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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Maurizio Morabito (omnologos) says:
The Monty Python take:
Wow, what a lot of straw men packed into one post.
Sustainable living isn’t about belief in eternal resources – that’s the blithely optimistic mindset of the people who want to burn, baby burn. Talk about projection.
The impoverished practise sustainable living by necessity. You don’t waste what you can’t afford to. You don’t have to be a greenie to know the value of insuring against the future.
Whether you believe it or not (that doesn’t matter for this point), climate change is projected to hit poorer countries much harder than affluent ones. Wealthier, developed countries would be better placed to adapt. Communities on the edge of subsistence would do it much tougher. And it’s poor countries who most vehemently want an international agreement on emissions controls. What’s that? Now they’re self-interested and gaming the UN, are they? Crikey, that was a quick turnaround. How much are we supposed to care, exactly? It’s so easy to lose the thread….
So let’s just make them healthy, affluent societies, right? Oh yeah, that’s been the cry for a century before global warming was an issue, and the distance between poor and wealthy countries is phenomenally greater than ever. But climate change cynics really truly rooly care about these people. They’re not using their hardship as a political football like the activists do, noooo.
Willis is telling us that we either forget emissions policy or make people starve. Wow. Just wow. What an amazingly straightforward dichotomy that is. Is it really that simple? There’s no way you can mandate emissions regulations without killing people. Well, it’s on a blog so it must be true.
The cynicism here is lamentable but understandable, but the faux concern for the world’s destitute is nauseating. Please don’t.
1DandyTroll says:
December 22, 2011 at 3:05 am
Hey, Dandy, back to trolling I see. In answer to your question, it’s because
a) for about the first 6,800 of those years there weren’t many of us, and
b) the world is a big place, and
c) when we start to run low we use something else. Who would have guessed that copper communication cables could be replaced by glass cables?
w.
Ken Hall says:
December 22, 2011 at 3:14 am
You miss the point. You can only farm sustainably with sustainable shovels … and shovels aren’t sustainable.
w.
Sustainable is time frame dependent. The Sun and Earth and wind will also pass away in a while, quite a while. Sustainability has always been defined in terms of our lack of knowledge of future resources and future technology, which we always estimate poorly. So, everything is sustainable for some unknown period of time and nothing is sustainable in some other period of time. ( If someone else said this, I am sorry, but I did not read all 176 of the other posts.)
Roger Carr says:
December 22, 2011 at 1:56 am
TimTheToolMan says:
December 22, 2011 at 3:44 am
In other words, Roger, there’s nothing that’s sustainable except building spaceships, and Tim, you agree? Just trying to clarify your position. If that’s it, it’s very much like mine—I say nothing is sustainable, and you say only building spaceships might be sustainable … but since building spaceships is only about 0.0001% of what humans do, we’re not far apart.
w.
“Sustainable development” is simply a weasel-term for “anything other than Capitalism”. It’s the latest attempt to put lipstick on the Marxist/Communist/Socialist pig.
The word “sustainable” belongs in the same genre as the phrase “climate change.” The constructs are seemingly totally meaningful, yet totally meaningless utterances that might be expected from the caterpillar with the bong in Alice-in-Wonderland. They are useful constructs in that they can be used by the socialists to “engineer” the culture in any way that they choose to take it.
That said, wood and trees get pretty close to being truely sustainable.
Willis – have you been watching George Carlin on “Saving the Planet”?
‘Sustainability’ is something dreamt up by elites living comfortable, secure lives in highly urbanised environments, knowing full well that what they preach for the rest of the world is not something they will ever do themselves.
The description by Judy F above (December 22, 2011 at 7:41 am) serves very well to illustrate this.
It always amazes me that so many professional feminists in the ‘green’ and ‘environmental’ movements seem to be wishing for nothing better for themselves and their daughters than the life of drudgery experienced by so many of us in the UK well into the middle of the last century.
I can promise those ladies – you won’t have time to go to meetings or swan off to nice resort when you have to spend your whole day to keep the fire burning in the kitchen, wash the clothes of your family by hand, scrub and sweep the floors by hand and trot out to get groceries every day because there’s no fridge nor freezer. And you still have to cook the food. Oh – and imagine doing the washing-up without – no, not a dishwasher, but without ordinary washing-up liquid.
And you spend the evenings (no telly, no PC, no iPhone, ordinary landline phone at the street corner) ‘sustaining’ the clothing of your family, like, darning socks, trousers, turning cuffs on shirts etc …
Yep, totally sustainable progress, and knowledge and intelligence, which could help produce new technologies, totally wasted on ‘sustainability’.
But there’s more:
both the idea we must and can ‘stop’ climate from changing, as well as this sustainability, are signs of dangerously closed minds, who have given up on evolution both in the usual meaning as well as in cultural meaning. Everything must stay just as it is now, with a few billion people less.
