The Myth of Sustainability

Authors Note: I first wrote the bones of this article in the year 2000 when I wrote extensively about the first rule of sustainability being Peace.  Late last summer I began writing more about externalities, and the need to link economic externalities to both environment and social justice issues. I hope to do more of the later in the coming months.

Sustainability involves the relationships between three core concerns- culture, economics, and society. Learning sustainability is about learning the complex interdependency between and amongst the three . Most people that understand sustainability know that the real bottom line is the environment.

Unfortunately many people that advocate sustainability, do not understand or care about that. Most of our sustainability platforms rest exclusively in economics, and pay a trickle down attention to culture and environment.

Across the board, economic growth and GDP is based on a consumer paradigm that promotes profit above all other factors. It treats culture and environment as exploitable commodities and markets rather than the immutable sustainability partners that they are. Sustainable growth, in this context, is an oxymoron.

Most of our economic progress today is based on this trickling down from the Oligarchs and 1%, who want you to believe, that access to wealth for the many comes from the acquisition of wealth by the few. The problem with this equation is that today, as I am sure that you have heard, more than 99% of the worlds wealth is controlled by les than 1% of the worlds people, and that divide is continuing to expand today and everyday.

According to the latest reports from the Federal Reserve, business profit margins have hit an all time high while wages have hit an all time low. Is this economic decline?  What is trickling down on you and me and small local business is from the big “guys” that are eviscerating our capacity to have a sustainable future. Consequences of that trickle include a growing cascade of some pretty big picture items including climate change, expansive poverty and growing social unrest.

Here are some fundamentals of achieving “sustainability.”

PEACE ON EARTH!

Without peace there can be no sustainability. There is a lot of profit in war-making. Fundamental economic hegemony drives political and cultural disagreements, and war has driven economic “progress” for centuries. Contemporary global disaster capitalism, enabled by the shock of war and imposed austerity fraud are economic policies decided by the hidden hands of the free market and born in war. These deliberate strategies have brought us destroyed and displaced peoples, cultures, environmental obliteration, and climate change, which is the ultimate failure of the free market. Without peace there can be no sustainability. Period.

Measuring Growth with Dystopian Externality

Economic theory and practice is a political construct, not science.

Contemporary economic practices place the costs of environment and social contexts as “externalities” outside the bottom line that is overwhelmingly prejudiced on determining profit and growth.

In that way, the environment is measured as a commodity in that ecosystems such as forests are valued as measured by board feet rather than the ecological value of a complete ecosystem.

A forest, a mountaintop, a river, lake, ocean, wetland is a complete ecosystem. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson says, “Nature achieves sustainability through complexity.” Biodiversity champions life, and this is what makes planet earth unique.

The externality factor distorts our economic fundamentals and promotes destruction of biodiversity, -the underpinning of life and makes Earth unique.  We know through science and ecological economic measurements that a wetland is quantifiably more valuable than a parking lot, and a forest is more valuable than an industrial farm. Yet we use our planet as a sewer and economic measurements externalize pollution. We support short-term profit and growth while transferring the real costs of sustainability off to society.

Ecosystems, through biodiversity, naturally clean waters, provide fertile soils, and stabilize the atmosphere. Poisoning the ecosystem through exploitation causes human health collapse and skyrocketing costs.  An unstable atmosphere leads to disasters.  The quantifiable loss of these services transcends global GDP by 1000% and more. That is measurable. Why is it an externality?

David Suzuki calls conventional economics with externalities a form of “brain damage”.

If we understand this, we can do much to reverse the myth of sustainability, but will we?

Local economy, local green infrastructure, including adapting biodiversity support in urban development, conservation of energy rather than expanding consumption, waging peace, and land use reform which includes finding ways to incentivize protecting biodiversity and wildlands are strategies that we hardly think about, never mind engage in.

We need leadership. Instead, everyone is enraptured by shiny objects in a false pursuit of happiness represented by buying more stuff that we don’t need.

This includes me. This sustainability stuff depresses me and so I go shopping at Walmart to relive the pain. I bought four new pairs of cheap socks last week to replace the ones that wore out that I bought the week before. Go figure!

If we are to advance beyond a myth of sustainability, we need to identify and defeat the destructive fables around economic growth that colonize and conquer at the expense of social and environmental sanity.

