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What Is Sustainability, Anyway?
by Thomas Prugh and Erik Assadourian
Vision for a Sustainable World
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Institute and its programs and publications, please
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Excerpted from the September/October 2003 WORLD WATCH Magazine
© 2003 Worldwatch Institute
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WORLD•WATCH September/October 200310
I n t r o d u c t i o n
welve years ago this September, eight men and women
said goodbye to wellwishers and walked into Biosphere
II, a 3.1-acre airtight greenhouse in the Arizona
desert. The door was sealed behind the “bionauts,”
a team of specialists right out of Mission: Impossible: a
systems engineer, a physician, two biologists, agricultural
scientists, a computer systems expert. They planned
to remain under glass together for two years, proving
that humans could design, construct, and live in a selfsufficient
ecosystem.
The project got off to a good start and ran smoothly
for several months. The $200-million enterprise represented
years of planning and the most up-to-date
research into ecosystem design and function, and the
planners seemed to have thought of everything. Like
the Earth (“Biosphere I”), Biosphere II was a closed
system except to sunlight. It featured a productive
mix of biomes, including miniature forests, lakes,
streams, and even an “ocean.” The researchers expected
to live off the system’s internal output, without additional
food, oxygen, or other supplies, throughout
the experiment.
In Mission: Impossible, the experts routinely
encounter odds that seem impossible indeed, but the
operations nevertheless always go flawlessly. Biosphere
II’s experts, on the other hand, were blindsided by
unforeseen developments. After 18 months, oxygen concentrations
had dropped from 21 percent to a marginal
14 percent, the level found at about 17,500 feet. The
carbon dioxide exhaled by the bacteria-rich soils was
being absorbed and bound up in the concrete walls of
the building, so the plants couldn’t break it down into
carbon and free oxygen. Other troubles, apart from friction
among the human inhabitants, included the extinction
of three-quarters of the small animal species and
all of the pollinating insects. Insect life in general came
to be dominated by ants. Food plants grew poorly, but
weedy vines ran wild. (Supplemental oxygen pumped
into the greenhouse kept the crew going for the full
two years.)
Biosphere II was a physical experiment in sustainability.
The project scraped off all the political and
rhetorical barnacles that cling to the idea of sustainability,
leaving the essential question: How do we make a selfcontained
place to live, and keep it going for a long time?
The question is important because human beings are
doing many things to the planet that are, or may be,
destructive to the natural systems we depend on. But
scaling the question up to the full-size real world brings
back the barnacles and makes the matter complex and
ambiguous, because of the many “it depends” questions
that must be asked: For how long? For how many people?
Are they rich or poor? What are their views of other
creatures? What technologies are available? and so on.
Despite its limits, the answer that came out of Biosphere
II is valuable. Since it was just an experiment, it
would be inaccurate to say it failed; it simply yielded
data. One of the things it showed is that ecosystems are
WhatIsSustainability,
Anyway?
by Thomas Prugh
and Erik AssadourianWat Raj Burana, Thailand. © Carl & Ann Purcell/CORBIS
T
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September/October 2003 WORLD•WATCH 11
extraordinarily complex and dynamic, poorly understood,
and prone to unforeseeable behavior that may
alter their functionality. (As the saying goes, ecology isn’t
rocket science; it’s a lot harder.) These “wild facts” likewise
color and inform everything that can be said about
living sustainably on “Biosphere I.” It’s not so easy to
create a robust, productive, hospitable, and long-lived
life-support system, and it is very foolish to ignorantly
compromise the one we’ve got.
Many are tempted to ignore these facts. Sustainability,
despite being a relatively new term, has already
been overused and corrupted. For its display at the 1992
Rio Summit, for instance, an Italian energy company
chose the slogan “Sustainable Development: We’re
Growing With the Planet”—apparently intending no
irony and without explaining in what way the planet
itself was actually growing. Just as sustainability can be
distorted so that it considers only humans’ interests, it
can also be defined in ways that force homo sapiens out
of the picture altogether—as in the views of some “deep
ecologists” who see people as a cancer on the Earth.
Being human ourselves, the authors have a viewpoint
that is centered on human values and experiences. But
we have tried to strike a balance, and we argue below
that to achieve true sustainability it is both necessary
and right to have a proper regard for all living creatures.
All people and cultures try to improve their lives and
conditions; this process is often called development. To
achieve sustainability requires sustainable development,
which was most famously defined by the Brundtland
Commission in 1987: roughly, the ability to meet our
needs without compromising the ability of future generations
to meet theirs. It’s a durable definition because
it is flexible and open to interpretation. An obvious flaw,
however, is that it begs the question. Of course people
will always need food, water, and shelter to survive,
but to thrive will take more than that—and we should
not presume to know, beyond certain basics, what
future generations will need to thrive. All we can be reasonably
sure of is that they will value having choices.
Ultimately, sustainable development and sustainability
itself are about collective values and related choices
and are therefore a political issue, almost certainly the
supreme global political issue of this century. Because
values, politics, and our understanding of the Earth and
its systems will evolve, notions of what is sustainable
will never be static.
But we have to begin somewhere. As a big, sloppy
subject, sustainability can be approached in many different,
and equally legitimate, ways. It may be convenient
to think about sustainability in terms of four dimensions—human
survival, biodiversity, equity, and life
quality (see figure). Survival refers to the bare minimum
conditions required for the continued presence of the
species homo sapiens on the Earth, and we start there
because without species survival, the rest is moot. This
is not our main focus, however, because human environmental
blunders and excesses are not likely to
threaten us as a species. More important are the
remaining three elements, which contribute to our
survival as a species but also encompass the survival
of humans as communities of individuals,
as well as the forms of human welfare we pursue—freedom,
fairness, fulfillment, and
related ideas—after we’re reasonably
assured of survival. We make this distinction
because history offers many
examples of human cultures that were
hardly fair or just but still managed
to last a long time.
