Key Concepts

After completing this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Understand the complex connections that tie our modern lifestyles and the consumption of goods to human and environmental impacts across the world.
2. Relate our habits of consumption to the long history of human social development on evolutionary time scales.
3. Apply the working distinction between “society” and “culture” outlined in this section to explain the different and often conflictual attitudes toward the environment that exist today.
4. Reproduce a basic timeline of global economic development since 1500, and outline the historical webs of trade linking sources of major raw materials—e.g. spices, cotton, oil—to their consumer markets on a world map.
5. Define the historical development of core and periphery nations in the world economy.
6. Understand the concept of externalization of environmental costs, and its role as a principle driver of unsustainable industrial development.
7. Define systems literacy, how it is tailored specifically to the understanding and remedy of environmental problems, and the ways in which it differs from traditional disciplinary approaches to academic learning.
8. Define bio-complexity as a scientific principle, and its importance as a concept and method for students in the environmental humanities and social sciences.
9. Identify a potential research project that would embrace applications of one or more of the following sustainability key terms: resilience and vulnerability, product loops and lifecycles, and carbon neutrality.
10. Understand the principle of the intergenerational social contract at the core of sustainability ethics.
11. Define the global terms of responsibility for action on sustainability, both the remote responsibilities applicable to you as an individual consumer, and the historically-based concept of shared but differentiated responsibilities driving negotiations between nations in different hemispheres.

The Human Dimensions of Sustainability: History, Culture, Ethics

Once we begin talking about sustainability, it’s hard to stop. That’s because sustainability is truly the science of everything, from technical strategies for repowering our homes and cars, to the ecological study of biodiversity in forests and oceans, to how we think and act as human beings. This latter category—the “human dimensions” of sustainability—is the focus of this chapter.

Much sustainability discourse focuses on scientific, technical and regulatory issues, but there is increasing awareness that without changes in people’s attitudes and patterns of behavior, and how these attitudes are reflected in public policymaking priorities, meaningful reform toward a more sustainable management of natural resources will be impossible. One key to this problem is that we are accustomed to thinking of the environment as a remote issue. Even the words “environment” and “nature” themselves suggest the habitual view we take of ourselves as somehow independent of or superior to the planet’s material resources and processes. The truth is different. Humanity is but a thread of nature’s web, albeit an original and brilliant thread. So brilliant indeed that we are now shaping the evolution of the web itself, to our short-term advantage, but in ways that cannot be sustained.

One example of the centrality of the human dimensions component of sustainability studies is the fact that sustainable technologies of food and energy production are increasingly available, but have yet to be adapted on the necessary scale to make a difference to humanity’s overall environmental footprint on the planet. Many look to technology for answers to our myriad environmental problems, but the fact that even the limited technological innovations that exist lack support and have been inadequately deployed is a complex human issue, touching an essential resistance to change in our economic and political structures, our lifestyles and culture and, at the micro-level, basic human psychology and behavior. This chapter will explore these human dimensions of the sustainability challenge, with an emphasis on the historical and cultural factors that have placed us on our dangerously unsustainable path, and which make changing course so challenging.

Sustainability in human terms is, first and foremost, a commonsense goal: to ensure that conditions on earth continue to support the project of human civilization, that widely diverse populations of the global community not slip into protracted crisis on account of deteriorating environmental conditions and depleted resources. This preventive dimension of sustainability discourse inevitably involves doom projections. Despite the popularity of apocalyptic, end-of-the-world scenarios in Hollywood movies, science fiction, and some corners of the blogosphere, the biological end of the human race remains scarcely imaginable—we will continue on, in some form. But in the emerging perfect storm of food stock declines, water scarcity, climate disruption, and energy shortfalls, there now exist measurable global-scale threats to social order and basic living standards that are the material bedrock of civic society as we recognize it.

The dramatic environmental changes underway on earth are already impacting human social systems. Droughts, floods, and rising sea levels are taking lives, damaging infrastructure, reducing crop yields and creating a new global underclass of environmental refugees. The question is how much more serious will these impacts become and how soon? There are no reassuring answers if we continue on a business-as-usual path. One thing about sustainability in the twenty-first century is certain: individual nations and the international community together will need to both mitigate the projected declines of the planet’s ecosystems, and at the same time adapt to those that are irreversible. As one popular sustainability policy mantra has it: “we must strive to avoid the unmanageable, while managing the unavoidable.”

The environmental historian Sing Chew sees in the cluster of environmental crises of the early 21^st century the hallmarks of a potential new Dark Age, that is, a period of conflict, resource scarcity and cultural impoverishment such as has afflicted the global human community only a few times over the past five millennia. The goal of sustainability, in these terms, is clear and non-controversial: to avoid a new and scaled-up Dark Age in which the aspirations of billions of people, both living and yet unborn, face brutal constraints. The implications of sustainability, in this sense, extend well beyond what might ordinarily considered “green” issues, such as preserving rainforests or saving whales. Sustainability is a human and social issue as much as it is “environmental.” Sustainability is about people, the habitats we depend on for services vital to us, and our ability to maintain culturally rich civic societies free from perennial crises in food, water, and energy supplies.

It’s Not Easy Being Green: Anti-Environmental Discourse, Behavior, and Ideology

The consensus view among scientists and professional elites in the early twenty-first century, as it has been among environmental activists for a much longer time, is that our globalized industrial world system is on an unsustainable path. Inherent in this view is a stern judgment of the recent past: we have not adapted well, as a species, to the fruits of our own brilliant technological accomplishments, in particular, to the harnessing of fossil fuels to power transport and industry.

Taking the long view of human evolution, it is not surprising to find that we are imperfectly adapted to our modern industrialized world of cars, computers, and teeming cities, or that human societies organized for so many millennia around the problem of scarcity should treat a sudden abundance of resources with the glee of a kid in a candy store. In evolutionary terms, we have simply not had sufficient time to adapt to the windfall of change. Though rapid advances in the biophysical sciences in recent decades mean that we mostly understand our maladaptation to industrialization and the great dangers it poses, our political decision-making and consumption patterns have barely changed on the basis of this understanding. This sobering fact tells us that, at this moment in human history, social behavior and political decision-making are not being driven by knowledge, but rather by entrenched attitudes that perpetuate an unsustainable drawdown of earth’s resources. In short, human decision making and consumption of material goods in our fossil-fuel age continues to largely take place outside of an awareness of the strained and finite nature of our planet’s ecosystem services.

It is the character of modern consumer society to promote the idea that nothing is connected, that the jeans we wear, or the food we eat, are matters of personal choice without any greater context beyond a concern for immediate pleasure and peer approval. Sustainability, by contrast, teaches that everything is connected. That favorite pair of jeans, for instance, is dependent on cheap labor in developing countries, on heavily fertilized cotton plantations, and enormous volumes of water expended throughout the jeans’ lifecycle, from the irrigation to grow the cotton to the washing machine that cleans them. Or let’s take that “cheap” fast food lunch from yesterday (Image 16.1): it most likely contained processed soybeans from a recently cleared stretch of the Amazon rainforest, and artificial sweeteners made from corn whose enormous production quotas are subsidized by government tax revenues. The corn-based sweetener, in turn, turns out to be a principal cause of the national obesity epidemic, a key contributor to spiraling health care costs. Thus the “value meal” turns out not to be so economical after all, once the systems-wide effects are factored in.

Image 16.1. Fast Food Industry’s Environmental Impact? Here’s food for thought. Though we are accustomed to measuring the impact of a fast food diet on our physical health, there is much less readily available information on the global network of agricultural providers that supports the fast food industry, and on its environmental impacts on land use, water resources, and human communities. Source: “1/3 lb. Bacon Burger with Fries at Hegenburger” by pointnshoot is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Connectivity

To think about sustainability in these terms may sound exhausting. But because we live in a world characterized by connectivity, that is, by complex chains linking our everyday lives to distant strangers and ecosystems in far flung regions of the earth, we have no choice. In the end, we must adapt our thinking to a complex, connected model of the world and our place in it. Persisting with only simple, consumerist frames of understanding—“I look great!” “This tastes delicious!”—for a complex world of remote impacts and finite resources renders us increasingly vulnerable to episodes of what ecologists call system collapse, that is, to the sudden breakdown of ecosystem services we rely upon for our life’s staple provisions.

