Sustainable

Patrick Bond

In 2015, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg famously declared his practical, financial opposition to net neutrality: “It’s not sustainable to offer the whole Internet for free,” he opined (Newman 2015). Without a commercial incentive, many facets of life end up falling short of “sustainability” in the classical sense of a financial rate of return greater than zero. Originally from the Latin “sustinere” (“to hold” or, in other evolutions, “long-lasting”), it is through the word’s recent etymological trajectory that the banal terminology of economic profitability was temporarily displaced by environmental signposting. In radical scenes, “sustainable” is also used to describe processes—particularly in organizing contexts—that do not lead to “burnout,” a major cause of movement disengagement. This usage, however, tends to invoke a metaphoric homology with both the ecological and the economic usage. It is therefore necessary to consider how such usages came to be.

The idea of “sustainability” as an ecological concept gained popularity in 1972 with the first Earth Summit in Stockholm and in The Limits to Growth (Club of Rome 1972), culminating in a 1987 United Nations Commission and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Co-opted by corporations during the 1990s, “sustainability” was downgraded in favor of neoliberal ideologues’ advocacy of export-led growth and the commodification of nature. Nevertheless, the concept emerged once again at the 2002 UN Earth Summit in Johannesburg, which fused the UN’s strategy with privatizers, carbon traders, and mega-corporations supporting its “Global Compact.” Then, finding “Green Economy” rhetoric, biodiversity offsetting, and market-centric climate change policy to be fertile soil at the 2012 Rio Summit, “sustainability” once again flowered, leading to fears of “neoliberalized nature” (Büscher et al. 2014). Despite extensive critique by the scholar-activist network The Rules (2015) and others, “sustainable development goals” have become a mantra of the UN and many other multilateral agencies.

The return of “sustainability” will inevitably be contested by radical critics and attacked by pollution-intensive capitalist forces. But it is the torture of “sustainability” through “ecological modernization” (e.g., the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, established by Swiss construction billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny) to which critics must pay closest attention. Like so many forms of greenwashing, the term is deployed in the course of commodifying, financializing and destroying nature. The financialization of nature is underway with carbon markets and other forms of emissions trading and virtual water sales, increasingly packaged in exotic investment instruments (Bond 2012). In ecological modernization’s most advanced form, Deutsche Bank’s Pavan Sukhdev initiated “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” (TEEB) within the UN Environment Program to “make nature’s values visible” and thus “help decision-makers recognize the wide range of benefits provided by ecosystems and biodiversity, demonstrate their values in economic terms and, where appropriate, capture those values in decision-making” (TEEB n.d.).

TEEB’s search for optimal resource use emphasizes “low-hanging fruit” that can achieve the least costly form of market-facilitated environmental management. Likewise, the World Bank’s (2012) Inclusive Green Growth mandated that “care must be taken to ensure that cities and roads, factories and farms are designed, managed, and regulated as efficiently as possible to wisely use natural resources while supporting the robust growth developing countries still need . . . [to move the economy] away from suboptimalities and increase efficiency— and hence contribute to short-term growth—while protecting the environment.” Not mentioned by World Bank staff were capitalism’s recent distortions in the food system, carbon markets, and real estate, most proximately caused by financial speculation in commodities, nature, and housing. Nor would the World Bank admit that overproduction tendencies in the world economy are amplified by the “increased efficiency” required for successful export-led growth, nor that irrationality characterizes a large share of international trade. Silences in neoliberal versions of sustainability discourse tell us just as much about the real agenda behind co-optation of this sort.

This is the weak, corporate-dominated version of the sustainability narrative, but there was once a stronger one. Gro Harlem Brundtland’s World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) defined “sustainable development” as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Moving beyond simple intergenerational equity, Brundtland also allowed mention of two central concepts that reflected a more favorable balance of forces for the environmental left. First was “the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given.” Second was “the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.” These relatively radical red and green agendas were briefly married in 1987. As a result, the idea of “sustainability” should have been a strong site for contesting capitalism had activists more jealously guarded the term.

It was not to be. As John Drexhage and Deborah Murphy (2012) explained, “over the past 20 years [“sustainable development”] has often been compartmentalized as an environmental issue. Added to this, and potentially more limiting for the sustainable development agenda, is the reigning orientation of development as purely economic growth.” It is worth dwelling on this artificial bifurcation because, within the discipline of economics, two lines of argument had emerged by the early 1990s. The first was the visionary work of Herman Daly, who edited the seminal Toward a Steady State Economy (1973) but then labored fruitlessly at the World Bank to inject environmental values into financial considerations. Daly (1996, 220) had offered a tougher definition of “sustainability” than Brundtland, calling for “development without growth beyond environmental carrying capacity, where development means qualitative improvement and growth means quantitative increase.” At the World Bank, he found that this framing “just confirmed the orthodox economists’ worst fears about the subversive nature of the idea, and reinforced their resolve to keep it vague.”