The four dimensions are arranged in a layered pyramid
that resembles psychologist Abraham Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs. The idea is much the same: the
dimensions are addressed from bottom to top and the
upper layers build on the ones below. We end by briefly
describing a core strategy for moving toward a culture
of sustainability.
H u m a n S u r v i v a l
In the sci-fi film The Matrix, intelligent machines have
bumped human beings off their self-assigned place at
the pinnacle of creation and turned them into dreampacified
energy slaves. The Matrix Reloaded, the sequel,
ends with the machines boring rapidly toward the
underground city of Zion, the last refuge of the few
human rebels against the new world order. Things look
bad for the humans. (The final episode is set for release
in late 2003.)
Is this scenario plausible as The End?
Something, if not smart machines, will no doubt kill
off humanity sooner or later. The fossil record suggests
that no species lasts very long in geological terms
(although the humble cockroach, already 280 million
years old, may prove the exception). A likely assassin is
an asteroid or comet, such as the one that apparently
collided with the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs
65 million years ago.
Killer asteroids or parricidal robots seem more plausible
than species-cide. Doomsday literature has tradi-
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WORLD•WATCH September/October 200312
tionally fingered nuclear holocaust, runaway viruses, or
environmental crisis as likely ways we might kill ourselves
off. But humans (like cockroaches) have proven
so resilient and adaptable that we have moved into
nearly every place on Earth except the oceans. And
although biologists have long debated the minimum
population needed to sustain a vertebrate species for a
few hundred years, the closest thing to a standard estimate
is the low thousands. Given this relatively low number,
and the adaptability and geographic dispersal of
human beings, it’s hard to imagine that even the horrors
just mentioned would do more than trigger a massive
eclipse of the human presence on the Earth.
So human survival as a species does not seem to be
in much danger from anything we might do to the global
ecosystem, however rapacious, stupid, and/or shortsighted.
Nevertheless, the survival of billions of individuals
certainly is. From a strictly anthropocentric
point of view, the only human survival issue that concerns
sustainability is that such rapacious, stupid, and/or
shortsighted abuse of our environment will kill many
people, cause profound suffering, and devastate cultures.
The human survival dimension of sustainability thus
boils down to the question, How many people can the
Earth support? This is also the title of a rich and wideranging
book by Rockefeller University biologist Joel
E. Cohen, who notes that people have been making such
estimates for nearly 400 years, with results that range
from less than 1 billion to more than 1 trillion. Clearly,
there is no simple answer except “It depends.” According
to Cohen, it depends on:
• the typical level of material well-being;
• the distribution of material well-being;
• available technology;
• political institutions;
• economic arrangements;
• demographic arrangements;
• physical, chemical, and biological environments;
• how much variability in total population is acceptable;
• peoples’ willingness to risk local ecological disaster;
• the time horizon; and
• fashions, tastes, and moral values.
Cohen’s 36-page chapter reviewing the many complex
ways these factors interact to shape the number of
people the Earth can support is aptly titled “Human
Choices.” Carrying capacity for humans is in large part
self-defined, because the limit on human population is
not the maximum carrying capacity, but the cultural carrying
capacity, which is lower. If everyone lives at a subsistence
level, the Earth will support more people than
if everyone lives at a more comfortable level that requires
more resources. The factors listed above help define the
difference between the maximum population and the
optimum population.
Take “typical level of material well-being,” for example.
Despite the sloganeering of Italian energy companies,
the world is finite and therefore imposes limits. If
the pie ultimately cannot be enlarged, then average
material well-being will probably be greater if there are
fewer people on the planet at any one time. An adequate
diet for all, for instance, will be easier to achieve
with 3 billion people than with 30 billion. Even if the
higher number were theoretically supportable, producing
a decent diet for 3 billion people would require
less cultivated land, less intensive farming, less disruption
of natural ecosystems, less freshwater, and less
energy for production and transportation. In turn, that
means more undisturbed wilderness, greater biodiversity
and fewer extinctions, less sprawl, less pollution, and
so on—which, beyond reducing human mortality and
disease, means the average quality of life can be higher.
But average well-being could be high and still
imperil billions if the material wealth is too unevenly
distributed, as it is now. For example, the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently
projected that the total amount of calories available per
person per day will rise from about 2,800 today to
3,050 in 2030. However, 440 million people will still
go to bed hungry. Malnutrition and undernourishment
affect survival directly as well as by undermining
health. The wealth necessary for healthcare delivery is
likewise unevenly distributed; the affluent nations spend
billions on healthcare related to overconsumption,
while inexpensive vaccines against basic diseases common
in the developing world go begging for funds.
The effects of technology on human survival, for
good or ill, are even more obvious. The industrial revolution
sprang from the invention of machines that could
tap fossil fuels and unleash their enormous stores of
energy. That flood of energy led in turn to higher production
and average standards of living in industrialized
countries. On the other hand, the 1986 Chornobyl
nuclear power plant disaster contaminated 150,000
square kilometers of prime farmland and significantly
reduced the region’s agricultural output. A global
nuclear exchange could slash the global carrying capacity
even as it reduced the population.
Lack of space prevents us from discussing most of
the other items on the list in more detail, but all have
their own effects on how many people survive, and who
they are. Different choices in these areas lead directly
to vastly different outcomes. For instance, although
human population growth now seems to be moderating
somewhat, for a long time it looked as though we
were lurching helplessly toward a boom-and-bust scenario:
a peak of, say, 20 billion people followed by a
cataclysmic crash that left a devastated and strife-torn
planet. This “maximum-at-one-time” option is clearly
inferior to a plan to support fewer humans at any one
time, but more over the long haul, by choosing to sta-
September/October 2003 WORLD•WATCH 13
bilize population at some lower level.
