There are lots of lists of ‘required but insufficient’ conditions of Planetary Sustainability. This isn’t really surprising, considering that Sustainability is the broadest topic of human study that can exist on the planet. It is much easier for a single person (or even a team of people) to describe the bits that would be required for any one aspect of Sustainability, than for someone to put them all together to cover the whole topic.

This is my effort at a list of ‘required and sufficient’ system conditions of Planetary Sustainability at a Community scale.  I would expect that any smaller scale would have to be consistent with this list. Thus corporate, individual, or project Sustainability (as examples) could be considered in isolation of the rest of the system if the effort was consistent with any parts of this list, without being in opposition to the rest of the list.

1. Each community must have a non-declining portion of their landmass that is protected as ‘wilderness’. Therefore, it must be prevented from being a source of resources or a sink for waste.

2. Each community must have an Ecological Footprint that is no larger than the Biocapacity of that community, for each biome.

3. Each community must not import resources or export waste to meet their needs. If trade for needs is required, then co-management agreements significantly beyond purchase and sale arrangements would be required.

4. Each community must be able to meet the needs of their entire population in less than 24 hours per day per capita.
To have Sustainable Development:
a) No fraction of a community can receive a greater burden of the costs associated with development than the benefits they receive, measured in the time required to meet needs, while considering all future time costs and time penalties.
b) Any given Development initiative must increase the time available to the community for activities other than those required to meet their needs, as if all needs were met, when considering the resource consumption in excess of what is available to the community in perpetuity.

This is simplified by:
Φ Reducing disparity of consumption between the segments of the population with the highest and lowest per capita consumption.
Θ In technologically rich communities, focusing on identifying and removing the obstructions within the self, family, or community that prevent people from meeting their needs.

To have Corporate Sustainability, for example, one would have to demonstrate that the business improves any of the first 4 conditions, without worsening any of the rest.  All CSR must be able to demonstrate the impact of their efforts with respect to these conditions.  Green vertical or horizontal infrastructure initiatives, such as LEED, CEQUAL, and Envision, must be able to show that they are improving some conditions for the community they are part of, without impeding any of the conditions.  Otherwise, they may be making things “less un-sustainable”, without actually improving quality of life of the community in a meaningful way.

I would argue that our economy is the metabolism of our society.  Thus it is the labour, material, and energy flows into, through, and out of our communities.  Economics would be the study of this.  Money would be a indicator, but not a major part of the understanding of this metabolism – it is the grease in the cogs, not the machine itself.  Too little grease is hard on the machine, but adding more than ‘enough’ does no good at all.

A 200 kg couch potato may have the same metabolism as a 50kg Olympic gymnast, but does either have the output we as a society are wanting to have?  Maybe we want the output from a 100kg lumberjack instead.  The Invisible Hand assumes that all metabolism is good, and eating more is better than eating less.  But if the invisible hand can not distinguish between the outcomes of the alternatives, conventional economics will fail to deliver what we need when we need it.

Can economists say ‘if you want this outcome, this is the best policy’, and be right most of the time?  I don’t know.  I think we’re going to see a peak in the world ecological footprint per capita in the next few years – can economists predict what that would mean?  What do we need to do to maximize the benefits that come from such a change, and minimize the suffering?  Hard to answer any of that.

I’m an engineer, and I haven’t taken much economics in school.  I feel, as I read much of what is written about economics, that there must be something in First Year Economics that is explained to all of the students, and it is taken for granted by everyone else, but I’ve missed.  And in a conversation on Research Gate (link below), I think I found it – it’s the concept of the Rational Agent.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_agent

The Rational Agent is assumed to drive our economy, by making decisions that will lead to the best possible outcome, based on the information available at the time, at all times.

Reality isn’t so simple – we respond physically, rationally, emotionally, and spiritually, at all times, in all situations.  We do not act in our long term best interest as a rule (else everyone would live to 100 years of age), and the actions of a mob of individually rational people does not have to be rational.

There is a Zen story about a farmer who gains a horse, loses a horse, gains 2 more horses, his son is injured, etc.  And each time, the neighbours say ‘Oh, that’s good luck’, or ‘Oh, that’s bad luck’ as appropriate.  Each time, the farmer says ‘Oh, is it?’, and each time the bad luck would turn out to be lucky, and vice versa.  A version is found here: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/zen.html.  The rational decision can only be observed after the fact – there is no way to know ahead of time what the best decision will be.  We can only base our decisions on experience, and Hope.  Hope isn’t rational and our experience is limited.  Which is why we are suckers to marketing, and fashion, and we make irrational decisions during stressful situations. And also why there is Fundamentalism (be it economic, religious, Western, or whatever) to ensure that our experience from yesterday still is valid tomorrow.

Believing that we’re all Rational Actors leads us to believe in an Invisible Hand, because if we’re all doing what we should do, then whatever we have done must defacto be what was ‘intended’ to happen.  It would be the best of all possible outcomes.  Which is plainly balderdash.  That logic assumes that the impact of all actions of all people are effectively the same, that there is a higher morality associated with having wealth and power, things that are blatantly untrue.  “I won, therefore I was the best player, regardless of if I cheated” is a philosophy that discourages others from playing.  In effect, that form of self-reinforcing selfishness breaks down community cohesion, decreasing social resilience.

Maybe we need to think about the ‘whole person’ instead, and their role and responsibilities in a ‘sustainable community”.

Is there need for redefining ‘Economics’ under the present context? – ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_there_need_for_redefining_Economics_under_the_present_context/1 [accessed Feb 19, 2016].

