Sustainable societies

"Sustainable" is one of those easy concepts that everyone knows its meaning. Or do we?

When applied to environmental and economic matters (collectively, ergecology), what is sustainable quickly becomes obscured in a haze of fudge factors ("parameters") and formulae, as well as sliding scales of value and differently perceived  end points. The fact is, we really don't know exactly what is sustainable. This, despite the relatively simple meaning of the word, "able to continue as it is." That definition disguises many qualifications, such as how long is anything sustainable? Forever or a day? Nothing lasts forever, and a day seems too short in most cases. The time scale must be between 1 and several trillion, which leaves a lot of wiggle room.

Fossil fuel use is a quick example of what is not sustainable. Geologists estimate it took 10-100 million years to create present natural reservoirs of oil, gas, coal and peet. Modern industries plan to use all those resources in a few centuries; in less than, say, 1000 years. That rate of depletion is clearly not sustainable. Fossil fuel use would have to be cut by a factor of at least (10,000,000 / 1000) or 10,000 to be in balance with resource creation, assuming the resource is being continuously created in this geological era. By that calculation, the cost of "sustainable" petroleum-based gasoline is somewhere in the thousands of dollars per gallon. Without attempting to make an exact calculation, it should be clear that the prices of fossil fuels are set artificially low.

A more difficult problem is wheat and corn production. Global breadbaskets are growing these crops intensively, using massive amounts of fertilizer derived from fossil fuels and other resources such as phosphate and limestone. Each year, topsoil is lost to tillage and other side effects of agricultural practices. Historically, every bread basket has collapsed sooner or later for any number of reasons. For example, salt build up is the inevitable consequence or irrigation, unless huge volumes of water are available to flush the soils annually. (That used to be a function of monsoonal flooding now prevented by flood control.) Climate change turned a significant portion of North Africa into the Sahara Desert - a process which still continues. The Maya apparently had trouble growing corn due to uncontrolled erosion in their hilly terrains. The Chinese solved the erosion problem with terracing, but denuded the natural plant cover in the process. Much of China's agricultural areas are in a precarious balance maintained by intensive human labor (which prevents a higher standard of living). Regions of India and Bangladesh are faced with drought or flood every year, which makes agriculture very difficult. In many regions, it is a regular phenomenon to swing from surplus and plenty to famine within a year.

I don't know anyone who has estimated the useful life of the North American grainery. If I knew how to do that, I would hazard a guess. Since North America is Pharaoh's storage bins, the last resort of the billions, it would be helpful to know what risks are inherent in North American agriculture. Remembering that there was a Dust Bowl, and portions of it still exist, how long can the corn in Kansas continue to grow? What about Canadian wheat? What about the great Oglala reservoir that underlies Nebraska and midwestern irrigation? The United States and Canada have extensive soil conservation programs. I am sure most farmers - even large corporations - use the best available (or very good) science in managing agriculture. But they don't do the science underlying modern methods: that is left to the agricultural colleges such as University of Caifornia, Davis (where I live). Are agricultural scientists focussing on the right questions? I am not opposed to genetically modified crops, or motorized and computerized fruit and vegetable pickers (unlike many liberals). But I do ask the question, what is sustainably cost effective?

Not far from here, they grow almonds, walnuts, cherries, peaches, plums, figs, kiwis and many more fruits and nuts in vast quantities. During the picking season, we are inundated with them at low costs at local farm-run fruit stands. Sometimes it is overwhelming because those products are so fresh, so fragrant and taste so good. It's a little piece of Nirvana just to sit around and eat the stuff. It keeps me here despite other dissatisfactions with this region. Nonetheless, is it sustainable? I surely hope so, but I don't know. What I do know is that a lot of mechanization and computing is involved in growing and harvesting those crops. The growers need accurate weather information on a grand scale to protect their plants, and to decide when to conduct the harvest. Harvest time is usually a period of 2-3 days or a week. Harvesting must be done during that period, as crop losses increase significantly before and after the optimum picking time. So, change around a few things - machines, labor, weather - and the big pile of grapes turns into dried husks even Blue Jays won't eat.

These anecdotes indicate that it is much easier to discover what is not sustainable than what is. This does undermine the concept to some degree, as negative definitions are usually unproductive of new discoveries or results. Thus, what we need is a delimited concept of "sustainable" which at least directs us to methods of evaluation. The methods should be useful in bringing about practical programs. While it is beyond the scope of this article to describe all the things needed to make a society sustainable, we can place some limits on the concept of sustainability.

The most basic measurement of sustainability is physical in nature: energy fluxes. "Sustainable" is an ecological concept, which includes both biological and physical conditions an their interactions. (It is the interactions which makes the idea complex and nebulous.) The biology included in any sustainable system ultimately relies on the physico-chemical background for its existence. Once we focus on the physics and chemistry of a system, sustainability is made more visibile. In both those hard sciences, there are well known equations describing energy flows and methods of measuring it. Those equations and methods are established science which can be immediately applied to determining sustainability. If a sample system cannot be maintained for long, it cannot be sustainable.