The choices we are making now
are placing a heavy load on the Earth’s
capacity to support us. By one measure,
the Ecological Footprint, we are
now exceeding that capacity by about
20 percent. The margin will widen,
probably at an accelerating rate, as our
numbers and consumption rise. The
increasing load will in turn drive
changes, some gradual and others
abrupt, in local and regional ecosystems.
These changes will compromise
our survivability. In a few
instances—such as the possible collapse
of the North Atlantic current
(which carries heat north from the
tropics and keeps Europe’s climate
temperate rather than Siberian)—our
tinkerings with the planet’s machinery
could have shattering effects. Both
the difficulty and cost of adapting
would be high. At all scales, human
survival is threatened by our reluctance
to embrace sustainability.
B i o d i v e r s i t y
“So careful of the type she seems, so
careless of the single life,” said Tennyson
of nature and her species. A
century and a half later, however, science
tells us that nature is careless with
types as well. On average, a species
persists for only 4 or 5 million years.
It’s estimated that several hundred
million species have emerged since
the Earth began, and most are gone.
Nature seems not to care that
much about preserving biodiversity
(the entire realm of existing species
on the Earth). Why should we?
There are two general sorts of
answer to this question. The nonutilitarian
answer is that every species
is intrinsically valuable, regardless of
what humans think about it or do
with it. People can be found at all
points along this spectrum of reverence
for other life, from the stripmall
developer knowingly obliterating a rare orchid in
pursuit of profits, to the devout Jain sweeping the
ground ahead of him so as to avoid treading on an ant.
But this assertion carries at least some weight with
most people, and rightly so: any species can be seen as
a miracle of creation, whether you believe in God, Darwin,
or both. In general, to wipe one out is certainly a
tragedy and possibly a sin (although it’s hard to argue
with the 1992 World Health Organization commission
that concluded, “there seems…little ground for prePreah
Palilay Temple ruins, Angkor-Siem Reap, Cambodia.
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© John McDermott/www.asiaphotos.net
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WORLD•WATCH September/October 200314
serving the human immunodeficiency, smallpox, or
poliomyelitis viruses, malaria parasites, or guinea
worm”). By this yardstick, sustainability means preserving
as many species as possible and only permitting
one to go extinct after the most profound reflection and
debate, and for the most compelling of reasons.
The second kind of answer is the utilitarian, or
instrumental, argument, which says that other species
have value because they are useful. Philosopher Bryan
Norton identifies two types of utilitarian value, transformative
value and demand value. Other species possess
transformative value if they provide occasions for
us to examine, deliberate over, and revise our own values—that
is, to grow as human beings. For instance, a
hunter chasing a gazelle for his dinner might consider
that the gazelle is running for its life. The hunter might
further ponder the ethics of killing other animals so he
can live, especially if he could have had rice or lentils
instead. Transformative values can be important because
humans are thinking and reflecting beings who can
gain from the examined life, not just the mindless
scratching of our various itches.
Other species have demand value for humans if they
are useful in satisfying our needs and preferences. The
gazelle, for example, has demand value (as food) to the
hunter. Of course this only hints at the enormous range
of biodiversity’s demand values. The list of the “goods”
and “services” other species of plants, animals, and
microorganisms provide merely begins with oxygen,
food, and fresh water. It also includes fuel, fiber, building
materials, drugs and medicines, adornments and decorations,
nutrient recycling, soil formation, erosion
control, water control and recycling, pollination, waste
absorption and recycling, and a number of others.
In other words, other species are indispensable as
functional parts of the ecosystems we depend upon to
sustain human life. And once survival is ensured, humans
seek to improve the quality of their lives. Other species
are also useful to that end, as sources of knowledge and
amusement, companionship, recreation, artistic inspiration,
and so on. For either survival or high quality of
life, humans need other species. But how many?
No one can say for sure. About 1.4 to 1.8 million
species have been named, though estimates of how
many species actually exist range from 2 million to 100
million, with a best guess of perhaps 10 million. There
are over 750,000 species of insects alone, and a quarter
of a million flowering plants. Nature is the master
of redundancy, however, and not all of these are necessary
for the continued functioning of the global
ecosystem. This is clear from the fossil record, which
testifies that the larger system soldiers on while most
species die out, one by one, over time. Endangered
species make the same argument: their very rarity means
they are generally (though not always) unimportant to
the ecosystems they inhabit.
Stretching between these two facts—there are millions
of species and some are functionally redundant—
is a vast area of uncertainty. This brings us to some key
aspects of how ecosystems work, and to the precautionary
principle.
Ecology studies the most complex systems there are
and is a relatively young science. Understanding of
ecosystems is limited and still evolving. “There’s a longrunning
debate in ecology,” says Curtis Bohlen, a professor
of environmental studies at Bates College in
Maine: “Is an ecosystem something that matures over
time, or is it a random assemblage of species that happen
to be occurring together at the same time?” Ecologists’
ideas have tended to shift over the last 20 years
toward the latter view, and the shift has implications:
“If these creatures have just been thrown together,” says
Bohlen, “maybe there’s not that much to protect in
terms of the whole unit.”
The story of chestnut blight shows how major
species loss can occur without compromising ecosystem
function. The chestnut blight fungus arrived in New
York on imported nursery stock around 1900. It raced
through the hardwood forests east of the Appalachian
Mountains, almost wiping out the American chestnut
by 1950. The chestnut is a mast-producing tree (it
makes nuts) and was the most important tree in those
forests. But its devastation made almost no difference
to the forests’ functionality, because several other mastproducing
species, including oak, hickory, and beech,
remained abundant.
