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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I always laugh at how many of the same people who talk about sustainability also claim that the world’s biggest ponzi scheme Social Security is sustainable.
Fantastic, another ‘Rational Optimist’, there are not many of us in this world. Here is to hoping for more critical thinking in the future instead emotional emoting!
Thanks.
A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 5:13 am
Our family’s Iowa farmland has been in our hands for 150 years, and it is still in good shape.
Is there enough land for everyone in America to have a farm in Iowa? In not, then the practice of individuals owning farms is inherently unsustainable, as eventually there will be a shortage of farm land, which drives the price out of reach for new farmers.
150 years ago there was a lot of farmland available in America, which made the price affordable. The former inhabitants having been removed under a process that itself is not sustainable, except by the next conquering invader.
Willis’ essay on sustainability unleashed a torrent of ideas that have been dammed up in my brain. In recent years, I have become a rabid anti-environmentalist. For many decades now environmentalists have promoted one eco-scare after another, all proven wrong in the end. The movement has become so mindless and corrupt that I automatically reject any notion they promote.
I first became aware of their antics back in the 1970’s during the run-up to the Alaska oil pipeline, which was supposed to devastate the caribou herds, but instead seems to have greatly benefitted them. Remember the ozone hole that wasn’t? The acid rain that wasn’t? The poor endangered polar bears that are at all time high populations? The (fill in the blank) eco-disaster that never happened?
Environmentalism is filled with nonsense concepts like “sustainability,” which Willis so expertly lampooned. The root idea of environmentalism is hatred of human beings — that humans are a plague upon the earth and damage the environment. I ask: Why is it that only human activity is considered damage to the environment? Why can’t humans eat bovine burgers, but lions can munch on antelope steaks? Why is it wrong for humans to log a forest, but okay for an elephant herd in Namibia to strip a forest bare? Why can’t humans build dams, but beavers can? Why can’t humans build mile long cities, but prairie dogs can?
According to biologists, humans are descended from hominids who evolved on the African savannah. In short, the environment made us just like it made every other living creature on the planet. So why is it that only human activity is considered to be damage to the environment?
What is “the environment,” anyway? Consider this tale. Through the patch of woods behind my property runs a small stream. Last spring, we had lots of rain, which swelled the stream, which created a wetlands of sorts in the drainage basin. For a time, the place was swarming with insects, frogs, and the birds which fed upon them. After seven weeks of no rain, the stream dried up and the wetlands vanished, as did all the creatures which depended on it. A large turtle even showed up in my backyard, the first time ever, apparently migrating toward my neighbors’ backyard pool. I relocated it to another nearby pond teeming with turtles.
Which environment am I supposed to protect? The dried up mud flats or the teeming wetlands?
Too many people seem to think the environment, including the climate, is static and unchanging. In truth, change is the only constant. The environment changes. All living creatures either adapt to their changing environment, or they adapt it to their needs. I declare that humans have as much right to impact the environment as any other living creature.
Sustainability is like so many things … it is a continuum. Some things, like iron, are extremely abundant and hence the use of it is more sustainable than something like oil. Of course, oil is also somewhat sustainable as the CO2 is recycled into plants that will once again form oil over millions of years. Nothing is 100% sustainable.
So, the real issue gets down to the time frame involved and the real need for items in the future. This is where human ingenuity comes into play. We will simply find something else to replace items that become scarce (those that are less sustainable). This is the fact that is lost on the scare-mongers. They cannot factor in technological change. So, instead of moving forward we should all huddle in our caves and pray to the gods that they provide bountiful resources.
Luther Wu @ur momisugly 3:35
I think that this is what is meant by sustainable development, with or without capital letters. My ex wanted to live a sustainable lifestyle. To him it meant producing everything we needed, with as few ( and I mean few) purchased inputs as possible. He only saw the positives and completely ignored the negatives of living this way. For some background, we lived on a farm. He sold his larger tractors and bought a very old tractor that didn’t even have a cab on it. He sold his larger field implements because the smaller tractor wouldn’t pull them. However, it used to take him X hours to work the fields and now it took him 3 times X, because the implements were smaller and didn’t cover as much area as they did before. He finally gave up farming all together and planted all the fields to grass, to let the cattle “harvest” the grass instead of having to harvest the fields (which had been wheat, millet and hay fields) using machines.
His goal was to have me fix meals with all the things our farm produced. We had our own meat, although it was sent out to be butchered, wrapped and frozen. He wanted to start doing that at home. We had a cow who provided milk, and I churned butter and separated cream. We had a large garden, but we still had to buy groceries at the store, and he hated us doing that. We didn’t live in the South or on the West Coast, so our garden was frequently hit with hail and grasshopper infestations.
