Sustainability

Summary: Sustainability is a multidimensional and multilevel approach to creating future-oriented ways of living that balance human activity and wildlife processes over long-term time frames. It includes environmental, social, economic, and various other aspects.

The notion of sustainability is used ubiquitously across all sectors of society, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to distill a meaningful definition. Nevertheless, like other terms—such as justice, equality, and freedom, which are also often abused and misused—sustainability has a normative aspect that, fundamentally, is worth considering. David V. J. Bell has defined sustainability as being about designing and organizing human activity in such a way that the complexity and interconnectedness of all systems are taken into account and the survival of any one system is dependent on the health of the others. Sustainability is generally concerned with both the health of the planet as a provider of life systems for humanity and the establishment of knowledgeable and empowered societies. It is a future-oriented outlook that emphasizes that the current generation of human beings should leave the Earth to their children in a condition equal to or better than the one they inherited.

The concept of sustainability has existed for centuries. Bell observed, for example, that the centuries-old belief systems of North American indigenous peoples reflect a balance between human activity, wildlife preservation, and protection of future generations. Sustainability as a normative practice can also be seen in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European planning laws concerning forestry practices, such that trees should be cut only in such a way that the forest can adequately regenerate itself. In the second half of the twentieth century, in the wake of postwar growth machines and mass-production processes, environmental activist groups have sprung up and lobbied for the preservation of the biosphere, endorsed animal rights, and campaigned for renewable energy. It has been observed that the relentless pillaging of natural resources for the simple and sheer benefit of a monetary gain, such as the clear-cutting of old forest growth for pulp and paper or the dumping of industrial waste into the waterways and the atmosphere, is not viable in the long term; sooner or later, in the absence of attention given to the reality of finite closed-circuit ecological systems, the Earth’s resources will run out and not only will plant and wildlife be extinguished but our children and grandchildren will also inherit a world depleted of the fundamental elements necessary for basic life.

The concept of sustainability achieved widespread, even mainstream, attention and application in public discourse because of a 1987 report by United Nations’ Brundtland Commission (the informal name of the World Commission on Environment and Development) entitled Our Common Future, which for the first time in recorded international policy recognized sustainable development (a companion term to sustainability) as an agenda item for cities and nations worldwide. Outlining the founding principles of sustainable development, it subsequently informed a wide body of planning and development literature, including the United Nations’ Vienna Convention in 1988, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (Earth Summit) and Agenda 21 in 1992, and the Johannesburg Summit in 2003. The United Nations’ directive trickled down to continental and subcontinental levels such as the policy initiatives in the European Union (EU), which include the Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities, the Aalborg Commitments, the Gothenburg Strategy, the Lisbon Strategy, and Europe 2020. The directive also ignited a plethora of business and institutional models.

It was at this point, however, that interpretations of sustainability began to vary widely and the normative ideology of the concept of sustainability began to decline. A poignant comment by Erik Swyngedouw in The Sustainable Development Paradox: Urban Political Economy in the United States and Europe (2007) reveals the current problematic plasticity of the term: “Greenpeace is in favour [of sustainability], George Bush Jr. and Sr., the World Bank and its chairman (a prime warmonger in Iraq) are, the Pope is, my son Arno is, the rubber tappers in the Brazilian Amazon are, Bill Gates is, the labor unions are.” The fact that everyone is nominally for sustainability, Swyngedouw argues, poses a postpolitical condition that precludes and occludes any real politics of the environment.

Sustainable Development

Although its objectives are slightly different from sustainability, the notion of sustainable development is worth mentioning here because of its wide application in planning systems all over the world. Sustainable development is a development practice based on the principles of sustainability. It is said to rest on three pillars: economic sustainability, social sustainability, and environmental sustainability. Some recognize a fourth and fifth pillar, which might be identified as the institutional and cultural aspects. Practices in sustainable development require the linking of interested parties and affected groups at all levels to the implementation of a development strategy designed to optimize current living systems that does not compromise either the environment or future generations. There are a wide variety of approaches, as well as best and worst practices, but it is generally agreed that governments, local community groups, businesses, and other stakeholders must be involved in the creation and implementation process. Sustainable development can be achieved only through the weighing and balancing of the viewpoints of as many actors as possible. Sustainable development is therefore necessarily transdisciplinary and in a constant state of becoming.

