Desjardins74_94.pdf
ACU-Aquinas Campus Li
ary
Environmental Ethics
An Introduction
to Environmental Philosophy
FIFTH EDITION
JOSEPH R. DESJARDINS
College of Saint Benedict/St. John's University
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Environmental Ethics: An
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Joseph R. Desjardins
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4
Sustainability and
Responsibi I ities
to the Future
It would be difficult tofjnd almost any
institution in contemporary culture that
has not in some way attached itself to the
idea of sustainability. We find "sustain-
able" used to modify: agriculture, archi-
tecture, business, buildings, construction,
communities, consumerism, development,
economics, ecosystems, forestry, market-
ing, investing, transportation, and on and
on. The concept of sustainability is every-
where. Thousands of corporations, for
example, have replaced the traditional
corporate annual report with an annual
sustainability report. But one should be
leery when any idea is so ubiquitous,
especially when it was originally intro-
duced as a critical alternative to the status
quo. Has "sustainability" lost its meaning?
Is it only a passing fad; or worse, is it a
smokescreen behind which anything
goes?
As most commonly used today, the
concept of sustainability is about 30 years
old. It is traced to a United Nations
74
commission that studied questions of
economic development, environmental
protection, and future generations in the
1980s. Named for its chairman, former
Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem
Brundtland, the Brundtland Commission
focused on long-term strategies that
might help nations achieve economic
development without jeopardizing the
earth's capacity to sustain all life. The
Brundtland Commission published its
findings in 1987 in a book titled Our
Common Future, which offered what has .
ecome the standard definition of sus-
tainable development: "sustainable
development is development that meets
the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future gen-
erations to meet their own needs."
Beginning with this report, the concept of
sustainability and sustainable develop-
ment has guided much of the world's
thinking about global economic growth
and development. ·
CHAPTER 4 SUSTAINABILITY AND RESPONSIBILITIES TO THE FUTURE 75
In some ways, sustainability is an
intuitively clear idea. A practice is sus-
tainable if it can continue indefinitely.
A simple example comes from finance.
Putting money into savings and spending
only the interest generated from those
savings exemplifies a sustainable bud-
geting practice. Spending down the
principal, as well as spending the princi-
pal and the interest, is unsustainable. The
income will decrease as the savings are
spent, and thus the income will run out
eventually. Aesop's fable about the
goose that laid the golden egg captures a
similar insight. Limiting your consump-
tion to the golden eggs is sustainable;
eating the goose itself is not.
Sustainability also has a certain ethical
intuitiveness. As discussed in Chapter 2, .
ights are sometimes explained in terms of
protecting those central human interests
that we identify as needs. In this sense, we
might explain human rights in terms of
every person having a right to what she
needs. Therefore, the Brundtland Com-
mission's definition of sustainability seems
simply to assert that this same human
ight should be extended not only to
every person presently alive, but to future
generations as well. Sustainability in this
sense seems just another way to say that
equal. opportunity should extend to
people not yet living.
Similarly, the Brundtland Commission's
economic goal had a certain intuitive
appeal. Economic development as prac-
ticed throughout the twentieth century, if
not throughout most of human history,
treated the productive capacity of the
earth as if it were infinite. But in the late
twentieth century, all signs are that
human consumption is approaching the
limits of that productive capacity. It is as if
we are beginning to look hungrily at the
goose itself rather than just at its eggs.
The Brundtland Commission's call for sus-
tainable development, rather than simple
unrestricted growth, was a call for us to
dial back on both the quantity and quality
of our consumption.
Sustainability is thus often character-
ized in terms of three fundamental cate-
gories, frequently called the "three pillars
of sustainability" or the "triple bottom
line." Sustainability has an economic
dimension that concerns production and
distribution of goods and services to meet
human needs. Economic sustainability
implies that we not use productive
esources, such as capital, labor, and nat-
ural resources at rates faster than those at
which they can be replenished. But sus-
tainability also has both an environmental
dimension and ethical dimension that
estricts this economic activity to activities
that do not degrade the biosphere in such
a way that people are denied in the future
an equal right to meet their own needs.
There are three pillars of sustainability:
economic, environmental, and ethical.
From one perspective, the explosion of
attention now paid to sustainability is
good news. The optimistic view is that
people worldwide have understood the
call to sustainable practices and that
global economic development is evolving
in a way that is promising for the future.
The hopes that were implicit in the
Brundtland report seem to be coming to
fruition . But skeptics remain unconvinced.
Some who are sympathetic to the goals
of Brundtland Commission, interpret the
universal attention to sustainability and
the explosion of businesses and countries
that now identify with sustainability as an
indication that something is amiss. To
understand this skepticism we should ask,
"What is being sustained?" It seems clear
that some who have jumped on the sus-
tainability bandwagon believe that the
status quo is what we should sustain. To
commit to sustainability means that I
commit to finding ways to keep doing
what I am doing. But, if sustainable
development was introduced as an alter-
native to the status quo, if the present
patterns of consumption, production, and
growth are what has led to the present
predicament in which we find ourselves
umping up against the limits of growth,
then it should be clear that not everything
that we are presently doing can be
"sustained." Some critics, for example,
would argue that sustainability cannot be
applied to the consumption patterns of
industrial societies such as the United
States, or to an energy industry built on
fossil fuels. Finding consumer giants such
as Walmart, or oil companies such as BP,
claiming allegian_ce to sustainability
76 ' PART II ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AS APPLIED ETHICS
convinces these critics that the concept
has been severely co
upted.
In a similar vein, other critics claim
that sustainability is unjust if it implies
that the path to economic development
enjoyed by the western industrialized
countries is no longer open to the devel-
oping world . If sustainability means sus-
taining the status quo for the present
alignment of the world's economies, then
countries such as China, India, Brazil,
Pakistan, Russia, and Indonesia decidedly
are not in favor of sustainability. These
critics interpret the West's call for sus-
tainable development as the rich telling
the poor that they should be satisfied
with what they have and find another
way to prosperity.
Other critics doubt the very founda-
tions of the sustainability movement. Sus-
tainability is built on the assumptions that
there are limits to growth, that we have a
esponsibility not to put future genera-
tions at a disadvantage in meeting their
needs, and that the best way to fulfil that
esponsibility is to adopt policies that limit
growth. Each of these assumptions can be
challenged.
The sustainability movement takes as a
given the assumption that resources are
limited. But some argue that this misre-
presents the nature of resources. Human
eings do not value natural resources for
their own sake, but for the services that
they provide to us.