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Sustainability – Gary Williams

Submitted by on November 10, 2009 – 12:41 pm

PINZ

“Life has become increasingly CREATIVE. Life creates itself, and over time has self-generated greater and greater opportunities for further creativity.”

I think it’s important to recirculate useful material.  This article was written back in 2001, yet it’s just as relevant today, if not more so.  It’s about the meaning of ‘sustainability’.  It’s from a permaculturalist’s perspective.  It covers sustainability in all areas – environmental, social, cultural.  It’s worth checking out.  I would have liked to have found this article when I was studying environmentalism at varsity.  Back then I was looking for ideas that not only stimulated me intellectually, but also touched me emotionally.  Permaculture does this for me. 

SUSTAINABILITY – Gary Williams

SUSTAINABILITY

Is ‘sustainable development’ an oxymoron? What is ‘sustainability’? There are many definitions from different viewpoints, but none seem adequate.

Where we perceive problems – of energy availability, resource supply, waste disposal or pollution, service delivery, effectiveness etc – we most often look for solutions in technological advances or innovations. This does not necessarily improve ‘sustainability’; it is more a matter of achieving greater efficiencies.

‘Efficiency’ is an easier term to define. It is “more for less”. Minimising the resources used (inputs) or wastes generated, or maximising the goods/services produced (outputs). Efficiency is about using the same resources to produce more goods/services, or using fewer resources to produce the same goods/services. Increasing outputs for given inputs, or reducing inputs for given outputs.

Efficiency is then a technical matter about processes, and is neutral about goals or objectives.

Engineers are very much concerned with efficiency and effectiveness. They use technical knowledge and design principles to achieve greater efficiency. The old adage is that an engineer can do for $1 what anyone could do for $2.

Whatever the objectives, engineers can do it more efficiently.

* efficiently bulldoze down hills and drain swamps to build roads;
* efficiently treat sewage to minimise pollution;
* efficiently develop wetlands to enhance wildlife habitats.

Different objectives, but the same process criteria.

So much for ‘efficiency’. Let’s try to move towards ‘sustainability’.

Where are there examples of sustainable system? When you look at artificial human engineered systems, then you can’t find any. If you analyse such systems they soon fall over, it quickly becoming apparent that they are very partial systems highly dependent on a continual supply of various external inputs. If you look at natural biological systems, then sustainable systems are everywhere. This is hardly surprising. They have been developed within a larger environment where life has existed for aeons and long term survival is the name of the game.

There is a trend now in engineering and other design professions to look at these natural systems for guidance. Like all trends it has been given a name – Biomimicry. Learning from nature, to get away from the high energy requirements of our ‘heat, beat & treat’ approach. Getting away from the high temperatures and high pressures which are so common in our conversion processes, to the ‘room temperature’ processes of nature.

This biomimicry is not just in terms of products, it is about processes as well, and even more importantly about systems.

Looking at biological systems then for sustainability, I will take just a couple of examples.

Colonising vegetation: Plant species that re-vegetate degraded environments – after fire, erosion, floods or droughts. They spread rapidly, as a high growth but wasteful or inefficient system. Not limited by available energy (from sunlight) or nutrients, a few well adapted species take over. Their sustainability though depends on the continual availability of degraded areas to give new opportunities for growth all the time.

Tropical jungle: A very diverse forest of many inter-dependent species, it is a highly efficient system recycling its resources, nutrients, water, atmospheric gases etc. It is a very stable and highly productive system, with lots of feedback links and inter-related recycling processes. Its sustainability derives from this complex interdependence.

There are many different types of forests around the world, from the single species cold climate conifer forests, to the more diverse but one species dominant temperate forests, to the more unusual temperate climate jungle of the New Zealand native low land forests or the single/dominant species high altitude forests. They are all sustainable within the wider system in which they exist.

Sustainability is then not about processes, like efficiency is, but about systems. It is a systems question, about the degree of integration and long term balance.

There are some principles of sustainability, but they are principles about systems and their long term functionality. Some are:

* balance of energy use and supply;
* no continual accumulations of ‘wastes’;
* no on going excess in the population of any part/species;
* self-regulation to maintain recycling balances;
* robustness to cope with damage through redundancy and repair capabilities.