Lest this seem to give carte blanche to developers
like the one mentioned earlier, consider the analogy of
the riveted airplane. Ordinary aluminum light planes
are held together by thousands of rivets. Given engineers’
passion for redundancy, many of those rivets are
Statue among overgrown trees, Bihac, Bosnia.
© Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos
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September/October 2003 WORLD•WATCH 15
probably unneeded, and drilling one out will not likely
cause serious harm. But keep subtracting rivets, and
eventually some critical part will drop off.
The analogy isn’t perfect, but it offers some important
parallels to ecosystems:
Just as it may be hard to say which rivet is the critical
one, ecosystems sometimes have keystone species
whose loss can trigger the transformation of the system,
even if it comes early in the subtraction process.
But it may be unclear which, if any, of the species is a
keystone. In a given ecosystem, the endangered species
might be unimportant. In another, one might be critical.
Species that appear redundant may actually have
valuable but undiscovered functions.
When the wing goes, it does so suddenly and catastrophically,
and heavily stressed ecosystems occasionally
do so as well. However, they are more likely to
transform from one state to a quite different state that
retains some but not all of the original species. Ecosystems
can have multiple stable states: in effect, different
identities involving different collections of species, different
levels of biological productivity, and so on.
Changes from one state to another, especially if they take
place on a large scale and we have come to rely on them
in their original state, can affect the function and habitability
of an ecosystem and thus human well-being.
If the wing falls off in flight, the damage is irreversible.
Putting back the last rivet removed will not
reattach the wing. Ecosystems losing species exhibit hysteresis,
says Bohlen: “In going from complex to simple
you go through one series of community types, but
when going from simple to complex you don’t retrace
those steps. In other words, it may be very easy to go
one direction but very hard to go the other.” This has
profound implications for the human response to loss
of ecosystem function, because it is difficult or impossible
to reverse the transformation. Simply restoring the
most recently lost species won’t necessarily work. If such
losses are serious and widespread—as many scientists
believe they already are, or will soon be—they could
gravely compromise our planetary life-support system.
At minimum, they would be extremely expensive to
restore or replace. (One famous estimate of the value
of global ecosystem goods and services, by ecological
economist Robert Costanza and colleagues, yielded an
estimated range of $18–62 trillion (2001 dollars) per
year. The gross world product in 2001 was $47 trillion.
A final complication is the difficulty of predicting
the course and consequences of ecosystem transformation.
Ecologists can try to make predictions, but the
uncertainties are so great that a crystal ball might do
as well. As Stephen Carpenter, a freshwater ecosystem
specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has
written, “The future dynamics of ecosystems are contingent
on drivers that are outside the domain of ecology,
such as climate change, human demography, or
globalization of trade. [The future behavior of these drivers]
may be unknown or unknowable. Therefore the
uncertainty of the ecological predictions cannot be calculated.”
Moreover, people are embedded in their
ecosystems and affect their development, so that human
action in response to any predictions could cause the
predictions to be wrong.
In other words, we can guess, but we can’t even tell
how wild our guesses are. Carpenter adds that ecologists,
more humble than many scientists, tend to use
words like “projection” and “scenario” rather than
“prediction” or “forecast,” for just these reasons.
The only sensible response to this combination of
high value and high uncertainty is “First, do no harm.”
In ecological terms, this is the precautionary principle:
the uncertainty means we must be really, really careful.
Maverick economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen put
it this way: “Our policy toward natural resources in relation
to future generations must seek to minimize
regrets.” That’s why the current trend in the species
count—rapidly downward—is so alarming. We humans
are lethal to other species; we kill them directly, wreck
their habitats, and introduce alien species that outcompete
them. The result is that species extinction
rates now vastly exceed the “natural” background rate.
The rate appears to accelerate as species’ original ranges
are chopped up and converted to human uses.
It may be tempting to assume that, in 25 or 50 years
when ecological knowledge has advanced far beyond
current limits, we can then safely (if not morally) destroy
any species thought to be superfluous or dangerous. Perhaps
so. But human knowledge is always imperfect, and
from the utilitarian standpoint it is foolish to break or
discard a tool you might need some day. From the aesthetic/spiritual/nonutilitarian
standpoint, further
knowledge is likely only to increase the sense of awe
with which we regard the natural world. Either way, the
default rule ought to be preservation.
E q u i t y
Imagine that you have been chosen to establish an
entirely new island community, and that you alone get
to decide how to organize the society. You can pick any
government, any economic system, any division of
resources that you want. The only condition is this: your
place in society will be chosen at random. Would this
change your answer? Would you choose a system in
which most resources are controlled by a few? Or would
you divide resources equitably in order to ensure your
access to the community’s wealth, whether you were
part of the elite or the underclass?
On that island, as on Earth, the equitable distribution
of resources plays a central role in social and eco-
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WORLD•WATCH September/October 200316
logical health. Extreme inequity—immense disparities
between rich and poor—has grown in the past half-century,
within countries as well as among them, and now
threatens the well-being of countless communities.
According to the World Institute for Development
Economics Research, income inequality increased in 48
of 73 countries surveyed between 1980 and the late
1990s. In the United States, for example, the richest
20 percent of the population earns 46 percent of the
country’s income, while the poorest fifth earns 5 percent.
In Brazil, the richest fifth earns 64 percent of the
country’s income and the poorest fifth earns 2 percent.
This trend may be starkest in the Brazilian city of São
Paulo (population 18 million): while three million
slumdwellers struggle to survive, corporate executives
commute to work in helicopters and live in walled suburban
communities to protect themselves from the
increasing urban crime.
