MONDAY, OCT 5, 2016: NOTE TO FILE
Schools of Sustainability
The feel-good of sustainability
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
With the coinage of 'sustainable development', the defenders of the unsteady state have won a few more years' moratorium from the painful process of thinking. — Garrett Hardin
TOPICS: THERE IS NO LIFE WITHOUT THOUGHT, FROM THE WIRES, THEREFORE ENDEAVOR TO THINK WELL
Abstract: Schools of Sustainability are a recent development within academia needed to serve a growing need to help the SYSTEM keep on keeping on. Somewhat ironically, the growth of the field plots out as exponential growth. But of course they have a plan to transition to sustainable teaching of sustainability studies. That the current SYSTEM is sustainable is of course universally accepted as any professors who don't think so self-select out of teaching sustainability studies that are currently well-funded because they serve a vital need, of course. [Update: Jem Bendell is now a "post-sustainability" professor. the Guy McPherson of sustainability studies.]
TUCSON (A-P) — “Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." —Brundtland Commission, 1987 UN report, Our Common Future. This is ground-zero, the oft cited definition of "sustainability" favored by sustainability theorists and educators.
"The three main pillars of sustainable development include economic growth, environmental protection, and social equality.... Economic Growth is the pillar that most groups focus on when attempting to attain more sustainable efforts and development." (Wikipedia). So "sustainability" is good for growth and vice versa. Given that "Equity" is the third pillar, the Brundtland Commission has been credited with reducing the number of people living on $1/day in half. Actually it was the exponential growth of the mostly coal-powered Chinese and Indian extractive economies beginning in the 1990's that reduced the number, not the fine words of the Commission. It may be that "sustainable development" is the incoherent oxymoron, feel-good buzzword, Orwellian doublethink, and pillar of corporate eco-speak it appears to be.
Is sustainability a science? If so, what sort of science is it? PNAS Evolution and structure of sustainability science, Bettencourt and Kaur: "Therefore, an important question is whether sustainability science has indeed become a field of science." Science is certainly being done, sustainability scientists are being paid, and research published. An exponentially growing number of PhDs in the field are being granted, but parapsychology is alive and well and success doesn't make questions go away.
I'm an enthusiastic supporter, however, of sustainable development, but "sustainable development" as "sustainable growth" is biophysically impossible, so no need to agonize over that, and as we appear to be in overshoot, we need to transition to degrowth, so forget the nasty old "qualitative growth" meme as no one believes it that anymore, instead speak of "qualitative development" that can grow asymptotically towards perfection without limit forever and ever. Development as "change" is a given, and if we avoid species extinction, sustainable development as "sustainable evolution" is possible.
"Sustainability is improving human well-being and ensuring social equity for present and future generations while safeguarding the planet’s life-supporting ecosystems." —fine words of Dean Chris Boone, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University founded 2006 (consider: educational background of 30 ASU tenured and tenure-track faculty). Note the definition of "Sustainability" is merely a rewording of the Brundtland Commission's "sustainable development" narrative.
"improving human well-being” = “economic growth”
“ensuring social equity for present and future generations” = “social equality”
“safeguarding the planet’s life-supporting ecosystems" = ”environmental protection”
Meanwhile, "The pace of planetary destruction has not slowed." —David Suzuki, 2016. The pace hasn't slowed, not just because Suzuki says so, but because the proverbial mountain of data says so. I've been paying attention since the late 1960s and the pace has been and continues to increase. The rate of species extinction has not peaked, but is plotting out as an exponential growth curve, perhaps related to continued growth of human population and per capita consumption. And that should be enough to call into question the academic field of 'sustainability' underlying all the Schools of Sustainability, textbooks, and degrees granted to create the men and women of words needed to serve the SYSTEM's growth narrative. That they have a long list of feel-good projects they are working on is irrelevant compared to the planetary destruction they are enabling by offering distractions, by performing sleight of mind tricks, and not effectively dealing with the core issue (it's the growth economy, ...).