Within these general principles sustainable systems can vary greatly, in: diversity; population fluctuations; adaptability (degree of robustness); and effectiveness of self-regulation (or degree of internal recycling). For example, some systems have a few species with large population fluctuations (like the colonising vegetation) and others have many species with minimal population changes (like the tropical jungle).

Any sustainable biological system is part of a larger system, and while it has its own internal dynamic, its sustainability also depends, in fact, on its inter-relationships and containment within a larger whole. Sustainability is about systems within systems.

Sustainability is then NOT:

* maintaining the resource base (land, water, air),
* protecting bio or cultural diversity,
* maintaining energy supplies (high availability at low cost).

Sustainability is about the INTEGRATION of all these aspects in a balanced systematic way.

* The balancing of energy and resources, of use to availability.
* The coherence of the system, for self-regulation and adaptability.

To give a couple of concrete examples:

Improving sewage treatment to protect water resources at the cost of greater energy use does not improve the overall system sustainability.

Replacing chemical weed control in agriculture with mechanical means may have environmental and health benefits, but it may have no real impact on sustainability.

So far I have talked about the physical environment, but there are, of course, social factors as well. We are part of the system, and our expectations and demands determine the claims we make on the wider system, on the natural environment that supports and sustains us.

The sustainability of our lifestyle, within the system of life on this planet, depends on the demands we make, how realistic they are and what are the system feedback responses that arise from our actions. The critical questions are: “What is enough?” and “What objectives and for whose benefit?”

In a system all parts are linked together, there is no prime position or final consumer. What are inputs and outputs depends on the point of view, or position within the system. Bacteria and viruses have a different viewpoint to us!

Sustainability is then really a matter of the quality of our lives and how playing our part in the wider system of life can be mutually fulfilling. There is an inter-relationship between sustainability and the quality of our lives, and between our expectations and their realisation.

QUALITY of LIFE SUSTAINABILITY

EXPECTATIONS REALISATION

So, efficiency is certainly not the issue. We are not trying to find a whole array of technical fixes for individual problems. We are searching for system balance, within a greater dynamic and constantly adapting system.

Continual growth (of material outputs we value) is certainly not possible.
Continual accumulation of wastes is not possible.
Reducing resilience or system adaptability is to invite trouble.

Any sustainable system must have limits (for all parts). There must be overall levels of productivity that are defined by the system itself – output ceilings for any part/species. And it must maintain adaptability, because life and the world we live in are dynamic and any system is within a wider system.

In the long term all living systems are in a sense sustainable, as they are part of the whole on going system of life. Whatever happens, any living system either self-corrects, or it is corrected by the larger system that contains it through some systemic constraints.

The question is: What type of system do we want, and what type of correction processes? What type of lifestyle is preferable and how will our demands be kept within the bounds of reality?

If survival is the ultimate criterion, then life as a whole has been a sustainable system over a very long period of time. Over this long period of time life has developed, and the way in which it has developed can provide some insight into what ‘sustainable development’ might mean.

Life has developed in the sense of becoming increasingly more complex and diversified. There have been qualitative changes or ‘improvements’, and we can characterise these improvements in terms of a greater responsiveness while becoming more robust or resilient. How has this been achieved? By an increase in the internal dynamics, through a combination of increasing structural arrangement (of differentiated species, eco-systems etc) and more and more feedback links.

Life has become increasingly CREATIVE. Life creates itself, and over time has self-generated greater and greater opportunities for further creativity.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT may then be the development of increasingly dynamic self-maintaining systems that enhance creativity.

It should not be seen as more efficient growth, or as a dumbing down because of the constraints of resource depletion, pollution and energy limitations.

Rather it should be life enhancing.

But if sustainable development is to be life enhancing, then we can not carry on as we are. We will have to look at the world in which we live in a different way, and have a different understanding of what life is about and what it means. Then we will naturally act differently – and hopefully sustainably.

GARY WILLIAMS

November 2001

www.permaculture.org

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