These inequities undermine sustainability in at least
two major ways:
Health. A World Bank study of 44 developing
nations revealed that infant mortality in the poorest
fifth of the population averages about twice the level
in the richest fifth. The weakness of public health
infrastructures in impoverished countries (including
substandard medical care, clean water access, and sanitation)
allows outbreaks of infectious diseases, such
as cholera and malaria, to spread unimpeded. Infectious
diseases killed 14.4 million people in 2000,
according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Of these deaths, three-quarters occurred in Africa and
southeast Asia, which account for only 36 percent of
the world’s population.
Diseases can cripple entire regions, as HIV/AIDS
has done in sub-Saharan Africa. Because HIV mainly
targets the adult population, the epidemic has disrupted
the economic and social system by killing off
thousands of farmers, educators, laborers, and parents.
AIDS has created 11 million orphans in Africa alone
and is expected to create 9 million more by 2010. And
we cannot pretend that an unstable Africa will affect only
Africa: as the SARS outbreak recently revealed, underfunded
public health systems can allow the spread of
new, unknown diseases around the world. SARS turned
out to be relatively containable and benign, but it still
infected about 8,500 people, killed over 800, and cost
an estimated $10–30 billion. A new bug, equivalent in
lethality to the 1918-19 flu epidemic (perhaps 40 million
dead) and spread around the world by jetliners at
500 miles an hour, could be catastrophic.
Security. Helicopter rides and gated communities
may help shield the rich from the sight of poverty, but
as World Bank President James Wolfensohn noted last
year, the wall that divides the rich from the poor is imaginary.
Terrorism is the reason du jour for the need to
deal with extreme inequities, because resentment is a
breeding ground for violence—whether as terrorism,
crime, or military conflict. In São Paulo, kidnapping rich
executives and their family members is a growing industry,
according to news reports.
But inequity threatens the security of the poor as
well as that of the rich. Impoverished local communities
are often powerless to resist powerful government
and business interests that recklessly exploit the areas
where they live for short-term gain. In the Star Mountains
rainforest of Papua New Guinea (PNG), for
instance, the Ok Tedi Mine produces 70 million tons
of tailings and rock each year, which are dumped directly
into the Ok Tedi River. While the mine produces valuable
metals and accounts for 10 percent of PNG’s gross
domestic product (GDP), the waste threatens over
2,000 square kilometers of the rainforest ecosystem
and the health and food security of the indigenous
tribes living along the river. Mining at Ok Tedi is
enabled by a government regulation that immunizes the
company from compensation claims. This keeps costs
down, at least for the company (perversely named Sustainable
Development Program Ltd.). But when the
mine closes in 2010 or so, the company will walk away,
pockets bulging with gold and other minerals, leaving
the local tribes a poisoned river and a scarred landscape.
Ok Tedi is not an isolated tragedy; similar mining
operations threaten nearly 40 percent of the world’s
large, untouched forests. Yet millions of tons of minerals
are discarded each year, largely because the current
economic system externalizes much of the
ecological and social cost of mining by ignoring the
degradation of communities and ecosystems, thus making
it artificially cheaper to extract virgin minerals. Yet
much of the resources we use could be recycled. Between
1990 and 2000, for example, Americans threw away 7
Collecting wood for charcoal, Sonoran Desert, Mexico.
©1993 Joanna B. Pinneo/AURORA
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September/October 2003 WORLD•WATCH 17
million tons of aluminum cans, enough to rebuild the
world’s entire commercial airfleet 25 times over. But
instead of recycling discarded aluminum, which would
use 95 percent less energy than smelting virgin aluminum,
new mines were gouged out of pristine ecosystems,
disrupting them and the communities that depend
on them.
Inequity can also affect the security of larger regions
and even the globe in general, by forcing the poor to
overuse and degrade local environmental resources in
ways that inflict broader effects on everyone, rich or
poor. Many marginalized people, struggling with dayto-day
survival, use the few resources they have inefficiently
and unsustainably. While cheap and efficient
solar cookers are available for cooking and water purification,
lack of access to these or other clean sources of
energy has forced millions to rely on wood, agricultural
residues, or dung. Burning these resources contributed
to 1.6 million deaths in 2000 through exposure to
indoor air pollution, according to WHO data. It also
increased deforestation, soil erosion, and depletion of
farmland, further impoverishing the inhabitants and
adding to global environmental pressures and increasingly
frequent “unnatural disasters.”
An example of the latter is Hurricane Mitch, which
dumped as much as two meters of rain on Central
America in 1999 and caused billions of dollars in damage.
In Honduras, the damage was worsened by the
development of fragile areas, such as the conversion of
hillsides into farmland—an outcome of the fact that 90
percent of prime farmland is owned by 10 percent of
the population. Eighty-two percent of the rural population
now lives on and farms the hillsides. Such disparities
amplify the effects of natural disasters, which
have become more frequent over the last 50 years.
They now afflict more than 200 million people each year
and have produced 25 million environmental refugees—
a number that is projected to double by 2010. Disasters
also squander foreign development aid: every dollar
spent on preventive measures could save seven in disaster
recovery costs. Wiser use of these dollars could
improve both the well-being of the most marginalized
and the health of the most stressed ecosystems.
While the connection between equity and security
is clear, governments’ understanding of security remains
myopically militaristic. In 2001, the world’s military
expenditures grew to $839 billion, yet illiteracy could
be eliminated around the world for an annual cost of
about $5 billion, clean drinking water provided for
$12 billion, starvation and malnutrition eliminated for
$19 billion, and soil erosion prevented for $24 billion.
These would all go a long way toward improving global
ecological security and societal stability, yet most governments
failed to act. One notable exception was
Brazil, which cut its military budget 4 percent in
order to fund an ambitious anti-hunger program.
