Green Plans, Revised Ed: Blueprint for a Sustainable Earth

2. Sustainability: A Modern Odyssey

what’s in a word? Experts who are paid to define ideas are always searching for the exact phrase or word that reaches into the essence of a product or an idea, so that everyone hearing it knows exactly what is meant, with all the nuances and associations. The fact that everybody gets it creates a culture of shared understanding around that term—“Mac,” for example, or “Martha Stewart.” The right words, on packages or billboards or in speech, have the power to draw people together in a common understanding, or behind a common idea. A friend of mine, Yvon Chouinard, started a company in the United States that sold climbing equipment, which he called Chouinard Equipment. One day he was mountain climbing with some Scottish climbers and noticed they had on big rugby shirts and that their arms were not getting bruised or scratched. Liking the style and function, he took some shirts back with chapter two Sustainability A Modern Odyssey Fig. 1. Environmental theme indicators, 1985 200 160 120 80 40 0 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 Environmental theme indicators Index (1985 = 100) Target climate change Target waste disposal Target acidification GDP Climate change Disturbance Eutrophication Acidification Waste disposal Estimates sustainability | 29 him and applied his little label, “Patagonia,” and a marketing phenomenon was born. When you look at the label, you feel the far-off mountain air, when you put on the jacket, you put on a whole idea. The environmental movement has its own “Patagonia” story. It happened back in 1987. The un’s World Commission on Environment and Development was about to deliver a blunt message about the perilous state of the global environment and wanted to call the citizens of the world to unite in the effort of averting environmental disaster. As they prepared the document , Our Common Future—which became known simply as the Brundtland Report, after the commission’s chair, former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland—they searched for a term that would sum up in one memorable word or phrase the change everyone needed to rally around. The term they came up with, and which is now used around the world, is sustainable development. what is sustainable development? Although the concept has been a subject of academic study for decades, the Brundtland Report emphasized the links between problems of growth, economics, technology, and the environment , and defined sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Ever since the Brundtland Report was published, the concept of sustainable development has been widely discussed and debated . The report itself, and the debates it inspired, gave shape and impetus to the Green Plan idea in the countries that are now adopting it. As a rallying cry, sustainable development has defined the hope that if we pursued the right avenues we could make a positive change. As a negotiating tool, it has served to enable people of opposing sides to approach discussing the common problem without alienating each other. All Green Plans 30 | defining the problem and its solution have the ultimate goal of achieving sustainable development, but though the term itself has served an important philosophical and social purpose, as a definition, it is imprecise. limits to the discussion of limits Although it would be realistic to discuss the topic of growth from a limits perspective, the influential voices from the world of economics would rise up and object to the threat of limits. This brings up an interesting point: One of the admirable qualities of the human condition is that when things seem to get really bogged down, diplomats seem to be able to get together and end a war. In this case, in the midst of violent opposition on the part of the various interests, the word sustainability surfaced and became a means of shifting gears into a more rational discussion . The term played a pacifying role. Whereas economists went crazy over the idea of “limits,” as insisted upon in the “limits to growth” books, sustainability was a safe-sounding word—more permissive than limits—and it was immediately embraced. Who could object to sustainability? The question remains : What does it mean, in terms of a practical definition? The term has had the simultaneous advantage and disadvantage of being vague enough to allow a multitude of...