His desire was for us to buy everything used, from cars to clothes. He didn’t want artwork on the walls because seeing nature outside through the window was enough. He didn’t want us driving any more than was necessary and wanted me to quit my off the farm job for that reason, although I desperately needed that time away from him. He didn’t want the kids playing organized sports because we: a) had to drive there and b) it taught them that some people were better than others. He wanted all the kids to stay on the farm and develop their own farm oriented enterprise, to provide an income. He thought that tribal living was the way to live and wanted to start an eco village on the farm, with “like minded” people, although it was basically a commune with a fancy name.
He couldn’t see that he was becoming a dictator and that his family was unraveling and revolting. Mother Earth was more important to him than his own family.
I know it sounds like I am bashing my ex, and this isn’t the forum for that. My reason for writing this is that my ex ABSOLUTELY thought we should live this way and that I was being selfish, uncaring and “living a consumeristic American lifestyle” for disagreeing with him. But can you see the thought processes he was using? We were becoming isolated, different, with his goals dominating and everyone else ignored. It was extremely cult-like thinking.
I saw many downfalls to his grand ideas, one of which is that living the way he wanted took an incredible amount of physical labor, and I was getting too old and achy to want to start adding that kind of physical labor to my daily life. I also thought that we were living too close to the edge for comfort- where an injury to him would seriously affect our standard of living; any financial downturn would be fatal; any weather event would be devastating. I lived this “Sustainable Lifestyle” for a number of years and it is only sustainable in good times. I cannot believe that this is the way the “powers to be” wants us to live. It sounds romantic from afar, but it is brutal up close.
I agree with Tom, vboring, and some others.
Development that is based upon materials which are not wasted or upon renewable resources is acceptably “sustainable”. If you build a house out of 20 trees, and replant 20 trees, then about the time the house is rebuilt, you’ll have more wood. You can melt down the glass and make new windows. You can recycle the metals. Farming that is sustainable maximizes yield while minimizing the depletion of the soil to maintain relatively constant yield.
Sustainable development is careful about the amount of pollution we introduce to the environment, realizing that once you poison a water source, you don’t get it back without great pains, or sometimes at all.
The argument that all “greens” are “warmists” and therefore we should allow developing nations to suffocate themselves in coal power pollution is a strawman, and shows weakness of mind. The fact is, developing nations have the best chance to maintain their environment in a state that is healthy for their constituents, as long as we, the polluted and developed world, continue to work on sustainable development technologies we can share with them. The technology exists for them to live without trashing their environment through their own industrial period. But that’s not what the developed world wants. It wants to keep doing things the cheap (destructive) way, but not in our own back yards.
Environmentalists are NOT the skeptics’ adversary. Warmists are. There’s a big difference.
@Tom
“…You confuse materials with consumables. When you mine that iron ore for that shovel, what you want is iron. You take four kilograms of that iron and turn it into a shovel. You use the shovel for twenty years and at the end… you still have four kilograms of iron. Even if some of it has rusted, that oxide is still convertible back to iron, given the right process and enough energy.
Oil and gas are fundamentally different. When you extract oil and gas, what you want is the energy potential in their chemical bonds. Once you’ve used that energy, you can’t get it back….”
This looks like a mixture of confused thinking and weasel wording, in an effort to score a point.
Depending on the timescale you are looking at, EVERYTHING is repeatable (sustainable?), right up to the heat death of the universe. In the case of your spade you put a large amount of energy in, to make the ore into Fe2, and then use it for a long time, until it rusts. Then you repeat the process.
You can do exactly the same with oil and gas, if you want to – using it as an energy storage material. So what if you use more energy to make it than you can extract from it? That’s the case for all energy interchange. At the moment we don’t need to do this because we have lots of oil hanging around. We used to pick up meteoric iron in classical times and not care about ‘forcing future generations to dig mines and create furnaces’, and all the environmental damage that goes with them. I believe we will use chemical power sources for a long time – they have a lot of energy per unit mass – and so we’ll have to make the chemicals if they run out (which they show no sign of doing so yet). In practice, we’ll probably import methane from the Jupiter system – that’s within our technological capability right now, it’s just not economically viable. Yet.