Basically the environmental movement (started 1962) ended (peaked) in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (whose fine words were strongly influenced by the Brundtland Commission) when the UN put every environmentalist's deeply held fine words in writing, taking the wind out of their rhetorical sails to put on paper, and signed while broadly grinning at their accomplishment. By mutually agreeable co-opting of the language of the environmental movement the movement effectively faded away, to be replaced by the sustainability/transition movement that had already been co-opted, rhetorically making way for the merely eloquent men and women of words to speak in relentlessly feel-good terms about sustainability issues whose solution (growing the sustainability economy of products and services) happens to be consilient with every Left leaning feel-good political agenda. Every progressive university now offers "green degrees" in sustainability (or environmental studies), including PhDs, as someone has to teach the new and popular academic field.
For the Right leaning, those with Sustainable MBAs are in demand. "Students graduating with this degree learn how to keep business competitive and profitable via sustainable strategies....An MBA in Sustainability degree program therefore emphasizes the Triple Bottom Line (abbreviated TBL or 3BL): , People, Planet and Profit." The original 3Ps were "Productivity, Profit, and Power" (and still are, but don't tell anyone). When all else fails, emphatic rhetorical emphasis is good enough. Greenwashing is a bipartisan growth industry (celebrated academic supported & opposed fraud).
For no particularly good reason I found myself walking the campus of the University of Arizona a few years ago. It occurred to me to ask what all these fine young people and their professors were doing there, as they had been doing since before I was young? When I was young the correct answer would not have occurred to me, but then I wasn't properly educated yet, and my guess is that no one (or maybe a fraction of one percent) on campus then as now would be able to state why they were actually there.
The human condition is one of error, ignorance, and illusion. So why are they there? The answer that came to me was: "To serve the SYSTEM," where the caps reference the social control SYSTEM that includes political, religious, economic, intelligentsia and educational subsystems that humans tend to focus their attention on as distinct from the encompassing geobiosphere system that matters vastly more. From citizens to decision makers, all must be educated to serve the SYSTEM, from Presidents to candlestick makers.
So students attending Schools of Sustainability come forearmed with the knowledge that the SYSTEM they will serve is sustainable. If any had the slightest doubt, they would have to resolve the concern before majoring in Sustainability Studies (the science, policy, theory of). Those who came to consider the economic system as NOT REMOTELY CLOSE TO SUSTAINABLE, would self-select out of the program. Any professor asked to serve, who persistently questioned assumptions, would also self-select out. Once all professor candidates are products of the Schools of Sustainability, no graduate would self-select out.
The result is a universal consensus that the current SYSTEM is sustainable (with proper tweaking by a virtual army of sustainability graduates). Meanwhile, the pace of planetary destruction... and all the Schools of Sustainability are part of "a complex, powerful and remorseless dynamic that automatically thwarts all attempts to stop it." In their Limits to Growth: The Thirty-year Update, the authors note that the world had most closely followed the business-as-usual scenario. Lotka's Maximum Power Principle selects for a business-as-usual system because business-as-usual is what works to grow the economy in the short-term and maximize self interest as humans who most enthusiastically embrace the Anthropocene are the type selected for (rewarded by the contingencies of reinforcement, the "rules of the game").
I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of....the environmental movement, or any other movement or party. I don't believe in political solutions (it's a mountain of evidence thing). For a sense of the "what-is" I study science—what's in front of my face. For fine words, I read poetry. To the legions of students paying to study "sustainability" in Schools of Sustainability, buying textbooks with "sustainability" in the title.... What are you thinking?
There really are environmental and sustainability issues/concerns/crises. Scientists sometimes endeavor to play messenger. Some humans, typically the "better" educated faction of the intelligentsia, get a garbled version they parse into their political speak to enthusiastically support favored political solutions, especially if those solutions also support their enthusiasm for social justice, human rights, fairness and equity issues (or freedom, liberty, patriotism, free market, globalism....). Not surprisingly, sustainability "solutions" do support other causes/movements.
