What "development" means for sustainability

I have written about the family of notions surrounding "development" on several occasions. Previous posts have talked about how the word is used as an adjective, e.g., "developing" countries, how tracts of land should be "developed," natural courses of "development," and how sustainability has come to mean sustainable "development" (here, here). I want to elaborate today on the arrogance of the word "development" when used in the context of describing countries, communities and just groups of people, and what this means for sustainability.

As you probably know, the meanings and connotations of words have a way of changing over time. The term "Third World," was initially used to describe countries that were neither leaning towards capitalism (and NATO) or communism (and the Soviet Union). Nowadays, many people in the West use that phrase to describe a country that is (according to Western standards) "undeveloped" or "developing." Furthermore, these "Third World" countries have economies that are "developing," according to Western-defined Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) standards.

There are several issues that come to mind because of these words and their connotations. First, it implies that Western standards are those that should be met. Since the standards on which countries want to be judged are these standards, it means that countries would prefer to graduate from being "developing" to being "developed." What does this mean for sustainability? What it means is that since the standards to be met are economic standards first and foremost, countries may lower their environmental standards so as to attract investments from "developed" countries. This most likely leads to the rapid and unthoughtful industrialisation of these "developing" countries. What it also means is that if there is any hope for a sustainable future, that necessarily comes from being "developed," i.e., if you are not developed, there are no standards on which a country can be judged to be "sustainable." This seems to me a different approach under which to view "sustainable development."

What the word "developing" connotes today is backwardness, and the sense is that there isn't much in these countries, and the people living in these countries are less fortunate than those that are in the "developed" world. But what this word masks, however, are the problems that come with being "developed," particularly under a capitalistic, competitive mindset. In my mind, there are very clear threads of reasoning that trace social issues such as the fracturing of families and declining neighbourliness and increased mental illness back to the very foundations upon which the country claims itself to be "developed." If you were to go to most any of these "developing" countries, I am sure you would find integrity in family life, and a greater spiritual and material contentment of the people. What does this mean for sustainability? It means that maybe these definitions aren't as clear cut as we think they are. Of course, while many "developing countries" are very polluted, many of them are not, and do not have to deal with toxic chemicals in their water; the serious environmental problems that we face here in the US, because of say, fracking (here, here), are just completely non-existent in these places. More importantly, what it means is that we shouldn't propagate the connotations of these words by using them in the manner that we currently do. It also means that maybe we shouldn't be using these words nonchalantly, and that we should be mindful of the full implications of using such words.

On the fallacy "economic" sustainability

Thoughts on the notion of sustainability have grown exponentially it seems. Everyone is talking about it, whether they mean it or not. As you may have found odd, massive resource extraction companies talk about it and promote it, when their very existence is in opposition to it. In all honesty, I am not really sure what "sustainability" means fully, and probably no one can really put it fully into words without writing a tome. My notions of it are challenged day by day. What I do know is that such companies mentioned above do not practice it at all, whatever sustainability truly is, apart from "economic" sustainability - they are making absolutely sure that their viability and legitimacy as entities stays intact, and they are "sustained." They have all too easily kidnapped the word, and made it mean what they want it to mean.

If you know a little bit about "sustainability," you'll know that the world has basically defined three pillars of it - environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. The way the problem of sustainability is currently set up is such that goals and targets must be met for all three pillars - environmental, social, and economic. A "sustainable" outcome is some sort of optimisation of the three pillars. What this means is that there are some compromises that need to be made, and one or two of the pillars will be compromised more so than the others; there are conflicts and tensions between these pillars. Our world has a tendency to compromise on the pillars of environmental and social sustainability, because there is very little willingness to change the economic foundations of how we live our lives, the foundations that have gotten us into this mess in the first place.

The way sustainability is currently defined involves the considerations of economic structures that are counter to the notion of sustainability, just like the economics practiced by corporations. The economic structures I am talking about are those such as capitalism, communism, or any mix of anything of that sort. Such economics are by their very definition destructive to both the environment and people. In fact, there is no way you can have equality in any capitalist or communist framework - there are losers, human and non-human, always. There is never a Pareto-optimal decision if you also consider the environment and justice.