In the early twenty-first century, vulnerability to these system collapses varies greatly according to where one lives. A long-term drought in India might bring the reality of aquifer depletion or climate change home to tens of thousands of people driven from their land, while the life of a suburban American teenager is not obviously affected by any resource crisis. But this gap will narrow in the coming years. Overwhelming scientific evidence points to rapidly increasing strains this century on our systems of food, water, and energy provision as well as on the seasonable weather to which we have adapted our agricultural and urban regions. In time, no one will enjoy the luxury of remaining oblivious to the challenges of sustainability. Drought, for example, is one of the primary indices of global ecosystem stress, and arguably the most important to humans. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, without wholesale reformation of water management practices on a global scale, two-thirds of the world’s population will face water shortages by 2025, including densely populated regions of the United States.

So how did we arrive at this point? Without you or I ever consciously choosing to live unsustainably, how has it nevertheless come about that we face environmental crises of global scale, circumstances that will so decisively shape our lives and those of our children? Here’s one explanatory narrative, framed by the long view of human evolution.

Since the emergence of the first proto-human communities in Africa millions of years ago, we have spent over 99% of evolutionary time as nomadic hunters and gatherers. A fraction of the balance of our time on earth spans the 10,000 years of human agriculture, since the end of the last Ice Age. In turn, only a third of that fractional period has witnessed the emergence of the institutions and technologies—writing, money, mathematics, etc.—that we associate with human “civilization.” And lastly, at the very tip of the evolutionary timeline, no more than a blink of human species history, we find the development of the modern industrialized society we inhabit. Look around you. Observe for a moment all that is familiar in your immediate surroundings: the streetscape and buildings visible through the window, the plastic furnishings in the room, and the blinking gadgets within arm’s length of where you sit. All of it is profoundly “new” to human beings; to all but a handful of the tens of thousands of generations of human beings that have preceded us, this everyday scene would appear baffling and frightening, as if from another planet.

Normalization

In this sense, the real miracle of human evolution is that cars, computers, and cities appear so normal to us, even sometimes “boring” and monotonous! Our perception of the extraordinary, rapid changes in human societies in the past two centuries—even the past half-century—is deadened by virtue of what is our greatest evolutionary acquirement, namely normalization, an adaptive survival strategy fundamental to human success over the millennia. The ability to accept, analyze, and adapt to often fluctuating circumstances is our great strength as a species. But at this point in human history it is also a grave weakness, what, in the language of Greek tragedy might be called a “fatal flaw.”

To offer an analogy, for many centuries slavery appeared normal to most people across the world—until the late eighteenth century, when a handful of humanitarian activists in Britain began the long and difficult process of de-normalizing human bondage in the eyes of their compatriots. The task of sustainability ethics is analogous, and no less difficult, in that it lays out the argument for wholesale and disruptive attitude adjustment and behavior change in the general population. Given the long-term adaptation of the human species to the imperatives of hunter-gathering, our decision-making priorities and consumption drives still tend toward the simple necessities, based on the presumption of relative and seasonal scarcity, and with little emotional or social reward for restraint in the face of plenty, for viewing our choices in global terms, or for measuring their impacts on future generations.

A working distinction between the historical evolution of human society and human culture is useful to understanding the social and psychological obstacles to achieving sustainability. As both individuals and societies, we work hard to insulate ourselves from unpleasant surprises, shocks, and disorder. We crave “security,” and our legal and economic institutions accordingly have evolved over the millennia to form a buffer against what Shakespeare’s Hamlet called “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” For instance, the law protects us from violent physical harm (ideally), while insurance policies safeguard us from financial ruin in the event of an unexpected calamity.

In one sense, this security priority has determined the basic evolution of human societies, particularly the decisive transition 10,000 years ago from the variable and risky life of nomadic hunter communities to sedentary farming based on an anticipated stability of seasonal yields. Of course, the shift to agriculture only partially satisfied the human desire for security as farming communities remained vulnerable to changing climatic conditions and territorial warfare. Global industrialization, however, while it has rendered vast populations marginal and vulnerable, has offered its beneficiaries the most secure insulation yet enjoyed by humans against “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” This success has been a double-edged sword, however, not least because the industrialized cocoon of our modern consumer lifestyles relentlessly promotes the notion that we have transcended our dependence on the earth’s basic resources. As it stands, we look at our highly complex, industrialized world, and adapt our expectations and desires to its rewards. It is never our first instinct to ask whether the system of rewards itself might be unsustainable and collapse at some future time as a result of our eager participation.

Sustainability Obstacles and Support

In terms of the evolutionary argument I am outlining here, our ability to grasp the sustainability imperative faces two serious obstacles. The first is psychological, namely the inherited mental frameworks that reward us for the normalization and simplification of complex realities. The second is social, namely our economic and institutional arrangements designed to protect us from material wants, as well as from risk, shock, disorder and violent change. Both these psychological and social features of our lives militate against an ecological, systems-based worldview.

Luckily, our cultural institutions have evolved to offer a counterweight to the complacency and inertia encouraged by the other simple, security-focused principles governing our lives. If society is founded upon the principle of security, and promotes our complacent feeling of independence from the natural world, we might think of culture as the conscience of society. What culture does, particularly in the arts and sciences, is remind us of our frailty as human beings, our vulnerability to shocks and sudden changes, and our connectedness to the earth’s natural systems. In this sense, the arts and sciences, though we conventionally view them as opposites, in fact perform the same social function: they remind us of what lies beyond the dominant security paradigm of our societies—which tends to a simplified and binary view of human being and nature—by bringing us closer to a complex, systemic understanding of how the natural world works and our embeddedness within it. Whether by means of an essay on plant biology, or a stage play about family breakdown (like Hamlet), the arts and sciences model complex worlds and the systemic interrelations that shape our lives. They expose complexities and connections in our world, and emphasize the material consequences of our actions to which we might otherwise remain oblivious. The close relation between the arts and sciences in the Western world is evidenced by the fact that their concerns have largely mirrored each other over time, from the ordered, hierarchical worldview in the classical and early modern periods, to the post-modern focus on connectivity, chaos, and emergence.

Life in the pre-modern world, in the memorable words of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, was mostly “nasty, brutish, and short.” By contrast, social and economic evolution has bestowed the inhabitants of the twenty-first century industrialized world with a lifestyle uniquely (though of course not wholly) insulated from physical hardship, infectious disease, and chronic violence. This insulation has come at a cost, however, namely our disconnection from the basic support systems of life: food, water and energy. This is a very recent development. At the beginning of the 20^th century, for example, almost half of Americans grew up on farms. Now, fewer than two percent do. We experience the staples of life only at their service endpoints: the supermarket, the faucet, the gas station. In this context, the real-world sources of food, water, and energy do not seem important, while supplies appear limitless. We are not prepared for the inevitable shortages of the future.

On the positive side, it is possible to imagine that the citizens of the developed world might rapidly reconnect to a systems view of natural resources. One product of our long species evolution as hunters and agricultural land managers is an adaptive trait the ecologist E. O. Wilson has called “biophilia,” that is, a love for the natural world that provides for us. In the few centuries of our fossil fuel modernity, this biophilia has become increasingly aestheticized and commodified—as landscape art, or nature tourism—and consequently marginalized from core social and economic decision structures. In the emerging age of environmental decline and resource scarcity, however, our inherited biophilia will play a key role in energizing the reform of industrialized societies toward a sustainable, renewable resource and energy future.

The Industrialization of Nature: A Modern History (1500 to the present)

It is a measure of our powers of normalization that we in the developed world take the existence of cheap energy, clean water, abundant food, and international travel so much for granted, when they are such recent endowments for humanity, and even now are at the disposal of considerably less than half the global population. It is a constant surprise to us that a situation so “normal” could be having such abnormal effects on the biosphere—degrading land, water, air, and the vital ecosystems hosting animals and fish. How did we get here? How can we square such apparent plenty with warnings of collapse?

Raw figures at least sketch the proportions of global change over the last 500 years. In 1500, even after several centuries of rapid population growth, the global population was no more than 500 million, or less than half the population of India today. It is now fourteen times as large, over 7 billion. Over the same period, global economic output has increased 120 times, most of that growth occurring since 1820, and with the greatest acceleration since 1950 (Figure 16.1). This combination of rampant population and economic growth since 1500 has naturally had major impacts on the earth’s natural resources and ecosystem health. According to the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, by the beginning of the 21^st century, 15 of the world’s 24 ecosystems, from rainforests to aquifers to fisheries, were rated in serious decline.

