Foreword
by Alan AtKisson
To-do
List for a Sustainable Civilization
The challenge of sustainability places greater demands
on us than is commonly understood. People often speak
of ‘balancing’ economic, social and environmental
needs – as though performing a mere tight-rope
act, a skilful stroll above the crowd and the safety-net,
was all that was required. But there is no safety-net;
to fail is to crash. The crowd cannot just watch;
all must participate. And we need far more than balance:
we need transformation, a wave of social, technical
and economic innovation that will touch every person,
community, company, institution and nation on the
Earth. The irony is that this transformation is still
viewed as an economic ‘cost’, when it
is in fact an enormous economic opportunity –
an opportunity that we are increasingly being forced
to recognize. Consider the widening abyss between
how we run our economies and what Nature’s systems
can tolerate. Consider the rising levels of international
tension as gaps widen between the have-a-lots and
the have-not-at-alls, the techno-rich and the food-andwater-
poor. Consider that we are rapidly losing whole peoples,
whole species, whole ecosystems. Technology is, of
course, an enormous blessing. Bhutanese villages celebrate
the arrival of electricity as though it were ‘the
coming of the sun’. Few alive today understand
the horror of smallpox and other diseases that have
been all but eradicated (even though other diseases,
like AIDS and malaria, continue to haunt us). Who
wants to turn back the clock on dental care, or withhold
it from those who do not
yet have it?
The developed world’s quality of life represents
success in the human struggle of a hundred thousand
years – the struggle for survival, health,
longer life, safety from Nature’s unpredictable
rages, comfort, happiness. Those living in the world’s
richer demographic groups can now expect their children
to grow up healthy, to see grandchildren do the
same and to watch all this from the vantage point
of technology based personal satisfaction. But this
amazing accomplishment has come to us via catastrophically
destructive methods. It is physically impossible
to spread such wonders to the whole world, doing
things the way we do them now. It is very likely
impossible even to maintain this quality of life
for those who already have it, without enormous
changes. In the industrialized world, we do not
need ‘sustainable development’. We need
sustainable re-development, a set of transformations
in the direction of sustainability, in virtually
every sector. Here are just a few of the challenges
we actually face, challenges that we inherited from
our recent ancestors and that we will almost certainly
pass on to our descendants:
The
complete redevelopment of our energy systems.
Energy is the life-blood of our economies but producing
it is destroying our climate, damaging our health
and degrading nature. We must make our energy sources
and systems climate-neutral, or better yet climate-restorative.
This transformation involves much more than just
energy efficiency or hybrid engines. We must either
put fossil-carbon-based energy systems essentially
to rest in our cars, planes and power plants; or
we must find a way to permanently sequester the
carbon and manage the Earth’s atmosphere,
permanently.
The complete redevelopment of chemical,
material and building technologies.
While we have begun a transformation in all these
areas, the work remains far from finished. We still
release dizzying amounts of poisonous substances
into nature, where they accumulate in living bodies.
We still build incredibly wasteful, toxic and inefficient
products and buildings. We are now adding the wild
cards of nanotechnology and biotechnology to this
strange brew. How we make things, and how we think
about how we make things, must change radically.
The complete
redevelopment of industrial agriculture.
If we are to feed the world and coming generations,
we need farming and food production systems that
do not depend on fossil fuel, fossil water, chemical
pesticides, ever-increasing nitrogen fertilizers
and the like. Despite many wonderful experiments
with change, most people’s very lives still
depend on one or all these things – all of
which are known to be dangerous, devastating, or
deadly. This is perhaps the transformation nearest
to our survival needs.
The
preservation of the world’s remaining species
and ecosystems. I say ‘remaining’
to remind us that much is already lost. The cost
of that loss is immeasurable, even in gross economic,
human-centred terms. Cures for cancer, models for
chemical production and farmable sources of food
have all certainly disappeared, without our knowing
it. Gone already are many sources of inspiration,
joy and – think of the dodo – even laughter.
‘Nature’ as we have known it for millennia
is disappearing. And yet there is no more precious
inheritance to preserve for future generations than
the richness of life itself.
Stable and long-lasting international
peace. We must never forget that human
beings have created the means to destroy whole cities
at the press of a button. We have created garbage
with the power to poison us and other creatures
for thousands of years. We are, as I have written
elsewhere, ‘doomed to a high-technology future’,
because we must forever maintain our technical capacity
to deal with the results of opening Pandora’s
Box. For this and so many other reasons, striving
for basic peace, stability and security is not an
ideal; it is a precondition for the maintenance
of civilization.
Given the scale of these challenges, perhaps our
greatest need is a drastic increase in the number
of people who understand them, accept them and dedicate
their efforts to addressing them. This book is meant
to support just such an increase in committed engagement.
And fortunately, the increase is well under way,
as the number of people working directly on ‘sustainability’,
or incorporating it into their existing work, continues
to grow exponentially. In part, this increase is
driven by moral concerns and idealistic feelings,
as well it should be. The development of morality
and the ability to envision better futures are fundamental
to the human animal. Love and vision are our ‘better
angels’.
But one need not be
an impassioned visionary to understand the profound
economic advantages of embracing sustainable (re)development.
In the transition from horse-drawn carriages to
cars, from firewood to fossil fuel, from typewriters
to the Internet, tremendous fortunes have been made.
The transformation to next-generation energy, transport,
agriculture and industry – indeed the rebuilding
of the 20th century’s ageing and increasingly
dangerous infrastructure – will make greater
fortunes still. And the past century’s best
examples have already given us plenty of case study
proof that morality and profit can be easily combined
to conserve habitat, reduce poverty and build peace.
The continuing explosion of creative and determined
efforts to build a world that is environmentally,
economically, socially and humanly healthy is hope-giving.
But it is not so hard to understand.
If this book’s
‘to-do list for a sustainable civilization’
is not worth the dedication of a life’s work,
what is?
Stockholm, Sweden
26 March 2004
|
|