The issue is this: the problem is over-constrained, because we have decided that our current economic structure trumps people and the environment. We have limited our conceptualisation and imagination of sustainability by limiting the options we have available to us, because we are unwilling to change our economies. (In order to maintain the economic viability of our nation, jobs are being created in sectors that necessarily involve violence against the land, air and water. Such jobs are clearly not sustainable.) There is no way you can be remotely sustainable unless you define a new economics. Economics should in fact not be its own pillar at all, but should rather be a fluid, moving and dynamic outcome of our definitions of society and the environment. Such economies might better be able to address chronic problems that face our society today, such as bad food, homelessness and poverty. The goal of any social structure should involve justice and equality. In this light, society itself should be dynamically defined based on environmental constraints and environmental sustainability. There is no getting around it - we live on Earth.

More to come.

When is it right to start criticising our ethics?

Now it is Ireland that has to be bailed out by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Why does the country of Ireland need to be bailed out? Here's what a BBC article reads:

"Put simply, the seriousness of the situation it finds itself in with regard to the debts of the Irish banks.

As several of the banks have been part-nationalised, most of their massive debt is now actually government debt.

And the great majority of this debt is owed to foreign lenders, which the Irish banks, and therefore the Irish government, simply cannot afford to default on.

This is because the Irish Republic, as a small country, is greatly reliant upon this overseas investment. And to default on their overseas loans would make it very difficult - and far more expensive - for Irish banks to borrow from their foreign counterparts in the future.

More importantly, if Irish banks could not pay back their overseas debt, it would have a knock-on impact on the Republic's overall credit rating.

This would make it more expensive for Dublin to sell government bonds, as it would have to offer a higher rate of interest to more sceptical institutional investors."

.......
House values have fallen by between 50% and 60%, and bad debts - mainly in the form of loans to developers - have built up in the country's main banks. This almost wrecked the institutions, leaving them needing bailing out by the government at a cost of 45bn euros (£39bn; $60.1bn).

This has opened a huge hole in the Irish government's finances - which will see it run a budget deficit equivalent to 32% of GDP this year."

I don't claim to be any sort of expert on banking, international debt and investing and the proportion of GDP that a country's debt is. What I do see, however, is a confluence of events across the world, that although seem disparate to most people, are fundamentally connected through their root cause(s). I think two graphics that are particularly telling are those two below, that I have pulled from here:

 

What the two graphics together tell me is that most Western countries (including the US) live well beyond their means - services are promised to people that the government takes loans out (from other countries or the IMF or the World Bank) to provide, and these loans are used to create vested interests in those services, ones which people will absolutely not do without. Then, when a problem does arise, say that too many people are starting to default on their mortgage payments, or people's pensions are lost because an airline goes bankrupt, we address the problem by band-aiding it, and addressing it with even more complexity than that which caused the problem in the first place.

Let's take the case of the automobile. We realise that we can use high-energy-density fossil fuels to power internal combustion engines that will propel people from place to place. We don't think of the consequences of sprawl, fluctuating gasoline prices, or greenhouse gas emissions. Now the world is in a bind. We have all of these people that live incredibly far from the places they work and shop, and think of an automobile as an expression of freedom. With "growing" environmental and climate change concerns, there are several options proposed - 1) let's cap carbon dioxide emissions and have companies duke it out to not be the ones paying to pollute, 2) let's tax those entities that pollute based on the amount they pollute, 3) let's find a way to continue driving cars and extract resources from the Earth, just this time let's not let it be fossil fuels. Okay, so we will drive....electric cars and have wind turbines. What do electric cars and wind turbines need? They need batteries and magnets. What are batteries and magnets made of? Lithium, lanthanum, neodymium, and other rare earth elements. Well, the largest deposits of lithium lie in Bolivia (but also in Afghanistan, now!), with an indigenous President who threatens vested interests by instituting land reform (read/listen here and here), and says "Either capitalism dies, or Planet Earth dies." At the same time, the largest deposits of rare earth metals lie in China (here's something for the techies). What will a country like the US do to get access to large reserves of lithium or rare earths? Well, maybe they go to war or assassinate those whose views are markedly different than their own. Also, did you hear about more coal miners stuck underground in New Zealand?

It seems to me that the foundational causes of these problems lie not in that the coal is too deep, or the oil is too far away, or that the rare earths are reserved in a country whose Communism we don't like, but rather in our ethics that compel us to want access to these resources so we can continue to live lives on debt and deficit. We are taking debt at the expense of those people, creatures and ecosystems that will come after we are gone, and we live in a world full of moral, ethical and spiritual deficit.