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Discussion > Is there such a thing as sustainability and is it even a good thing?

One of the favourite arguments of the warmist is that we might as well cut back now because our resources won’t last forever and the faster we use them, the sooner the crunch will come. They say we must be sustainable. The purest form of this would be to use only as much as we can recycle/regenerate. A tall order.

Funnily enough, that bastion of leftishness, the BBC, has already demonstrated how hard it is. Remember The Good Life? A tale of two successful suburbanites who decide to give up the rat race and live on what they’d got? If you study it, you’ll find that despite having all the major necessities of life (home, land, good climate, utilities on tap, clothes etc) it was a continual battle against failure. They were permanently cadging things from others and, worthy or not, recycling is only possible if someone has cycled the stuff in the first place. Their lifestyle was not sustainable. In global terms they had too much land (huge garden, allotment and grazing common) to be multiplied across the billions..

More significantly we’ve also seen huge experiments with sustainability that lasted decades. We usually call them Communism. One of the reasons why capitalism reared its head in modern China was one of the fundamental problems with sustainability. In the beginning, people were only allowed to wear set clothes. This created a unique problem. Once you had enough little green Chairman Mao outfits for a full wash, plus one for Sunday best, why would you need any more until they fell apart? Unlike food that needs to be constantly replaced, the clothing market dried almost to a stop. Money trickled towards the farmers who didn’t return it because there was nothing for them to spend it on. If there’s no consumerism, what do non farmers do? Once you exclude all the essential professions, you leave a huge and irate population with nothing to do.

So alternatively you arrange enough work and consumerism to just keep the machinery turning but don’t drift into greed. This has also been tried and it was also under the aegis of Communism. Some time back a friend was in the USSR countryside with a guide. At the edge of each field were piles of manure in various stages of decay. The guide explained that the farmers got paid for the number of hours they worked, not their productivity so there was no incentive to spread the stinky muck. The whole technology disparity between the East and West was largely the result of the stifling effects of sustainability. Why invent new things if you can’t benefit from them? Why work hard if you get the same life as the git next door who does the minimum (or does nothing, if we assume some will be on benefits in our sustainable utopia). Sustainability is the enemy of invention.

So do we reward people who invent more efficient things, irrespective of consumer choice? Hmmm, actually we already know how many things can be made more efficient, it just involves ignoring one or more of the other ideals we strive for. Cars for instance could be made much lighter by removing all the things that have made them safer and more comfortable over the years. Or even do away with safety rules altogether and hope the subsequent deaths ease the burden on the planet. In a sustainable world, is drinking and driving a good thing? Are smaller and smaller homes or flats a demonstration of developer greed or sound environmentalism? Have the naughty oil barons been heroes all this time by raking in large profits and making us use less?

There will come a time when the shortage of resources will threaten and change society but it will happen naturally. If we’re lucky, the ingenuity and… greed of mankind will come up with solutions. Would we have people who can still solve problems if we’ve bred generations to be happy with what’s sustainable? Do we think that environmentalists have thought about sustainability at all?

Jun 18, 2014 at 2:35 PM | Unregistered CommenterTinyCO2

With so many straw-men, you have yourself a straw-army. Playing with toy soldiers has always entertained some simple souls.

Jun 20, 2014 at 2:39 PM | Unregistered CommenterTinyMind

That's the idea, insults rather than arguments!

Jun 20, 2014 at 4:28 PM | Unregistered CommenterTinyCO2

Arguments? I have the feeling that you don't really want a serious argument or discussion about sustainability. Rather, you want cheers and agreement from people who don't recognise your introduction as the grossly untrue caricature it is. As someone who is capable of creating this discussion thread, it seems likely that you are also able to use Google to learn something about sustainability.

If you were to write a fair summary of sustainability and to offer some arguments against it I might bite, but I see no point arguing against your army of straw-men.

Jun 20, 2014 at 9:41 PM | Unregistered CommenterTinyMind

So you refuse to give me any reasons why I should believe sustainability is anything other than the latest buzz word, because somewhere on the net, those reasons exist? That's a winning argument. Lawyers the world over will stop presenting the evidence and just tell the jury to Google it.

I'm not even sure that those who use 'sustainable' have a common meaning. I've seen it used as a call to grow veg on grass verges and for an excuse not to build power stations. Who can say what's sutainable and what's not? 50 years ago the current global population was not sustainable but now it is. If sustainability is about having less so that all will all benefit in the long run, define 'less' and then justify it.

