On sustainability
Talking about sustainability has become the ecological equivalent of putting ‘love’ in cards to elderly relatives whose house price you are keeping an eye on.
On one end of the scale everything is sustainable. Say next Tuesday we nuke most of the complex life from the face of the Earth. The planet will probably have another crack at being the Garden of Eden, given a few million years or so. Besides, there are billions more planets like this one out there for the universe to be going on with.
At the other end of the scale nothing is sustainable. We’re all going to be dead in a few decades.
We live most of our everyday lives like these extremes are irrelevant. But they’re not. They might even be all that is relevant.
For example, we might consider how much of the environmental movement rests on eternal life fantasies linked to our myth of progress. I suspect that buried somewhere in our solutions fantasies there’s a tiny voice saying: “If we can just get this right, we can live forever. The scary thing won’t happen.”
Or we might consider what “unsustainable” really means. Thanks to decades of spin from folks like me, most people seem to think of unsustainable as something like “naughty”. In fact, it means that something will cease to happen in the foreseeable future.
Let’s take an example. It’s pretty well universally accepted that the industrialised global economy is unsustainable. What is not so accepted is that the industrialised global economy will cease to function in the foreseeable future. It took me about 20 years of working in the environmental movement to realise this. Which is odd, because it’s exactly the same thing.
This is a very different proposition to the current system just being a bit wonky. Most people understand that industrialised society isn’t perfect. They include the people who have experienced it killing their families and destroying their cultures. There are, of course, the odd few tech billionaires who cling to the ridiculous notion that it is headed towards some kind of perfection. But most of us just shrug and say, well, nothing’s perfect, and go about our day. We muddle along and see what happens.
Others are more influenced by the environmental movement. So they might believe this system will be made sustainable any day now by somebody doing something or other, or a lot of different something or others. They succumb to the cosy avalanche of claims that we’re making things “more sustainable” every day.
But there's only one way to make something unsustainable sustainable. Change it from being something that will cease to happen in the foreseeable future, to something that will carry on. This is orders of magnitude harder than what we are doing.
For example, back in 2003 I was working for the UK arm of a major global environmental organisation. They were helping to develop the then relatively niche concept of ‘ecological footprinting’. Basically, this divided up the world’s “natural resources” (productive land, clean water, etc) between the entire human population on Earth. It then calculated how much of their “share” people were using. It, of course, was largely based on the baseless assumption that the world exists for the benefit of our particular species of ape, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.
At the time most of the middle class lifestylers in the room were cruising along at something like 3.8 ‘planets’. The suggestion was that if everyone lived like us, we would need 3.8 Earths to make that “sustainable”. So we had to cut down on the cous cous. You’ve probably heard of this.
I asked the presenters whether their research had identified anyone in the UK living what they called a “One Planet” lifestyle. This would theoretically be someone who was only using their fair share of the planet’s resources. “Yes,” the speaker replied, somewhat sheepishly. “Tony Wrench.”
I nearly fell off my plastic chair. I didn’t know Tony personally. But I knew who he was. Before becoming a journalist and professional environmentalist I had spent a few years trying to carve out a life as a traditional forester. Tony was famous among us. He had built a hidden wooden roundhouse without permission in a Welsh forest and lived on the land, until the sun glinting off his solar panel was spotted from a helicopter.
“Are we going to start promoting that lifestyle then?” I asked, once I had composed myself. I was wondering whether I had made a wrong turn and should have just kept the massive beard and my axes.
Of course they weren’t. This organisation has royal patrons and armies of corporate sponsors. It's got executive salaries to pay. It's not about to start promoting a radical ‘back to the land’ neo-Luddite agenda, even though they’d just demonstrated that it would probably be at least as useful as anything we were doing. They certainly weren’t going to be led into the future by an illegal squatter in a protected area. Having a smattering of hippies living in woods in yurts might be picturesque, but it wasn’t a realistic future for a population of 60 odd million people.
So instead, the organisation got involved in the building of an ecologically designed block of flats in south London. The intention was that the occupants could live a One Planet lifestyle. It had everything. Solar power. Shared gardens and vehicles. High quality insulation. Water recycling. The aesthetics of a budget cereal packet. You name it.
After the technology and people had settled in, they were still cruising along on more than a ‘two planet’ lifestyle. Everyone realised that unless the building’s surroundings were also redesigned, if not the entire country it was standing in, most of the ecological impact of this way of life would continue. Residents drove off to supermarkets. They had unsustainable jobs, unsustainable schools and went on unsustainable overseas holidays. It wasn't long before we all pretty much stopped talking about it and went back to harassing the remaining snow leopards.