Because implementing sustainability (through development or anti-development) is a process of spatial production through negotiation, it can be argued that decision making is a critical component of any implementation strategy of sustainability, whether Inuit hunting practices in northern Canada, selective tree-cutting practices in Luxembourg, or one of the sustainable communities in the United Kingdom. However, the decision-making structures required for creating sustainability have become less clear in recent decades as governments, particularly in North America, have begun scaling down and as vertical systems of industrial production have been eroded and replaced by horizontal, transnational, and flexible systems. Margit Mayer observed that governance structures have emerged as new forms of regulation.

Furthermore, bargaining and decision making have begun taking place outside traditional centralized political structures. These new structures do not guarantee political voices for those at the bottom (although at times those voices come through), and some have been concerned that the new mode of production could lead to social, political, and economic injustices, as well as environmental irresponsibility. These new and somewhat nebulous decision-making structures have posed a challenge for those wishing to implement normative ideas such as sustainability. However, they may also have opened up discursive spaces for those who were formerly excluded from the public sphere. In fact, as Gardner Church notes, the “tunnel vision” of vertically integrated industrial systems and centralized governments with particularized fields of jurisdiction has been incapable of addressing the multilevel character of sustainability processes. The new horizontal and overlapping networks might be better suited to addressing cross-sector and cross-border problems, which characterize sustainability issues.

Interconnectedness and Liquidity

There is a breadth of international literature that is critical of the concept of sustainability and, by extension, questions the core values involved. First, many methods of operationalized sustainability are characterized by a simplified understanding of social space and territory, whereby sustainability takes place in one particular locality. Thus, the interconnectedness and liquidity of urban and regional landscapes in overarching networks are overlooked. These localized implementations also often overlook the domino effect that transformation at one sociopolitical level can have on other levels of space. There are cases in which greening measures have been implemented for the benefit of one community and at the expense of other, outlying communities. Second, strategies have been criticized for their technocratic leanings, reflected in the pervasiveness and dominance of environmental engineering, architecture, eco-efficiency, or green technologies, the result of which is the underestimation of or blatant disregard for the social aspects of sustainability. Third, there are conflicting views and opinions concerning what is valuable and worth sustaining. Susan Buckingham, among other feminist writers, has argued that there is little in the construction of capitalist accumulation that is worth preserving because it has been seen over and over again that equality under capitalism is simply not possible. Moreover, health and balance with nature are impossible as long as humans cannot achieve health and balance with one another.

Despite the wide array of policy initiatives with the objective of sustainability, the planet has continued to face severe challenges. Worldwide rates of mass production and dependency on fossil fuels have continued at non-sustainable levels. Twenty-first century environmental disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and orbital space junk are but a microfraction of the issues that characterize the state of the Earth at the beginning of the third millennium, not to mention the social and economic injustices associated with war, religion, poverty, and migration. While it cannot be assessed that the quantity of catastrophes has increased, it can be said that in a world where more than half of the planet’s inhabitants live in urbanized spaces, environmental crises can have wider impact, and this might give us pause to think (consider, for example, the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, which irrevocably contaminated an area twice the size of Japan).

In Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City, S. Harris Ali and Roger Keil showed how the SARS epidemic in Singapore and Toronto revealed new actors (such as microbes, airplanes, and bats) driving the urban-global dialectic and affecting all levels and scales—municipal, national, and international—thus forming an elaborate social, cultural, political, economic, and biophysical matrix of factors. Harris and Keil thereby exposed new links that bond spaces that seem remote from one another (when seen on a Cartesian grid, for example) and connect otherwise insulated communities to otherwise faraway social groups and networks. Very quickly, a localized tragedy can become a catastrophe of global proportion. This was seen on an even greater scale with the COVID-19 pandemic that broke out worldwide in 2020, underlining how globalization creates new and powerful threats to sustainability. However, the pandemic also revealed an interesting a glimmer of hope, as the unprecedented contraction of industrial activity—and, consequently, reduction in carbon emissions and other pollution—during widespread lockdowns resulted in environmental benefits in some areas. Many environmentalists suggested this was evidence that given enough human effort, sustainability is indeed possible.

Sustainable Development Goals

On September 25, 2015, countries of the United Nations agreed to a set of social, industrial, and environmental goals to maintain sustainability. The countries agreed to the achievement of specific goals for each of the seventeen tenets of the UN's development goals. Among these goals are the eradication of poverty and hunger, attention to animal life on land and in the water, clean energy, and actions to fight the effects of climate change. The UN's resolution also included an additional 169 associated targets. These goals, known as the Paris Agreement, became a major guiding principle of many international sustainability efforts during the early twenty-first century.

By the early 2020s, the world had made incremental progress toward reaching the Paris Agreement's ambitious climate goals. Expansion of the green energy sector had helped reduce the projected global temperature increase to roughly 2.9 degrees Celsius, as opposed to the projected 3.6 to 4.2 degrees experts had foreseen prior to the Paris Agreement. Still, a number of challenges continued to complicate efforts to reach these goals. For example, the United States withdrew from the agreement between 2016 and early 2021 during the administration of President Donald Trump, and some countries, including Brazil, continued to see high levels of deforestation. Although the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic hindered investments in some key areas, falling production costs for some sustainable goods, including wind turbines and electric vehicles, offered hope that many countries would continue to reduce emissions. By the mid-2020s, the Paris Agreement had inspired low-carbon solutions and new markets as increasing numbers of jurisdictions and organizations established carbon neutrality targets and zero-carbon solutions became more and more competitive. Member nations had also established an enhanced transparency framework, or ETF, to report transparently on their actions and progress.

Bibliography

"About the Sustainable Development Goals." United Nations, www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.

Ali, S. Harris, and Roger Keil. Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City. Wiley, 2008.

Barthel-Bouchier, Diane. Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of Sustainability. Left Coast, 2013.

Cornwall, Warren. "The Paris Climate Pact is 5 Years Old. Is It Working?" Science, 11 Dec. 2020, www.science.org/content/article/paris-climate-pact-5-years-old-it-working. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

de Vries, Bert J. M. Sustainability Science. Cambridge UP, 2013.

"Learn About Sustainability." US Environmental Protection Agency, 16 Oct. 2023, www.epa.gov/sustainability/learn-about-sustainability#what. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.

Mayer, Margit. “The Changing Scope of Action in Urban Politics: New Opportunities for Local Initiatives and Movements.” Possible Urban Worlds: Urban Strategies at the End of the 20th Century. Ed. Richard Wolff, et al. Birkhäuser, 1998.

Mollenkamp, Daniel Thomas. "What Is Sustainability? How Sustainabilities Work, Benefits, and Example" Investopedia, 13 Dec. 2023, www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sustainability.asp. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.

Oosterveer, Peter, and David A. Sonnenfeld. Food, Globalization, and Sustainability. Earthscan, 2012.

"The Paris Agreement." United Nations Climate Change, unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.

Plumer, Brad, and Nadja Popovich. "Yes, There Has Been Progress on Climate. No, It’s Not Nearly Enough." The New York Times, 25 Oct. 2021, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/25/climate/world-climate-pledges-cop26.html. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

Swyngedouw, Erik. “Impossible ‘Sustainability’ and the Postpolitical Condition.” The Sustainable Development Paradox: Urban Political Economy in the United States and Europe. Ed. Robert J. Krueger and David Gibbs. Guilford, 2007.