Prosperity is a concept that is used in economics in strange ways. It seems to be implied to be something more than economic activity, but then the measure of it is then restricted to economic activity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity “Economic growth is often seen as essential for economic prosperity…”

I think there is a better way to think about it.

Simplicity comes in two basic flavours. Voluntary simplicity allows the individual to decide what to do without. A student may decide to not eat well in exchange for going out for a night on the town. Mandatory simplicity allows the individual no real choice about what to do without – it is poverty. Ultimately, the money in the pocket may be used for booze instead of food, but there is an implication of a lack of real choice.

I think that choice is the distinction. The student can choose to do without food, because she is otherwise well fed. He could choose to spend his dinner money on beer, because there is (or will be) other money available. There is a confidence that the ‘cost’ can be borne without serious impact on the self. Meeting that want won’t prevent a perceived need in the future from being met. And that’s why a student lifestyle is not poverty – in a state of poverty, there is a real risk at all times that meeting a want will prevent a perceived need from being met.  Even if there isn’t a state of depravation, there will be a stress created by wondering if rent will be available, or what food will be on the table, etc.

Prosperity would therefore be the confidence that the time, effort, and cash spent to meet a want would not prevent one from having sufficient time, effort, and cash to meet one’s perceived needs.  And I would suggest that Prosperity is a Need.  We all need the confidence that we’re going to be OK tomorrow to prevent a degradation of the self, family, or community.

I was speaking with a colleague recently about what I’d like to do relating to housing, and I’ve repeated much of it here:

I’d love to build DHW system that is solar+on-demand. This would involve conventional solar thermal collectors running at between 60C and 70C, an insulated wax tank within the building envelope, and greywater heat recovery. One heat exchanger dumps heat into the wax when the sun is shining, storing heat in the phase change at something above 55C, and another draws heat out on demand at something above 35C. My math says about 3 T of wax is sufficient for an off-grid home filled with teenage girls to get through November.

I’d love to build a solar concentrator to pipe light into conventional buildings to provide hybrid solar. 10 Suns, or even 100 suns would be really interesting to me. The hybrid part would include small LEDs connected to solar panels and lithium batteries that would be entirely self-contained, so when the sun is shining in the room, the batteries are charging. Each light would be set to have a different background light level as a trigger to come on. As the light intensity dims, individual lights come on automatically, either as ambient light or task lighting. No penetrations in the building envelope, and a continuous gradation of lighting. Maybe they would share batteries in clusters…?

I’d love to find out how to do cooking off-grid. 10,000 suns can melt Bismuth (with a similar volumetric heat of fusion to water), at 271C. While that’s hot enough to use for cooking, I just can’t visualize how to store that safely, or what I would use as my heat exchange fluid, or how I would draw the heat out when I wanted to cook, or…

I’d love to build a system to store winter using ice as a phase change material. 17T stored in a straw bale vault replaces a refrigerator. 43T with a air-to-air heat pump provides all heating, cooling, refrigeration, and dehumidification (wanna keep you house at 14 C all summer?) for a well built house. The trick is to build a structure that is sufficiently flexible to avoid rupturing when the ice expands. I’ve got that…

I’d love to build a house in Ontario that doesn’t need a heating system. Build the walls and floors out of the soil you dig out of the basement, and have a thermal mass of hundreds of tonnes, and wrap in strawbale. It would be massive and passive (and I guess, glassive, since the south wall would be glazing). With the rest of those ideas, it would be entirely off grid, (except for cooking for now).

I’d love to use a DCFC to generate CHP using wood or farm waste as a feed stock. Hell, I’d love to be a vendor if such a product became available anytime soon. I heat with 6 Cord of wood per year, and spend about $2000/year on electricity. I’d love to burn 8 Cord of wood a year, and get all of my electricity for sweat alone.

My Sustainability design philosophy would be:

• use what you get for free (to be frugal)
• keep the energy in the form closest to the free source (to be efficient)
• understand the shadow that your system casts on the ecosystem (to be moral)
• resilience should not be abandoned for efficiency (to be adaptable)

Did Not Finish: Status Quo. Client provides a problem for the engineer to solve. Engineer maximizes utility while minimizing the cost to the client. Short term solution to the symptom of an underlying problem.

D: Level 1 Green Engineering. Client asks for a broader perspective from the engineer. Engineer maximizes utility while minimizing the cost to the client, and uses indicators (TBL, etc.) or critieria (LEED, Envision, etc.) to provide rationale for the broader perspective of ‘utility’. Probably long term solution to the symptom of an underlying problem. Bonus marks available if method addresses social justice in a meaningful way.

C: Level 2 Engineering for Resilience. Client asks for an underlying problem to be solved. Engineer uses community data to determine the greatest Potential Quality of Life (PQoL) that can be obtained through Technological Development. Long term solution to the problem identified by symptoms provided by the client.

B: Level 3 Sustainability Engineering. Client asks engineer to identify the underlying problems and find the greatest possible improvement in the Actualized Quality of Life (AQoL). Engineer involves Human Development professionals to find how to work around the obstructions within society that prevent the PQoL from being Actualized. Long term solution to underlying problems using technological development.

A: Level 4 Undefined but required future condition. Client identifies that symptoms to problems exist. Human Development Professionals identify all obstructions within community and determine the means to remove them. Engineer provides appropriate T.D. solution once problems being solved can be done most economically (eg, when T.D. is the lowest hanging fruit). Problems are solved in most efficient manner available to community.

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.