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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Willis, you have a real gift for bringing a smile to my face … `cuz ain’t Wendell Berry himself now 77 years old, and still doing the work of three ordinary men (farmer, essayist, poet)?
Wendell’s belief in sustainability evidently is doing him no harm … heck, most of us scarcely hope to be even half as lively at age 77 as Wendell is.
So purely on the evidence, Wendell’s sustainability practices not only have been mighty good for his farmland, they’ve been mighty good for Wendell himself too. 🙂
It’s mighty instructive to search Google’s N-Gram Viewer for usage of “sustainability, sustainable development“; these two n-grams have come into widespread use only since 1980 or so (an earlier, less-used, mainly military variant is “sustainment”). And when we search the early 1980s literature with Google Books, we verify that Wendell Berry’s name is prominently associated with these terms.
And finally, Google Books shows us that Wendell Berry uses the words “sustain”, “sustainability” and “sustainment” commonly in his own writings … along with another Wendell Barry favorite word: “stewardship”.
So anyone who’s been wondering what these words mean needs only to consult the writings by and about Wendell Berry … who is (IMHO) a true American original and a national treasure.
Everything we do or are is sustainable until it isn’t! So it’s a totally superflous word.
Seriously Willis (since your last post overlapped with mine), if you’re going to claim for yourself such a high regard for Wendell Berry, why don’t you simply quote Wendell’s views regarding sustainable development?
Instead you’ve posted quotes from boring UN bureaucrats, along with a cartoon that outright mocks four of Wendell Berry’s most cherished values clean air, pure water, healthy exercise, and organic farming methods.
In my opinion, WUWT folks would be far better off reading for themselves what Wendell Berry has to say about sustainability.
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?
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.
Bottom line: Life on Earth (and in this universe) might not be infinitely sustainable, as entropy will eventually have it’s way, but for all practical puposes, if we watch the methods nature has evolved, we can learn how to be practical sustainable in our lives and in our civilizaitons.
2)
There is nothing more dangerous than a government policy to meet a goal that no-one can define. Winners and losers in any such system are dictated by those controlling the definition.
What is troubling is that critical infrastructure and food security matters may be put in the hands of social scientists and crusading english majors in the name of sustainability. To those commentors here that think sustainability is about common sense soil erosion controls. Perhaps this will wake you up- What is Sustainable Agriculture?http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/concept.htm
“In addition to strategies for preserving natural resources and changing production practices, sustainable agriculture requires a commitment to changing public policies, economic institutions, and social values. Strategies for change must take into account the complex, reciprocal and ever-changing relationship between agricultural production and the broader society”
To attain sustainable agriculture we must make “specific and concentrated efforts to alter specific policies or practices, to the longer-term tasks of reforming key institutions, rethinking economic priorities, and challenging widely-held social values.” And then the author goes completely off the rails linking to locavore issues, labor organizing and meeting spiritual needs. But most importantly sustainability was about giving more money to UC Davis to guide us to this green future.
If UC Davis’s definition of sustainable agriculture prevails over modern agriculture practices we may all end up hungry- but we will all be equally hungry. Consider resistance to “sustainability” sustainable on my part.
Everything depending on its nature, may be sustainable in its life time.
Thanks Willis,
Yes, it is entropy we would seem to want to avoid. And yes, it can be done. It just takes some international government “seed”‘ investment in the perpetual motion machines industry; A small tax on the rich would fund it so it would be fiscally sustainable. /sarc
Willis Eschenbach says:
December 22, 2011 at 11:44 am
Wow! “A Physicist’s” argument is a classic example of the fallacy of composition, assuming that characteristics of the parts are also characteristics of the whole. Did Wendell go to college? Where?
Willis,
I believe you are completely wrong about the source of the modern usage of the word “sustainable” – it actually comes from Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot who was one of the early visionaries of the more radical green sustainable movement. It is based on agrarian socialism and is a political philosophy rather than anything to do with the scientific use of the word “sustainable”.
In a scientific sense, there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, so ultimately nothing is sustainable and even the sun will die eventually.
“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.”
A lion does not count the number of gazelle, and the number of lions and then descide to not kill and go hungary instead if the gazelle numbers are too low for their population. Lions don’t calculate what their carrying capacity is on any given day.
