Sustainability forum March 2004

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Long term thinking for sustainability

Discussion Paper by the SDF Research and Policy Working Group

Sustainability

Although sustainability is discussed as ensuring that the needs of the current generation are met without compromising the needs of future generations and ‘ensuring quality of life’, the definition lacks a sense of future – there is no clear understanding of what is meant by future generations. Economists argue that we care about our children, their children and possibly their children, but beyond four generations, we do not have a sense of concern or obligation for future welfare. Maori would identify five generations as the minimum period of thinking (G. Coates, personal communication).

However, in the context of future society, four or five generations (100-125 years) is relatively short. Many societies have existed for much longer than that – some for thousands of years (Europe, Middle East, China, India, Egypt). Many of the major cities in Europe, north Africa, the middle East and Asia have been in existence for over two thousand years; some for over 5,000 years. Some environmental impacts can last for thousands of years, particularly loss or salinisation of soil, loss of resources, degradation of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity. Some impacts can take long periods of time to develop or occur – loss of soil or biodiversity, desertification, deforestation and depletion of resources. Thus, at the very least, we should be considering a period of 1000 years and looking to the type of future we want at that point.

Future thinking

We cannot, of course, know what technologies we will have available 1000 years into the future. However, we can make some assumptions and use these to guide sustainable thinking. These assumptions include:

• humans will be here;
• current cities will be here;
• food will still be grown;
• materials and energy will still be required to meet human needs;
• human basic needs will not have changed; these include (Peet and Bossel, 2000):
  • Existence – provision of the basic biological needs of its members: food, drink, shelter, and medical care;
  • Effectiveness – provision for the production and distribution of goods and services;
  • Freedom of action;
  • Security - provision for the maintenance of internal and external order;
  • Adaptability – able to change;
  • Coexistence – able to exist peacefully with other races and species;
  • Reproduction - provision for the reproduction of new members and consider laws and issues related to reproduction;
  • Psychological needs – provision of meaning and motivation to its members;
  • Ethical reference – provision of definitions of right and wrong.

Over 1000 years we will have to consider land use, food production, soil health, water quality and quantity, human habitation, ecosystem health, evolution and robustness, biodiversity, waste disposal (particularly hazardous waste), climate change, resource use and even technological direction. Long term planning for cities, regions and countries becomes important as it is within that framework that infrastructure of human habitation can be developed and managed for the long term. Limitations of land, water, food, soil and materials can be identified and ways of managing those resources within those limitations developed. Areas that are suitable for human habitation, for agriculture, for transportation corridors and for green areas can be identified and managed. In addition, backcasting will enable identification of technologies which must be developed for future survival.

Even having identified these issues, we certainly cannot predict with any certainty what will happen in the future. However, we can evaluate the risk of our activities on the needs of future generations and reduce those risks. Thus we can look at the probability and consequences of negative impacts on the environment and society over the short, medium and long term and move to mitigate those risks, particularly those which have major consequences.

The identification of risks requires that we understand more fully the systems we are affecting – environmental, social and even economic. Systems and process thinking is critical to enable the linkages and feedbacks between systems to be identified and f+or planning to take all systems into account. It also requires us to identify and recognise the limitations of those systems, not only for the short term but also for the long term. Those are the limitations which we must live within if we are to achieve sustainability. At this point, we have identified some critical species or ecosystem levels, the points at which species or ecosystems will crash. However, the causes and factors leading to such crashes are not well known and the critical levels of many species and ecosystems remain unknown.

Plato, writing Critias 2,400 years ago, lamented the impact of deforestation and farming on the Greek island of Attica:

..all other lands were surpassed by ours in goodness of soil, so that it was actually able at that period to support a large host which was exempt from the labors of husbandry. And of its goodness a strong proof is this: what is now left of our soil rivals any other in being all-productive and abundant in crops and rich in pasturage for all kinds of cattle and at that period, in addition to their fine quality it produced these things in vast quantity... And, just as happens in small islands, what now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left. But at that epoch the country was unimpaired, and for its mountains it had high arable hills, and in place of the “moorlands,” as they are now called, it contained plains full of rich soil; and it had much forestland in its mountains, of which there are visible signs even to this day; for there are some mountains which now have nothing but food for bees, but they had trees no very long time ago, and the rafters from those felled there to roof the largest buildings are still sound. And besides, there were many lofty trees of cultivated species; and it produced boundless pasturage for flocks. Moreover, it was enriched by the yearly rains from Zeus, which were not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil it had was deep, and therein it received the water, storing it up in the retentive loamy soil and by drawing off into the hollows from the heights the water that was there absorbed, it provided all the various districts with abundant supplies of springwaters and streams, whereof the shrines which still remain even now, at the spots where the fountains formerly existed, are signs which testify that our present description of the land is true.

Such, then, was the natural condition of the rest of the country, and it was ornamented as you would expect from genuine husbandmen who made husbandry their sole task, and who were also men of taste and of native talent, and possessed of most excellent land and a great abundance of water, and also, above the land, a climate of most happily tempered seasons.

(Plato, 360 BCE; translated by Bury, 1966.)

References

Peet, J. & Bossel, H., An Ethics-Based System Approach to Indicators of Sustainable Development. International Journal of Sustainable Development3(3):221-238 (2000).

Plato, 360 BCE. Critias. In Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 7, translated by R.G. Bury. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1966. The Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Plat.+Criti.+110e