We should consider justice, fairness, compassion, equity, equality, rights..., but humans who have dominated the industrial society of the past 200 years, now global, have been so anthropocentric that the case for human justice, human fairness, compassion for humans, human equality, and human rights has been so over stated by the Empire's intelligentsia, by several orders of magnitude, that to correct the injustice, let us exclude humans from such concerns until the imbalance has been redressed. Indeed, in the end, given that humans are not exceptional, there should be no need to single them out. I share half my genes with Brother Cabbage. If you want to talk about social justice, first question is "how does justice for eusocial species differ?" I have yet to meet a human who could think about justice, fairness, equity, rights.... without reference to humans. Perhaps I have known too few humans.
The intelligentsia's problem is to reconcile economic growth interests, the core memes of the Euro-Sino Empire, with other citizen's interest in beloved environmental/sustainability rhetoric and "solutions." Easy—a group of international wordsmiths spent five years (1983-1987) coming up with a vision that could be committee approved in writing (politics=compromise). The Earth Summit, Earth Summit II, and Paris Agreement followed the pattern, with more broad grinning, no doubt, to come. To support the message (the SYSTEM's narrative), ever more and better trained wordsmiths are needed. Departments of environmental and (more recently) sustainability studies arose to be funded, or rather were funded and arose to serve the SYSTEM. Of those often idealistic young attracted to environmental and sustainability studies, zero percent will spend their lives working for the destruction of industrial society. Zero, hence the growth SYSTEM's interests are served. Bottom line message: environmental/sustainability activists/professionals are working to serve the SYSTEM, not save the world from techno-industrial humans.
Universities were once known to endeavor to produce scholars (learning machines) not unlike the Marine Corps endeavors (still successfully) to make marines by taking the willing young, tearing them down, and rebuilding them into fighting machines. Students once had their most deeply held beliefs challenged, every assumption questioned, all values reevaluated without being told what to think, but with emphasis on how to think, and with the expectation that they come to think better than their professors. Some departments (typically heavy on science) are still old school, but universities prospered by making happy alumni, by having winning sports teams, and by giving what paying students want — teaching them what they want to learn and to believe in. It really is a marketplace and consumers come first. Universities were once anything but 'safe spaces' for young minds.
I'm a man of science, not a wordsmith, and as a man of science I wouldn't say the above. I'm trying to translate reality-based messages (as messenger) into the political-speak others talk. The above rhetoric is merely an attempt to hit wordsmiths in training (students) upside their heads with a rhetorical 2x4 to get their attention before they have been subsumed by the SYSTEM. Start with Al Bartlett's Arithmetic, Population & Energy, think it through, see the ramifications, and firmly believe, if you must believe anything, in the ignorance of experts. Go ahead, correct Bartlett's narrative (the ecolate message), give it your best shot, then change your major or transform your field of study towards real solutions. And don't neglect to consider Cassandra's Curse which looks at how The Limits to Growth study was demonized.
For extra credit, ask one or more of your professors why the Limits to Growth study was discounted and at what point they realized that the possibly feebleminded professors behind the study were Chicken Littles with a computer. Testable conjecture: sustainability faculty (with a few exceptions), virtually anyone numbered among the intelligentsia, will agree 1) that the Limits to Growth study made predictions, 2) the predictions proved to be false, and 3) therefore the premise of the study has been discredited. 1) Read the book, 2) read Limits to Growth the 30 Year Update (2004), 3) climax, per 1972 scenarios (not predictions), likely 2030 to 2070, so reports of the study being discredited are premature, have been greatly exaggerated. "People would rather believe than know." —E. O. Wilson. Our primate brains tend to believe what feels good, though obviously false, and disbelieve what is obviously true but unpleasant.
