Sustainable delusion

Julian Kenny
Tuesday, February 23rd 2010

First there was the Club of Rome and its Limits of Growth in the 1970s followed by Our Common Future in 1980s. Both are products of the United Nations and aim to tackle the conflict between growth of human populations and the negative effects of such growth on the environment.

It is by no means a new issue. Indeed the Reverend Malthus in 1798, just a year after Trinidad was captured by the British, wrote in An essay on the principle of population ’The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man’. His alarming words were written at a time where there was considerable debate among diverse thinkers about the future of human society, some supporting while others opposed, much like we see in the current global warming/climate change flap. His predictions proved to be incorrect as he did not take into effect human ingenuity and technological advances.

The book, Our Common Future, is a 400-page document produced by an international bureaucracy and popularly called the Brundtland Report, after the chair Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway. It was commissioned by the World Commission on Environment and Development established in 1983 by the UN and published in 1987. It in some ways resembles the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), given the diversity of its contributors the listed in the report. The book gives a somewhat rambling and wooly definition of the concept of sustainable development starting with the observation; ’Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable - to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept of sustainable development does imply limits - not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organisation on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities’. It concludes with the observation, ’Yet in the end, sustainable development is not a fixed state of harmony, but rather a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological developments and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs. We do not pretend that the process is easy or straightforward. Painful choices have to be made. Thus, in the final analysis sustainable development must rest on political will.’’ Typical international bureaucratic jargon. This idea is now incorporated into the laws of Trinidad and Tobago and has become embedded in the revised National Environmental Policy. The University of the West Indies even has a special research and educational unit for sustainable development. Now it rolls of the tongues of politicians, planners and economists, and even the odd scientists, with almost religious and missionary zeal. It is perhaps relatively easy to understand when one lives in a small island, with its island-dwarfing pressures, entirely dependent on extraction of natural gas and petroleum for the time being, and a country where development is seen as exclusively economic and physical development, where the minister responsible for the environment publicly talks about T&T having a ’low carbon future’ as it expands its emissions of carbon dioxide. This is not to say that there is nothing in the concept. The general approach might be applied in circumstances where there is some prospect of success. But so much of the world consists of the rich consumer societies while a significantly larger population lives in poverty, even if they seem to be able to afford cell phones. And there are the countless multitudes for which there are simply no prospects simply because they are socially, culturally or demographically entrapped. I would have thought that although the politicians and bureaucrats might be unaware of the world problem, at least the economists and certainly the biologists would understand and appreciate that the resource consumption levels of Western Europe, North America and Japan must be entirely unsustainable if applied to the other six billion humans on the planet. Human population can only continue expanding at cost to the world environment in terms of conversion of natural environment to built human environment. Attempting to sustain even current mean world consumption patterns, with all the predicted negative effects loss of tropical forests, drought and desiccation, air, water and soil contamination and possibly global warming and climate change must surely be unsustainable, within the meaning of the word. But in the third world, especially in small island states, there will always be some who will continue with messianic zeal to try to convince the uncritical public that sustainable development is a clearly defined and designed engineering mechanism that can expand the carrying capacity of their little delusional envelopes. Sustainable development is the only way to save the planet they claim. All that is needed is to get the politicians to adopt it. Simple, as simple as the power of prayer, that can negate laws of biology. Source: http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161599093