Daly (1996, 88–93) proposed four sustainability policy recommendations for both the World Bank and for governments centered on preserving the ecological inheritance, which came to be known as “natural capital.” These were to stop counting natural capital as income, to tax labor and income less and resource throughput more, to maximize the productivity of natural capital in the short run and invest in increasing its supply in the long run, and to move away from export-led growth and toward domestic production for internal markets. By 1995, Daly (1996, 220) had grown frustrated because, “although the World Bank was on record as officially favoring sustainable development, the near vacuity of the phrase made this a meaningless affirmation. . . . The party line was that sustainable development was like pornography: we’ll know it when we see it, but it’s too difficult to define.”

Laying down the party line on the other side of the bifurcation, was World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers (1991), who dramatically reworked the idea of sustainability: “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that,” he asserted. For Summers, sustainability at a global scale allowed evasion or evisceration of state regulations designed to “internalize the externalities” associated with pollution or ecological damage. Summers’ version meant simply displacing these externalities to wherever the immediate environmental implications were least visible. After all, Summers (1991) continued, inhabitants of low-income countries typically died before the age at which they would begin suffering prostate cancer associated with toxic dumping. Using the “marginal productivity of labor” as his guiding measure, Summers implied that low-income Africans were not worth very much, nor were their aesthetic concerns with air pollution as substantive as were those of wealthy northerners. In this view, “sustainability” actually permitted dumping toxic waste on poor people instead of halting the production of toxins.

“Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane,” rebutted Brazilian environment secretary José Lutzenberger. “Your thoughts are a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in” (quoted in Summers, 1991). Lutzenberger was subsequently fired by a conservative Brazilian president (later impeached for corruption). In contrast, Summers rose to the positions of US Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, Wall Street investment advisor, and President of Harvard University (a position from which he was fired for sexism). He also became Barack Obama’s economic czar, and in this role, arranged trillions of dollars’ worth of bailouts following the hazardous deregulation of banking he had championed. Summers personifies unsustainability, and, thanks to displacement of the “dirty industries,” pollution largely generated in the North (or caused by northern overconsumption) began to shift to new production sites including Mexican maquiladoras and newly industrializing countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea.

In part because of rampant socio-environmental unsustainability in these sites, the world began hitting what the Club of Rome (1972) had long warned would be “planetary boundaries.” Of these, the most serious immediate threat overshooting the carrying capacity for greenhouse gases that cause climate change and, in turn, ocean acidification. There are others: biodiversity loss, stratospheric ozone depletion, chemical pollution, freshwater adulteration and evaporation, and shortages of arable land. As Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster (2011, 12) remark, “Staying within each of these boundaries is considered essential to maintaining the relatively benign climate and environmental conditions that have existed during the last 12,000 years (the Holocene epoch). The sustainable boundaries in three of these systems . . . have already been crossed, representing extreme rifts in the Earth system.”

Addressing these systemic threats, powerful institutions and companies are increasingly proposing technological silver-bullet fixes to unsustainability. These include “clean energy,” biofuels, carbon capture and storage, and other geo-engineering gimmicks like genetically modified trees, air sulfates to shut out the sun, iron filings in the sea to create algae blooms (to sequester CO2), large-scale solar reflection, and artificial microbes to convert plant biomass into fuels, chemicals, and other products. Many of these tech-fix strategies violate the precautionary principle, create land-grab pressure, have excessive capital costs, require increased energy, are unproven in technological terms, and are many years—if not decades— away from implementation.

Can capitalism repair the damage being done? Some, including Al Gore (2009), believe in a “green capitalism” strategy based on arguments by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins (1999). However, as Ariel Salleh (2012) has pointed out, a serious consideration of externalized costs should include at least three kinds of surplus extractions not considered by the “green capitalist”: 1) the social debt to inadequately paid workers, 2) an embodied debt to women and family caregivers, and 3) an ecological debt to nature.

In contrast to this weak form of “sustainability,” the left has stressed distributional equity, non-materialist values, and a critique of the mode of production. These ideas found early expression in the environmental justice vision articulated by African American activists in North Carolina during in the 1980s (Bullard 2000), and in the “anti-extractivism” and “rights of nature” positions articulated by Ecuadorean and Bolivian activists as well through the Andean indigenous peoples’ versions of “buen vivir.” They also found expression in allied ideas, including “degrowth” (“décroissance”) (Latouche 2004), post-GDP “well-being” national accounting (Fioramonti 2014), “the commons” (Linebaugh 2008), and eco-socialism (Kovel 2007). Strategies for transitioning to genuinely sustainable societies and economies are also hotly debated (Swilling and Anneke 2012; Scoones, Leach, and Newell 2015).

With such creative options flowering, determining genuine sustainability does ultimately depend on the nature of the critique of unsustainability. Perhaps the most popular systemic analysis comes from Annie Leonard’s (2007) Story of Stuff film and book, which link the spectrum of extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. Naomi Klein’s (2014) This Changes Everything puts the onus on capitalism for climate change. For their part, Joan Martinez-Alier and Jochen Spangenberg (2012) explain what is truly at stake: “Unsustainable development is not a market failure to be fixed but a market system failure: expecting results from the market that it cannot deliver, like long-term thinking, environmental consciousness and social responsibility.”

See also: Care; Labor; Materialism; Nature