Figure 16.1. World Population. Graph showing the rapid increase in human population since the beginning of the Industrial Age with future estimates. The projected range of population after 2020 is between the UN’s “low” and “high” population growth projections. Source: “Human population since 1800” by Bdm25 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Economic Development

Fundamental to significant changes in human history has been social reaction to resource scarcity. By 1500, Europeans, the first engineers of global growth, had significantly cleared their forests, settled their most productive agricultural lands, and negotiated their internal borders. And yet even with large-scale internal development, Europe struggled to feed itself, let alone to match the wealth of the then dominant global empires, namely China and the Mughal States that stretched from the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia to the busy ports of the Eastern Mediterranean. As a consequence of resource scarcity, European states began to sponsor explorations abroad, in quest initially for gold, silver, and other precious metals to fill up their treasuries. Only over time did Europeans begin to perceive in the New World the opportunities for remote agricultural production as a source of income. Full-scale colonial settlement was an even later idea.

The new “frontiers” of European economic development in the immediate pre-industrial period 1500-1800 included tropical regions for plantation crops, such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice, indigo, and opium, and temperate zones for the cultivation and export of grains. The seagoing merchants of Portugal, France, Spain, Britain and the Netherlands trawled the islands of the East Indies for pepper and timber; established ports in India for commerce in silk, cotton and indigo; exchanged silver for Chinese tea and porcelain; traded sugar, tobacco, furs and rice in the Americas; and sailed to West Africa for slaves and gold. The slave trade and plantation economies of the Americas helped shift the center of global commerce from Asia to the Atlantic, while the new oceangoing infrastructure also allowed for the development of fisheries, particularly the lucrative whale industry. All these commercial developments precipitated significant changes in their respective ecosystems across the globe—deforestation and soil erosion in particular—albeit on a far smaller scale compared with what was to come with the harnessing of fossil fuel energy after 1800.

The 19^th century witnessed the most rapid global economic growth seen before or mostly since, built on the twin tracks of continued agricultural expansion and the new “vertical” frontiers of fossil fuel and mineral extraction that truly unleashed the transformative power of industrialization on the global community and its diverse habitats. For the first time since the human transition to agriculture more than 10,000 years before, a state’s wealth did not depend on agricultural yields from contiguous lands, but flowed rather from a variety of global sources, and derived from the industrialization of primary products, such as cotton textiles, minerals and timber. During this period, a binary, inequitable structure of international relations began to take shape, with a core of industrializing nations in the northern hemisphere increasingly exploiting the natural resources of undeveloped periphery nations for the purposes of wealth creation (Figure 16.2).

The Great Acceleration

Despite the impact of the world wars and economic depression on global growth in the early 20^th century, the new technological infrastructure of the combustion engine and coal-powered electricity sponsored increased productivity and the sanitization of growing urban centers. Infectious diseases, the scourge of humanity for thousands of years, retreated, more than compensating for losses in war, and the world’s population continued to increase dramatically, doubling from 1 to 2 billion in 50 years, and with it the ecological footprint of our single species.

Nothing, however, is to be compared with the multiplying environmental impacts of human activities since 1950, a period dubbed by historians as “The Great Acceleration.” In the words of the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, “over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber, and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.” The post-WWII global economic order promoted liberal and accelerated trade, capital investment, and technological innovation tethered to consumer markets, mostly free of environmental impact considerations. The resultant economic growth, and the corresponding drawdown of natural resources, are nonlinear in character, which is, exhibiting an unpredictable and exponential rate of increase.

All systems, human and natural, are characterized by nonlinear change. We are habituated to viewing our history as a legible story of “progress,” governed by simple cause-and-effect and enacted by moral agents, with the natural world as a backdrop to scenes of human triumph and tragedy. But history, from a sustainability viewpoint, is ecological rather than dramatic or moral; that is, human events exhibit the same patterns of systems connectivity, complexity, and non-linear transformation that we observe in the organic world, from the genetic makeup of viruses to continental weather systems. The history of the world since 1950 is one such example, when certain pre-existing conditions—petroleum-based energy systems, technological infrastructure, advanced knowledge-based institutions and practices, and population increase—synergized to create a period of incredible global growth and transformation that could not have been predicted at the outset based upon those conditions alone. This unforeseen Great Acceleration has brought billions of human beings into the world, and created wealth and prosperity for many. But nonlinear changes are for the bad as well as the good, and the negative impacts of the human “triumph” of postwar growth have been felt across the biosphere. I will briefly detail the human causes of the following, itself only a selective list: soil degradation, deforestation, wetlands drainage and damming, air pollution and climate change.

Soil Degradation 

Since the transition to agriculture 10,000 years ago, human communities have struggled against the reality that soil suffers nutrient depletion through constant plowing and harvesting (mostly nitrogen loss). The specter of a significant die-off in human population owing to stagnant crop yields was averted in the 1970s by the so-called “Green Revolution,” which, through the engineering of new crop varieties, large-scale irrigation projects, and the massive application of petroleum-based fertilizers to supplement nitrogen, increased staple crop production with such success that the numbers suffering malnutrition actually declined worldwide in the last two decades of the 20^th century, from 1.9 to 1.4 billion, even as the world’s population increased at 100 times background rates, to 6 billion. The prospects for expanding those gains in the new century are nevertheless threatened by the success of industrial agriculture itself. Soil depletion, declining water resources, and the diminishing returns of fertilizer technology—all the products of a half-century of industrial agriculture—have seen increases in crop yields level off. At the same time, growing populations in developing countries have seen increasing clearance of fragile and marginal agricultural lands to house the rural poor.

It has been estimated that industrial fertilizers have increased the planet’s human carrying capacity by two billion people. Unfortunately, most of the chemical fertilizer applied to soils does not nourish the crop as intended, but rather enters the hydrological system, polluting aquifers, streams, and ultimately the oceans with an oversupply of nutrients, and ultimately draining the oxygen necessary to support aquatic life. As for the impact of fertilizers on soil productivity, this diminishes over time, requiring the application of ever greater quantities in order to maintain yields.

Deforestation

Arguably the biggest losers from 20^th century economic growth were the forests of the world’s tropical regions and their non-human inhabitants. Across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, approximately one-third of forest cover has been lost (Figure 16.3). Because about half of the world’s species inhabits tropical rainforests, these clearances have had a devastating impact on biodiversity, with extinction rates now greater than they have been since the end of the dinosaur era, 65 million years ago. Much of the cleared land was converted to agriculture, so that the amount of irrigated soils increased fivefold over the century, from 50 to 250m hectares. Fully 40% of the terrestrial earth’s total organic output is currently committed to human use. But we are now reaching the ceiling of productive land expansion, in terms of sheer area, while the continued productivity of arable land is threatened by salinity, acidity and toxic metal levels that have now degraded soils across one third of the earth’s surface, some of them irreversibly.

Figure 16.3. Global Forest Map. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the global logging industry, and hence large-scale deforestation, has shifted from the North Atlantic countries to the forests of tropical regions such as Indonesia and the Amazon Basin in Latin America. This tropical “green belt” is now rapidly diminishing, with devastating consequences for local ecosystems, water resources, and global climate. Source:NASA.

Wetlands Drainage and Damming

Meanwhile, the worlds’ vital wetlands, until recently viewed as useless swamps, have been ruthlessly drained—15% worldwide, but over half in Europe and North America. The draining of wetlands has gone hand in hand with large-scale hydro-engineering projects that proliferated through the last century, such that now some two-thirds of the world’s fresh water passes through dam systems, while rivers have been blocked, channeled, and re-routed to provide energy, irrigation for farming, and water for urban development. The long-term impacts of these projects were rarely considered in the planning stages, and collectively they constitute a wholesale re-engineering of the planet’s hydrological system in ways that will be difficult to adapt to the population growth demands and changing climatic conditions of the 21^st century. As for the world’s oceans, these increasingly show signs of acidification due to carbon emissions, threatening the aquatic food chain and fish stocks for human consumption, while on the surface, the oceans now serve as a global conveyor belt for colossal amounts of non-degradable plastic debris.

Air Pollution

In many parts of the world, pollution of the air by industrial particles is now less a problem than it was a century ago, when newspapers lamented the “black snow” over Chicago. This is due to concerted efforts by a clean air caucus of international scope that arose in the 1940s and gained significant political influence with the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1970s. The impact of the post-70s environmental movement on the quality of air and water, mostly in the West, but also developing countries such as India, is the most hopeful precedent we have that the sustainability issues facing the world in the new century might yet be overcome, given political will and organization equal to the task.