As I tell my newly homeless friends in Staten Island and Jersey-

Without new strategies, “sustainability” is simply another economic deceit that will trickle down on us until the rains of the collapse of civilization wash us all away into the unstoppable deluge of time. It wont be the first time that earth has made major adjustments.

On a slightly happier note-

In this season of Peace on Earth, think about it. Without peace there can be no sustainability. Find ways to act. You can make a difference. Don’t forget to gift shop local. It may help you to emotionally work though our problems. New Years is soon.  And buy local, because local owners care about their community and caring about our community is, as one of our constant media messengers tells us “HUGE”.

The Rising Tides of Climate Change

The Rising Tides of Climate Change

Published in the Buffalo News, Sunday Viewpoints Cover, December 2, 2012

under the Title: 

Seeking a Sustainable Future-Region Must Treat Climate Change as an Emergency Situation

http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20121202%2FOPINION%2F121209983%2F1074

by Jay Burney

Image Courtesy Buffalo News and Daniel Zakroczemski

For decades denial has been a river running through Washington, Albany, Buffalo, and probably through your house.  Harris Polls conducted between 2007 and last year, indicate American’s belief in climate change has dropped from 71% to 44%.

Today, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and an election campaign that ignored climate change, we face an onrushing economic, cultural, and environmental reality that will shape our future. If for whatever reason you don’t want to call it climate change, call something else, call it a “situation”, because whatever you call it, we have a situation.

The question- are we in a position in Buffalo and WNY to address and mitigate potential consequences of climate change? Do we have a sustainable future? The answer is maybe.

During his election victory speech President Obama said, “We don’t want our children to live in an America… that is threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”

It’s about time.  Now he and other policy makers including NY Governor Cuomo are raising climate issues understanding that if we do not, we face a precipitous decline in our future opportunities.   This includes the potential for disasters like hurricane Sandy that made many of our friends and families refugees’ -without shelter, food, power, warmth, and water. Imagine the consequences of a storm-caused, prolonged, deep winter power outage in WNY?

Since the Clinton White House sent Dr. Peter Sousounis here to release the initial Regional Climate Assessment (Great Lakes) in 2000, we have witnessed escalating global and regional change including warmer winters and extreme weather events.

 Sousounis said at that 2000 event held at the Statler “We can predict increasing average temperatures, changing lake levels, and extremes in weather conditions in the coming decades.”

Last spring NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director Dr. James Hansen, initially a climate skeptic, declared that “Now we can go beyond global and regional predictions because we have actual evidence that climate change has arrived, and is worse than we thought it would be”.

This is all eye opening.

Yet climate skeptics continue to divide public opinion. Even the more rational recent discussions pit those that think Sandy was caused by climate change against those that say “not.”  The inconvenient truth is that Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, was a storm supercharged by climate change.  Lets not equivocate here. Without climate change Sandy would not have been Sandy. Period.

What our city and region does in the next months and years regarding climate change will help to characterize the future of our community.  This is a collective responsibility. We have to educate ourselves and invest in personal, neighborhood, and regional strategies that address our future. It must be a wide-ranging public policy discussion and a deeply personal discussion that affects virtually every aspect of our lives. This will determine our ability to survive as a species.  It is about you and me. We can make a difference.

Economic Strategies

There is a lot going on locally and more is on the way. A primary strategy to dealing with climate change is to address renewable energy issues.  Programs such as FIT- (Feed In Tariff) help to incentivize renewable energy by guaranteeing markets and values to investors and make renewables competitive in the energy market. This is important. It is a no brainer given our current political economy of consumerism and growth. But is it enough?

Sustainability rests on three pillars- Culture, Economics, and Environment and understanding relationships between these three pillars with one caveat- the environment is the bottom line. Without a substantial environmental context, the others could not exist.

Contemporary economic strategies identify the free market as fundamental, consumerism and growth as the tactic, and profit as the objective. Environment is considered to be an “externality”. This means that the costs to the environment of economic development, including polluted water, air, food, soils, climate impacts, and the very real costs of human health, are costs that are born by society and not the entities engaged in profit-taking.  This socialized offloading of responsibilities and real costs is a fatal flaw of the free market and makes “sustainable development” an oxymoron.  Climate change may be the biggest failure of free markets.

