Quibbling on the Definition of “Sustainability” — And Other Words
The other day, I wrote a comment on an article that dealt with the sustainability of dog ownership, in response to which someone pointed out:
I guess it depends on how you define “sustainability.”
True, it may be hard, or even impossible, to work out a precise definition of “sustainable” that applies in all cases. In fact, a number of people have suggested that we stop using the term altogether simply because it means so many different things in various contexts.
I totally disagree with this latter idea.
No better word in the English language exists to communicate the idea here, though, obviously, if you want to pick nits on the subject, you won’t get anywhere at all. We can all agree that sustainable processes are those that, a) can be continued indefinitely though time, b) result in a minimum of toxic byproducts, c) don’t abuse or exploit members of the human race, d) don’t pose a constant drain on finite natural resources without a way to replenish them and, e) don’t cause unacceptable amounts of damage elsewhere in the ecosystem.
I just wrote this off the top of my head, and I’m sure there are more complete, elegant, and unassailable ways of expressing the idea. In fact, it may sound like a lot of words for such a simple concept, but consider an example. What if I told you that I had a way to raise and catch wild tuna that was minimally polluting and left the tuna population essentially unchanged? You might say that this was by definition “sustainable,” until I admitted that it would wipe out 90% of the seal population in a matter of a few decades, or that it posed incredible safety risks to fishermen, at which you’d be forced to admit that my plan is not really “sustainable” in any meaningful way.
Again, not to be cavalier, but I think the intention of the term, as it’s commonly used by thoughtful people who honestly care about the subject, is completely clear.
This provides an opportunity for a segue: There happens to be an interesting coincidence happening in the U.S. right this moment surrounding this concept of the “intention of the term.” Readers outside the country may be unaware that our Supreme Court has agreed to re-consider the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), based on the fact that the actual words in the law may result in an unacceptable burden on the states vs. the federal government–even though it is 100% clear that this was a simple error, i.e., the lawmakers’ mistaken choice of words; it was certainly not part of the intention of the law.
Now you might be one of the people (like me) everywhere who say, “Well, if you’re so sure that the authors of the law intended X, why don’t you simply ask them? Wouldn’t that put an end to any doubt that might exist in anyone’s mind? This was just two years ago in 2012; just ask them to clarify what they meant. It’s not like you’re trying to interview the people who wrote the Bible—or even the Constitution itself. Just walk across the street (First Street Northeast in Washington, DC) and ask them.
Most people interpret the Constitution this way (above), though not all. For example, Antonin Scalia (pictured above), who I believe played a pivotal role in the decision to re-hear the case, is what is called a “textualist.” This means that to him, the intention of the law doesn’t matter in the slightest; the only thing that counts is the precise words that appear in the law themselves.
This strikes me as extremely backward; it sounds like some relic of jurisprudence from before Hammurabi’s time. Yes, it’s given the academically appealing name “textualism,” but it seems more like “obstructionism” or “regressivism,” or some other word that means “a doctrine that facilitates attempts to block civilization’s efforts to make itself more civilized.”
In any case, we’ll see what happens here.
In the meanwhile, for what it’s worth, I’m “thumbs up” on the word “sustainable.”
Agreed. Many people attack the semantics to defend legacy practices or to avoid the responsibility that comes with the term. I do wish there was a better verb other than “greening” for making a process or organization more sustainable.
Thanks. Yes, people object to “greening” even more than they do to “sustainability.” Personally, I’m fine on both, FWIW. You can’t please everyone. Plus, I think we have bigger problems to solve.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the word. The problem arises when people/corporations use it to sell us something, a product or a process. “Organic” & “natural “, are other words like “sustainable” that get that kind of abuse, not to mention “green” and “renewable”. For instance burning trees to power turbines is using a renewable resource, but with a time-scale of 40 years for humans & one wonders if the displaced moles, voles and lichen can wait around that long.
