Sustainability, Part I: On the Edge of an Oxymoron

• Lindsey Grant
• March 1, 1997
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
• 0 Comments

President Clinton fell into the trap.  Even as he created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development (see NPG Forum paper “Sustainability, Part II“), he charged it with helping to “grow the economy and preserve the environment. . .”, objectives that are bound to conflict in any but the shortest time frame.  The Council itself was caught in the same conflict.  It called for stabilizing U.S. population and helping other countries to stabilize theirs, but it also called for a growing economy and growth in “jobs, productivity, wages, capital and savings, profits. . . “.  It did not really explore what sustainable development means.  It was not prepared to advocate early population stabilization to escape the treadmill of economic growth.

An acceleration of GNP growth is hailed; a slowdown generates jitters.  Politicians regularly reach for economic growth as a panacea, because it offers a vision of perpetually rising consumption.  That is a swifter way to disaster than population growth itself, because it is our activity, not simply our presence, that does the damage.  Growth is necessary, but why?  To provide jobs and goods for an expanding population.  Bring one form of growth under control, and the need for the other subsides.  An oxymoron is a great cover for ambivalence.  Precisely because of its popularity in the environmental community, the phrase “sustainable development” is in danger of being coopted by people who want to give the appearance of environmental commitment while avoiding the harsher decisions that a true commitment would require.  Beware of those who profess an enthusiasm for sustainable development if by “development” they mean “growth.”  Another tricky phrase is “managed growth.”  Granted, one may mitigate the immediate impacts of growth by restricting the ways in which it develops, and thus perhaps defer the day of reckoning.  However, such compromises should be seen for what they are:  temporizations.

The Conflict Over Growth

The industrial revolution, with its apparently unlimited prospects, created the myth of perpetual growth.  At the same time, some thinkers began to recognize that such growth contains its own eventual destruction.  John Stuart Mill in 1848 proposed the concept of a “stationary state of capital and wealth” and said that despite the “unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by political economists of the old school . . . I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition.”

He went on to point out that the lack of growth does not mean the end of improvement of the human condition; it would more likely lead to the improvement of “mental culture and moral and social progress. . .”  At that early date, he thus challenged the stereotype that growth and progress are synonymous.

It has been a hard lesson to learn, especially in America.

The environmental and population communities have historically had a hard time recognizing how deeply their goals are interlinked.  Thomas Malthus and his successors have long argued that population growth becomes unsustainable at some point.  On the other hand, some of the great environmental writers John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson led the American environmental awakening but paid little or no attention to the population connection.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930’s dramatized the damage we were inflicting on our resources.  It led to President Roosevelt’s conservation policies such as creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Soil Conservation Service.  At that stage, population was hardly seen as a factor in the destruction.  U.S. fertility was momentarily below replacement level, and net migration was around zero.  The population issue came later.

The post-World War II surge in U.S. population forced us to look at the connections.  By 1969, President Nixon was asking whether projected population growth would lead to a deterioration of American living standards.  He and Congress created the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future and asked John D. Rockefeller III to head it.  In 1972 the Commission reported that “we have concluded that. . .  no substantial benefits will result from the further growth of the Nation’s population, rather that the gradual stabilization of our population would contribute significantly to the Nation’s ability to solve its problems.” 

That message did not reverberate in America. The faith in growth is deeply rooted.  Growth is invoked as a solution to current problems by both political parties and by most pundits.

The WCED was not alone in equivocating about “sustainable development.”  Others, even while claiming the mantle of sustainability, have tried to straddle the contradiction and argue that, somehow, “good” growth is possible. Dennis Pirage’s introduction to The Sustainable Society. Implications for Limited Growth is a good example.  He called the introduction “A Social Design for Sustainable Growth.”  He admitted that “sustainable growth is a difficult concept,” but nevertheless he chose it as “the best guide to the future” by a bit of sophistry:  “. . . even steady state advocates have foreseen significant growth in the quality of life taking place within the constraints of limited resource consumption.”²  He thus did an injustice to Herman Daly and “steady state” advocates; and in pretending that quality and quantity are synonyms he fell into an error that John Stuart Mill had avoided more than a century earlier.

That argument is regularly heard:  growth is somehow desirable if it can be described as an improvement in “quality”.  It is never spelled out in detail, and it is a fallacy.  “Quality” in the popular modern idiom means monster trucks and all-terrain vehicles, 30-foot trailers, yachts and bass boats, trophy homes, vacation houses, and ski trips to distant places.  As we are defining it, “quality” eats up many more resources and does more damage than the simple life.

There is a better definition for quality, but a string quartet generates much less GNP than a pro football team.  A hill to climb, a clean breeze, a walk down a quiet country lane, silence and solitude, a glimpse of a lonely sea; these are all aspects of quality, but they do not generate much GNP. In fact, population growth makes them less accessible.  A quality house costs less over its life cycle than a shoddy one, and thus creates less GNP.  Quality thus defined is more likely to be at war with growth than a justification for it.

The real issue is this: can physical growth continue? for how long? and at what cost?  Quality is a legitimate and desirable pursuit, but one cannot simply wave the word in the belief that it will dispel those questions.

Writers have wasted a lot of misspent effort trying to cling to the faith in growth in face of the evidence of the damage it leads to.  We owe thanks to writers such as Herman Daly, the Ehrlichs, Donella and Dennis Meadows, E.F. Schumacher and William Catton for taking the lead in recognizing the contradiction between growth and sustainability and addressing it, in different ways.