Jun 20, 2014 at 10:19 PM | Unregistered CommenterTinyCO2

Define sustainability sensibly and identify what is wrong with the idea. Then it becomes worthy of discussion. Arguing about your fictitious image of "sustainability" seems futile to me, although I'm sure others here will enjoy indulging in comparative fabrication.

Jun 20, 2014 at 11:48 PM | Unregistered CommenterTinyMind

I can't define it, that's the problem. Like many warmist concepts it's amorphous and can mean whatever the user wants it to. How can you achieve a goal that has no definition?

Jun 21, 2014 at 12:09 AM | Unregistered CommenterTinyCO2

From time to time, I have asked people who advocate 'sustainability' to tell me precisely what the term means.

I have noticed a couple of things each time:

- An air of surprise that anyone would feel the need to ask such a question when it is obvious (apparently) what 'sustainability' means.

- Despite the apparent obviousness of what it means, the evident extemporization and the vagueness of the replies has indicated to me that it was the first time that the person involved had ever attempted to explain what 'sustainability' was - or had even thought about the question.


Tinymind: If you know what 'sustainability' is, please tell us. If TinyCO2 were to define it and then say what was wrong with it, according to their definition, you would presumably start talking about straw men.

Jun 21, 2014 at 10:36 AM | Registered CommenterMartin A

I think if you see sustainability as a warmist concept you're in danger of missing the point.
My somewhat ancient Chambers defines the word thus:

that which is capable of being sustained; in ecology the amount or degree to which the earth's resources may be exploited without deleterious effects.

However, wikipedia extends the definition more than somewhat:
The simple definition "sustainability is improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems",[22] though vague, conveys the idea of sustainability having quantifiable limits. But sustainability is also a call to action, a task in progress or “journey” and therefore a political process, so some definitions set out common goals and values.[23] The Earth Charter[24] speaks of “a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.”
[Excuse me while I throw up!]
The article runs to over 8,000 words (excluding references and notes) compared to the straightforward definition which manages to do the job in 24!
Another quote:
Since the 1980s sustainability has been used more in the sense of human sustainability on planet Earth and this has resulted in the most widely quoted definition of sustainability as a part of the concept sustainable development, that of the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations on March 20, 1987: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
which really tells you all you need to know about the people who bandy the word about as if they actually understood what it meant.
In its modern definition, sustainability is indeed a "buzz-word" and a weasel word as well because the putative definition (which can be best defined as "we must think of the children") glosses over what "the children" are expected to do in their turn.
We must not, we are told, "[compromise] the ability of future generations to meet their own needs", a concept which fails so may tests as to rule itself out as a useful guide for living.
If previous generations had behaved in this fashion the modern world would more resemble the middle ages (or even earlier) than anything we see around us.
If we behave as recommended by the eco-extremists (or neo-luddites as I usually call them) the one thing that can be virtually guaranteed is that we would be compromising the health, wealth and well-being of future generations.
And no-one has yet answered the obvious question: how are those future generations supposed to behave? Are we to leave hydro-carbons in the ground so that they are there for our grandchildren to use or, as I suspect is more likely, so that the grandchldren of the eco-luddites can make the same plea, and so ad infinitum? The inanity of such behaviour is beyond reason.
The connection between sustainability and global warming is simply that the eco-luddites have succeeded in latching onto the deminsation of CO2 (which they have actively and loudly and very successfully encouraged) but their prime objective is a sort of ill-thought out woolly environmentalism in which they see humanity as a blight on the planet only to be tolerated in small numbers and only provided it behaves "in harmony with nature". They will obligingly supply the explanation of what that means though they have been known to disagree among themselves on the matter.
The other thing worth remembering is that, while living a "sustainable" existence may make sense, it only does within certain defined limits.
In simple terms there is no point in beggaring ourselves just so that our children can be better off. All the evidence (including from the IPCC surprisingly enough) is that our grandchildren will be massively better off than we are — one plausible scenario posits that by 2080 the poorest in the world will be richer than the average US citizen is today — even without going down the neo-luddite self-flagellation route.
The UN figures have the earth's population stabilising at ~9-10 billion by shortly after the mid-century always provided that we don't screw up and prevent the poorest in the world from getting richer. Economic development is the surest way to stabilise and then reduce the birth rate.
As things are, we could give every person living ¼-acre of land in Australia and still have Tasmania left over — not to mention the rest of the planet.
The argument has been made before that while drought is natural, famine is political. As long ago as December 2011 I blogged on this subject, quoting work by Professor Calestous Juma who told us that
- one in three Africans is chronically hungry in spite of almost £2bn being spent on food aid annually and ten times that amount being spent on food imports;
- Africa is the only continent with land readily available to expand agriculture;
- southern Sudan alone could feed all Africans if it was properly developed.
All Sudan needs is the application of known technology and a respite from western-subsidised warlords and interfering NGOs and it could become the bread basket of Africa. That's sustainability!
The neo-luddites aren't interested. If they were they would be campaigning for it to happen. Instead they lament the decline in planetary raw materials in spite of all the evidence to the contrary and argue that we cannot use precious mineral and other deposits even as we find new sources and new processes that extend the life of those deposits well into the future. That is a very weird definition of sustainability.