But what is a "long time?" Nothing lasts forever. Perpetual motion machines are forbidden in our Universe. So "sustainable" must mean something less than forever. How long is the key limitation in a useful notion of sustainability. Different biophysical systems have different life spans. Human societies have life spans. There is no single time scale that applies to all ecological systems. So, one of the very first things that must be estimated when evaluating a sustainable system is how long it lasts in its present form. That statement assumes that all ecological systems at least have a half-life (in analogy to radioactivity).

In evaluating sustainability with respect to human societies, several levels of evalution are required because "society" refers to many different kinds of associations. Other animals, such as rabbits and gorillas, have social arrangements that are relatively constant over several generations. ("Social arrangements" means the relationships based on social roles, not particular assignments to those roles. Social arrangements implies the existence of a social order.) Some of the arrangements among Homo sapiens seem to have lasted not only generations, but many millenia; e.g., the breeding family. On the other hand, other arrangements last only a few years or a few generations; e.g., nation States. Human cultures persist for thousands of years, as demonstrated in Chinese culture. Ancient Egyptian culture lasted 2,500-3,000 years. Ancient Western (Greco-Roman) culture lasted about 1,000 years. Modern Western culture started its development about 1,000 years ago. Based on known History, it is unusual for a culture to last more than 3,000 years, but we do not know if that is a limit or if we just haven't been around long enough. So, there are different time scales depending on what one is considering.

In most of our political discussions of sustainability, we are considering Modern Technical Civilization (MTC). This form of social relations is still under development, having begun either with the Renaissance or the later Industrial Revolution. Which starting point is selected, 500 or 200 years ago, probably depends on whether one emphasizes the intellectual or technical basis of modernity. While I usually consider modernity as starting in the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution broke the bond between people and land. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences are the greatest happening in History since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago.

Clearly, human societies managed to grow during the last 10,000 years, despite several climate changes and little agricultural knowledge. Until the Industrial Revolution, the agricultural basis of human existence did not permit large scale urbanization. It is likely that the old Roman and Chinese Empires represented the limits of what a single civilization could control using ancient methods. When most of the population has to be bound to the land and forced to endure gruesome conditions just to earn a meager and unsteady surplus, it isn't possible to invest and diversify beyond the limits Nature allows. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, which certainly suggests that the sustainability of MTC must be evaluated differently from that of ancient civilizations. (This also indicates that studies of social collapse are different in the two cases. The modern histories of Spain, the Netherlands, England, Russia, China and Japan are far more relevant to the United States than that of Rome of Egypt.)

From that perspective, the important definition of "sustainable" pertains to MTC, not the other cases. This limitation in time is reflected in the well established human population curve, which started its exponential phase during the 18th century. Population growth and urbanization correlates directly with industrial growth during the last 250 years or so. The population growth curve also helps us to establish limits on human population, thereby limiting and informing what is sustainable. Most demographic experts expect the human population to reach at least 9 billion before 2050; i.e., they predict 50% growth in just 2 generations. According to United Nations estimates, the population could even double to 12 billion within 50 years, if major efforts are not made to reduce the birth rate everywhere. Meanwhile, other things being equal, agricultural experts believe we might support 9 billion  people, but not 12 billion. Sometime in the next 2-3 generations - within the living experience of most people now alive - Homo sapiens is going to bump against the growth ceiling, other things being equal. That last, famous phrase means "if things continue as they are now."

I take it as a fact that there is a limit to population growth. It is well known the planet can only support so many plants and non-human animals. It is indisputable that the planet can only support so many people. Of course, the population limit depends on resources allocated to each person. Far more people can live as they do in Amazonia than what passes as usual in New York City or Beijing. Allowing for that variance, there is still a limit, currently estimated at around 9-12 billion based on the current standard of living. In other words, there is a limit on the planetary resources that can be allocated to human existence. The estimate of allocable resources has been developed in some rough and ready calculations of planetary energy use. Almost all living things on our planet depend on solar energy in one form or another. Without Sol, everything dies except those chemically-dependent bacteria buried deep in the Earth or the Oceans.

Thus, the ultimate limits of life on Earth are determined by available solar energy. Of that energy, ecologists believe about 1/3 is required to maintain all non-human living things. This is a significant finding, because it implies the natural organic world exists within a huge margin of error. Put another way, non-Industrial "natural" ecology leaves most of Sol's energy untapped, effectively operating at a low loading factor. An analogy in the human use of electricity would be having 3 times more generating power than one needs. In civil engineering, this is called the "safety factor" which is "designed in" buildings, bridges and other structures people use. The purpose of a safety factor is to make sure the thing works as expected under almost every conceivable condition. Coincidentally, safety factors of 3 and 4 are commonly used in human engineering, about the same as Mother Nature uses in allocating resources to non-human organisms.

