wendell Berry writes excellently upon the link between sustainability and adult responsibility.
R. Gates said:
“… the lion guarantees the survivability of both species.”
Your scientific concept, Gates, has been well explained in Disney’s Lion King.
You’ve created some bewilderment with the commenters here by trying to describe in English prose something that can only be illuminated when it’s chanted in Zulu and accompanied by English poetry:
Nants ingonyama bagithi, Baba [Here comes a lion, Father]
Sithi uhm ingonyama [Oh yes, it’s a lion]
From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun
There’s more to see than can ever be seen …
‘a physicist’ says:
“…everyone knows folks who indulge in magical thinking, like ‘Maybe those bills won’t come due (that is, climate change won’t happen)”. And also “Surely my lottery tickets will pay off (space-flight and other magical technologies will arrive in time to save us)’.”
Saying “climate change won’t happen” is a perfect example of psychological projection. Climate change always happens, and only the alarmist crowd disputes that fact [as in Mann’s pretending that there was no significant temperature variation prior to the industrial revolution]. The reference to being saved by space flight ties in perfectly with Mrs Keech’s Seekers, who believed that the flying saucer would save them. I wonder if ‘a physicist’ understands the perfect analogy between him and the Seekers, and how crazy he sounds to rational folks?