Jun 21, 2014 at 11:13 AM | Registered CommenterMike Jackson

"Tinymind: If you know what 'sustainability' is, please tell us."

My dictionary defines sustainable as something "able to be maintained at a certain rate or level"

It says nothing about communism or self sufficiency. I think people here and elsewhere (using the word) are imprinting their own preoccupations onto a simple concept.

Jun 21, 2014 at 4:49 PM | Unregistered CommenterLa Buena

Of course. Usage is the ultimate definition.



Why 'Self-Sufficiency' Should Replace 'Sustainability' in the Environmental Movement
Jeffrey Green
Activist Post

The environmental movement is in love with the word 'sustainable'. Admittedly, it's a wonderful word in the purest sense, meaning; 1. capable of being sustained, 2. capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment.

Who doesn't want those capabilities? Yet, 'sustainability', like everything else good and pure, has seemingly been hijacked by the ruling oligarchs as a way to impose more top-down control of society. Passionate environmentalists are beginning to realize that the only way to affect real change is by becoming sustainable individuals through self-sufficiency. This focus on individual empowerment will naturally lead to increased liberty, as it minimizes the tactics used by mega-cartels and government to control our core needs of food, electricity, or medicine. Living in an environmentally and socially sustainable world should be an obvious goal, but it won't work if imposed at the barrel of a gun.

Removing individual liberties through restrictive legislation can never amount to sustainability, since much of the proposed legislation doesn't even 'minimize the long-term effect on the environment.' Banning incandescent light bulbs, for example, in favor of more energy-efficient but chemically-poisoning CFLs, demonstrates that our leaders have no genuine desire for the environment, but only wish to control consumer choice. It's similar to favoring nuclear power because it seems cleaner today, yet when the reactors meltdown, or waste needs to be disposed of, it irrevocably ruins Mother Nature. Legislating something as petty as what type of light bulbs we are allowed to purchase only indicates the tyrannical level of micromanagement intended for their view of a sustainable society.


Those who are trying to force lifestyle modifications on the public, while they jet-set and limo around the world, have forever stained the authenticity of the 'sustainability movement'. However, if we, as environmentally-concerned individuals, focus on becoming self-reliant, we will not only break our dependency on many of the establishment's control mechanisms, we'll also limit our impact on the environment and gain the ability to 'be sustained' -- the two core definitions of sustainable. That's the real triple bottom line for environmental activists: sustainable self, sustainable environment, and genuine independence.

If the current oil spike continues, the industrial food and big box store machine will grind to a halt, or at least make non-local food impossibly expensive. Perhaps then the masses will discover how much power this system has over them. We're already seeing the makings of a global food crisis. By producing some of your own food and buying the shortfall from your local organic cooperative, you can come close to food self-reliance. This type of food production/consumption is healthier for us, it reduces the impact on the environment in countless ways, and it breaks our dependence on factory food.

(etc etc etc)

Jun 21, 2014 at 9:38 PM | Registered CommenterMartin A

Nothing is "sustainable" in the pure sense. Nothing lasts for ever.

So, we end up with various definitions of sustainability for every occasion and every cause. Usually they are predicated on false assumptions, principally that humans are incapable of adapting to change including substituting one good or service for another, and that everything else will stay the same.

For example, a "sustainability" believer looking at a computer in the 1950s would be apoplectic if told that half a century later, hundreds of millions of people would own a computer. What a waste of resources! Why would people even need such a thing? And so on.