This all speaks of their total fear – of change, of weather, of nature.
Actually, we should pity them.
A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 4:15 am
I’d be glad to, A physicist … I just couldn’t find any good analyses of the subject, much less “best analyses”. I’m sure there are people out there smarter than me … but I can’t find where they have analyzed the term “sustainable development”.
I also note that you are playing your usual game, throwing out crappy, ill-formed ideas without even an attempt at a citation. If you want me to believe that there are some kind of great analyses of sustainability, you’ll have to cite chapter and verse.
Having read Wendell Berry extensively over the last forty years or so, I haven’t a clue what you are on about. Maybe Wendell said something about mining steel, but where and what are you referring to? Cite chapter and verse and give us a quote to chew on. A vague hand-wave in the direction of a man’s entire life’s work is meaningless.
Here are the problems, “A”. (You don’t mind if I call you by your first name?) First, we have no useable definition of “sustainable”. Second, we have no idea which of Wendell Berry’s thoughts about sustainability you approve of, and which you think are wrong. Third, I’m not all that interested in the “sobering challenges” seen by Wendell Berry. I’m more interested in the UN/NGO plans to change the planet’s entire economic system based on their warped idea of “sustainable development”, whatever they mean by that today.
w.
PS—STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. There’s no “medicine” in it, not enough “M”s. Nice try, though, it actually made you sound intelligent for a moment.
John West says:
“The solar system and the universe is evidence that order can arise from chaos, that the second law of thermodynamics is not applicable to such systems.”
I don’t know about that, seems pretty chaotic to me, over the long haul at least. The rules (that we think we know of) by which it seems to operate do allow for both it and us to exist, for now anyway. And those rules seem to have some order to them. Change just one small factor though, like the expansion rate of the universe or the energy levels occupied by electrons within the atom and there would be nothing here. Antropomorphic theory or intelligent design, take your pick. Or I guess probability theory in a multiverse could get us here. Easier to believe in God, I should think.
A physicist –
I am a farmer myself. My own father got some (very cheap and large) areas in 1976 where nothing but some wild herbs and puny pines could grow. The first years almost nothing grew there.
Fast forward now. Soil from these fields is now able to produce almost as the other places around which were producing long before.
Give me 30 years and I terraform whatever unproductive fields you have.
Imagine going to your doctor for a routine physical and having him telling you “I need to amputate your arm”. You ask why. He says: Well, it’s a dangerous world. You could cut your arm. And if you cut your arm it could get infected. And if your arm gets infected we could become unable to control the infection. In a worst case scenario, we might have to amputate the arm. If we amputate now, this situation will be impossible.
So much of the greens’ “reasoning” reminds me of this prophylactic amputation. Why impose on ourselves policies at least as bad as what *could* happen if we continue business-as-usual? Even worse, they they argue that such policies are demanded by their canonized “precautionary principle”.
“Sustainable” is an illusion. Eco systems appear to be sustainable only over the medium term. But in reality, no population of organism is sustainable. Rabbits exploit their environment, and without preditors would reproduce themselves into collapse as they exceed the carrying capacity of their environment. Then collapse in numbers (meaning huge numbers of individuals starve to death.) until the population drops to a very low percent of the previous high (as much as a 90% cull rate, extinction at 100%).
Entire ecosystems work under that same premise, especially those at the top of the food chain. Thus populations go through boom and bust cycles, which over generations appears sustainable, but on the low level of the individuals is a brutal struggle for life.
But even middle term there is no sustainable population because the environment changes, and alters the rules of the game for populations by changing the carrying capacity. Changes in the environment pulls the rug out from under populations. Thus only a small subgroup of a population will make it past such changes as a new species evolves.
Thus this romantic notion of creating a sustainable society (no growth) is an unattainable pipe dream. Sustainable development (growth) is worse, it’s an oxymoron. Doesn’t matter how smart we think we are, we cannot defy the laws of physics.
Re Sustainable someone else may have made this point allready but:
The universe is a puzzle box
you need fire to harden wood and bone tools to et you work with copper then bronze which lets you dig surface deposits of Iron and coal which lets you make steel that allows you to drill oil and gas which in turn gives you the rescource base to buid nuclear power plants and computers which will eventually allow you to mine the moon and then the asteroids and so forth and so on each level of technology opens the door to the next the only way to fail is to stop advancing to deny the benifits of hich tech and only worry about the possible problems. I have faith we will continue to advance maybe not in the US or the west but eventually some group will walk on the moon again and eventually someone will be able to tell us about living on those eartlike planets kepler keeps finding
Just my 2 cents John G
A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 5:13 am
Berry is always worth reading. However, since he didn’t use the words “sustainable” or “development” in his essay, it is not clear what relevance that has to the common use of the term “sustainable development”, and how it makes no sense the way the UN uses it.
