Conservation Comment: United stand on sustainability vital

Peter Frost

WHAT is your understanding of the concept of "sustainability"? At the end of August, the government released its Draft National Strategy for Environmental Education for Sustainability (EEfS). I only got to hear about it last week, but it got me thinking: what is our concept of sustainability?

Do we all have the same understanding? I suspect that some eschew the concept altogether, arguing that it is either irrelevant or too abstract. Dream on. Others may promote it, but perhaps without thinking through all its complexities.

The draft strategy proposes the vision: New Zealanders are innovative and motivated people who work together for social, cultural, economic and environmental sustainability. This implies that we need to consider the concept across at least four, not wholly separate spheres. To do this, the strategy sets out four goals: developing social, cultural, economic and scientific understanding; fostering kaitiakitanga, personal responsibility and citizenship; enhancing whanaungatanga and collaboration; and, emphasising care for our environment and life-long learning.

These may all be necessary but are they sufficient? Just what concept of sustainability is being promoted? The document doesn't elaborate, nor are the complexities inherent in concept apparent.

Let's take environmental sustainability. There are at least two contrasting views. The 1987 Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, takes a utilitarian view, defining "sustainable" as development "that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

The problem with this is that we don't know what these future needs may be, either in quantitative terms or qualitatively. The human population continues to grow, as does its aspirations, meaning that tomorrow's needs for resources will almost certainly be greater than those today, but by how much? We also don't know exactly which resources will be in greatest future demand. Technological advances, new inventions and changes in lifestyles, for better or worse, will all likely place different pressures on resources than those today. A currently overused resource may be little needed tomorrow.

More critically, our economies depend overwhelmingly on non-renewable resources: fossil fuels, metal ores, earth minerals, paleo-water, even uranium-based nuclear energy (in some other countries). As such, much of our resource use can never be infinitely sustainable. Nevertheless, the utilitarian view encourages a shift towards proportionately greater use of renewable resources and more judicious consumption of non-renewable resources. This includes, for example, using them preferentially to construct the infrastructure needed for renewable energy production; making longer-lived products; recovering and reusing as much energy and materials as possible; and producing higher-value goods rather than simply increasing unit output.

The other view of sustainability considers Earth as a system. What is needed to maintain optimum throughput of energy and matter, not only to sustain human needs, but also those productive, regulatory, assimilatory and underlying supportive processes that sustain life generally, ourselves included? It sees our economies as being embedded in the biosphere, not separate from it. The Earth is not a closed system (most of the energy that drives life and physical processes comes externally from the sun), but in material terms it is finite.

This view implicitly questions the concept of unlimited growth, that we can continue expanding our economies by endlessly depleting non-renewable resources, or increasingly degrading the regenerative capacities of renewable ones. We may be delaying the onset of limits through increasing global transfers of resources, finding ever more remote stocks to exploit (think fracking and seabed mining), and partial resource substitution, but limits will eventually emerge, no matter what economists and politicians say. Unlimited growth is not sustainable, and the EEfS draft strategy could best start by acknowledging that reality.

�Peter Frost is an environmental scientist who has worked on issues of environment and development overseas. He wonders if our current approach to environmental issues is sufficiently holistic.