So while we think we’re making noble attempts to make life “more sustainable”, we’re allowing fundamentally unsustainable things to go on a bit longer. This increases the damage those activities are doing. It doesn't reduce it.
Spending my career working out how we can all run two planet lifestyles rather than three has still been working out how we can destroy most of the living things on this planet, probably including us.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about all these initiatives is the rock solid certainty that they are all on the right track all of the time. It has become more or less habitual for the elements of the environmental movement to feign certainty on a regular basis. This is partly because it’s seen as the only way to compete with the feigned certainties of the other side.
But certainty can so often mean being wrong at the top of our lungs. We would do better to risk getting things wrong while trying to be honest about them, and our uncertainties. That would be better than regurgitating safe mediocrities that we know to be partially or completely untrue.
I’ll go further. Right now I think uncertainty is a prerequisite for a sensible response to our predicament. Adopting a tone of certainty in the face of complexity is not leadership. It is bullshitting. In a complex situation any certain positions we adopt will likely be proved wrong sooner or later. The more certain we attempt to be in complexity the more we demonstrate that we don't know what we are doing.
At the moment the environmental movement often fails to acknowledge its mistakes, or even its uncertainty. We try to just move on to the next ill thought-out position, hoping nobody notices. That prioritises our own agendas and bias over truth. One of the main reasons NGOs are being increasingly mistrusted and ignored is because the public already knows that its certainties are false.
If NGOs were right to be so certain about all their positions, then why do they differ and change over time? And why do they never actually solve the problems they are apparently so certain about?
Expressing things in earnest, certain terms perpetuates arguments rather than opening up discussions. And while most of the money remains on the other side, we are likely to keep losing the arguments. Arguments also have a terrible propensity to spin off into tangents and irrelevancies. Most of the people I know who are considered socially or environmentally conscious waste a hell of a lot of energy and time trying to come up with definite, certain positions on a whole host of issues. Which lettuce should buy? Is JK Rowling a raging transphobe? It’s almost like the more ‘conscious’ we want to be, the less acceptable it is to say: “I’ve no idea,” or “that’s got nothing to do with me.” We’re too busy judging the trees to notice the forest is on fire.
There are times when we might want to state trenchant views for effect. That’s largely what I am doing here. But we shouldn’t consider these views policy, let alone reality. We should own our own prejudices and when we get it wrong, even if it’s awkward.
“We don’t know” is a perfectly good answer. It is often a much more accurate one than wheeling out the latest piece of groupthink. Environmental organisations yearn for trust and influence. To get them we need to hold serious, sensible conversations about the challenges we face. We need to stop pretending we already know everything.
I for one am not making any attempt to claim the moral high ground. I can’t even see it from where I’m standing.
On sustainability
More solid work Andy. It's horrifying to fully accept but the facts seem to tell us with no real prospect of being wrong that our civilization is whistling through the air, having overshot the top of the cliff some time ago and until we hit the ground we aren't going to see change. My old excuse to play by the systems consumptive rules was that we need to hit the tipping point (this was when I assumed that contemporary levels of climate and ecological impact would see a multilateral change in global politics and economics - I was a hopeful youth) ASAP so we can steer civilization into a better trajectory at the soonest possible time. This was justified using the logic that delaying the civilizational tipping point with constant loss of ecological function and biodiversity would mean that urging it on rather than delaying would leave us with the best planetary function to work with when the eco-rapture arrived. All those naïve mental gymnastics have now failed me. The perverse result is that now I'm more committed to so-called sustainable choices such as trying not to fly, cycling everywhere I can, growing as much of my own food as possible and avoiding unnecessary consumption (which probably still leaves me with a footprint equivalent to 10x a Tony Wrench footprint) but I no longer think these actions are making a tangible difference. The best reasoning I can come up with is that it's a good upbringing for my kids and might make them more resilient to the future. So this leaves me in a very foreign moral landscape. I think I'm probably doing these things mostly to a swage the cognitive dissonance of a middle aged and stumbling conservation biologist who is seeing the justification for their career crumbling around them. Perhaps this ramble is just my way of confirming to myself that so called 'sustainable practices' are now just therapy for the sadness that our predicament creates.
If I can sum up - we convince ourselves that 'it will get better' whilst doing nothing to make it so. The planet will self correct and likely kill off humanity in the process.
NGO's work on the principle that ambition is progress, when in fact just the opposite is true.