Addressing extreme poverty is essential, but it is only
half of the equity problem. As Confucius observed
2,500 years ago, “excess and deficiency are equally at
fault.” Too much consumption is just as bad (or worse)
for the environment as too little. Twenty percent of the
world’s people, the global consumer class, consumes
70 to 80 percent of the world’s resources, and their
excesses are leaving the world’s ecosystems strained. The
global carbon, nitrogen, and hydrological cycles have
been radically altered, as much as half the Earth’s land
is transformed or degraded, and three-quarters of the
world’s fisheries are at capacity, overexploited, or
depleted. The disappearance due to overfishing of 90
percent of the populations of large predatory fish is only
the latest chapter in this sorry story.
As noted earlier, human consumption may already
be drawing down resources 20 percent faster than the
Earth can renew them. Globalization is spurring a rapid
increase in the size of the global consumer class, driven
by growing advertising expenditures and widening
access to consumer credit. Yet if both too much and
too little access to the world’s natural and humanmade
wealth seem unsustainable, they are also unnecessary.
Overconsumption involves a great deal of
pointless waste, which could be eliminated. Moreover,
it not only fails to proportionately improve well-being,
it often is bad for the overconsumers, as we’ll see in the
next section. Attacking counterproductive overconsumption
on these fronts would free up resources for
the billions of people for whom raising consumption
levels is necessary for a decent life.
L i f e Q u a l i t y
In 2002, advertisers spent $451 billion to convince people
that they would find happiness in the latest fad or
fashion (especially the ones the advertisers were promoting).
Often they succeeded. But more and more critics
are challenging the high-consumption economic
model, drawing attention to consumerism’s failure to
satisfy people and to the collateral damage it causes:
declines in health, environmental quality, and social
cohesion. At the heart of this debate is the ancient and
much pondered question, What is the good life?
In our view, the definitions of sustainability and
the good life are tightly interwoven. Prerequisites to
both include human survival, ecosystem health, and
some degree of social equity. Beyond those, what makes
for a quality life? In defining development, the United
Nations Development Programme says that it has to
do with “creating an environment in which people can
develop their full potential and lead productive, creative
lives in accord with their needs and interests.” If the
consumer model is valid, perhaps this simply means
✦
WORLD•WATCH September/October 200318
building more malls and McDonald’s. However, we
would invite mall- and fast-food fans to consider the
growing evidence that goods alone cannot deliver the
good life—even if there actually were enough resources
to provide this lifestyle to all 6.3 billion of us.
The United States, the richest nation in the world,
increased its per capita gross domestic product (GDP)
by 92 percent between 1970 and 2000. According to
this index, Americans are nearly twice as well off now
as they were 30 years ago. But GDP is blind to the social
value of economic activity and simply adds up all the
recorded expenditures. So the more spent on cleaning
up toxic waste, housing prison inmates, or burning
gasoline while trapped in traffic, the better. It also
ignores all the beneficial activities not captured in the
market, such as volunteer work, unpaid childcare, and
housework. Factoring in these negatives and positives—
as the NGO Redefining Progress does with its Genuine
Progress Indicator (GPI)—paints a very different picture.
In the same period that the GDP shot up 92 percent,
the GPI stayed nearly flat, increasing only 4
percent (see figure). Indeed, social indicators suggest
a decline in societal well-being over the 1970–2000
period. Income inequality rose 21 percent, teen suicides
jumped 33 percent to 7.9 per 100,000 per year, and
the number of Americans without health care increased
from 11 percent to 14 percent of the population to a
total of 40 million, according to the Fordham Index
of Social Health. This index, which tracks 16 indicators,
has declined 29 percent from 1970 to 2000.
The growth of total economic activity at the expense
of social health reflects societal priorities, that is, the valuing
of increased private consumption at the expense of
essential public goods. John Kenneth Galbraith warned
of this shift in 1958 in his ironically titled book The
Affluent Society. In the United States, “public squalor,”
such as the weakening of the education and healthcare
systems, paralleled rising private affluence.
This change turned out to be part of a larger societal
shift that led to the conversion of the United States
into the “consumer republic” it is today. Harvard professor
Lizbeth Cohen argues that the transformation
began with the mobilization of the post-World War II
economy for domestic consumption and has climaxed
with the current almost pathological fixation on ever
increasing consumption, even at the expense of personal
and social well-being—a condition many critics term
“affluenza.”
In the United States, affluenza is reflected in its many
symptoms:
High levels of debt. In 2000, the average U.S. household
held $7,500 in credit card debt, and over a million
Americans filed for bankruptcy.
Increasing work stress. The average American works
more hours than people in any other nation, and more
of these hours fall on nights and weekends, disrupting
sleep schedules and reducing time available with family
and friends.
Declining physical health. Overweight and obesity,
abetted by poor diet and sedentary lifestyles, now affect
61 percent of the adult population and contributed to
300,000 deaths in 2001—second only to tobacco.
Affluenza is not confined to the United States.
Through the promotion of staple consumer products like
cigarettes and Coca-Cola, it is compromising the health
and well-being of billions worldwide. Lifestyle diseases,
such as cardiovascular diseases and cancers, caused more
than 42 percent of the 55.7 million deaths in 2000. These
diseases weighed disproportionately on the industrial
world, where consumption levels are highest. According
to a WHO analysis, smoking contributed to 4.9
million deaths in 2000, overweight and obesity to 2.6
million, and physical inactivity to 1.9 million. About half
of all these deaths occurred in industrial nations, even
though they accounted for just 24 percent of total deaths
and 22 percent of the global population.
But aren’t these just acceptable side-effects of a
culture that, overall, most people find deeply satisfying?