Climate Change

Air pollution is still a major problem in the megacities of the developing world, however, while a global change in air chemistry—an increase of 40% in the carbon load of the atmosphere since industrialization—is ushering in an era of accelerated climate change. This era will be characterized by increased droughts and floods, higher sea levels, and extreme weather events, unevenly and unpredictably distributed across the globe, with the highest initial impact in regions that, in economic and infrastructural terms, can least support climate disruption (for example, sub-Saharan Africa). The environmental historian J. R. McNeil estimates that between 25 and 40 million people died from air pollution in the 20^th century. The death toll arising from climate change in the 21^stcentury is difficult to predict, but given the scale of the disruption to weather systems on which especially marginal states depend, it is likely to be on a much larger scale.

Summary

From the Portuguese sea merchants of the 16^th century in quest of silver and spices from Asia, to the multinational oil companies of today seeking to drill in ever more remote and fragile undersea regions, the dominant view driving global economic growth over the last half millennium has been instrumentalist, that is, of the world’s ecosystems as alternately a source of raw materials (foods, energy, minerals) and a dump for the wastes produced by the industrialization and consumption of those materials. The instrumentalist economic belief system of the modern era, and particularly the Industrial Age, is based on models of perennial growth, and measures the value of ecosystems according to their production of resources maximized for efficiency and hence profit. In this prevailing system, the cost of resource extraction to the ecosystem itself is traditionally not factored into the product and shareholder values of the industry. These costs are, in economic terms, externalized.

A future economics of sustainability, by contrast, would prioritize the management of ecosystems for resilience rather than pure capital efficiency, and would incorporate the cost of ecosystem management into the pricing of goods. In the view of many sustainability theorists, dismantling the system of “unnatural” subsidization of consumer goods that has developed over the last century in particular is the key to a sustainable future. Only a reformed economic system of natural pricing, whereby environmental costs are reflected in the price of products in the global supermarket, will alter consumer behavior at the scale necessary to ensure economic and environmental objectives are in stable alignment, rather than in constant conflict. As always in the sustainability paradigm, there are tradeoffs. A future economy built on the principle of resilience would be very different from that prevalent in the economic world system of the last 500 years in that its managers would accept reduced productivity and efficiency in exchange for the long-term vitality of the resource systems on which it depends.

Sustainability Studies: A Systems Literacy Approach

Transition to a sustainable resource economy is a dauntingly large and complex project, and will increasingly drive research and policy agendas across academia, government, and industry through the twenty-first century. To theorize sustainability, in an academic setting, is not to diminish or marginalize it. On the contrary, the stakes for sustainability education could not be higher. The relative success or failure of sustainability education in the coming decades, and its influence on government and industry practices worldwide, will be felt in the daily lives of billions of people both living and not yet born.

The core of sustainability studies, in the academic sense, is systems literacy—a simple definition, but with complex implications. Multiple indicators tell us that the global resource boom is now reaching a breaking point. The simple ethos of economic growth—“more is better”—is not sustainable in a world of complex food, water and energy systems suffering decline. The grand challenge of sustainability is to integrate our decision-making and consumption patterns—along with the need for economic viability— within a sustainable worldview. This will not happen by dumb luck. It will require, first and foremost, proper education. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, universal literacy—reading and writing—was the catch-cry of education reformers. In the twenty-first century, a new global literacy campaign is needed, this time systems literacy, to promote a basic understanding of the complex interdependency of human and natural systems.

Here I will lay out the historical basis for this definition of sustainability in terms of systems literacy, and offer specific examples of how to approach issues of sustainability from a systems-based viewpoint. Systems literacy, as a fundamental goal of higher education, represents the natural evolution of interdisciplinarity, which encourages students to explore connections between traditionally isolated disciplines and has been a reformist educational priority for several decades in the United States. Systems literacy is an evolved form of cross-disciplinary practice, calling for intellectual competence (not necessarily command) in a variety of fields in order to better address specific real-world environmental problems.

For instance, a student’s research into deforestation of the Amazon under a sustainability studies paradigm would require investigation in a variety of fields not normally brought together under the traditional disciplinary regime. These fields might include plant biology, hydrology, and climatology, alongside economics, sociology, and the history and literature of post-colonial Brazil. Systems literacy, in a nutshell, combines the study of social history and cultural discourses with a technical understanding of ecosystem processes. Only this combination offers a comprehensive view of real-world environmental challenges as they are unfolding in the twenty-first century.

From the viewpoint of systems literacy sustainability studies works on two planes at once. Students of sustainability both acknowledge the absolute interdependence of human and natural systems—indeed that human beings and all their works are nothing if not natural—while at the same time recognizing that to solve our environmental problems we must often speak of the natural world and human societies as if they were separate entities governed by different rules. For instance, it is very useful to examine aspects of our human system as diachronic—as progressively evolving over historical time—while viewing natural systems more according to synchronic patterns of repetition and equilibrium. The diachronic features of human social evolution since 1500 would include the history of trade and finance, colonization and frontier development, and technology and urbanization, while examples of nature’s synchronicity would be exemplified in the migratory patterns of birds, plant and animal reproduction, or the microbial ecology of a lake or river. A diachronic view looks at the changes in a system over time, while the synchronic view examines the interrelated parts of the system at any given moment, assuming a stable state.

While the distinction between diachronic and synchronic systems is in some sense artificial, it does highlight the structural inevitability of dysfunction when the two interlocked systems operate on different timelines and principles. The early twentieth century appetite for rubber to service the emerging automobile industry, for instance, marks an important chapter in the “heroic” history of human technology, while signifying a very different transition in the history of forest ecosystems in Asia and Latin America. Human history since the agricultural transition 10,000 years ago, and on a much more dramatic scale in the last two hundred years, is full of such examples of new human technologies creating sudden, overwhelming demand for a natural resource previously ignored, and reshaping entire ecosystems over large areas in order to extract, transport and industrialize the newly commodified material.

Biocomplexity

For students in the humanities and social sciences, sustainability studies requires adoption of a new conceptual vocabulary drawn from the ecological sciences. Among the most important of these concepts is complexity. Biocomplexity—the chaotically variable interaction of organic elements on multiple scales—is the defining characteristic of all ecosystems, inclusive of humans (Figure 16.4). Biocomplexity science seeks to understand this nonlinear functioning of elements across multiple scales of time and space, from the molecular to the intercontinental, from the microsecond to millennia and deep time. Such an approach hasn’t been possible until very recently. For example, only since the development of (affordable) genomic sequencing in the last decade have biologists begun to investigate how environments regulate gene functions, and how changes in biophysical conditions place pressure on species selection and drive evolution.

Figure 16.4. The Biocomplexity Spiral. The biocomplexity spiral illustrates the concept of biocomplexity, the chaotically variable interaction of organic elements on multiple scales. Source: U.S. National Science Foundation.

How is the concept of complexity important to sustainability studies? To offer one example, a biocomplexity paradigm offers the opportunity to better understand and defend biodiversity, a core environmental concern. Even with the rapid increase in knowledge in the biophysical sciences in recent decades, vast gaps exist in our understanding of natural processes and human impacts upon them. Surprisingly little is known, for example, about the susceptibilities of species populations to environmental change or, conversely, how preserving biodiversity might enhance the resilience of an ecosystem. In contrast to the largely reductionist practices of twentieth-century science, which have obscured these interrelationships, the new biocomplexity science begins with presumptions of ignorance, and from there goes on to map complexity, measure environmental impacts, quantify risk and resilience, and offer quantitative arguments for the importance of biodiversity. Such arguments, as a scientific supplement to more conventional, emotive appeals for the protection of wildlife, might then form the basis for progressive sustainability policy.

But such data-gathering projects are also breathtaking in the demands they place on analysis. The information accumulated is constant and overwhelming in volume, and the methods by which to process and operationalize the data toward sustainable practices have either not yet been devised or are imperfectly integrated within academic research structures and the policy-making engines of government and industry. To elaborate those methods requires a humanistic as well as scientific vision, a need to understand complex interactions from the molecular to the institutional and societal level.

