Sustainability is a shift in thinking from the individual to include an awareness of other people and the wider context, over time. Yes, it is about accepting responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions – one of its foundations is the ‘polluter pays’ principle. It also asks for constraints on the individual for the benefit of the wider group. We do need to be extremely vigilant or course, to ensure that any constraint imposed is justified and fair, but this is a basic part of living in society.
Sustainability did not develop as an ideology of constraint, even less as a form of spirituality or nostalgia for nature. It developed as a rational response to real problems that directly affect people. Problems like diseases caused by industrial pollution, old people dying of cold in uninsulated homes, mass unemployment, crop failure, floods. People have quite rightly looked at that and said ‘this is rubbish. Is this the best we can do?’
Some critics of sustainability tend to frame it in terms of self-doubt, constraining individual freedom, and reducing innovation. In describing sustainability, I would urge them to look instead for the positive counterpart to all three:
What we are now exploring, collectively, is whether human beings can work together cooperatively to address problems and create solutions, such as:
Is it possible to forecast and prevent a human catastrophe, on a global scale?
What I find intriguing about sustainability, is that we don’t know if we can do it. So perhaps the question of ‘should we do it?’ is in fact secondary to ‘can we do it?’
Entire societies have been destroyed due to environmental, economic or social changes. I am not interested in preserving our society in aspic, far from it. I don’t think we have ‘the best’ society, but I am kind of attached to it, and I think it’s a nice idea that future generations of people will be able to get on with their lives in peace and dignity, because we didn’t trash the place too much.
The philosophy of sustainability follows from the recognition that we need to create a system in which we can survive, which enables the management of our resources and our environment. Inherent in sustainability is the heroic belief that we can steer the future. We do not yet know if we can do it, but we should support the people who have risen to that challenge.
Sustainability introduces a wider set of factors into the design equation; it means raising the bar on design. It would be wrong to assume a dogma among sustainability advocates – we are all engaged in a debate in which there are few black-and-white answers. The positive side of sustainability has tremendously innovative consequences.
is a Chartered Architect specialising in regeneration, sustainability and communities. She was until recently Head of Sustainability at award-winning Wilkinson Eyre Architects and now runs her own practice, Surface to Air, which enables creative initiatives in architecture through design, event, publications and research. She has completed research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and offers sustainability consultancy to architects and other built environment professionals.
Pascale is organising Seductive Sustainability, an ‘open deck’ debate and networking event on 1st February 2006, 6.30pm till late, in the Basement Bar, Jaguar Shoes, 34-36 Kingsland Road, Shoreditch, London. Contact: info@peopleinspace.com
Elected politicians, unelected NGOs, morally-conscious media types and professionals – architects, designers, planners – often say the word ‘sustainable’. Sometimes, in my hearing, the tone is romantic. Usually, however, it has an edge of menace. The emphasis is on the second syllable: stain. The stain is human, and laid on the unblemished face of nature.
It is as if some unbeliever just might stand up on behalf of unsustainability as a way of life. That kind of untenable, or unsustainable position, consciously held, may in fact never have existed; if it did, it now faces a kind of species extinction of its own.
When people talk about sustainability it is because they have the feeling that contemporary arrangements of many sorts – extraction, production, transport, consumption – cannot go on in the old way. The elite foreboding that current conduct is unsustainable recalls the famous remark of the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. In the middle of the First World War, Lenin wrote:
‘For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way.’
Today Christopher Caldwell, senior editor at the American right-wing magazine, The Weekly Standard, notes that ‘Politics is drifting towards deadlock in every western country’ and asks:
‘Are we in the democratic equivalent of what leftists used to call a "pre-revolutionary situation"?’.
We are not; but Caldwell certainly suggests that the upper classes feel unable to live in the old way. Environmentally, they hate themselves for what they have done, and are still doing.
Perhaps the feeling that the centre cannot hold is also, more charitably, a protest against short-term thinking. Sustainababble frequently invokes the fate of future generations. Not to be sustainable is to subject imagined children of the future to all kinds of terrors. Thus sustainability is a doctrine hostile not just to the abuse of nature, but also to what it perceives as a global kind of child abuse – abuse that is perpetrated now, but whose full, cumulative impact will not be known for decades.
Yet many of those who proselytise for sustainability have an unsustainable attitude to the timing of events. Global warming is variously perceived as a threat in the mid century, in the year 2100, and right now, after Hurricane Katrina. Avian flu is to produce a European pandemic among humans right now. For the influential German chemist and environmentalist Michael Braungart, chemicals in buildings, textiles and toys have already warped the minds of kids.
Those championing sustainability also have an unsustainable attitude to history. There is no accounting for past errors. Rachel Carson’s Silent spring (1962) held that pesticides and insecticides ranked with nuclear war as ‘the central problem of our age’. But in 1968, Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich found a different central problem: overpopulation. By 1972, the Club of Rome’s emphasis was on resource depletion.
It seems almost anything can be dubbed The Most Unsustainable Aspect of Our Age. Memories need not be sustained of whatever was the previous incumbent. But a concept so dependent on historical amnesia is of little use to the long-term thinking which it purports to represent.
is Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester.
© 2004·06
Civilisations have been built up, have flourished and, in most cases, have declined and perished. This is not the place to discuss why they have perished; but we can say: there must have been some failure of resources.
E. F. Schumacher
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