"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." — Mark Twain (attributed)
"The higher and faster you grow, the further and faster you fall, when you're building up capital stock in a nonrenewable resource. In the face of exponential growth of extraction or use, a doubling or quadrupling of the nonrenewable resource gives little added time to develop alternatives.... The real choice in the management of a nonrenewable resource is whether to get rich very fast or to get less rich but stay that way longer." —Donella Meadows,Thinking in Systems: A Primer [Choice? The current SYSTEM always selects for short-termism, a remorseless dynamic we are all trapped in.]
Review of Enough is Enough: Building a sustainable economy in a world of finite resources by Rob Dietz & Dan O'Neill, 2013.
Review of World on the Edge: How to prevent environmental and economic collapse by Lester Brown, 2011
It is quite possible to graduate from Stanford—arguably one of the best universities in the world—without knowing anything of significance about the impacts of population growth, the second law of thermodynamics, ecosystem services, total fertility rates, how the climate works, externalities, exponential growth, the food system, the biology of race, nuclear winter, the limits to growth, Federalism, the history of fascism, or many other topics of critical importance to modern citizens. —Paul & Anne Ehrlich
It is also quite possible to ignore the implications of the exponential function and leave unanswered criticism such as (from Wikipedia): "One critic has argued that the Brundtland Report promoted nothing but a business as usual strategy for world development, with the ambiguous and insubstantial concept of 'sustainable development' attached as a public relations slogan: The report was largely the result of a political bargaining process involving many special interest groups, all put together to create a common appeal of political acceptability across borders.
After World War II, the notion of 'development' had been established in the West to imply the projection of the American model of society onto the rest of the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, this notion was broadened somewhat to also imply human rights, basic human needs and finally, ecological issues. The emphasis of the report was on helping poor nations out of poverty and meeting the basic needs of their growing populations — as usual.
This issue demanded more economic growth [Brundtland called for 5% growth meaning doubling growth/consumption/waste every 14 years], also in the rich countries, who would then import more goods from the poor countries to help them out — as usual. When the discussion switched to global ecological limits to growth, the obvious dilemma was left aside by calling for economic growth with improved resource efficiency, or what was termed 'a change in the quality of growth'. However, most countries in the West had experienced such improved resource efficiency since the early 20th century already and as usual; only, this improvement had been more than offset by continuing industrial expansion, to the effect that world resource consumption was now higher than ever before [emphasis added] — and these two historical trends were completely ignored in the report.
Taken together, the policy of perpetual economic growth for the entire planet remained virtually intact. Since the publication of the Brundtland Report, the ambiguous and insubstantial slogan of 'sustainable development' has marched on worldwide, the critic concludes." [see chapter Growth: A Discussion of the Margins of Economic and Ecological Thought (especially p. 95) from book: Trans-governance for details. Sustainability students note: author is research fellow at Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam.] Information is not subject to conservation laws, so humans have a potentially unlimited capacity to ignore/deny what is demonstrably true but unpleasant.
Are all sustainability students required to read Demystifying Sustainability: Towards Real Solutions, 2015, by Dr Haydn Washington? If not yet assigned, read it, or at least a review that includes the Foreword by Dr. William Rees, originator and co-developer of the 'Ecological Footprint' concept and the Introduction. All libraries, and students of sustainability, should have a copy.
For those outside of sustainability studies, perhaps having a grounding in natural science, who would like some clue as to what sustainability theorists are thinking, which includes a few who can question whether society can keep on keeping on, should read a paper by Professor of Sustainability Leadership, Jem Bendell (in the sustainability field for 25 years) who has come to believe and assert as a given that we are fated to "an inevitable near-term social collapse due to climate change." Read Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating ClimateTragedy which "offers a new meta-framing of the implications for research, organisational practice, personal development and public policy, called the Deep Adaptation Agenda. Its key aspects of resilience, relinquishment and restorations are explained. This agenda does not seek to build on existing scholarship on 'climate adaptation' as it is premised on the view that social collapse is now inevitable." Read it not as a source of verities, but for Dr. Bendell's contrarian take on his field and his unintended revelations about his conceptual limitations. From a systems science perspective he is "not even wrong."