There IS no fundamental difference between ‘materials’ and ‘consumables’. It’s just a case of timescales and economic conditions, both of which are changing forces and impossible to second-guess. All you have done is consider an energy interchange over a period of 10 or so years, which favours the iron shovel, and then made up the idea that somehow the fact that the natural chemical process to reverse hydrocarbon oxidation takes a long time means that it is impossible. Oil and gas WILL be recreated naturally from the CO2 remnants of the oxidation process, and we are already able to do this artificially. All else is just time and economics…
I think Willis has said all that can be said about sustainable development. However, there is an associated concept that is worth some thought. That concept is what I will call “steady state humanity” for lack of a better phrase.
In the 1960s, some scientist argued that we will never be visited by extraterrestrials. His argument was very simple. Once humanity reaches a level of development that is just one or two clicks above our present level, it will attain the ability to provide the necessities for everyone and some really cool mind altering drugs will be available for everyone. (Apparently, one is to imagine safe fusion energy as one of the clicks.) Everyone will be born into a life of total satisfaction. Given such a life, all striving will end. The same reasoning applies to extraterrestrials. Before any group of beings attained the abilities needed for intergalactic travel they would have hit the satisfaction plateau which is endless, so we will never see them.
If there is a serious point in this little story, I think it is that those who promote the idea of sustainable development are really thinking that there is such a thing as “steady state humanity.” However, if “steady state humanity” is possible then we have to do some serious unsustainable development before we get there. So, for the foreseeable future sustainable development requires unsustainable development.
JJThoms says:
December 22, 2011 at 4:47 am
Is there coal in central Africa? Oil? Gas?. Is there wind/sun?
Who knows what is hidden away in Africa, but it was the first continent to go nuclear!
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/mragheb/www/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%20Engineering/Natural%20%20Nuclear%20Reactors,%20The%20Oklo%20Phenomenon.pdf
In the old days, one of the great truths was: “If it can’t be grown, it’s gotta be mined.” This applied to everthing consumed/used by man.
The obvious exception was hookers, now that has been superceded by hookers and carbon credits.
“You cannot talk about sustainability without talking about people, about politics, about power and control.” John Holdren*
A more honest definition I have yet to read- He who controls the sustainable definition- controls the power and the people.
*from a 1995 World Bank speech-The Meaning of Sustainability: Biogeophysical Aspects by John P. Holdren, Gretchen C. Daily, and Paul R. Ehrlich
Warmarxists are turning language upside down — it’s astonishing if one thinks about it alittle:
WORD ACTUAL MEANING
progressive regressive
diversity conformity
education indoctrination/ignorance
communication propaganda
justice injustice/cronyism
grassroots astroturf
sustainable unsustainable
green red
consensus non-consensus
ethical unethical
NGO legalized mafia syndicate
non-profit rent-seeking
There are many more…
A note to “a physicist:” I envy your patience. You can recommend to Willis that he read some literature on a topic so that his essays might at least acknowledge the accumulated wisdom of others, but he won’t do it. It is probably not that he does not want to read the literature, but that he has already moved on to his next drive-by essay.
REPLY:I’m not sure patience is the word, blind faith dogma might be a better fit. Go ahead, argue with Willis on this topic, make my day – Anthony
Sorry, my formatting above didn’t work. Mods might help…
REPLY: Formatting lost, you probably used the wrong tags – can’t recover what we can’t see – Anthony
A good summary measure of the resources that went into the production of a product is the cost of the product. Of course there are distortions due to government meddling with subsidies and taxes, but if you want to minimize resources expended, minimize the cost.
Sustainability” is just a convenient way for eco-loons, warmenistas, and enviro-nazis to side-step such inconvenient issues as economics, logic and common sense. It is also very good for government funding and as a means of informing all concerned about how “environmentally concerned” one is, as well as how “concerned” for the future.
“A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 4:15 am
On a local scale, my father taught me that farmland regenerates on a scale of a few thousand years — a long but not immeasurably long time.”
Obviously your father was aware of the Russell soil loss equation.But, as in most of your posts, your diatribe was long on flowery stereotypic definitions, but short on facts.
Each “type” of soil regenerates at a highly predictable rate, roughly 2-10 tons a year. Since an acre/furrow/slice (6″/acre) weighs ~2,000,000 lbs, it can take up to 5,000 years or as little as 2,000 years to regenerate 6″ of topsoil. What sustainable folks don’t comprehend is that even virgin grassland loses soil, as in gullies, blowouts on hilltops (even in CRP set aside acres), indigenous weed patches that have no winter cover, etc. The massive coastal wetlands where the Mississippi outlets into the Gulf existed before mankind. Who caused that erosion of topsoil?