I guess the other issue is that one needs to be pretty comprehensive in one’s understanding of what is going on, how complex systems are actually working, before one can confidently say this or that process or product is sustainable. Degrees or approximations of sustainability are generally a more realistic way to look t things than a flat pronouncement of sustainability.
One of the really BIG ideas surfacing so inconveniently in so many aspects of human behavior is that not much of the way we have been living or behaving is or has been sustainable for a very long time.
You’re right about the use of vague terms to sell us stuff, and you’re absolutely about the word “natural,” which, as far as I can see, has lost 100% of its meaning.
To me, sustainability is not a thing but a state of mind.
and your so called textualism is a state of mind. The authors of the constitution provided a way to amend it that insured that the will of the people was followed when making progressive changes to the way we are governed. Reinterpreting the constitution without amending it is also a state of mind. Without this magnificent guiding document, these divergent states of mind would have come to blows long ago and shattered the union.
Sustainability is not specifically mentioned in the constitution so congress has wide latitude to act for the will of the people. The state of mind will become clearer and consensus will emerge. Only in a dictatorship will the intelligencia be able to ram through their inspired version of what is or is not sustainable. The end does not justify the means if it bypasses the safeguards built into the constitution. It may take longer to reach consensus but I don’t think that the environment is quite to the Henny Penny, sky is falling today. jmo
Maybe one way to look at the word “sustainable” is to review examples of what isn’t sustainable and use those examples in a thought experiment.
Here’s a few worth mentioning:
One: A global population of over seven billion humans will add another billion in ten years. The UN reports, food demand will increase by half, and energy demand by 60%, within the next 15 years. Already, three quarters of a billion people have no access to clean drinking water and 2.5 billion of us have no access to adequate sanitation.
By the way, 70% of freshwater use in the world is for agriculture – indeed, in the US, that figure is 80% and rises to 90% in many southwestern states. We hear lots of talk of ‘water conservation’ efforts across the huge swaths of the country now under drought conditions. Interesting that the focus of these campaigns seems to be fairly exclusively on residential use, which is by far the smaller fraction of the whole.
Two: Our intensive farming practices and the attendant heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides are rapidly depleting the soil while reducing the nutritive value of our food…
Here’s just one brief story on that subject: http://news.yahoo.com/only-60-years-farming-left-soil-degradation-continues-165713221.html
Three: An energy infrastructure based on fossil fuels that are, by definition, both finite and (despite the current dip in oil prices) increasingly expensive to extract as decades pass. These prehistoric carbon fuels also cause damage to living things (including us) as a direct consequence of extraction, refining, transportation and use.
Given that we here in the US already use 25% of global energy production with only 6% of the world’s population, with the rise of India and China as consumer economies with fossil-fed infrastructures, it will simply not be possible to rip carbon out of the belly of the earth fast enough.
Not long ago, an aid to Colin Powell revealed in an interview that Royal Dutch Shell has contingency plans in place for two global energy scenarios. The first is a smooth and orderly transition away from prehistoric carbon to modern renewable energy resources. The second is a desperate and bloody global brawl over the dwindling fossil scraps, before renewable energy is more seriously pursued. The firm’s conclusion is that the second is more likely.
Re: your last paragraph, wow! Can you send me something on this, please?
Obviously, there no law against a corporation’s going into a survivalist mode, like individuals who head to the hills or build bomb shelters. But this is more complicated; it’s equivalent to a single party’s building a bomb shelter for itself–and then dropping the bombs.
The man’s name is Lawrence Wilkerson, and here’s one of the places he talked about Shell’s scenarios – a speech in 2009:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4376
“What I’m talking about, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the American Empire. Empires have idiosyncrasies, nuances, complexities. Go back to the Assyrian, move forward to the British, go back to the Roman, move forward to the Third Reich, which lasted not 1,000 years but quite a few less. Every one is a little bit different, but they all disappear. Ours could last another 75 years, indeed another 100 years, but it could be a very messy 100 years.