To boil it down, humanity has a problem, climate change, which alone will force humanity to accept a deep adaptation agenda. "In pursuit of a conceptual map of 'deep adaptation', we can conceive of resilience of human societies as the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances so as to survive with valued norms and behaviors. Given that analysts are concluding that a social collapse is inevitable, the question becomes: What are the valued norms and behaviors. that human societies will wish to maintain as they seek to survive?
That highlights how deep adaptation will involve more than 'resilience.' It brings us to a second area of this agenda, which I have named 'relinquishment'. It involves people and communities letting go of certain assets, behaviours and beliefs were retaining them could make matters worse. Examples include withdrawing from coastlines, shutting down vulnerable industrial facilities, or giving up expectations for certain types of consumption. The third area can be called 'restoration'. It involves people and communities rediscovering attitudes and approaches to life and organisation that our hydrocarbon-fuelled civilisation eroded.
Examples include re-wilding landscapes, so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play, and increased community-level productivity and support."
Other problems, such as species extinction, are of concern because "most biodiverse places are at risk of extinction due to climate change," So if it weren't for climate change, sustainable development could continue, but as "climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term," sustainable development cannot continue, hence "deep adaptation" must inform the actions of environmental activists, policymakers, governments, and discussion of the human predicament on social media.
Climate change is, clearly, a distraction among the inecolate who appear confined to their concept mongering rabbit hole. Go to his website where he offers his number one deeper adaptation: "1) Return to, or explore afresh, the idea of a divine or a spirit or a consciousness or a God that is prior to the Earth and moves through the Universe right now and forever more. Do so without seeking a simple story of explanation but a sense of faith that there is an existence and a meaning beyond our culture, our species and our planet. Such ‘faith’ helps anyone to experience and process the inevitable difficulties and traumas of life." Welcome to Dr. Bendell's "post-sustainability framing" of the world.
Are all sustainability students required to understand the exponential function and population issues? Al Bartlett is a start. For population concerns with reference to the sustainability debate, consider Discussing why population growth is still ignored or denied by Helen Kopnina & Haydn Washington , 2016. Population is no longer the elephant in the living room. The floor is collapsing and its legs extend into the basement. It grows. The roof is detaching from the walls and is supported only by the elephant's back, yet academics can still sit on the porch and talk about the failure of Malthus, the Limits to Growth 'prediction' failures, and the underlying racism, anti-developing countries elitism, overt misanthropy, and naked anti-human values of those who deign to point to the elephant. There really are limits, even to denialism. The merely eloquent, at some point, will not be able to believe even their own prattle. Listen to Nature, the nature of things, and not to fellow travelers—Right, Left, or Middle.
Cuba, serving Soviet interests, was the most developed nation-state in Latin America prior to the collapse of Soviet Union (1991). With Soviet collapse, the economic rug (and energy imports) was pulled out and the average Cuban may have lost 9 kg (20 lbs) body weight, but they transitioned to prosperity without a die-off. Cuba may fail, like all other nation-states, to actually manage their system sustainably.
Those to the left merely have that potential without wide-spread undevelopment (degrowth) assuming population limits (reduction) and equitable per capita consumption of limited planetary resources. The per capita American footprint (less than 5% of global population consuming a quarter of planetary resources) is highest, the least sustainable. If humans want to live like Americans, figure depopulating to a global population of maybe 200 million.
Note that carrying capacity will be reduced by further degradation of the environment secondary to ongoing growth/development. Any assumption that a 0.8 or higher level of consumption (development index considering humans only) is needed to live the "good" life is highly questionable. The 2.1 hectares per person is also questionable, as perhaps humans should not consume all available environmental productivity of planetary life-support system, but "leave room for nature." Something closer to 0.4 hectares per capita claimed for human use along with lower population may be considered. The Kogi, if they were shown, would be far lower left — a realistic, non-self-delusional goal having the potential to actually be sustainable while leaving room for Nature (Aluna).