But you are right in suggesting conservation. The goal in conservation is to limit erosion of the topsoil to the rate of regeneration of that particular soil determined by the soil loss equation. It has nothing to do with horse drawn implements or forcing the population of the world to eat grass, which is the goal of the UN committee on Agriculture. I can show you extensive examples of highly intensive operations that are actually gaining soil and increasing soil organic matter, one of the main ingredients in productive soils (think Mollisols in Iowa). In terms of maintaining productivity, these farms utilize energy in the form of chemicals, large implements, and nutrient replenishment. They actually have a lower energy footprint/unit of production than ecosystem evolution. So to alter this massive production system to a “sustainable” energy utilization in the terms loosely bandied about by the ecofascists is tentamount to commiting mass genocide on a global scale. Develop thorium reactors, reuse the current waste, and eat more chicken.
But you don’t want to hear this, do you?
Oh BTW, that’s not a shovel I would use to dig a garden.
I recently gave a talk along with Lord Monkton to a group of Maryland County officials concerned with the State’s new sustainability planning master plan (PlanMaryland) about to be adopted. The plan is about the growing of local food that doesn’t pollute, fair and equitable tiny housing, a return to the cities and a whole lot of bicycles and walking. Businesses will also need to fit the green future.
At the heart of the Agenda 21/sustainability is a belief markets cannot be trusted to produce a sustainable or equitable outcome. The nearly approved PlanMaryland- states this quite clearly:
” in the absence of a set of policies and strategies for containing development and prioritizing the highest and best use of all land in the State, there is no reason to believe that market forces alone will produce development that is smart, sustainable, and balances the competing demands made on limited resources.”
The pesky market forces are to be replaced by the enlightened guidance of sustainability commissioners who will decide how the interests of sustainability, equity and the environment are apportioned. Monetary evaluations are not a proper planning metric for the new Maryland that uses theThe Happy Planet Index as an example guide in how to value sustainable decisions. The happiest of countries include Guatemala, Laos, China and Viet Nam-while the middling happy include Haiti, Iran and Algeria. The most unhappiest of countries includes the US just edging out Nigeria and Tanzania. (When I first saw this I thought it was a joke- after reading it I recognized it as dangerous).
Naw, you don’t. There is no way for your decisions today to be binding on the next 30 generations down the road let alone anticipate what is to come your way and what they must do to cope with those unforeseen consequences!
Can you point to any ‘letters of intent’ or specific directions on how to ‘handle your land’ dating back 150 years as to what your ‘practices’ and routines should be today beyond the universal generics of ‘plant in the spring’ and ‘harvest in the fall’?
No; I’ll bet not.
It was understood what should be done … be adaptable and survive, above all. This then entails many different choices and directions to ‘take the land’ and what may be planted on it or even ‘built’ upon it.
But since we have seemingly lost ‘common sense’ today, can I say your generation seems to require ‘written specifics’ on the issue?
.
Willis:
There is no doubt there is a finite amount of iron in the world. Have we reached “peak iron” yet? It’s written in stone (another thing that we’ve already reached peak production of, stone) somewhere. It’s just a matter of time.
Unless, of course, we carefully plan for peak iron, and how much anybody should be allowed to own or consume.
~More Soylent Green!
RE: Olen says: (December 22, 2011 at 7:25 am)
“Sustainability is the capacity to endure.”
Quite right. When you get past all the buzzwords; that is what it means. A ‘sustainable development’ must be able to endure indefinitely, for all practical purposes, without destroying or exhausting the basis of its own existence.
Ferd, you ask a good common-sense question, and one of the best common-sense answers (known to me) is the answer that Wendell Berry gives in his celebrated essay Solving for Pattern:
Here the point is that family farms are but one organ within the living body that is the American way of life. And therefore, as Berry’s essay wisely reminds us, what is good for America’s family farms is good too for America in its entirety. It follows, as Berry’s essay also reminds us, that the ongoing destruction of family farming must be regarded as “desperate, irreversible, destructive, and unsafe” for America.
Because if American farmers cease to conserve their land, with foresight on a timescale of centuries, who will take their place?
That is the common-sense reason why Solving for Pattern is about more than farming, and is recommended reading for skeptic and scientist alike.
Willis:
1.
If something exists then it is sustainable because it has been and is being sustained.
2.
If something ceases to exist then it was not sustainable because it was not sustained.
3.
If something is increasing (e.g. in use) then it is very sustainable and there is no indication that it may become unsustainable.
4.
If something is decreasing (e.g. in use) then its sustainability is declining so it may become unsustainable.
5.
Nothing can be sustained for infinite time (not even the existence of the Earth).
And none of points 1 to 5 is governed by how much of the something exists. For example, flint knapping has become unsustainable because of lack of demand for flint tools and NOT because of lack of flint.
Richard