Communities can be Sustainable. Individuals can not be. It is not clear to me that projects can be Sustainable, although they can add to the Sustainability of a community.
Land Development, as the way it is currently practised, is the process of converting Community Wealth into Individual Wealth. We trust market forces to ensure that Individual Wealth is maximized. We rely on Planning to ensure that the loss of Community Wealth is minimized. But there is no calculus that ensures that the loss of Community Wealth is less than the gain in Individual Wealth, and as a result, not all Land Development is good Development. If we were doing Sustainable Development, we would ensure there was no net loss of Wealth.
Sustainability is a foregone conclusion. The only questions we have is when, at what level of consumption, what population, and what quality of life we will have when we achieve it. We can choose today to be poor in the future, or we can choose to be rich (think about how pensions work). Choices we have made historically have limited the choices that are available for us today, and unless we choose otherwise, continuing with the status quo will limit ourselves even farther. Already, some people in the world have no good choices. It would be a fairly simple mathematical model to determine when different countries would cease to have good choices.
Simplicity is our future. The choice is ultimately if we choose ‘Voluntary Simplicity’, or ‘Mandatory Simplicity’. The first is student lifestyles, and individuals can choose what they do without, and requires doing something specific to come into being. The second is poverty, and those choices are made for the individual by others, and will happen if we do nothing to prevent it. Politicians will always put off any discussion of Simplicity, since Growth hides bad management. But putting off the discussions is allowing poverty to become a reality by default.
GNP is used as a surrogate of a better measure of quality of life because, if all other things remain constant, a positive change in GNP will produce a positive change in quality of life. However, not all things remain equal. Increasing population density will automatically increase GNP, but there is no indication that quality of life increases meaningfully (eg: Children playing outside has been shown to have the same mental health benefits as the best combination of treatments available to children).
The story of Goldilocks and the Three Sets of Indicators is a simple description of why too few indicators means we will design for the indicator, too many will be impossible to adequately populate, and even having exactly the right set (a mythical creation at best) means that we will end up with unintended consequences that come from designing to solve the surrogate of the symptoms, rather than the problem the symptoms imply.
A 747 Jumbo Jet has over 140 different indicators and controls that the pilot uses to fly the airplane. Not a single one was used to design the aircraft. No indicators can be used to develop a performance envelope. Rather, the performance envelope must be fully understood to design the indicators.
Monetizing Sustainability in any way is counter to the concept of inter-regional and inter-generational equity.
I like the parallels between Aeronautical Engineering and Sustainability Engineering. Early efforts at flight mimicked nature, observing the indicators of flight (flapping wings and smoke). We can check in with Icarus and his wings, and the Kings of France with their smokey ballooning, but neither understood the underlying problems (Icarus doesn’t have the musculature, and manure doesn’t produce much heat) and so it took until the Wright Brothers (or whoever it was who actually came first) to find the balance between the forces to achieve flight. This I would call ‘Engineering for Flight’, and while it achieved flight, it was certainly sub-optimal. Aeronautical Engineering is what NASA does, and they know the relationships and rate equations between each of the forces, so that if lift is increased, it is known what that will do to the drag, thrust, and weight. Optimal solutions are now possible. My paper describes how to achieve Engineering for Sustainability. I want to take this to Sustainability Engineering.
Engineers can do ‘Engineering for Sustainability’. I don’t know if we can do ‘Sustainability Engineering’ with the skill sets we currently have, and the way we get used. To do it right, we would need to be hired to examine the symptoms and come up with both the problem statement and the solution (politicians would HATE this). We would need to be able to ask people questions in a manner that will produce results that would be meaningful to the design – it comes close to the idea of ‘Social Engineering’ and I don’t know how to do this right. Hell, I don’t know the language sufficiently to be able to talk with the Social Scientists who would be developing those questions.
Most engineers that are involved with ‘Sustainability’ today are focused on a specific application of the concept, without the underlying theory to see how the different applications could interact. Applied Sustainability practitioners have a well established knowledge that a broad theory that crosses all boundaries isn’t possible. There is no ‘Science of Sciences’, so it is understood that there is no Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability. I don’t think that is necessarily true, and I like the idea of developing a GUTS. Sure, it’s taken 19 years to date, but it’s worth doing.
All governments, everywhere, everywhen, do 2 things: they act as a steward of the commons, and they maintain the status quo. Since the world is beyond capacity, these two things are in conflict, and one of them has to give way to the other. I would propose that all governments (democracy, dictatorship, something in between) need to adopt a 3rd thing to do. They must act to ensure the potential quality of life within their community is increased. This would be not unlike Bhutan and their GNH, and it would allow an elected government to remain elected, or an appointed government to maintain stability. Failing to do so (enough) would mean a government change for one, or a regime change for the other.