And Martin, that is one fine loony rant you reproduced there. What a nutter. He seriously believes that we can all have a terrific lifestyle by growing veges in the back yard (if we have one) and keeping chooks. Just like those deluded 1970s hippies. It would, of course, lead to poverty and starvation on a level not seen since the Middle Ages, when people had no choice but to do exactly that. Or, for that matter, on the level we see in very poor countries where people still live like that today - when they are not risking their lives to climb onto leaky boats and get the hell out of there.

Jun 22, 2014 at 7:10 AM | Registered Commenterjohanna

Didn't someone recently remark that there were only two categories of people who supported subsistence living, those who had never tried it and those who had never known anything else?
The likes of Jeffrey Green presumably come into the former category.
I would be prepared to bet they would change their minds fairly rapidly if they were obliged to live that way for a couple of years — or maybe even a couple of days! Or perhaps it's the rest of us that are supposed to live that way while they continue to pontificate through brainless articles such as that one.

Jun 22, 2014 at 8:58 AM | Registered CommenterMike Jackson

Or, for that matter, on the level we see in very poor countries where people still live like that today - when they are not risking their lives to climb onto leaky boats and get the hell out of there.
Jun 22, 2014 at 7:10 AM | Registered Commenterjohanna

Or not that long ago, in the British Isles. I've just returned from a trip to Ireland and soaked up much of the history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course, conclusions drawn from 19th century conditions don't necessarily apply today but I was struck by the contrast between industrialised 19th century England and 19th century Ireland, where self sufficiency was the lot of the unhappy majority.

Even before the potato blight struck, the poverty of the majority of Irish people of the 19th century would have made Burkina Faso of today seem fabulously wealthy. As somebody at the time said, most families lived in a one-room building with a fire but no chimney and their only wealth would be a pig and a dungheap. No wonder so many scraped together the fare for a risky trip to the New World.

The figures illustrate the story

Date......Population of Ireland...Population of England
1846.............6M...........................14M
1946.............3M...........................38M

Jun 22, 2014 at 9:30 AM | Registered CommenterMartin A

Can you have sustainable living with economic growth? Can you have an environmental movement without economic growth?

I submit that the answer to both those questions is "no" and that the purpose of "sustainable" living is to stop economic growth. However without economic growth there can be no parasitic activities unrelated to the production of food and other necessities of life - so the death of environmentalism will follow (along with a thousand good causes like NSPCC, RSPCA, RSPB etc.) These are all children of the industrial revolution and economic growth.

The problem the environmentalists have is a distaste for their own species, not a love of the environment, and the paradox is that they can only exist if their own species is thriving.

Jun 22, 2014 at 9:41 AM | Unregistered Commentergeronimo

Martin A
Ireland isn't the only part of the British Isles where subsistance was a way of life until recently (some would say it still exists in the far North West). The Black House was a feature of Highlands and Islands life until very recently.

I have probably mentioned this too often here, I grew up in rural Perthshire without electricity and other mains services. If Jeffrey Green can manage living there through two winters and still thinks if we, as environmentally-concerned individuals, focus on becoming self-reliant, then hats off to him, otherwise he is just like Those who are trying to force lifestyle modifications on the public, while they jet-set and limo around the world, and should be ignored. I will continue to ignore him.

Jun 22, 2014 at 10:22 AM | Unregistered CommenterSandyS

SandyS
I agree with you and have made the same point. In rural Northumberland on the 40s there were plenty of dwellings without main services.
We had electricity and cold water but no mains drainage. My grandmother on the outskirts of Morpeth had gas and mains drainage but no electricity.
We managed well enough because we hadn't known anything better but go back to it now? You jest, sir! Or rather Green does except that I suspect he's not jesting at all.

Jun 22, 2014 at 12:20 PM | Registered CommenterMike Jackson

Take a step back and you can see that modern industrial society is sustainable
The horse age evolved into the petrol age before we got immersed in horse crap and the fossil fuel age will evolve into the fusion age before we run out of fossil fuels etc. Our constant evolution is sustainable.
- Green loony subsidies however are not.

Jun 22, 2014 at 1:29 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Will you big oil funded deniers ever achieve the same carbon footprint of a media-green ?
Friday 20th the Geological Society of Londonhad it's 'communicating contested science' meeting in London

but Monday in Ladakh they hold another green-cause 3 day meeting
Sustainable resource development in the Himalaya
24 June 2014 — 26 June 2014 Geological Society of London, The

Location: Leh, Ladakh, India
Venue: The Grand Dragon Hotel
The rich and varied resources of the Himalaya hold the promise of enormous opportunities for local communities and the nations to which they belong. Yet unless these resources are developed sustainably, they also have the potential to do great damage to people and environments
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/himalaya14

Jun 22, 2014 at 8:39 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

that buzzword again
Fly to a jamboree in Stockholm to be SUSTAINABLE
"The 2nd International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S 2014) will be held in Stockholm, Sweden 24-27 August 2014.

