Advancing and Resolving The Great Sustainability Debates

Thesis Title

Advancing and Resolving The Great Sustainability Debates

Research Abstract

In 2005 the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment conducted by 1360 experts in 95 nations stated that approximately two-thirds of the ecosystem services that support life on Earth are being degraded or used unsustainably. Its report states that 'Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.' The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, said the study shows 'how human activities are causing environmental damage on a massive scale throughout the world, and how the very basis for life on earth is declining at an alarming rate.' Studies also show that in 2005 global inequality is higher than ever and rising.

This thesis is a contribution to furthering understanding of why current development is unsustainable and how to overcome barriers to achieving sustainable development. Since this is such a broad topic this thesis focuses more specifically why so little progress has been made on the key debates about whether achieving sustainable development will help or harm business competitiveness, jobs and economic growth. In particular, it attends the long standing and unproductive confusion between economic growth (monetary growth) and physical throughput (physical growth of energy and resources) in modern economies, and the implications of such a clarification for achieving consensus and progress on sustainability.

The thesis considers this in detail in terms of how it can help progress current climate debates. It is almost twenty years since the Brundtland Report Our Common Future was published. In the forward to this Our Common Future Gro Brundtland wrote 'What is needed now is a new era of economic growth-growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable'. Yet still almost twenty years later no one has worked out under what conditions a form of economic growth could achieve this? The thesis is novel because for the first time ever it investigates whether it is possible to have a new form of economic growth that is also both socially and environmentally sustainable and under what conditions can this be achieved?

These debates are not new. Already by 1900 the risks of overfishing (1865), pushing beyond ecological thresholds (1864), dryland salinity (1893), soil degradation (B.C), deforestation (~300 B.C), materials like asbestos (1898), chemicals such as PCB's (1899), benzene (1897), and radiation (1896) were known and whether action should be taken was being debated. To emphasize how important these debates are and how long they have been going on, the thesis starts by asking when did humanity have a chance to start on a global scale to achieve sustainable development? Most would say 1992, when the nations of the world gathered in Rio for the 1992 UN World Summit for Sustainable Development. Some may say 1972, at the first UN Summit on the Human Environment in Stockholm.

Most would assume that this period from the 1960s-1990s was the first time humanity had the necessary scientific knowledge, eco-technological solutions, political and community will and global communications to achieve sustainable development globally. But this thesis shows that humanity actually had its first real opportunity to strive to achieve global sustainable development as far back as the turn of last century. In 1909, the US President Theodore Roosevelt asked all the world's powers, the leaders of the nations of the world to meet in the Hague for the purpose of considering the conservation of the natural resources of the entire globe. Between 1907-1909 Roosevelt

- convened the first conference of Governors at the White House to consider problems of conservation, [i]

- set up a National Conservation Commission to look at the use, wastage and conservation of natural resources to prepare first inventory of natural resources, and [ii]

- convened the first North American Conservation Conference at the White House.

Sadly this world summit on the environment did not happen. This thesis shows that by 1909 enough of the key understandings and ideas and enough new emerging technologies needed to achieve sustainable development were known. Central ideas and understandings that inform the call for sustainable development like "the tragedy of the commons" were first articulated not in 1968 by Hardin but in 1833 by William Forster Lloyd in his Oxford lectures. John Stuart Mill articulated the desirability to decouple economic growth from physical throughput of the economy in his writings on the stationary state economy back in the 1850s. Other economists also articulated the need to address problems of negative market "externalities" such as environmental degradation as early as the 1880s when the term "externality" was first used in economic journal papers [1].