A practical example of biocomplexity as the frame for studies in environmental sustainability are the subtle linkages between the hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico and farming practices in the Mississippi River watershed (Figure 16.5). To understand the impact of hydro-engineered irrigation, nitrogen fertilizer, drainage, and deforestation in the Midwest on the fisheries of the Gulf is a classic biocomplexity problem, requiring data merging between a host of scientific specialists, from hydrologists to chemists, botanists, geologists, zoologists and engineers. Even at the conclusion of such a study, however, the human dimension remains to be explored, specifically, how industry, policy, culture and the law have interacted, on decadal time-scales, to degrade the tightly coupled riverine-ocean system of the Mississippi Gulf. A quantitative approach only goes so far. At a key moment in the process, fact accumulation must give way to the work of narrative, to the humanistic description of desires, histories, and discourses as they have governed, in this instance, land and water use in the Mississippi Gulf region.

Figure 16.5. Mississippi River Basin. The catchment area of the Mississippi River covers almost 40% of the U.S. continental landmass, collecting freshwater from 32 states. Included in the runoff that feeds the river system are large quantities of agricultural fertilizer and other chemicals that eventually drain into the Gulf of Mexico, creating an ever-growing “dead zone.” Source: EPA.

To complexity should be added the terms resilience and vulnerability, as core concepts of sustainability studies. The resilience of a system—let’s take for example, the wildlife of the Arctic Circle—refers to the self-renewing stability of that system, its ability to rebound from shocks and threats within the range of natural variability. The vulnerability of Artic wildlife, conversely, refers to the point at which resilience is eroded to breaking point. Warming temperatures in the Arctic, many times the global average, now threaten the habitats of polar bear and walruses, and are altering the breeding and migratory habits of almost all northern wildlife populations. The human communities of the Arctic are likewise experiencing the threshold of their resilience through rising sea levels and coastal erosion. Entire villages face evacuation and the traumatic prospect of life as environmental refugees.

As mentioned earlier, we have grown accustomed to speaking of “nature” or “the environment” as if they were somehow separate from us, something that might dictate our choice of holiday destination or wall calendar, but nothing else. A useful counter-metaphor for sustainability studies, to offset this habitual view, is to think of human and natural systems in metabolic terms. Like the human body, a modern city, for example, is an energy-dependent system involving inputs and outputs. Every day, millions of tons of natural resources (raw materials, consumer goods, food, water, energy) are pumped into the world’s cities, which turn them out in the form of waste (landfill, effluent, carbon emissions, etc.).

Unlike the human body, however, the metabolism of modern cities is not a closed and self-sustaining system. Cities are consuming resources at a rate that would require a planet one and a half times the size of Earth to sustain, and are ejecting wastes into the land, water, and air that are further degrading the planet’s ability to renew its vital reserves. Here, another body metaphor—the environmental “footprint”—has become a popular means for imagining sufficiency and excess in our consumption of resources. The footprint metaphor is useful because it provides us an image measurement of both our own consumption volume and the environmental impact of the goods and services we use. By making sure to consume less, and to utilize only those goods and services with a responsibly low footprint, we in turn reduce our own footprint on the planet. In important ways, the problem of unsustainability is a problem of waste. From a purely instrumentalist or consumerist viewpoint, waste is incidental or irrelevant to the value of a product. A metabolic view of systems, by contrast, promotes sustainability concepts such as closed loops and carbon neutrality for the things we manufacture and consume, whereby there are no toxic remainders through the entire lifecycle of a product. In this sense, systems literacy is as much a habit or style of observing the everyday world as it is an academic principle for the classroom. Because in the end, the fate of the world’s ecosystems will depend not on what we learn in the classroom but on the extent to which we integrate that learning in our lives beyond it: in our professional practice and careers, and the lifestyle and consumer choices we make over the coming years and decades. If systems literacy translates into a worldview and way of life, then sustainability is possible.

The Vulnerability of Industrialized Resource Systems: Two Case Studies

Sustainability is best viewed through specific examples, or case studies. One way of conceiving sustainability is to think of it as a map that shows us connections between apparently unrelated domains or sequences of events. To cite an earlier example, what do the cornfields of Illinois have to do with the decline of fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico? To the uneducated eye, there is no relationship between two areas so remote from each other, but a sustainable systems analysis will show the ecological chain linking the use of chemical fertilizers in the Midwest, with toxic runoff into the Mississippi Basin, with changes in the chemical composition in the Gulf of Mexico (specifically oxygen depletion), to reduced fish populations, and finally to economic and social stress on Gulf fishing communities. Here, I will look at two case studies in greater detail, as a model for the systems analysis approach to sustainability studies in the humanities. The first concerns the alarming worldwide decline of bee populations since 2006, owing to a new affliction named Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The second case study examines the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, considered in the larger historical context of global oil dependency.

Our Faustian Bargain

Before the emergence of coal and later oil as highly efficient and adaptable energy sources, human beings relied on mostly renewable sources of energy, principally their own muscle power, supplemented to varying degrees by the labor of domesticated farm animals, wood and peat for fuel, and the harnessing of wind and water for milling and sailing. An extraordinary and rapid transformation occurred with the extraction of latent solar power from ancient organic deposits in the earth. On the eve of industrialization, around 1800, the raw muscle power of human beings was responsible for probably 70% of human energy expenditure, while slavery—a brutal system for the concentration of that energy—functioned as a cornerstone of global economic growth. In the 1500-1800 period, in addition to the ten million or more Africans transported to slave colonies in the Americas, several times as many Indian and Chinese laborers, under various regimes of servitude, migrated across the globe to answer labor “shortages” within the globalizing Atlantic economy.

But technical improvements in the steam engine revolutionized this longstanding energy equation. Already by 1800, a single engine could produce power the equivalent of two hundred men. Today, a single worker, embedded within a technologized, carbon-driven industry, takes a week to produce what an 18^th century laborer would take four years to do, while the average middle-class household in the industrialized world consumes goods and energy at a rate equivalent to having 100 slaves at their disposal round-the-clock.

In the famous medieval story of Faust, a scholar who dabbles in black magic sells his soul in exchange for extraordinary powers to satisfy his every desire (Image 16.2). The Faust story provides an excellent analogy for our 200-year love affair with cheap fossil fuel energy. Our planetary carbon endowment has provided us with extraordinary powers to bend space and time to the shape of our desires and convenience, and fill it with cool stuff. But petroleum and coal are finite resources, and such is the environmental impact of our carbon-based Faustian lifestyle that scientists have now awarded our industrial period, a mere blink in geological time, its own title in the 4 billion year history of the planet: the Anthropocene. We are no longer simply biological creatures, one species among thousands, but biophysical agents, reshaping the ecology of the entire planet, and shaping the fates of all species.

Image 16.2. Faust and Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles, the devil figure in Goethe’s play Faust, tempts Faust with the exhilaration of flight. From the air, it is easy for Faust to imagine himself lord of the earth, with no limits to his powers. Source: “Faust et Mephistopheles” by Alphonse de Neuville, via Wikimedia Commons, is licensed under CC0 1.0.

In short, we are all Fausts now, not the insignificant, powerless creatures we sometime feel ourselves to be, but rather, the lords of the planet. How this came to pass is an object lesson in complex diachronic evolution. Without any single person deciding, or any law passed, or amendment made to the constitution, we have transformed ourselves over but a few centuries from one struggling species among all the rest, to being planetary managers, now apparently exempted from the evolutionary struggle for survival with other species, with the fate of animals, birds, fish, plants, the atmosphere, and entire ecosystems in our hands. This Faustian power signals both our strength and vulnerability. We are dependent on the very ecosystems we dominate. That is, we have become carbon-dependent by choice, but we are ecosystem-dependent by necessity. We may all be supermen and wonder women relative to the poor powers of our forebears, but we still require food, clean water, and clean air. The billion or more people on earth currently not plugged into the carbon energy grid, and hence living in dire poverty, need no reminding of this fact. Many of us in the developed world do, however. Our civilization and lifestyles as human beings have changed beyond recognition, but our biological needs are no different from our species ancestors on the East African savannah a million years ago. In sum, the lesson of the Faust story is hubris. We are not exempt from natural laws, as Faust recklessly hoped.