It is only when we consider what happens to the remaining 2/3 of insolation that an appalling fact shows up. About 60% of solar radiation arriving on earth is now appropriated for human use, leaving a safety margin of only 5-10%. The human control of  plants and animals and inorganic natural resources extends to a large fraction of available solar energy. What humans use directly, say as food or clothing, is far less than the total appropriation, so most of what is actually used resides in the infrastructure. This explains a major difficulty in the politics of sustainability: it is invisible to most people. Most people, even the well informed, are not familiar with the causal chain which brings corn to the supermarket. Phosphate mined in Florida is spread onto the fields of Iowa. Mine operations required huge purpose-built machines made out of steel, aluminum, rubber, plastic, wood, silicon and water brought in from all over the world. The tentacles of a New York deli reach into the deepest jungles of darkest Africa and the South Seas Spice Islands. If every product were required to wear a label showing its complete provenance, it would take a large freight truck to bring home a week's groceries. The result of recent ecological studies is plain enough: we've already expropriated all available "free" solar insolation.

Now there is no safety margin for Homo sapiens or any other living thing. This implies any further human depradations will of necessity come out of non-human uses. That alarming conclusion is a scientific fact. That conclusion should provide a strong motive for limiting and reducing human populations in the very near future. The same conclusion show that sustainability is not a nebulous concept: there is an experimentally determined limit to natural resources. In the negative sense of sustainable, we have reached that limit.

If, in fact, there are calculable resources, and the influx of solar radiation approximates the maximum rate of human energy use, what more can be said about sustainable practices? It should be obvious that people cannot appropriate all the solar energy to themselves, for the simple reason that we require other natural processes for our survival. Even if most people do not perceive the depth of the food chain, it is well known to science. Scientific studies have shown that mercury ends up in tuna fish, and that acid rain poisons fresh water. The world's ecology, Gaia, is the combination of millions of complex, interactive, continuous processes. There are positive and negative feedback loops. That much seems certain about our environment, but ecological studies have not proceeded far enough to paint a detailed picture in most cases. In other words, we are operating somewhere around the limits of ecological envelope without a map. This is about as sensible as leaping off an oceanside cliff in a hang gilder, and heading out to sea without navigational  tools or survival gear.

There are also many known limits to specific uses. Because multi-national firms depend on natural resources, they have information about the location and extent of those supplies. Unfortunately, much of the knowledge is kept private for reasons of capitalist, competitive advantage. It would be very helpful if the law required such information to be made public. Collectively, fairly accurate knowledge exists about how much oil, coal, natural gas, wheat, corn, rice, etc is available every year. We do know, in private, the likely depth of reservoirs of water, phosphate and other important commodities. But we don't know it publically, in a manner useful to scientific study or political decision. This situation is akin to flying a large airplane across the Pacific without a fuel gauge, having locked several drugged navigators in sealed boxes. What  scarcely anyone would do in private life is the norm in our public institutions.

Beyond the general programs of reducing population and resource use, what other specific measures are signs of a sustainable society? It would be a step forward if people were educated in ecology, and were generally sensistive to environmental limits. Living within our means is not just a matter of public policy, it is an individual responsibility. People everywhere should know what is ecologically sound, and have the means of determining compliance with environmental standards. If people preferentially select environmentsally sound products, producers who abuse our planet will be driven out of business.

Businesses that do not comply with environmental standards should be penalized, and their products so marked. Product labelling is a powerful tool because it simplifies the decisions consumers make. Taxation and labelling should be positive and negative to induce conformity with our best science. Conservatives believe all that regulation should be left to voluntary compliance, but that does not work. Regulatory authorities have to rig markets to make it unprofitable to violate environmental standards. Especially in Capitalist economies, there is nothing to encourage ecologically sound products unless the authorities make it so (as shown over and over in History). That is why a spate of environmental regulations were established 30 years ago. While some people think that interferes with their propery rights, the alternative is death and destruction on a planetary scale.

So, we are able to determine what is sustainable on a global basis because of the facts of our physical environment. We are able to determine what is sustainable in many particular cases. As a result, we know the human population must be reduced. We also know we have reached the sustainable limit in using planetary energy, beyond which we destroy the very basis of life. This means that  Population * (Standard of Living) = a constant, which sets up a series of hyperbolic (competitive) curves; i.e., at any given set point, more population results in a lowered standard of living, and higher standards can only support fewer people. If we were to follow the example of naturally evolved systems and approved engineering practices, we would set safety factors of 3-4, which implies the maximum population should be reduced to approx. 2 billion or less. (There are a lot of analyses which come up with optimal populations of 1-2 billion.)

Assuming a linear scale, reducing the human population to 1/3 of present levels implies that resource demands should be reduced similarly. In fact, if comprehensive conservation programs were implemented, and energy sources were shifted to so-called renewables, the total demand on natural resources might be reduced more than proportionally. What this suggests strongly is that the notion of a sustainable society cannot be divorced from regulation of population size.

In GSQ and elsewhere, I suggested that democracy works best in small societies. Sustainable societies can permit and even encourage democracy because there is less intense competition for resources. Democratic decision making takes time and involvement. There has to be room for alternatives. In a world pressured by getting enough to eat, worried about the drinking water, and uncertain about almost everything else humans need or desire, there are intense selfish feelings motivated by the will to survive. The fact is that over-population causes immorality, crime and war.

Thus, we have strong reasons to bring about a sustainable society, if we would wish ourselves comfortable and pleasant lives.