Another key understanding, from which the call for sustainable development partly has come, is the fact that environmental pressures can push ecosystem's past a threshold and into irreversible decline. This was understood and articulated as early as the 1850s by George Marsh. Marsh emphasized that some acts of destruction exceeded the earth's recuperative powers and thus implicitly humankind needed a precautionary approach:

"The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature had established between her organized and her inorganic creations; and she avenges herself upon the intruder, by letting loose upon her defaced provinces destructive energies hitherto kept in check by organic forces destined to be his best auxiliaries, but which he has unwisely dispersed and driven from the field of action. When the forest is gone, the great reservoir of moisture stored up in its vegetable mould is evaporated, and returns only in deluges of rain to wash away the parched dust into which that mould has been converted." He continued, "The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for is noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence... would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism and perhaps even extinction of the species."

Marsh could also see that now that humankind had explored the world, there were no more new Edens to migrate to if humankind continued such destruction of nature.

"... Man, who even now finds scarce breathing room on this vast globe, cannot retire from the Old World to some yet undiscovered continent, and wait for the slow action of such causes to replace, by a new creation, the Eden he has wasted"[2]

Also by 1900 there was experience in how to address scientific uncertainty and resolve debates. For instance the first major historical environmental sustainability debate had already achieved resolution by the 1760s leading to some of the first environmental policies to be adopted in 1767-1772 in Mauritius . The debate in question was whether deforestation caused desiccation - the drying out of the land - and other environmental problems such as soil erosion and loss of soil fertility. This debate began in ancient Greek times when Aristotle's biographer and botanical gardener, Theophratus of Erasia, developed the desiccation theory which firmly linked deforestation to the decline in rainfall, which he believed was taking place in Greece and Crete[3].

By 1760 this theory had been proven to be true by a broad consensus of the Academies of Sciences of the day. This emerging consensus on the science of desiccation and the growing understanding of the threat of extinctions lead to the first comprehensive environmental policies to conserve forests, soil and fisheries being adopted implemented in 1767-1772 in Mauritius. 

It is timely then to reassess why it is that so little progress has been made on the great sustainability debates over the last century to help ensure that greater progress on these sustainability debates is made today.

Take today's climate debates; they are still largely debates about whether sustainable development will help or harm business competitiveness, jobs and economic growth. In late 2005, Tony Blair has stated that he does not think nations will sign up to a Post Kyoto Framework because he believes that it will significantly harm nation's economic growth. In the 21 st century, politicians and business leaders can still simply state that large trade offs exist between economic, social and environmental goals and no further explanation is needed with the electorate. During the Australian 2001 federal election campaign, when Prime Minister John Howard stated that he was not going to sacrifice timber jobs ahead of saving the environment, it resonated with many Australians. Why is it, when these issues have been debated for over 100 years still today many see large trade offs being inevitable? This thesis challenges this assumption and from detailed empirical research shows that the opposite is true.

It is over 30 years since the Limits to Growth debates yet politicians, journalists and commentators still frequently state that society needs more economic growth, and that only after this is achieved, can society 'afford' to even seek to achieve better social environments, environmental standards and health outcomes. This is often presented as the current accepted wisdom of political 'reality', and those who disagree are labeled idealists and utopians. The empirical evidence gathered in this thesis shows that what has previously been called utopian, namely a focus on achieving higher social and environmental sustainability goals, far from harming economic growth, can actually help it.

A key debate explored in this thesis is the "growth" debate. This thesis clarifies the long standing and unproductive confusion between physical throughput and economic growth in modern economies, shows the constructive implications of this for consensus and policy advance, and provides the evidence supporting the proposition that significant decoupling of economic growth and physical growth (and thus environmental impact) is indeed possible and starting to happen in some areas. The thesis draws on a diverse literature from the last three hundred years of sustainability debates, and consolidates and significantly builds on from evidence gathered and arguments developed by the author with Karlson 'Charlie' Hargroves, Cheryl Paten and Nick Palousis through The Natural Edge Project (TNEP) and the award winning international publication The Natural Advantage of Nations:Business Opportunities, Innovation and Governance in the 21 st Century.

