The Future of Sustainability: Have Your Say!

Week One - “Global Challenges to Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century”
Comment / Comentario / Commentaire

Bryan Furnass, Nature and Society Forum, Australia

Moderating team: Bryan Furnass examines the the challenges to sustainability from a bio-historical perspective. He identifies the human trilemma as three Ps - population, pollution and poverty; and the solution as three Es - ecology, education and ethics. He agrees that science and technology can play an important role in moving towards sustainability but that they will be ineffective unless societies cease to be imprisoned by the prevailing economic rationalism.

Bryan Furnass analiza los desafíos globales desde una perspective bio-histórica. Identifica un trilema: población, polución y pobreza; la solución es triple: ecología, educación, ética. Está de acuerdo sobre el posible rol de la ciencia y la tecnología hacia la sostenibilidad, pero advierte que las sociedades deben liberarse de su modelo económico.

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Thank you Jeffrey McNeely for your comprehensive view of challenges facing us in the 21st century.

I think it is also useful to examine the origins of these challenges in bio-historical perspective. The stage was set for an unsustainable future when our hunter-gatherer ancestors made the transition to agicultural settlements in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East some 10,000 years (400 generations) ago. This established the basic equation: environmental impact = population x resource use.

Human population numbers gradually increased to around one billion until the industrial transition, a mere 250 years (5 generations) ago, since when population has increased over sixfold to around 6.5 billion. The resource side of the equation has had a major impact during the past 50 years (2 generations), when humans entered the hyper-consumption phase of history, initiating a plague of the communicable disease affluenza which has now spread to the world's two most populous nations, India and China, but with increasing degrees of inequality within and between nations.

The human trilemma may be summarised as the three Ps - population, pollution and poverty. The solution may be summarised as the three Es - ecology, education and ethics. Although there is no such entity as sustainability in the long term, we can at least try to progress towards a less rapidly developing unsustainable future. An uncomfortable analogy is with the "unsinkable" liner, the SS Titanic, whose increasing speed was driven by the greed of economic gain, coupled with the hubris of wanting to break the speed record for a transatlantic crossing, despite warnings of icebergs ahead. At some stage in the journey it was possible to avoid collision by reducing speed and changing direction, before the momentum of the ship made disaster inevitable in the time available. The current global situation is similar to that of the SS Titanic, although we would all like to think that it is not too late to effect change.

I absolutely agree that science and technology can play an important role in moving towards sustainability - existing technologies for agricultural reform and low-carbon energy generation are examples. But they will be ineffective unless societies cease to be imprisoned by the prevailing fashion of economic rationalism, through which non-renewable natural resources are converted as rapidly as possible into wastes, regardless of environmental consequences (modern warfare is an outstanding example of this).