ICT4S is a series of research conferences bringing together leading researchers, developers and government and industry representatives interested in using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a tool to reach sustainability goals...."
spot the other green buzzwords on the schedule

Jun 22, 2014 at 8:52 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

I see no reason why sustainability is in conflict with economic growth. Suggestions that there is a conflict come about only because of deficiencies in measurement of the economy, where current measures do not consider environmental or third party costs.

Jun 22, 2014 at 9:03 PM | Unregistered CommenterTinyMind

"I see no reason why sustainability is in conflict with economic growth." Then you haven't understood the message. Sustainability is about stopping economic growth. I suggest you read Agenda 21, or the articles of the Club of Rome.

Jun 23, 2014 at 6:47 AM | Unregistered Commentergeronimo

Excellent replies, even from Lovelock, thanks stewgreen. From Mike Jackson’s research “sustainability is improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems”.

To live within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems you have to decide how much of those eco systems must be left for nature and how you intend to protect it. It’s tough on the undeveloped countries if we draw a line in the sand and say ‘this far and no more’. One of the best ways of preserving the wild spaces is to lure people out of them and (as others have mentioned) that happened in the UK and Ireland with many people moving from rural subsistence living to urban based industrial occupations. Towns held an alternative to starvation and poverty. They were also the areas that saw the first advances in utilities and facilities. Mass power supply was a big part of that. A main theme of the ‘sustainable’ plans for the undeveloped world involves actively dissuading them from building centralised power systems and relying instead on solar power or hydro. Boutique power won’t lure people away from their rural locations, so instead of easing pressure on the wilderness, these plans actively encourage people to stay and impact directly upon the wildlife. At the same time, with modern medicine and food aid, the populations rapidly increase and land that really can’t support large numbers is stressed even further. Matt Ridley’s slide showing the difference between the Dominican Republic that imports fuel and Haiti that burns ‘renewable’ trees is a powerful argument against the warped idea of sustainability.

For some, organic and free range farming is the epitome of sustainability, but it’s actually very poor use of precious agricultural land. There just isn’t enough land to pander to such sentimentality. Just last month Prince Charles was praising rural parts of eastern Europe for retaining old methods of farming but he turned a blind eye to the poverty and ignorance that explained it. As clever farmers are finding, land that was barely scraping a profit can become as productive as the best, if modern farming know how is applied. This has spawned an undignified scramble to buy land in places like eastern Europe and Africa where the locals mutter about immigrants ‘coming over here, bringing their work ethic and superior farming experience with them.’ Of course you could argue that modern farming is more harmful to wildlife than the traditional methods but as wildlife is also on the menu to supplement poor farming and failed harvests, it’s not quite so cut and dried. Where in the world are deer becoming a pest?

Many, on both sides of the sustainability debate, would agree that population is the biggest reason for the erosion of wild places. While many of us worry about that, there’s very little that we can do about it. As far as I know, there are only four ways to stop population growth. Firstly you can try China’s one child policy but I doubt we have the stomach or the power for it. Second we could stop treating disease and promote wars, neither of which is a sane response to solve a problem that developed because we started treating disease and strove for peace. Thirdly, we could ask nicely if those people who rely on their kids as their pension and their old age carers could just stop having kids. We could supply them with contraception and advice. However that’s not working now and I see no future where it would. The only effective and humane way to reduce population is prosperity. It turns out that couples who are too busy, too comfortable and too self centred, don’t care to pop out more than one or two sprogs. Nobody has to hurt them, nag them or teach them about contraception, it just happens naturally.

Jun 23, 2014 at 10:06 AM | Unregistered CommenterTinyCO2

To live within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems you have to decide how much of those eco systems must be left for nature and how you intend to protect it. It’s tough on the undeveloped countries ...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tiny, have you read a single word above?

The "carrying capacity" of the world is infinite. 500 years ago, millions of people lived from hand to mouth (if they didn't die in the meantime), while most of the metal ore, oil, gas etc that we use today weren't even thought of.What was the "carrying capacity" of the world then, and why?

What does that term even mean, except as a statement of limitation and defeat?

Jun 23, 2014 at 8:00 PM | Registered Commenterjohanna