A thousand years? You are trying to convince us you have a one thousand year planning horizon for your farm?
Thats … um … er … well … that’s wonderful, A. What will be the main power source of the farm in the year 3011? Will your shovels be made out of renewable iron?
I can’t speak for the rest of your family, but you sure seem to be. You go on and on without providing a usable definition of “sustainable development”. You seem to enjoy hand-waving about Wendell Berry, but you haven’t said what it is that you like about his thoughts. Now you are claiming you have some clue about what your farm will look like a full millennium from now … but you still haven’t dealt with the fact that iron ore is non-renewable. Seems kinda foolish to me …
w.
PS—My problem with Berry is that he tends to be rhapsodic and poetic, the man can write, but he’s not necessarily all that logical. For example, from your citation:
Well, that all sounds romantic and New Age, but … no. What is good for the plants is not necessarily good for the water, that’s the problem. Organic fertilizer is great for plants, but you really don’t want it in your drinking water. Good for the plants … bad for the water. I’m sure you can think of other examples.
John West says:
“The solar system and the universe is evidence that order can arise from chaos, that the second law of thermodynamics is not applicable to such systems.”
Sorry John, but it doesn’t work that way. The second law of physics requires that any order you see today must have existed at the time universe was born. It’s the law of entropy. In a closed system order does not increase without a commensurate reduction in order from elsewhere in the closed system. It can also be called the law of conservation of information where we define information as order. Two of the greatest living physicists today, Leonard Susskin and Stephen Hawking, along with a cadre of kibbutzers on both sides, argued over whether the information in an encyclopedia could be permanently destroyed by dropping it into a black hole. Neither argued that it be destroyed by some more mundane chaotic event like being burned in blast furnace. In principle all the information would still be present in the exact positions and velocities of the ash and smoke molecules. It would be practically lost but not theorectically lost. This is the law of conservation of information illustrated and defended by top physicists. The argument was about whether the information would be lost forever to the outside universe should the destruction occur by falling into a black hole. After 10 years Hawking conceded that even in that case the information would not be lost it would exit the black hole in the form of Hawking radiation which is the moral equivalent of smoke from a fire on the other side.
You either misunderstand the second law or you misunderstand the nature of the universe. Order can only increase if it is imported from outside the system under consideration. For order to have increased in the universe over time it must have been imported from outside the universe. Plenty of religious folk will be happy to say that outside source is God. Personally I don’t think God needed to tinker with his creation so, as Einstein went to his grave believing, we live in a clockwork universe of cause and effect that God wound up and set in motion. If there’s any chaos in the universe I think it might be confined to free will if such a thing as free will really exists.
Speaking of sustainability…Steve Jobs, media darling and Wall Streets Golden Boy made most of his fortune creating devices that will be obsolete in 6 months…
When I hear reference to sustainable, i immediately expect a conversation on green self righteousness.
If a person has to announce their own virtue, they probablly lack virtue.
Now we enter an era of light pollution. We are polluting the evening skies with fugitive light form parking lots and cities.
David says:
December 22, 2011 at 7:43 am
Since no one here has made that argument, your claim is a strawman, and shows weakness of mind …
See how easy it is to prove something when all one needs is assertion?
More to the point, your arrogance in thinking that you have either the brains or the right to tell other nations what kind of power plants “we should allow” them to use is astonishing.
w.
I’m wondering, when my Irish ancestors were cutting peat did some busybody come up and pester them about not using too much as future generations would be in need of this fuel source?
Matt Skaggs says:
December 22, 2011 at 7:52 am
Bull.
First, “A physicist” just waved his hands at Wendell Berry, he didn’t recommend that I read some literature as you speciously claim. He’s as parsimonious with his citatations as a man can be.
Second, if you had bothered to follow the interchange, you’d have realized that I’ve been reading Wendell Berry all my life, I have a high regard for him.
So tell me, Matt … exactly which “literature on the topic” did “a physicist” recommend, that I refused to read? Near as I can tell, he recommended the same amount of literature you recommended.
That would be “none”, Bob …
w.
Even the Chevy Volt is unsustainable.
http://dailybail.com/home/bailoutmobile-chevy-volt-costing-taxpayers-up-to-250k-per-ve.html
A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 8:07 am
Gosh … let me see if I can follow your logic.
Corporate rent-seekers make up a large percentage of the American farm ownership these days. And by your logic above, since they are part of America, what’s good for rent-seeking corporate farmers is good for America in its entirety. So we should increase the farm subsidies to the corporations.
How’m I doing so far? Like I said, Wendell Berry is long on poetry and love for the land, and I appreciate and honor him greatly for that.
Regarding logic, however, he’s not so strong …
w.