Nearly 30 years ago, research by economist Richard Easterlin
led him to conclude that “economic growth does
not raise society to some ultimate state of plenty. Rather,
the economic growth process itself engenders evergrowing
wants that lead it ever onward.” Since then,
psychologists have extended this thinking in studies of
the sources of human contentment, which reveal that
once basic needs are met, wealth improves life satisfaction
very little. This finding holds true both at the individual
and national levels and is due mainly to constantly
shifting perceptions of “needs.” While telephones, air
conditioners, and automobiles have been around for an
eyeblink of history, they already have the feel of necesAbandoned
police pickup truck, Umatac, Guam.
©Michael S.Yamashita/CORBIS
✦
September/October 2003 WORLD•WATCH 19
sities (at least for those who own them).
The most affluent often don’t even realize they’re
rich. According to the 2002 RoperASW survey “Affluent
Americans and Their Money,” only 20 percent of
a sample of 1,767 Americans in households earning over
$75,000 considered themselves “affluent.” Fifty-eight
percent were at least $100,000 in debt and 85 percent
of them worried about money at least occasionally (40
percent worry “all the time”). More than three out of
four said they’d need at least a million dollars to consider
themselves affluent. This group, the most affluent
24 percent of the richest country in the world,
seems still unsatisfied with their wealth. Even if one
achieves sudden and overwhelming wealth, it doesn’t
seem to help; psychological studies of lottery winners
reveal that they adapt to their new levels of affluence,
settling back to original levels of satisfaction after an
initial burst of euphoria.
If the sense of affluence is so ephemeral, perhaps
the consumer model, which promises satisfaction
through increased consumption, is not the best path
to a quality life—especially if its effects on social health
and the environment are considered. This is not to say
that there are no benefits to the consumer society. But
there are alternative models that may help redirect
society towards a more satisfying, equitable, and ecologically
harmonious path.
Reducing the public squalor that Galbraith long ago
warned of would significantly improve the life quality
of millions. In the United States and France, child
poverty rates are both about 25 percent. However,
after government-provided payments and services are
factored in, child poverty drops to 7 percent in France,
while in the United States it remains at over 20 percent.
While these statistics highlight a serious equity
issue, when one in five children lacks adequate nutrition,
healthcare, and education—when basic needs are
not met—it becomes a life quality issue as well.
Sweden, which has been ranked as the most equitable
nation in the world, may also provide some
insights. Rather than unrestrained private affluence,
Swedish social policy emphasizes public goods, providing
universal health care, generous unemployment benefits,
and practically free university education. Sweden
uses significantly more resources than the global average,
but its per-capita ecological footprint is still 31 percent
smaller than the U.S. footprint, even though
Swedes’ standard of living is at least as high (perhaps
higher, if measures of social health are included). Critics
may rage that public goods depend on government
spending and thus on taxation. But as New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman recently explained, there
would probably be less revulsion if the word “services”
replaced “taxes.” Since all people, rich or poor, have
access to public services (unlike private wealth), slogans
like “read my lips, no new services” might be sneered
rather than cheered.
Another lesson comes from the villages of Sri Lanka.
Started in one village in 1958, the Sarvodaya Shramadana
movement has now spread to over 12,000
(more than half the villages in Sri Lanka). Organized
around an ideal of “no poverty, no affluence,” villagers
work mutually to provide not just for their communities’
most basic needs, but also opportunities to live lives
they value, improving education, healthcare services, and
environmental quality.
Sarvodaya and its philosophy of sufficiency and
shared labor may provide a model for both individuals
and nations as they choose a development path. The
consumer model is just one path among many. Considering
there are multiple paths to fulfillment and consumerism
is so ecologically costly, maybe we should
look more closely at the examples of living sufficiently
that Sarvodaya and Sweden offer. Sufficiency is a lesson
that has been taught at least since the 3rd century
BCE, when Lao-Tzu mused that “he who knows
he has enough is rich.” Perhaps it is time to reawaken
this wisdom.
C o n c l u s i o n
We began with a story about the fate of an isolated habitat,
and we end with another that may also be familiar
to many readers. Easter Island is a speck of land in the
Pacific Ocean 2,000 miles off the Chilean coast. This
remote place and its people have been intensely studied
for years, for Easter Island today bears little resemblance
to the island settled by voyaging Polynesians over
1,500 years ago. The island’s dramatic story tells us a
great deal about sustainability.
When the new arrivals beached their ocean-going
canoes, they found a lushly forested place offering several
valuable tree species, including large palms suitable
Thousand2001Dollars
GDP and GPI, United States, 1970–2000
Source: Cobb et al.
2000199019801970
Year
Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)
Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
0
10
20
30
40
WORLD•WATCH September/October 200320
for building canoes and timber-framed dwellings. For
food, the settlers had brought chickens (deliberately)
and rats (inadvertently), but the island also teemed
with edible birds. Dolphins, seals, and the crops typical
of Polynesian culture—bananas, taro, sweet potatoes,
and sugarcane—rounded out the settlers’ diet.
They thrived on the island’s abundance and their numbers
eventually grew to perhaps 7,000 (20,000, by
some estimates). A sophisticated hierarchical culture
emerged, wealthy and organized enough to produce the
island’s remarkable stone statues. Hundreds of these
sculptures were carved over the centuries, and more than
200, some weighing over 80 tons, were raised up onto
stone pedestals.
But the Easter Islanders’ success triggered their
undoing. Generations of harvesting trees for building,
making rope, and for fuelwood—and of seed-eating by
the stowaway rats—led to complete deforestation.
