We face an unfortunate list of existential threats – climate change, antibiotic resistant diseases, collapse of open ocean fisheries, peak conventional agriculture, peak fossil carbon, etc. The only way to address all of these threats in a manner that doesn’t create new (potentially worse) ones is to embrace sustainability whole cloth. But that begs the question – what do we mean by that?
I suggest that sustainability is the ability of a community to ensure that it’s population is able to meet all of its needs, using only the resources that come from the land/water/air that they are stewards (or co-stewards) of, and using only their skills, in 24h/d/ca or less, beyond any planning horizon.
The rest of this quick note is support for that suggestion.
The first two sentences of the Wealth of Nations can be paraphrased to read, “People use their time to meet their wants and needs.” In a world that is significantly beyond capacity, and possesses both complex ecological services and technology, that statement must be more fully explored.
People use their time to meet their wants and needs directly (sleeping, self-care, child care, care for the infirm/elderly, etc.), and they use their time to convert resources into the means to meet their wants and needs (processing and eating food, making houses, making clothes, etc.). In addition, people use ecological services to meet our wants and needs without requiring any meaningful time use (breathing oxygen, for example) – I colloquially refer to this as ‘manna from heaven’. And people use technology to process resources into the means to meet our wants and needs without any meaningful time use (self-driving cars, for example) – I call this ‘robots making robots’.
If we are considering sustainability, we have to focus on those activities that are used to meet people’s needs, those ecological services and resources that we use to meet our needs that can be stewarded/managed to be available beyond any planning horizon.
Conventional economics considers the ownership of resources and the sale of those resources as the foundation of our economy. While ecological services may be considered in Ecological Economics, the approaches taken attempt to distill the ‘value’ to a fiscal calculation. I would argue that a fiscal approach cannot truly addresses sustainability – that we have to focus specifically on the time used at activities expected to meet needs, the efficiency of using time to convert resources into the means to meet our needs, and the effectiveness of how our needs are being met. And then consider how that will change as over-consumed resources and over-exploited ecological services cease to be available in the future.
A sustainable community would be able to show that in the absence of over-consumed resources and ecological services, all of the people would be able to meet all of their needs in perpetuity. In the First World, this would generally mean a decrease in consumption, and an increase in resilience. It would generally mean a little technological development, and a lot of human development. It would generally mean degrowth to increase quality of life and a reduction of affluence to eliminate poverty. It would mean that we would consume resources and ecological services like the poorest of us today, while having a quality of life like the richest.
While this is a monumental goal, I think it is all doable. It means not thinking that our economy is based on a fiscal system, but rather it requires a realization that our economy is based on the time we use to meet our wants and needs, and how efficiently and effectively we are able to use that time.