Many are the professors of philosophies of order and government in the world today. Each school regards itself as having found the best... Regulation by law, distinction by ranks and titles, verification by comparing evidence and reaching a decision after due investigation. These are means (of administration) by which officials carry out their duties in order. To start out with the business of daily living, whose principal occupations are food and clothing, to grow and multiply and save, so that the old and the young and the widow and the orphan shall be well provided for—these are the fundamental needs of the people.
(Now) the world is in universal chaos. The ways of the wise... are not understood.... Many philosophers emphasize one particular aspect and hold on to it. It is like a person whose senses function properly each in its own field, but do not cooperate with one another, or again like the artisans of different trades who are good each in his own line and are often needed. However, without an adequate comprehension of the whole, these are but one-alley scholars. In their appreciation of the beauty of the universe, their analysis of the principles of the creation, and in their study of the entirety of the ancient's thoughts, they seldom comprehend adequately the beauty of the universe and the ways of the spirit. Hence the principles of the authorities of thought and of government are hidden in the dark and find no proper expression. Each man thinks what he likes and creates his own system. Alas, gone astray are the various schools of thought, without being able to find their way back. They shall never find the truth. The scholars of posterity, unfortunately, shall not be able to see the original simplicity of the universe and the main foundation of thought of the ancients. Philosophy is thus cut up and falls apart. — Chuang Tse, Prolegomena, third century BCE, "The Main Currents of Thought" in China. Then is now.
3/7/22 SUBNOTE TO FILE:
The concept 'sustainability science' implies that sustainability is 'out there' such that it can be studied, and not merely a supposition, an assertion, created by believing minds. If I were one of the authors to write a book titled: 'Modern Techno-Industrial Economic Science' within which is a chapter called 'Modern Techno-Industrial Sustainability Science', then to anyone who failed to reconcile neoclassical welfare economics with the concepts of 'science' or 'sustainable' would be outside the consensus narrative of the authors. I might note that such people exist, but I would have nothing to say them. At best, I might come to pity them their limitations, their failure to have faith in modernity. Everyone of my co-authors agree that modern techno-industrial civilization is the greatest achievement of humankind and will continue to progress, to develop (sustainably of course), and will define the increasingly wonderful life posterity will or can know. We sustainability scientists are their best hope. All right thinking humans are Anthropocene enthusiasts all. Everyone I know agrees. Meanwhile, the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed (but sustainability science is growing rapidly).
Or maybe I don't know anything. Maybe 'Sustainability Science' is a social construct. Perhaps Harvard's website on their school of sustainability science is sustainable. Perhaps their Sustainability Science website is what it claims to be:
An "experiment in collaboration and community publishing for sustainability science as a response to our conviction that the field of sustainability science remains less than the sum of its impressive parts. The diversity of academic disciplines, research programs, and practical experience that have contributed to the field are in many ways a strength, bringing potentially complementary bodies of theory, data, and methods to bear on the challenges of sustainable development. But this has also meant that the sciences of sustainability are sometimes isolated in their own “island empires,” separated by their own idiosyncratic origins, terminologies, publication venues, case studies, and conceptual frameworks. No single annual conference or academic journal or professional society yet provides a place where all of us from our respective islands regularly gather to learn one another’s languages and explore potential complementarities among our various perspectives. The modest community building experiment represented by this site is an attempt to construct one such gathering place. We are under no illusion that this experiment alone can do much to mitigate the field’s centrifugal tendencies. But if you, our colleagues, are willing to join us, perhaps it can help."
Perhaps sustainability science is not another case study in concepts referencing other consensus concepts, of vast fields of concept mongering verbal behavior that academia and modern techno-industrial society selects for (for a time). Perhaps sustainability economics is not science (oh, Charlie Hall, who does not believe in faith-based economics, commented on Bill Rees' article after I brought it to his attention, so I cannot consider my life a complete waste). Perhaps sustainability theorists also exist in 'splendid isolation'. For a time.