This thesis therefore re-examines these classic sustainability debates and shows new ways to resolve them and move them forward. This thesis also readily acknowledges that in the debates of ideas, people do not side always with what is true based on empirical evidence and rational objective argument. It took Hayek, and the think thanks, academics and politicians that he inspired, over fifty years to shift debates and bring about the rise of market fundamentalism and economic rationalism to the dominant position they hold today. Will it take a similar effort by new 'sustainability-promoting' think tanks over the next 50 years to shift the debates to a more sophisticated level of discussion about how to achieve sustainable development? Only time will tell, but history shows that it could take this long. As stated above it is almost 20 years since the Brundtland Report Our Common Future was published and still the "growth" debates rage on.

But is clearly true is that simply writing a "rational" Ph.D thesis on its own will not be enough to move the great sustainability debates forward and achieve sustainable development. Even winning these debates in the media will not be enough to ensure that sustainable development is achieved. Many factors such as the silo'd nature of institutions, powerful vested interests, effective media campaigns of think tanks, WTO decisions, people's daily behaviour choices, the basic lack of capacity building and literacy in sustainable development can all effect whether sustainable development is achieved or not on a sufficient scale.

This thesis therefore is not simply theoretical. As part of the practice of the thesis, the author has co-founded a new think tank, The Natural Edge Project (TNEP) with Karlson 'Charlie' Hargroves which is seeking to put into practice what this thesis recommends and thereby compliment existing "sustainability-promoting" think tanks in Australia and around the world such as (this list is not exhaustive) The Australia Institute, The Forum for the Future in the UK, Rocky Mountain Institute (USA), The Wuppertal Institute (Germany), The Product Life Institute (Germany), The Natural Step (Sweden), and civil society groups like The Australian Collaboration.

This thesis argues therefore that a broad integrated approach is needed to address the barriers to sustainable development and turn them around to become drivers for sustainable development. No one person or academic has the time to take a broad integrated approach. The Natural Edge Project (TNEP) has been set up to address this by bringing together many effective experts and change agents across the full breadth of society from teachers to policy makers, from businessmen to ecologists. This thesis concludes that since we live in a world where business, government and civil society all have power all must be involved in the process to achieve sustainable development. To achieve sustainable development all three need to move forward together. To achieve sustainable development it is vital that goodwill to achieve sustainable development is underpinned by purposeful policy settings. If that can be achieved then this can help to minimize polarized debates, and open up exciting possibilities for innovation and success.

Therefore above all what is needed are new and effective institutions and also new "boundary organizations" that bring representatives of the whole of society together both within government, like National Councils of Sustainable Development and outside government, like The Natural Edge Project. Such new institutions and boundary organizations that can create processes and mechanisms to build consensus between business, government and civil society on many broad issues are vital. Once this is done then at least all these diverse organizations and interests have a solid foundation from which they can move forward together to create the most ecologically and socially sustainable options possible.

The Natural Edge Project is such a boundary organisation and has successfully built consensus across 36 major organizations and peak bodies through a wide range of projects. From this solid foundation The Natural Edge Project is seeking to, amongst many initiatives, also help to finally resolve and move these great sustainability debates forward over the coming decades. This thesis deliberately therefore seeking to create a resource that will help The Natural Edge Project think tank to be able to achieve this.

[1] 1883 Henry Sidgwick was one of the first economists to formally recognize externalities as a source of market failure in his Principles of Political Economy.

[2] Marsh,G.P (1864) "Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action"

[3] Hughes,J.D (1985) 'Theophrastus as ecologist', Environmental Review, 4, 296-307 see also Glacken,C.J, (1967) Traces on the Rhodian shore:Nature and culture in Western Thought, From Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley, California

[i] http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/life/timeline.htm

[ii] From Appendix A "Lessons from the past" in Volume Two The technical Report, The Global 2000 Report to the President in Barney, G. (1982). The Global 2000 Report to the President: entering the twenty-first century. Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, Middlesex , UK .