Lions get hungry and hunt. Why they don’t go extinct is because at some point the population of lions gets too big for the number of gazelles, which means some lion cubs starve to death.
Sustainability in the natural ecosystem is cycles of boom and bust.
reposting this from the Hansen arrested development thread special for A Physicist:
A physicist;
And IMHO, it’s very good to see that science and skepticism are evolving toward this natural mutual accommodation! :)>>>>
That’s probably the biggest load of total bunk you’ve posted in this thread so far.
Your assumption that skepticism isn’t even part of science in the first place, that it is some sort of other discipline or process, and that skepticism is moving toward an “accomodation” with science is ignorant and arrogant beyond belief. But what else should we expect of someone who calls themselves a physicist, but clearly doesn’t know SFA about physics or science? What else should we expect from someone who takes ridiculous positions, and rather than respond to the criticisms with facts and logic, simply changes the subject, or comes up with that most devastating or remarks, “what’s the problem?”
You sir are a charlatan attempting to present yourself as some sort of middle ground proponant, but your conduct reveals what you are. A spin doctor advocate for magic dressed up as science who understands neither the magic nor the science.
A physicist says:
December 22, 2011 at 11:45 am
“It’s mighty instructive to search Google’s N-Gram Viewer for usage of “sustainability, sustainable development“; these two n-grams have come into widespread use only since 1980 or so (an earlier, less-used, mainly military variant is “sustainment”). And when we search the early 1980s literature with Google Books, we verify that Wendell Berry’s name is prominently associated with these terms.
And finally, Google Books shows us that Wendell Berry uses the words “sustain”, “sustainability” and “sustainment” commonly in his own writings … along with another Wendell Barry favorite word: “stewardship”.
So anyone who’s been wondering what these words mean needs only to consult the writings by and about Wendell Berry … who is (IMHO) a true American original and a national treasure.”
Willis, I think this is about all you can expect from “A Physicist” by way of citation.
Yes, “A P,” Berry does use the word ‘sustain’ in some of his writings but as long as you do not give an actual citation then we do not know whether that word occurs in a sentence such as “How am I going to sustain my income if I continue writing these crappy books?” See, citations are to sentences or paragraphs not to words. The sentence is the basic unit of meaning in an article, book, or any discursive writing. In poetry it is different. I know a poet, who I try to avoid, who wrote a poem consisting of only the word ‘mother’ repeated an indefinitely large number of times.
This may rock your Iron Boat:
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-buzz/scientists-discover-metal-type-earth-core-202021339.html
Iron oxide (rust) is an insulator unless it is subjected to high heat and pressure (such as is found in the inner mantle of the Earth). It then becomes a conductor.
Perhaps iron is more ‘sustainable’ that previously thought.
Upcoming at http://prl.aps.org/
R gates says, “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?”
The bleeding obvious conclusion is that life (DNA) is incredibly sustainable and there is absolutely no need to worry. Long after humans are gone or mutated into something else, we can be absolutely assured that life (DNA) will continue. Chances are that life from our solar system is already spreading through our region of the galaxy and chances are that life got here on a comet or asteroid in the first place. Meteor impacts may cause mass extinction from time to time but chances are they spread life around too!
You need to learn a little humility and realize that, in the scheme of things, humans are quite irrelevant. The AGW always over estimate human importance – a recurring theme going back to times when it was popular to think the earth was at the center of the universe.
All right folks. When you think about energy and raw materials remember that we live in a star system that’s chock full of everything we need to fill it with life.
This tiny planet is but an infinitesimal part of it.
If we would just stop fighting over the table scraps and start mining asteroids and moons, and building habitats and power sats, we would have access to virtually infinite resources and living space.
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.”
The solar system and the universe is here BECAUSE of the laws of thermodynamics. It is progressing to LESS entropy, not more. The universe was more “orderly” at the Big Bang.
Based on:
Figure 1. Example of unsustainable development.
Sustainable development is not shovel ready.
@A physicist
My word man. You use “physicist” in your title, yet you don’t even understand the second law of thermal dynamics? What resources on our planet are actually sustainable in the sense that we can infinitely use and reuse them without also using up another resource in the process? Let’s look at air: Did you know we are losing atmosphere, and all it contains, to space slowly over time? Even the air is not sustainable.