David Suzuki, the outspoken Canadian environmental activist, resigned form his own organization recently because of economic threats by big donors. He calls our economic system “brain cancer.”  Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine” says that this system empowers what she calls “disaster capitalists” -those that make money by deliberately creating or taking advantage of economic shocks and then taking advantage of a distracted citizenry. She would argue that disaster capitalism took full advantage of WNY after the surprise October snowstorm of 2006. Shocks include environmental crises and destabilization events such as the austerity budgets now sweeping parts of the European Union.

Klein says we need to treat climate change as an “emergency situation”.  “That means pulling out all the stops.”

Klein says that many well-meaning environmental organizations are as much a part of the problem as part of the solution. Because of their own economic pressures, many enviro groups have promoted business friendly solutions. If they rock the boat much, like Suzuki, they are threatened with defunding.  She says that while important, simply changing light bulbs to be more energy efficient, planting trees, or advocating investment schemes to make energy more renewable while ignoring the climate change elephant in the room, -consumerism and growth, are just not enough.  Klein says that most enviro-groups enable the economic and policy maker hands that feed them by addressing strategies that everyone in that bubble considers “winnable” and not strategies that push the envelope and demand solutions to the emergency that confronts our planet. Emergency Declared. Now what can we do?

Support Local Business

-Many activists point to local economies as a way toward a more sustainable future.  Corporate models such as Walmart, treat communities like Buffalo as an extractable profit center. They invest relatively little, and take a lot. When they are finished, they leave behind abandoned buildings and neighborhoods, a looted environment, and forgotten people.

Sarah Bishop the executive director of Buffalo First that is laying the groundwork for a local economy, says that “A local economy is about local dollars staying local, and local businesses being more responsible, responsive, and engaged about local issues including local culture and environment.

“Choosing a locally owned store generates almost four times as much economic benefit for the surrounding region as compared to shopping at a chain. This is a hopeful statistic in a city and region that has seen significant divestment over the past quarter century. “

Bishop recently co-sponsored a visit to Buffalo by Chicago activist Naomi Davis, founder of “Blacks in Green.”

Davis, whose focus is on livable and walkable self-sufficient neighborhoods, told us that a “city is comprised of many villages.” Each village can create local jobs, benefit, and investment, and support individuals and families. Can we do this in Buffalo?

-The ecological services of habitat including clean air and water are fundamental to life and have a great impact on wealth.  The atmosphere evolved as a part of a biodiverse system. Biodiversity helps to regulate atmospheric gasses including greenhouse gasses by absorbing and storing carbon. Protection of our remaining habitats -oceans, forests, freshwater ecosystems, is fundamental to addressing climate change.

Externalizing the environment in the name of economic development encourages the destruction of biodiversity.  This destruction has both cause and effect. Science is pointing to an ongoing current extinction episode, described as the sixth great extinction, with climate change as an accelerant.

Protect the Great Lakes

One of earth’s greatest natural resources are the Sweetwater seas known as the Great Lakes. Each year over 20 billion gallons of raw sewerage are dumped into the Great Lakes, which contain 1/5 of the world’s fresh surface water.  This causes biodiversity loss and subjects humans to disease and the ravages of climate change. Buffalo/WNY is responsible for between 2-4 billion gallons of raw sewerage released each year.

Jill Jedlicka Spisiak, executive director of the Buffalo Niagara RiverKeeper is working with the Buffalo Sewer Authority on a green infrastructure plan that if fully financed could reduce the release of raw sewerage significantly. She says-“A major investment in sewer infrastructure is needed”.   The cost of the project is estimated to be $500 million over 19 years. It is imperative that we find money to address this problem.

-there is a new approach to land use modeling that is beginning to emerge in WNY. The model would begin to evaluate land use from an ecological services perspective rather than the traditional land use models that characterize land as and economic commodity such as “agricultural” “mining”, etc. this new model would help to quantify the real values and costs of land, and would help to inform zoning and tax practices that currently “externalize” environment.

These are just a few examples of solutions that are emerging locally. Finding a comprehensive strategy including some of these projects can make a big difference and help to create a sustainable future for all of us.

This situation is an emergency-If we don’t treat it as one, and if we don’t seize the reins, we can expect a future predicated on a globalized disaster economy that will turn our region into the third world instead of the sustainability leader that we can become.