It’s Not Not Sustainable (Welcome to the funnel)

My favourite line from my Leadership Towards Sustainability textbook reads;

“We are, in fact, heading towards a republic of grass, insects, and microbes, preceded by a period of chaos and barbarism.”

Sometimes I wonder when will be a good time to drop out, move back to Northern Ontario and build my shack in the bush. When should I start honing those skills – farming and boobytraps – that will best serve me in a not-unlikely future?

The following is summary of what’s in my opinion the most important thing I’ve learned; that there is a simple, full and helpful definition of sustainability.

Some light science.

According to the conservation laws neither matter nor energy can be created or be destroyed. According to the second law of thermodynamics, time energy tends to spread out evenly with time towards an increasing state of entropy. The universe at the end of time will be even, cold, and still.

Luckily for us, the Earth and its atmosphere are not totally closed systems. The matter basically stays in place, but energy is allowed to constantly flow in and out. This is how we get just the right balance of change and consistency. Energy enters mainly as sunlight and is released into space as heat.

Powered by sunlight, plants turn carbon dioxide into biomass (sugars) at the same time as they release oxygen as a byproduct. The plants are consumed by animals who release and use the stored energy.

Animal life, let alone society would obviously be impossible without plant photosynthesis and we can only demand so much from this foundation before undermining the integrity of the whole thing. We know from Captain Planet that exhausting resources and changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere, oceans and biological systems causes exactly this kind of corrosion.

Welcome to the Funnel…

Imagine a funnel. The walls are natural limits for society. Everything inside is all the stuff we can do. Hitting the walls is bad. It might mean that your business shuts down because you relied too heavily on fossil fuel, or that the soil erosion you caused by chopping all those trees has made it so you can’t grow enough food to feed your population. And how do you cause the walls to close in? Apply pressure. It’s like when Batman, Robin and Batgirl get tied in the Siamese Human Knot and the more they struggle the tighter it gets. This is a nice illustration and it’s the right idea, but if we’re acually going to use the definition of sustainability to make decisions it will have to be a little more specific and helpful than a funnel.

Every bad thing we do to the Earth falls into one of the following three categories:

1. Increasing concentrations of substances from the earth’s crust (lithosphere) into the biosphere.
Includes fossil fuels dug up from the ground result in increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, and a lot of mined metals among other things.

2. Increasing concentrations of substances produced by society.
Includes weird pesticides accumulating up the food chain because they can’t be broken down , endocrine disruptors, and a bunch of other stuff.

3. Physical degradation. Includes overharvesting, poor forestry practice, ruining coral reefs, strip mining…..

So if these are all the things we can’t do, then everything else do is inbounds.

If none of your actions contribute to systematic increases from underground substances or human made substances; and if nothing you do has anything to do with any physical degradation, congratulations. You are officially environmentally sustainable.

This is not my definition, but I agree with it. It was developed by eminent Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt.
He has a fourth principle too.

4. People must not be (systematically) subject to barriers stopping them from meeting their needs.

I have a lot of problems with this last one, but that may be a subject for another time.

I issue a challenge. Come up with something environmentally unsustainable that doesn’t fall into those first three catergories. I may see the good doctor this week and it would be great to stump him.

For more information about this definition check out The Natural Step.