To understand the impact of our fossil fuel based, industrialized society on the planet we inhabit requires we think on dual time scales. The first is easy enough, namely, the human scale of days and years. For example, consider the time it takes for liquid petroleum to be extracted from the earth, refined, transported to a gas station, and purchased by you in order to drive to school or the shopping mall. Or the time it takes for that sweater you buy at the mall to be manufactured in China or Indonesia and transported thousands of miles to the shelf you grab it from. This is an oil-dependent process from beginning to end: from the petroleum-based fertilizers that maximized the productive efficiency of the cotton plantation, to powering the machinery in the factory, to the massive goods ship transporting your sweater across the oceans, to the lights in the store that illuminate your sweater at the precise angle for it to catch your eye.

Now consider the second time scale, to which we are usually oblivious—the thousands or millions of years it has taken for terrestrial carbon to form those reserves of liquid petroleum that brought you your sweater. This is a process describable only on a geological time scale, the costs of the disruption to which have been wholly omitted from the sticker price of the sweater. What are the environmental, and ultimately human costs that have been externalized? In powering our modern societies through the transference of the earth’s carbon reserves from long-term storage and depositing it in the atmosphere and oceans, we have significantly altered and destabilized the earth’s carbon cycle. There is now 40% more carbon in the atmosphere and oceans than in 1800, at the outset of the industrial age. The earth’s climate system is reacting accordingly, to accommodate the increased non-terrestrial carbon load. The result is altered weather patterns, increasing temperatures, glacial melt, and sharp increases in droughts, floods, and wildfires. The cost to the global economy of these climate disruptions this century has been projected in the trillions of dollars, even before we consider the human costs of climate change in mortality, homelessness, impoverishment, and social instability.

Extracting carbon from the earth, and transforming it into energy, fertilizers, and products has enabled an almost magical transformation of human lives on earth, as compared to those of our premodern ancestors. The house you live in, the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the gadgets you use, and all the dreams you dream for your future, are carbon-based dreams. These amazing fossil-fuel energy sources—oil, coal, gas—have created modernity itself: a crest of population growth, economic development, prosperity, health and longevity, pulling millions out of poverty, and promoting, life, liberty, and happiness. This modernity is truly a thing of wonder, involving the high-speed mass transport of people, goods, and information across the globe, day after day. Regardless of the season, it brings us apples from New Zealand, avocadoes from Mexico, and tomatoes that have traveled an average of 2000 miles to reach the “fresh produce” section of our supermarkets. Having bought our groceries for the week, we jump in our car and drive home. Because our species ancestors were both nomads and settlers, we love our cars and homes with equal passion. We value both mobility and rootedness. Done with roaming for the day, we cherish our indoor lives in atmospherically controlled environments: cool when hot outside, toasty when cold, light when dark, with digital devices plugged in and available 24/7. A miraculous lifestyle when one sits back to reflect, and all the result of ongoing carbon-intensive investments in human comfort and convenience.

But it is also a 200-year chemistry experiment, with our planet as the laboratory. We are carbon beings in our own molecular biology; we touch and smell it; we trade, transport, and spill it; we consume and dispose of it in the earth and air. Intensifying heat and storms and acidifying oceans are carbon’s elemental answer to the questions we have posed to the earth system’s resilience. Mother Nature is having her say, acting according to her nature, and prompting us now to act according to our own mostly forgotten natures—as beings dependent on our ecosystem habitat of sun, rain, soil, plants, and animals, with no special allowance beyond the sudden responsibility of reformed stewardship and management.

The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was a spectacular warning that the 200-year era of cheap fossil fuel energy is drawing to a close. With viable oil reserves likely to be exhausted in the next decade or so, and the dangers to global climate associated with continued reliance on coal and natural gas, the transition to a sustainable, low-carbon global economy—by means that do not impoverish billions of people in the process—looms as nothing less than the Great Cause of the 21^st century, and without doubt the greatest challenge humanity has faced in its long residence on earth. The stakes could not be higher for this task, which is of unprecedented scope and complexity. If enormous human and financial resources were expended in meeting the greatest challenges faced by the international community in the 20^th century—the defeat of fascism, and the hard-earned progress made against poverty and infectious diseases—then the low-carbon sustainability revolution of our century will require the same scale of resources and more. At present, however, only a tiny fraction of those resources have been committed.

Case Study: Agriculture and the Global Bee Colony Collapse

Two thousand years ago, at the height of the Roman Empire, the poet Virgil wrote lovingly about the practice of beekeeping, of cultivating the “aerial honey and ambrosial dews” he called “gifts of heaven” (Georgics IV: 1-2). Bees represent a gift to humanity even greater that Virgil knew. In addition to satisfying the human appetite for honey, the European honey bee, Apis mellifera, is the world’s most active pollinator, responsible for over 80 of the world’s most common nongrain crops, including apples, berries, almonds, macadamias, pumpkins, melons, canola, avocadoes, and also coffee beans, broccoli and lettuce (Image 16.3). Even the production chain of the enormous meat and cotton industries relies at crucial points on the ministrations of the humble honeybee. We depend on pollinated fruits, nuts and seeds for a third of our caloric intake, and for vital vitamins, minerals and antioxidants in our diet. In total, around 80% of the foods we eat are to some degree the products of bee pollination, representing one third of total agricultural output.

Given the $1 trillion value of pollinated produce, any threat to the health of honey bees represents a serious threat to the human food chain—a classic sustainability issue. With the industrialization of the global agricultural system over the last 50 years—including crop monoculture and mass fertilization—bees have indeed faced a series of threats to their ancient role, the most recent of which, called Colony Collapse Disorder, is the most serious yet.

Image 16.3. Busy Bee Hive. A forager honeybee comes in for landing at a healthy hive, her legs dusted with pollen. Colony Collapse Disorder has devastated tens of thousands of such hives. Source: “Honeybees” by Ken Thomas is licensed under CC0 1.0.

In his poetic primer on beekeeping, Virgil includes a moving description of a bee colony suffering mysterious decline:

“Observe the symptoms when they fall away… And languish with insensible decay… They change their hue; with haggard eyes they stare . . . The sick, for air, before the portal gasp… Their feeble legs within each other clasp… Or idle in their empty hives remain… Benumbed with cold, and listless of their gain” (368-78).

Beekeepers worldwide faced an even worse predicament in late 2006: the mysterious disappearance of entire hives of bees. Over the winter, honeybees enter a form of survival hibernation. Their populations suffer inevitable losses, but these are replenished by the Queen’s renewed laying of eggs once winter thaws. In the spring of 2007, however, hundreds of thousands of colonies in the United States did not survive the winter. A full 30% of all honeybee colonies died. Similar losses afflicted Europe and Asia. Worldwide, millions of colonies and billions of bees have perished since 2006 on account of the new bee plague.

Because the global commercial value of bee pollination is so enormous, well-funded research into colony collapse began immediately. A number of theories, some credible, some not, were quickly advanced. Several studies pointed to new or enhanced viral strains, while others suggested the toxic effect of industrial fertilization. Still others claimed that mobile phone towers were interfering with the bees’ navigations systems. Because the honey bee is a charismatic creature and features so prominently in our cultural lore—we admire their industriousness, fear their stings, call our loved ones “honey,” and talk much of Queen Bees—the story of colony collapse was quickly taken up by the media. A flurry of news stories announced CCD as an epic “disaster” and profound “mystery,” which was true in simple terms, but which cast bee decline as a new and sudden calamity for which some single culprit must be responsible.

The truth, as it is now unfolding, is more complex, and shows the importance of viewing the interactions between human and natural ecologies in systemic terms. There are a number of factors deemed to be related to CCD. Currently researchers are focusing on the following factors in their research to understand the cause of CCD:

• Increased hive losses due to the Varroa mite (a pest of the honeybee)
• Israeli Acute Paralysis virus and the gut parasite Nosema
• Increased exposure to pesticides and miticides
• Stress bees may experience due to migratory beekeeping practices such as transportation to multiple locations for pollination services
• Changes to bee foraging habitat
• Inadequate forage leading to poor nutrition
• Immune-suppressing stress on the bees caused by one or combination of the factors above

Before the industrialization of farming, bees came from neighboring wildlands to pollinate the diverse range of crops available to them on small plots. But the conversion, for economic reasons, of arable land into enormous monocrop properties in the last sixty years, and hence the diminishment of proximate wildflower habitats, has necessitated a different system, whereby bees are trucked around the country to service one crop at a time, be it peppers in Florida, blueberries in Maine, or almonds in California. At the height of the recent almond boom, the California crop required almost the entire bee population of the United States to be fully pollinated. Wholesale suburbanization is also to blame for the destruction of the bees’ natural wildflower habitats. Be it a thousand-acre cornfield or a suburban street of well-tended green lawns, to a bees’ eyes, our modern landscape, engineered to human needs, is mostly a desert.

