Eco-Watch

1/4/94

Steven Viederman is Vice President of The International Society for Ecological Economics. He has a dream about building a shared vision of sustainability, then restructuring our society and ourselves to make it become reality. His restructuring would key on education and politics. In "A Dream ...", as described in last summer's RENEWABLE RESOURCES JOURNAL, he defines sustainability and suggests five areas where a sustainable society would differ from our society today:
  1. equity and ecology will be primary considerations in assessment and implementation of all policies, particularly economic policies,
  2. humility and restraint will characterize our actions,
  3. sufficiency will replace efficiency, and we will be able to distinguish between needs and wants,
  4. "right scale" and community--place and locality--will be regarded as foundations for all durable policies and economies, and
  5. diversity-- both human and biological--will be preserved, defended, and encouraged.
To Viederman sustainability is more than a scientific precept, it is "an ethical guiding principle."
Happy 1994, Dave. 4 pages.

A DREAM OF SUSTAINABILITY
By Stephen Viederman*

With the end of the Cold War and the promise, potential, and pitfalls of a new administration, the need to dream becomes more urgent as it becomes more possible. It is clear that the problems that we face, here and overseas, are not likely to respond to simple solutions. The challenge is to go beyond the worn and largely ineffective bandaids that we have been using. We need to refocus the questions and then frame different answers for getting from here to there. To do so, we must acknowledge the structural and systemic origins of the problems we face. We need to refocus the questions and then frame different answers for getting from here to there. To do so, we must acknowledge the structural and systemic origins of the problems we face. We must also allow ourselves to dream - to create a vision - of a sustainable society, to overcome the social inertia of the past decade when, in the words of an African-American organizer in North Carolina, "We no longer dared to dream."

Each and every one of us is entitled to - needs to - dream. My dream, from the 22nd floor of a New York City office building in the shadow of the Empire State Building, will reflect different values and different perceptions from the dreams of others sitting in different places in this country and in other countries. By sharing our visions with one another and sharing our different experiences and expertise, we will begin to create a common dream, a grounded vision, of where we need to go.

An analysis of where we are is a necessary beginning. The challenge is to develop a sense of where we want to be. The "problems" that need solution are not limited to where we are - the immediate issues that have generated individual or societal suffering. Rather, the larger problem is to bridge the gap between where we are and where we are going - where we want to be. As a result, we must emphasize the need to get away from tinkering with policy and to move toward systemic and structural solutions.

If our goal is a sustainable society, we will fail if we take our systems, structures, and institutions as givens. We cannot forget the past - our history - but we cannot be bound by it. Our task must be to invent our future.

As I envision the future, I do not see the model of the American university as we know it today and have known it over the past centuries. The so-called great universities and the not-so-great will have disappeared because they reflect an educational system that has become dysfunctional, contributing as much to the causes of our problems as it does to their solutions.

I envision an educational system that is issue-oriented. The real world will intrude in the life of the new institutions, which will accept that facts are uncertain, values are in dispute, stakes are high, and decisions are urgent. Such a learning and knowing system will include the stakeholders who will be impacted by decisions rather than excluding them from the process. Such a system will recognize that while the political system can benefit from knowledge and science, ultimately politics must return to being a branch of moral philosophy.

Environmental decay, racial scapegoating, economic pain, social decay, and voter cynicism are not isolated problems, but they are among the many symptoms of the structural and systemic nature of the task ahead. Realization of the fact that these issues cannot be dealt with in isolation is an important step in understanding the nature of the changes needed.

What is required beyond that is to look to the future and suggest some of the desirable characteristics of a sustainable society. Sustainability, while hardly a household word, is increasingly coming into the vocabularies of policymakers, elected officials, and others. As the word gains currency, it seems to be losing whatever precision it may have had. At one level, this may be fine. For, as Bert DeVries, a Dutch scientist, has observed, "Sustainability is not something to be defined, but to be declared. It is an ethical guiding principle."

Retaining the ethical and moral underpinnings of sustainability is absolutely essential. But if the concept is to be useful for the policy debate and, more important, for policy formulation and implementation, it should also be defined more precisely.

How will the sustainable society differ from our society today?

When Gertrude Stein observed that "a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," she did not see the rose as an integral part of the system that affects and is affected by it. In the world of policy and politics, we act is if "the economy is the economy is the economy," and "the environment is the environment is the environment." But we have learned, painfully, that the workings of the economy have had considerable impact on equity and on the environment and that our concern for the environment can affect the economy. The challenge is to define an economic system that embraces and enhances equity and the environment rather than destroys them. The costs of preventing downstream, tail-pipe cleanup are too great - in financial and human terms - to allow them to continue. We must assess consequences within and among countries and for present and future generations before we embark on a course of action.

We know that everything is the result of and related to everything else, yet fail to accept the hopelessness of ever figuring out all of the relationships. We still believe that we are capable of "managing the planet." We seek for certainty, believing that there are no limits to human knowledge or human ingenuity. Economic and political considerations, rather than ethics and moral values, take precedence in our decisionmaking.

Our failure to accept "enoughness" - limits to our wants - derives from our unwillingness to accept the finiteness of the earth and our belief, at least in the United States, in technology as savior. Regardless of the efficiency we achieve, we will still have more than we need for a fulfilled life, while placing too great a strain on our ecosystems. "To learn to live more poorly," as suggested by essayist and farmer Wendell Berry, does not mean living less well and, in fact, might result in a life of greater fulfillment. The realization that the poor in our own country and in the rest of the world have a right to an equitable share of the earth's limited resources is a major challenge confronting us.

Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture Greg Watson has observed that "we come back to scale as the most powerful method for dealing with the tendency not to want to practice constraint." When scale is appropriate, we can gain confidence in moving ahead, proceeding with humility and with some confidence that our knowledge may be adequate. Within communities we can create new definitions of citizenship, participation, and accountability, leading to new and strengthened definitions of democracy. As a result, individual liberty and community can be balanced, with rights and responsibilities given their rightful place.

While many of our problems - economic and environmental - are global in their effects, their solutions will be found at national and subnational levels. A "global community" will need to be seen, therefore, as a community of communities, reflecting and encouraging diversity, rather than as a single entity. In seeking interdependence, we will need to avoid homogenity. As in nature, a polyculture has strengths not seen in a monoculture. Therefore, diversity will need to be seen as an index of human as well as ecological health and as a measure of resilience that will provide us with a margin of safety.

A statement of some of the principles that might characterize a sustainable society is far from a plan of action, but it is a beginning. It makes explicit that there cannot be ecological sustainability, as is often implied in discussions of sustainability, without equal attention to issues of equity and the economy, of politics and policy, and of ethics and values. Sustainable development and human development are inseparable.

While accepting, with DeVries, that sustainability is something to be declared, a definition seems in order to help us maintain our focus. In closing, I offer the following:

Economist Howard Wachtel has recently observed that communism is no longer an ism; it is a wasm. A sustainable society will accept capitalism and socialism as wasms and go beyond them. The challenge of inventing a new ism that values individual liberty and community, equity, the integrity of the ecosystem, and participation and accountability is an exciting one - and one whose time has come.

*From Renewable Resources Journal, Summer 1993. Stephen Viederman is president of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and a vice president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. His article is adapted from a presentation he gave at RNRF's Washington Round Table on Public Policy.

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