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Shaping the Future:




manuscript by
Hugh Bibbs


2.

"Sustainable" Development?


"Sustainable development is synthetic and constructed within the confines of current convention in northern-dominated debate about development."-W.M. Adams

Before taking a critical look at this statement from Adams' essay "Sustainable Development?", some definition of the terminology is required. For this essay, I will use the definition from the Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future (1987), which states that sustainable development is:

"...development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

It is in light of the looming global resource supply crisis that the issue of the long term sustainablility of economic development has become a major concern for the developed economies of the North. However, it is in the developing South that the crisis has first reared its head, as the more primitive resource extractions of wood burning economies and subsistence agricultural economies burdened by overpopulation have been forced to deplete the very resources upon which they depend for survival.

In the industrial world, we might think of the so-called oil crisis of the mid 1970's as the precursor of supply crisis. However, that supply crunch was caused by a cartel of producers slowing down production on purpose. In light of the subsequent oversupply of oil after the collapse of the cartel, and the mushrooming of oil consumption in the industrial world, that crisis was neither serious nor influential in informing public policy towards the consumption of oil.

There are two kinds of resources. Firstly, there are the renewable ones. Those are the organic resources which can be harvested as they reproduce themselves in great enough numbers to be economically extracted. These include forests, all agricultural and silvacultural enterprises, aquaculture and natural fisheries, water supplies, as well as wild game and plant harvesting. The limits to growth which rein in the harvestable output of all of these organic species will limit the quantity of extraction of these resources unless we intend to destroy the resource. What we are discussing here, then, is the actual limit of extractable quantities beyond which we are engaging in unsustainable development.

The second kind of resources are the nonrenewable ones. These can, in some cases be used and recycled, such as in the production of metal goods, and in the manufacture of lubricating engine oils. In many cases,though, the resource in depleted in its use, such as in the burning of mineral fuels like natural gas and refined petroleum fuels. While these mineral fuels are being mined and burned, they are nonrenewable. If, on the other hand, it becomes economically feasable to distill mineral fuels from agricultural products then that particular resource will become, for us, a renewable one.

Soil, worldwide, is being depleted at an alarming rate because the agricultural practices of the green revolution, replacing natural soil with chemical enhancing agents which fertilize temporarily, have displaced the practices of crop rotation and fallow land renewal. With the population pressures on farmland today, especially in the developing South, there is no chance of leaving farmland fallow for years on end. But, by overuse of the farmland, the soil itself is being depleted. It loses nutrients and soil mass in harvesting and in irrigation as the water dissolves and carries away the inland soils downstream to the great ocean deltas. Eventually, all of today's cropland must be replaced naturally with the composting detritus of unharvested plants or else there will be a total collapse of agricultural capacity throughout the overpopulated world.

The ideal response to the needs of the overpopulated and underdeveloped South is to help them to use their resources more efficiently through industrialization of some processes. Conversion of heat and cooking fuel from wood to oil would be a great step in this direction, except that oil itself is presently nonrenewable. A huge increase in oil consumption will only exacerbate the looming supply crisis. Allowing the developing world access to mineral fuels will also hasten the output of greenhouse gases heating the planet, which in turn threatens the very lowland populations we may be trying to help.

The great delta of Bangladesh is home to the poorest of earth's rural folk. They crowd a floodplain by the millions in order to grow only enough to eat. Yet that land which is the last hope of sustenance for these farm families and their beggar neighbours is itself the greatest physical threat to their safety, since is is below sea level during a high tide storm surge and exposes them to death by drowning. Higher sea levels in the near future will kill hundreds of thousands of these people every time there is a cyclone across their delta.

Again and again, part of the solution to sustainable development appears to be population control. This could prove to be the single most powerful engine of sustainability, just as overpopulation appears to be the most powerful driver of crisis.

In his essay, Adams has focussed on the degradation of rural areas as population pressures result in expedient short term renewable resource extraction with no view to the viability of the renewable resources. In addition, where nonrenewable resources are extracted, the processes often involve chemical agents and the release of orebound toxins which degrade groundwater, river and lake water, and downstream communities far from the source of the pollutants are likewise impacted. He puts it thus: "Poverty and environmental degradation, driven by the development process, interact to form a grim world of risk and hazard within which urban and rural people are trapped."

The drive to arrive at sound methodology for sustainable development was the focus of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, where the UN held its United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. What emerged from that conference was a perception that a rift existed between the interests of the developing nations and those of the industrial world.

The developing nations are suffering the most from environmental degradation (due largely to overpopulation) and sought to benefit from modernization as a relief from wasteful and inappropriately haphazard techniques of resource management (nonmanagement). On the other hand, they provide the industrial world with cheap supplies because they have no industrial overhead costs, and the industrial world is happy with the status quo.

The United States in particular was loath to sign on to any deals which could lead to a transfer of real benefit from themselves to developing states. Their goal appears to be to maintain a growing superior economy while allowing others to benefit from a spillover of wealth and development from their overflowing cup, the trickle down effect.

At least this stance recognizes the reality of wealth in the world. There is a wealthy developed core, the northern industrial nations, which drain brainpower and resources from the periphery of developing nations into their own highly organized economies. The depletion of the resources of the peripheral states, meanwhile, does those poor countries little benefit, and in fact is resulting in alarming degradation the the physical capacity of those regions to maintain their own populations.

Meantime, the flight away from sustainability accelerates. The frontline wizards of our industrialized world, the scientists, are hoping to arrive at sustainable techniques for continued economic growth. But what they seem to be discovering repeatedly is that there is no sustainable growth. They have sounded the alarm that the developing nations must not be allowed to industrialise, nor develop full blown consumerism, else the biosphere will certainly become too poisoned for life as we know it to continue. Hence, the biological basis for mankind's welfare depends upon the continued undevelopment of the developing world. The only solution they can propose is population control.

This set of givens is rejected out of hand by the developing world which wants its share of the benefits of industrialization, now.

While the UN has responded to environmental crises in the past with such initiatives as the Regional Seas Program, The Global Environment Monitoring System, and the UN Conference on Desertification, that august assembly has been unequal to the inertia of global development pressures. They still hope to achieve results by addressing the crisis with an emphasis on managing resources to maximize human welfare, having in mind three goals:

1. The maintenance of ecological processes.

2. The preservation of genetic diversity.

3. The sustainable development of species and ecosystems.

Economic growth is still seen as the only was to tackle poverty, apart from population control which is a failure.

Even the concerns of the grassroots participants in the debate, as demonstrated at Rio in 1992, differ on class lines (if we agree that the citizens of the industrial world are members of another social class than the peasants and slumdwellers of the developing world). The representatives from the two extremes did not agree on the problems, let alone on the solutions. However, the statements issued by the third world speakers have informed the debate in the years since, and may yet prove influential.

It is not possible to conclude this review on a positive note. The likelihood of arriving at the equilibrium that sustainable development promises is further away than the merely remote. It is not within sight even of the imagination. It is without rational optimism that I conclude, crisis appears to be the only viable impending catalyst for unwanted change.



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