A very common sense essay Willis. And this is why we need to expand into space. While the Earth is massive and can sustain us as we are for millennia, I believe, eventually our future can only be found among the stars. A long ways away.
My graduate adviser used “sustainability” as a trick to make sure we were thinking. “Were American Indian agricultural practices sustainable?” was one question used on our comprehensive graduate exams. The correct reply is the question “In time or in space?” followed by “Which group or nation?” In some cases the correct answer is “apparently neither.” In other cases “it was sustainable over time but not in place, which is why they practiced modified swidden agriculture. But how long that could last we cannot know.” The prof is philosophically as Green as grass but is a stickler for looking at all the data and avoiding platitudes as well as being a firm believer in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Wish more were like that.
While I agree with the general point of the article, it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater: some systems are more stable and more secure than others. It behooves us to make the distinction and pursue stability. To the extent that climate change is a force for instability, we should consider modifying our energy infrastructure. I realize that most people here don’t think that Climate Change is a force for instability, but in the spirit of open discourse thought I’d float the point.
The U.N. Agenda 21
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
But, you missed the following . . .
It contains within it two key concepts:
1) the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
2) the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs
Limitations imposed by social organization. Hmm. That would be government, eh? And, since Agenda 21 is put forth by the U.N., we’re talking about a unified WORLD government, eh? So, this really has absolutely nothing to do with resources, environment, or development. It does have a lot to do with power and money. Always follow the money. But here we also have power. What kind of power? The power to be able to impose limitations (rationing or redistribution) on pretty much anything or anyone.
So I dig up iron and make a shovel. What right do I have to that shovel under this agenda? I have no right to any of my private property, like a shovel, because it is up to some world government agency to decide what is the best use of that shovel. Because that is what is implied in “meeting the needs of the present.” Who decides what is sustainable? What laws can be passed, if everything has to pass a sustainability test? Who enforces those laws? Are the laws subject to any restrictions at all?
It is my pleasure to assist you, Theo. The above link is to the Google Books on-line version of Wendel Berry’s pamphlet Another Turn of the Crank (1996) in which the word “sustainable” appears on pages 3, 6, 18, 21, 22, and 23. The first usage is page 3:
Theo, I trust that in this passage Mr. Berry has clarified the meaning of the word “sustainable” to you, and that in particular you now appreciate the severe limitations of Willis Eschenbach’s arguments to the effect that “nothing is sustainable.”
Mr. Berry argues the precise opposite: Everything that is truly important is sustainable.
To me, this simple principle is the foundation of all true conservatism.
Theo, should it happen that you still find clarity to be elusive, why … may I suggest that you simply read the rest of Mr. Berry’s pamphlet! 🙂
The UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report makes NO sense:
Here is the statement that I copied from a commenter above:
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Reads like this to me: “’Sustainable’ development is development that meets the needs of the present while remaining without ANY ability to predict or understand what may or may NOT be compromising or improving the unknown ability using undiscovered technology of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Willis, I love that cartoon you have posted earlier, I have it hanging in my office.
I, too, am concerned about this trend of “sustainable development.” I am a technical person who was put on my corporation’s newly formed “sustainability team” to lend a bit of practicality to the process. I first attempted to get the team to define what “sustainability” is, defining the problem has always been the most effective first step in my experience. It turns out the definition is in the eye of the beholders, no real definition has been drafted.
I have always been in the practical side of the industry, I have been responsible for turning out a real product that is useful to people. In the process, we churn out lots of greenhouse gas. In terms of the real production of greenhouse gas, which is apparently included as a part of sustainability, one little tweak of a valve or starting a motor or repairing a steam trap has much more influence than all of the efforts of this team. I know this, but they do not. I have never been in a situation where the support personnel have so little knowledge of how the money making side of the business works.
But, fault me if you must, I have been laying low in the team because it keeps the greenies in the company busy and makes them feel good. Meanwhile, the production side does what it does best, making our product in the most efficient and money making manner possible. That is true sustainability.
Jeremy-
“Resilient” is your word here (not sustainable).