Studies that have not identified specific culprits for CCD have nevertheless shown the extent of the long-term decline in bee health wrought by their conscription to industrial agriculture. For instance, researchers found no fewer than 170 different pesticides in samples of American honey bees, while other studies found that even bees not suffering CCD habitually carry multiple viral strains in their systems. The combined toxic and viral load for the average honey bee is enormous. In the words of Florida’s state apiarist, “I’m surprised honey bees are alive at all.” (Jacobsen, 2008, p. 137) A further study showed a decline in the immune systems of bees owing to lack of diverse nutrition. Pollinating only almonds for weeks on end, then travelling on a flatbed truck for hundreds of miles in order to service another single crop, is not the lifestyle bees have adapted to over the near 80 million years of their existence. As Virgil warned, “First, for thy bees a quiet station find.” The lives of modern bees have been anything but quiet, and the enormous changes in their habitat and lifestyle have reduced their species’ resilience.

The most important lesson of recent research into CCD is the identification of a larger system under multiple long-term stresses. Complex systems, such as bee pollination and colony maintenance, are not characterized by linear development, but rather by sudden, nonlinear changes of state called tipping points. CCD is an example of a potential tipping point in a natural system on which humans depend, in which sudden deterioration overtakes a population beyond its ability to rebound. Everything seems fine, until it isn’t. One day we have almonds, berries, melon, and coffee on our breakfast menu. The next day there’s a critical shortage, and we can’t afford them.

In sustainability terms, bee colony collapse is a classic “human dimensions” issue. CCD will not be “solved” simply by the development of a new anti-viral drug or pesticide targeting the specific pathogens responsible. Part of what is believed to have caused CCD is the immunosuppressive effects of generations of pesticides developed to counter previous threats to bee populations, be they microbes or mites. Our chemical intervention in the lifecycle of bees has, in evolutionary terms, “selected” for a more vulnerable bee. That is, bees’ current lack of resilience is a systemic problem in our historical relationship to bees, which dates back thousands of years, but which has altered dramatically in the last fifty years in ways that now threaten collapse. And this is to say nothing of the impact of bee colony collapse on other pollination-dependent animals and birds, which would indeed be catastrophic in biodiversity terms.

That we have adapted to bees, and they to us, is a deep cultural and historical truth, not simply a sudden “disaster” requiring the scientific solution of a “mystery.” In the light of sustainability systems analysis, the bee crisis appears entirely predictable and the problem clear cut. The difficulty arises in crafting strategies for how another complex system on a massive scale, namely global agriculture, can be reformed in order to prevent its collapse as one flow-on effect of the global crisis of the vital honey bee. The incentive for such reform could not be more powerful. The prospect of a future human diet without fruits, nuts and coffee is bleak enough for citizens of the developed world and potentially fatal for millions of others in the long term.

Case Study: Energy and the BP Oil Disaster

On the night of April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, one of hundreds operating in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded, killing eleven men, and placing one of the most rich and diverse coastal regions on earth in imminent danger of petroleum poisoning. BP had been drilling in waters a mile deep, and in the next two days, as the rig slowly sank, it tore a gash in the pipe leading to the oil well on the ocean floor. Over the next three months, two hundred million gallons of crude oil poured into the Gulf, before the technological means could be found to seal the undersea well. It was the worst environmental disaster in American history, and the largest peacetime oil spill ever (Image 16.4).

Image 16.4. The Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig on Fire. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig on fire, April, 2010. It would later sink, precipitating the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Source: U.S. Coast Guard.

The BP oil disaster caused untold short- and long-term damage to the region. The initial impact on the Gulf—the oil washing up on beaches from Texas to Florida, and economic hardship caused by the closing down of Gulf fishing—was covered closely by the news media. The longer term impacts of the oil spill on wetlands erosion, and fish and wildlife populations, however, will not likely receive as much attention.

Much public debate over the spill has focused on the specific causes of the spill itself, and in apportioning responsibility. As with the example of bee colony collapse, however, the search for simple, definitive causes can be frustrating, because the breakdown is essentially systemic. Advanced industries such as crop pollination and oil extraction involve highly complex interactions among technological, governmental, economic, and natural resource systems. With that complexity comes vulnerability. The more complex a system, the more points at which its resiliency may be suddenly exposed. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon rig, multiple technological “safeguards” simply did not work, while poor and sometimes corrupt government oversight of the rig’s operation also amplified the vulnerability of the overall system—a case of governmental system failure making technological failure in industry more likely, with an environmental disaster as the result.

In hindsight, looking at all the weaknesses in the Gulf oil drilling system, the BP spill appears inevitable. But predicting the specific vulnerabilities within large, complex systems ahead of time can be next to impossible because of the quantity of variables at work. Oil extraction takes place within a culture of profit maximization and the normalization of risk, but in the end, the lesson of BP oil disaster is more than a cautionary tale of corporate recklessness and lax government oversight. The very fact that BP was drilling under such risky conditions—a mile underwater, in quest of oil another three miles under the ocean floor—is an expression of the global demand for oil, the world’s most valuable energy resource. To understand that demand, and the lengths to which the global energy industry will go to meet it, regardless of environmental risk, requires the longer view of our modern history as a fossil-fueled species.

Sustainability Ethics

Developing an Ethics of Sustainability

The 1987 United Nations Brundtland definition of sustainability embodies an intergenerational contract: to provide for our present needs, while not compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. It’s a modest enough proposal on the face of it, but it challenges our current expectations of the intergenerational contract: we expect each new generation to be better off than their parents. Decades of technological advancement and economic growth have created a mindset not satisfied with “mere” sustainability. We might call it turbo-materialism or a cornucopian worldview: namely that the earth’s bounty, adapted to our use by human ingenuity, guarantees a perpetual growth in goods and services. At the root of the cornucopian worldview lies a brand of technological triumphalism, an unshakeable confidence in technological innovation to solve all social and environmental problems, be it world hunger, climate change, or declining oil reserves. In sustainability discourse, there is a wide spectrum of opinion from the extremes of cornucopian optimism on one side and to the doom-and-gloom scenarios that suggest it is already too late to avert a new Dark Age of resource scarcity and chronic conflict on the other.

For every generation entering a Dark Age, there were parents who enjoyed a better life, but who somehow failed to pass along their prosperity. No one wants to fail their children in this way. To this extent, biology dictates multigenerational thinking and ethics. Though it might not always be obvious, we are all already the beneficiaries of multi-generational planning. The world-leading American higher education system, for example, depends upon an intergenerational structure and logic—a financial and human investment in the future committed to by multiple generations of Americans going back to the 19^th century. But conversely, in terms of vulnerability, just as higher education in the United States is neither necessarily permanent nor universal, but a social institution built on an unwritten contract between generations, so the lifestyle benefits of advanced society as we know it will not simply perpetuate themselves without strenuous efforts to place them on a sustainable footing.

Our current problem lies in the fact that multigenerational thinking is so little rewarded. Our economic and political systems as they have evolved in the Industrial Age reward a mono-generational mindset driven by short-term profits and election cycles. In the West, for example, there is no significant political philosophy, regulatory system, or body of law that enshrines the idea that we act under obligation to future generations, despite widely held views that we naturally must. One challenge of sustainability is to channel our natural biological interest in the future into a new ethics and politics based on multigenerational principles. Many indigenous communities in the world, marginalized or destroyed by colonialism and industrialization, have long recognized the importance of sustainability in principles of governance, and provide inspiring models. The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy, for example, states that all decisions made by its elders should be considered in light of their impact seven generations into the future.

To embrace an ethics of sustainability is to accept that our rapid industrialization has placed us in the role of planetary managers, responsible for the health, or ruinous decline, of many of the globe’s vital ecosystems. This ethics requires we activate, in the popular sense, both sides of our brain. That is, we must toggle between a rational consideration of our environmental footprint and practical issues surrounding the reinvention of our systems of resource management, and a more humble, intuitive sense of our dependence and embeddedness within the web of life. Both reason and emotion come into play. Without emotion, there can be no motivation for change. Likewise, without an intellectual foundation for sustainability, our desire for change will be unfocused and ineffective. We are capable of adapting to a complex world and reversing broad-based ecosystem decline. But to do so will require technical knowledge wedded to an ethical imagination. We need to extend to the natural world the same moral sense we intuitively apply to the social world and our relations with other people.

