The myth of sustainability

In recent conversations I have heard the word ‘sustainable’ used as an unthinking excuse, an adequate gesture of compensation for violent and massive environmental destruction, one too many times. Most recently it came up in discussions of tourism planning in fragile ecosystems, and it stood for a cloud-cuckoo-land harmony between making lots of money, local people getting a slightly better life, the region having a good reputation as a tourist destination, and not destroying the landscape too much. The word presumes a stable context within which certain activities might consume too many resources and need to be restrained. That’s not where we are. The global system is wholly out of balance, changing inevitably and very fast. Fundamental needs such as food, air and water are slipping away from us and all other living things. In the context of official meetings and bureaucratic conversations it is tempting to let these platitudes slide past, but in the spirit of Orwell I think we must tear down the idea of sustainable development.

The Bruntland model of sustainable development, in an oft-repeated phrase, ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ That is simply no longer possible. Let us be frank. Generations past and now alive have damaged the global ecosystem beyond repair; it hasn’t just been nudged off-balance but hurled down a slope whose size and angle we cannot yet understand. There is no sense in which we can pretend to offer our children anything like ‘intergenerational equity’.

Even if we collectively erased ourselves as a species today, we have already tipped the entire system that supports life on this plant so drastically that our absence wouldn’t reset the system or even stop it from continuing to change for thousands of years. The climate will continue warming for centuries and pollution is already an inextricable feature of water and food everywhere on earth. Recent news coverage of plastic fibres in food, microplastics in water, and vast rubbish gyres in the ocean make this painfully clear. Whole orders of life, such as the Amphibia, are going extinct. Forests are changing rapidly as a result of disease and climate change, let alone massive clearing and fragmentation. If we do remain, then human culture has also been vandalised past repair. The number of languages spoken, which is a good proxy for the richness of the cultural toolbox we bequeath to our children, has crashed from something like 20,000 to the present 6,000, and it is continuing to collapse rapidly.

Economic inequality serves the selfishness of a tiny group of plutocrats who control the largest governments and corporations; they are completely insulated from the suffering of most humans and uninterested in the worth of any life other than their own immediate human kin, if that. The people that control how politics and economies are structured work hard to make them more unequal and exploitative. This means that there is no solution in conventional economics or politics. The genuinely powerful are unaccountable and have made sure that there is no political mechanism that can affect them or dislodge a self-destructive economic system that vomits death onto the coming generations of all life on earth so that these rich humans can live “comfortably” now. Moreover, commodity capitalism is extremely adept at appropriating potentially threatening social processes and repurposing them for the sake of the wealthy. ‘Disrupt’ now means to make a more profitable business model. I have even heard strange terms such as ‘alternative sustainabilities’, as a way of grasping at the acceptably bland optimism of ‘sustainable’ whilst acknowledging that there might be an issue.

Hence, when we talk about ‘development’ in ‘sustainable development’, we have to distinguish between the opportunity to flourish and increasing economic output. Especially in fragile landscapes with high diversity, such as montane landscapes, it is possible to work towards key indicators such as women’s literacy and integrated landscape/agriculture/human health needs at the same time as supporting locally-led initiatives for a healthy ecosystem. That doesn’t make money for those that already have it, though, and such projects may well never cause any increase in economic indicators. Other kinds of project, such as mass tourism, big roads or mining, will be put forward by major sponsors as ‘economic development’ initiatives. In a rapidly changing ecosystem, such projects are almost always desperate grabs for more money at the expense of living beings who actually have to live with the effects of widespread pollution, a warming climate and sea level rise.

A destructive cultural myopia, human exceptionalism, is inherent in the sustainable development paradigm. It arrogantly presumes that resources and living things are to be stewarded only for the benefit of future human generations—and it is both a cause and a symptom of our unfeeling attack on life, a feature of the problem to be solved. Sustainable development is not a promise, or a framework, or a path to a viable future; it’s a lethal distraction in the middle of a maelstrom.

I insist on hope. The wonderful entanglements of anthropogenic biocultural diversity we study are, for me, solid empirical evidence that human-non-human entanglements can create diversity and flourishing during ecosystem change. Our optimism is well warranted, but it carries a responsibility. As self-aware culture transmitters, we owe it to all the species we have wiped out, and all our ancestors, and all the species with whom we are entangled through evolution and gut biomes and spit and zoonoses and hunting, not to give up but to struggle towards a life in moving balance, together with all our leaf- and fur- and bacteria- kin. We must work and play with each other and those who follow us to find a better way. Yet if we as collectives—–symbiotic bodies, families, universities, communities of purpose and value—have any scrap of reflective capacity or even an anaemic trickle of ethics left, then we must confront the actual situation of life on earth and stubbornly resist any comforting illusions.