(When the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen first saw
Easter Island in 1722, it was a shrubby grassland.) The
spiraling competition among clans to build and raise
ever-larger stone statues, which required a lot of timber
for rollers and other simple machines, took a particularly
heavy toll. Pollen analysis suggests that the last
of the great palms was cut down around 1400. Bird nesting
grounds were destroyed along with the forest; that
and direct consumption drove every native landbird
species to extinction. As the trees disappeared, so did
the means to build the traditional big canoes. Fish and
dolphins from deeper offshore waters could no longer
be harvested (and escape or migration to other islands
became impossible). Firewood supplies dwindled and
streams dried up. Soils eroded and became less fertile.
In short, the island’s carrying capacity plummeted.
Food surpluses disappeared, leading to cannibalism.
With the surpluses went social complexity. Eventually
the population crashed by 75 to 90 percent and the culture
devolved. Roggeveen found perhaps 2,000 people
on the island, living in “singular poverty.”
As Jared Diamond, Clive Ponting, and other writers
have observed, Easter Island is a potent warning.
Four lessons seem obvious:
• Human beings respond strongly to incentives to
overuse resources. During most of our evolutionary history,
everything we needed was abundant. We seem
wired to use it up and find something else rather than
regulate ourselves to stretch and conserve resources over
long periods.
• We have great difficulty noticing when things are
going wrong, unless it happens over relatively short periods.
Gradual changes, even if noticed, are likely to be
shrugged off and adapted to. Bounty is taken for
granted, especially by those societies (such as the rich
North) in which the hallucination of limitless wealth is
sustained by importing carrying capacity from elsewhere.
But the Easter Islanders didn’t have the illusory
comfort of imports, and they still drove their culture
into the ground. Social patterns and ways of perception
die hard. As Diamond has written, by the time the
last tree was cut, trees would have been scarce for many
years and nobody would have thought it alarming.
• Declining resource availability can undermine
the very organizational structures and capacities needed
to fashion a response. This is crucial: as noted above,
we are well suited biologically to perceiving and
responding to short-term threats but not to long-term
ones. Culture, including our social organizations, social
learning, science, and politics, is our only defense
against the latter.
• The failure of the Easter Island culture to grasp
what was happening to it led, not to its extinction, but
to its radical impoverishment and simplification—in
terms of numbers, capacity to act, biodiversity, wealth,
and cultural richness.
Was Easter Island culture sustainable? People still
live there, after all. The answer isn’t worth quibbling
over; it simply hinges on one’s definition of sustainability.
If it incorporates (as the authors’ does) the notion that
human communities and cultures should thrive and not
just survive, Easter Island fails the sustainability test. The
islanders’ unwitting assault on the foundation of their
tropical paradise led implacably to the loss of biodiversity
and life quality (and possibly equity too, but not enough
is known of the social structure to say) as the island’s
ecosystem was simplified.
There is no particular reason that this process cannot
repeat itself on a global scale. In fact, that is precisely
what seems to be happening. Unlike the islanders,
however, we have no excuses. We can’t plead ignorance—Easter
Island and many other examples show
clearly what happens to cultures that are incautious
about natural constraints—or blindness: our science
enables us to see changes that are imperceptible to a
single generation. (Science will also improve our meager
understanding of the immensely complex natural
systems we live in and lead to improved quantitative
measures of sustainability.)
Most important, we know that a sustainable global
human society is imperative and what must be done to
move toward it. In this context what usually comes to
mind are familiar solutions such as solar, wind, and
hydrogen energy technologies; habitat and species protection;
control of our own consumption and population—all
of which environmentalists have been urging
for years. These share a deference to the cyclical character
of the Earth’s systems and the need to harmonize
the human economy with them. Since the industrial revolution,
we have increasingly ignored or altered the natural
cycles—carbon, nitrogen, hydrological—that
replenish these systems. The resulting explosion in eco-
✦
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September/October 2003 WORLD•WATCH 21
nomic output has come at the cost of
the long-term and dangerous depletion
of natural capital. The costs by
now are as familiar as the solutions: by
relying heavily on nitrogen fertilizer
instead of organic farm waste, for
instance, we have reduced the fertility
of agricultural lands and created
enormous dead zones in our oceans
and rivers. Our vast and accelerating
logging operations and ubiquitous
dependence on fossil fuels have
increased atmospheric carbon concentrations
to levels never seen before.
By diverting or damming rivers, we’ve
dried out seas (or created new ones),
changed local weather patterns, and
disrupted entire ecosystems.
We know this cannot go on.
Returning to a cyclical system—harvesting
renewable resources sustainably,
reusing and recycling materials
in preference to mining virgin ones,
rebuilding and nurturing agricultural
soils, weaning ourselves off of fossil
fuels, and so on—along with respectful
husbanding of biodiversity, will
start us down the path of material sustainability.
Giving due and purposeful
attention to the inequities that lock billions
into wretched poverty and
undermine the security of all will start
us toward social sustainability.
Together these movements
amount to a revolution. Those
opposed to change may cast this future
as one of short rations, belt-tightening,
and general deprivation. On the
contrary, thriving human communities
such as those that have embraced the
Sarvodaya principles, as well as millions
of individuals the world over who have
adopted sufficiency as their touchstone,
are proof that human wellbeing,
connection, and contentment
are achievable without consumerism,
mass advertising, planned obsolescence,
heedless and destructive waste,
or the endless pursuit of profits—and
without a single trip to the mall.
Only the prospect of a truly sustainable culture
offers the universal possibility of human fulfillment. It
is the business-as-usual course that leads inexorably to
a sad future of inequity, strife, natural and economic
impoverishment, suffering, and cultural decline—a
future made all the more bitter by the knowledge of
superior choices foregone and forever lost.
Thomas Prugh is Senior Editor and Erik Assadourian
is a Staff Researcher at Worldwatch Institute.
Ta Prohm Temple ruins, Angkor-Siem Reap, Cambodia.
© John McDermott/www.asiaphotos.net