Sustainability ethics thus does not need to be invented from whole cloth. It represents, in some sense, a natural extension of the ethical principles dominant in the progressive political movements of the 20^th century, which emphasized the rights of historically disenfranchised communities, such as women, African-Americans, and the global poor. Just as we have been pressed to speak for dispossessed peoples who lack a political voice, so we must learn the language of the nonhuman animal and organic world, of “nature,” and to speak for it. Not simply for charity’s sake, or out of selfless concern, but for our own sake as resource-dependent beings.

Remote Responsibilities

What distinguishes an ethics of sustainability from general ethical principles is its emphasis on remote responsibilities, that is, our moral obligation to consider the impact of our actions on people and places far removed from us. This distance may be measured in both space and time. First, in spatial terms, we, as consumers in the developed world, are embedded in a global web of commerce, with an ethical responsibility toward those who extract and manufacture the goods we buy, whether it be a polo shirt from Indonesia, or rare metals in our computer extracted from mines in Africa. The economic and media dimensions of our consumer society do not emphasize these connections; in fact, it is in the interests of “consumer confidence” (a major economic index) to downplay the disparities in living standards between the markets of the developed world and the manufacturing countries of the global south (Africa, Asia, Latin America), which serve as the factories of the world.

Second, as for sustainability ethics considered in temporal terms, the moral imagination required to understand our remote responsibilities poses an even greater challenge. As we have seen, the landmark United Nations Brundtland Report establishes an ethical contract between the living and those yet to be born. For an industrial civilization founded on the no-limits extraction of natural resources and on maximizing economic growth in the short term, this is actually a profoundly difficult challenge to meet. More than that, the practical ethical dilemmas it poses to us in the present are complex. How, for instance, are we to balance the objectives of economic development in poorer nations—the need to lift the world’s “bottom billion” out of poverty—with the responsibility to conserve resources for future generations, while at the same time making the difficult transition from industrialized fossil fuels to a low-carbon global economy?

The issue of fairness with regard to individual nations’ carbon emissions reduction mandates is a specific example of how ethical issues can complicate, or even derail, negotiated treaties on environmental sustainability, even when the parties agree on the end goal. In the view of the developing countries of the global south, many of them once subject to colonial regimes of the north, the advanced industrialized countries, such as the United States and Europe, should bear a heavier burden in tackling climate change through self-imposed restraints on carbon consumption. They after all have been, over the last 200 years, the principal beneficiaries of carbon-driven modernization, and thus the source of the bulk of damaging emissions. For them now to require developing nations to curb their own carbon-based modernization for the benefit of the global community reeks of neo-colonial hypocrisy. Developing nations such as India thus speak of common but differentiated responsibilities as the ethical framework from which to justly share the burden of transition to a low-carbon global economy.

From the point of view of the rich, industrialized nations, by contrast, whatever the appearance of historical injustice in a carbon treaty, all nations will suffer significant, even ruinous contractions of growth if an aggressive mitigation agreement among all parties is not reached. Some commentators in the West have further argued that the sheer scale and complexity of the climate change problem means it cannot effectively be addressed through a conventional rights-based and environmental justice approach. To this degree at least, the sustainability issue distinguishes itself as different in degree and kind from the landmark social progressive movements of the 20^th century, such as women’s emancipation, civil rights, and multiculturalism, to which it has often been compared.

Disputes over the complex set of tradeoffs between environmental conservation and economic development have dominated environmental policy and treaty discussions at the international level for the last half century, and continue to stymie progress on issues such as climate change, deforestation, and biofuels. These problems demonstrate that at the core of sustainability ethics lies a classic tragedy of the commons, namely, the intractable problem of persuading individuals, or individual nations, to take specific responsibility for resources that have few or no national boundaries (the atmosphere, the oceans), or which the global economy allows to be extracted from faraway countries, the environmental costs of which are thus “externalized” (food, fossil fuels, etc.). How the international community settles the problem of shared accountability for a rapidly depleting global commons, and balances the competing objectives of economic development and environmental sustainability, will to a large extent determine the degree of decline of the planet’s natural capital this century. One tragic prospect looms: If there is no international commitment, however patchwork, to protect the global resource commons, then the gains in economic prosperity, poverty alleviation and public health in the developing world so hard won by international agencies over the second half of the 20^th century, will quickly be lost.

Precautionary Principle

The precautionary principle is likewise central to sustainability ethics. The margins of uncertainty are large across many fields of the biophysical sciences. Simply put, there is a great deal we do not know about the specific impacts of human activities on the natural resources of land, air, and water. In general, however, though we might not have known where the specific thresholds of resilience lie in a given system—say in the sardine population of California’s coastal waters—the vulnerability of ecosystems to human resource extraction is a constant lesson of environmental history. A prosperous and vital economic engine, the Californian sardine fishery collapsed suddenly in the 1940s due to overfishing. The precautionary principle underlying sustainability dictates that in the face of high risk or insufficient data, the priority should lie with ecosystem preservation rather than on industrial development and market growth.

Sustainability, in instances such as these, is not a sexy concept. It’s a hard sell. It is a philosophy of limits in a world governed by dreams of infinite growth and possibility. Sustainability dictates that we are constrained by earth’s resources as to the society and lifestyle we can have. On the other hand, sustainability is a wonderful, inspiring concept, a quintessentially human idea. The experience of our own limits need not be negative. In fact, what more primitive and real encounter between ourselves and the world than to feel our essential dependence on the biospheric elements that surround us, that embeddedness with the air, the light, the warmth or chill on our skins, and the stuff of earth we eat or buy to propel ourselves over immense distances at speed unimaginable to the vast armies of humanity who came before us.

Sustainability studies is driven by an ethics of the future. The word itself, sustainability, points to proofs that can only be projected forward in time. To be sustainable is, by definition, to be attentive to what is to come. So sustainability requires imagination, but sustainability studies is also a profoundly historical mode, committed to reconstruction of the long, nonlinear evolutions of our dominant instrumentalist views of the natural world, and usage and ideology that continue to limit our ecological understanding and inhibit mainstream acceptance of the sustainability imperative.

Sustainability studies thus assumes the complex character of its subject, multiscalar in time and space, and dynamically agile and adaptive in its modes. Sustainability teaches that the environment is not a sideshow, or a scenic backdrop to our lives. A few more or less species. A beautiful mountain range here or there. Our relation to our natural resources is the key to our survival. That’s why it’s called “sustainability.” It’s the grounds of possibility for everything else. Unsustainability, conversely, means human possibilities and quality of life increasingly taken away from us and the generations to come.

Review Questions

1. What are the major technological and economic developments since 1500 that have placed an increased strain on the planet’s ecosystem services? What is the role of carbon-based energy systems in that history?
2. What is the so-called Great Acceleration of the 20^th century? What were its principal social features and environmental impacts?
3. What is the Green Revolution? What were its successes, and what problems has it created?
4. What does it mean to say that global environmental problems such as climate change and ocean acidification represent a “tragedy of the commons?” How are global solutions to be tied to local transitions toward a sustainable society?
5. How does sustainability imply an “ethics of the future?” And in what ways does sustainability ethics both borrow and diverge from the principles that drove the major progressive social movements of the 20^th century?
6. How has the human capacity for normalization both helped and hindered social development, and what are its implications for sustainable reform of our industries, infrastructure, and way of life?
7. Take an everyday consumer item—running shoes, or a cup of coffee—and briefly chart its course through the global consumer economy from the production of its materials to its disposal. What are its environmental impacts, and how might they be reduced?
8. What are synchronic and diachronic views of time, and how does the distinction help us to understand the relation between human and natural systems, and to potentially rewrite history from an environmental point of view?
9. How is a bio-complex view of the relations between human and natural systems central to sustainability, in both theory and practice?
10. What is the long history of the human relationship to bees, and what radical changes in that relationship have occurred over the last fifty years to bring it to the point of collapse?
11. What are the implications of bee colony collapse for the global food system?
12. In what ways is the BP Oil Disaster of 2010 an example of complex human systems failure, and what are its longer chains of causation in the history of human industrialization?

References and Further Reading

Environmental Protection Agency. 2018. Colony collapse disorder. https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/colony-collapse-disorder. Accessed June 2, 2021.

Jacobsen, R. (2008). Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. New York: Bloomsbury.