“Royal Dutch Shell has done a look. They have some of the best strategists that I’ve run into (and I was a strategist in the military) in a long time, and their look says the future is a blueprint, or the future is a scramble. And they talk about how to 2075, how dwindling water resources, dwindling petroleum resources, gas and oil, and so forth are going to cause world leaders to have to either cooperate and coordinate”blueprint”or fight each other mercilessly for half a century or longer. Royal Dutch Shell believes it’s probably going to be the latter. They call that “scramble”.
“We arrive at essentially the same point in 2075, with a basket of energy sources, some of which we probably don’t even know now due to technological innovation, with different countries in the world, with different power relationships in the world; we arrive pretty much at the same place, whether it’s the blueprint scenario or the scramble scenario. There’s just under the scramble scenario a lot of blood, a lot of treasure, and a lot of dead bodies. Frankly, Royal Dutch Shell strategists, they won’t tell you this, but I believe it’s fair to say that they think the political will and the leadership won’t be here, and so we’re going to do the scramble and not the blueprint. If you’re an optimist, you can go for the blueprint.
“The real reason that Dick Cheney changed from the man who in 1991 (and in 1994 he repeated it) said, “Going to Baghdad is not worth a single soldier or Marine,” to some 12 years later, “Going to Baghdad,” with some enthusiasm, is a three letter word called “oil”.”
Sustainable is one of a collection of words including “Alternative,” “Renewable,” Sustainable and “green.” I commented on their use many times before I found this collection of definitions on the web: http://www.designnews.com/index-dn-ad.asp?gotourl=http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?doc_id=209565&dfpPParams=ind_184,aid_209565&dfpLayout=blog The author, of that article, makes several good points. These are not scientific terms with a commonly accepted meaning. When used in legal documents including legislation the terms should be defined in the documents. Sometimes those definitions can be quite far from commonly accepted understanding.
I think it is valid to consider the terms as covering an ever restrictive understanding. But we also have to be careful to see if what is being described is a definable set (set theory) or a direction. For example it is one thing to describe something as “green” meaning for example that it “does no harm” and another to describe something as “greener,” meaning that it has more of the “green” quality than something else although it may not be part of the defined set at all. For example people describe cars as “green” when I would argue that they actually mean that it is “greener.” Is any manufactured product made without some damage to the environment especially a complex item like an automobile? But an electric car can be “greener” or “more sustainable” than a petrol burner. Unfortunately in language we frequently use a shortcut and simply call it a “green” car. In this case it is not the definition that is the problem but our use of language.
It is rather sophomoric to outlaw the use of certain words, but we do it all the time with non “PC” words. We should be expanding our understanding and capacity to listen. Instead we constantly insist upon limiting what others should say (often because we assume people can’t or won’t listen.
Being a “textualist.” grants the greatest power to the one interpretation the law. A Jurist can rewrite any law through the interpretation of the language. Unfortunately this leads to exactly the opposite of the common agreement and certainty that legal documents are supposed to create. The law says that there is no parking on “Sundays.” But if “Sunday” comes to be interpreted as a “religiously observed day of worship” then it could mean any of a number of days as different religions have different days of worship. People understand the law to mean one thing but the jurist makes the law anew through their interpretation.
But also language can change. Someone from the 1890’s would have an entirely different definition of the word “Gay” than is understood today. A law written in the 1890’s to open public fountain on memorial day “to promote a “gay” atmosphere” may require an understanding of the framers intention more than a current definition.
If we’re going to stop using words based on the tendency of the media (and humans in general) to dilute their meaning, we won’t have very many words left in the lexicon.
All this discussion is great but based on Craig’s description, “We can all agree that sustainable processes are those that, a) can be continued indefinitely through time, b) result in a minimum of toxic byproducts, c) don’t abuse or exploit members of the human race, d) don’t pose a constant drain on finite natural resources without a way to replenish them and, e) don’t cause unacceptable amounts of damage elsewhere in the ecosystem.” I can only say that this perfectly and accurately describes the operation of the business that started this whole conversation.