Sustainability has become a vague and politically manipulated word that can lack a precise or objective meaning. In one sense this is inevitable for any advanced concept. We know that “democracy” is “good,” but we’d be hard-pressed to define it, no less to apply it correctly in every situation. We also know, however, that excessive vagueness can be exploited. Is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a legitimate use of that term for the political system of North Korea? Our first order of business is, then, to explore what sustainability does and doesn’t mean. Otherwise, someone can call “sustainable” a program to build a coal-fired power plant to produce electricity to be used to desalinate ocean water to irrigate hay and corn to feed to cattle to produce hamburgers to be sold in throw-away plastic containers to customers in air-conditioned SUVs at a fast food drive-through window—and we’d have no basis for saying it’s not sustainable.

The Modern Demographic and Economic Explosion on a Finite Planet

Human habitation of the Earth in the 21st Century is a fundamentally different challenge than it was in the 19th and 20th Centuries, perhaps even from what it has ever been since humans became a separate species from chimpanzees in the East African savannas several million years ago. Why is this the case? Two centuries ago, the Earth for the first time supported one billion people. In 2022 it supports 8 billion (see Figure 1.1). By 2050 it is projected to support 9 to 10 billion before stabilizing in the late 21st century. These increases in numbers have come along with a tremendous lengthening of the human life span from a mere 29 years two centuries ago to about 73 years as a global average today. Behind these numbers lies a great victory of much of humanity over disease and want, a victory that must be sustained, and in fact advanced, if human welfare and quality of life are to continue to improve, especially in the poorest regions.

 

Vast increases in human numbers and longevity alone, however, do not explain why humans’ relationship to the Earth has changed so fundamentally. The second critical factor is that population growth has been accompanied by an even greater increase in economic activity. Per capita income has exploded (the term explosion implies sustained exponential growth) over the past two centuries. While it increased from a meager $133/year in 1000 C.E. to only $195 in 1800, it more than tripled in the 19th century, and increased 10-fold in the 20th to reach about $20,000 by 2022 (see Figure 1.2). This represents over a 100-fold increase in two centuries on a per capita basis. Multiply this per capita increase by the 8-fold increase in human population and you get about a 1000-fold increase in the size of the human economic enterprise over the last two centuries, doubling every 26 years (about a generation). This is an astounding fact, and by and large is one that people can take great pride in, especially since it occurred despite world wars and other convulsive set-backs.

Humans’ environmental impact on the Earth is driven by how many people there are, but even more by the size of the world economy. Most directly, the human footprint is derived from natural resource use when this entails extractions from the Earth and waste products returned to it. Over the last two centuries, growth in the world economy has required an increase in natural resource use. Accelerated natural resource use lies at the heart of the industrial revolution and has, on the whole, vastly improved the quality of human life.

We will use energy consumption as a surrogate for all natural resources because historical data on energy use are much better than for specific resources such as wood or aluminum. From 1850-2000 world energy consumption increased about 20-fold, doubling about every 35 years, and per capita energy consumption increased about 4-fold, doubling about once per human lifetime. Thus, natural resource use, as measured by energy consumption, has tracked the demographic and economic trends (see Figure 1.2).

What rate of natural resource use and waste emissions can the Earth accommodate? Do current and likely future rates fall well below these limitations or greatly exceed them? Here we have no one easy answer and will instead have to explore the issue in detail, issue-by-issue and sometimes region-by-region. Nevertheless, we can raise some overarching issues and perhaps get an approximate answer that will help us gain perspective on this issue of planetary limits to natural resource use and pollution emissions.

In 1986, Peter Vitousek, an ecologist at Stanford University, and his colleagues attempted to answer this question using human appropriation of global photosynthesis. Why, you may ask, use this measure? In ecology, plants are viewed as producers because they are capable of capturing solar energy and using it to turn carbon dioxide from the air and water from the soil into carbohydrates—the calories of energy upon which both the plants themselves and nearly all other life on Earth depends. So the rate at which the biosphere (a term that refers to all living things on Earth) can photosynthesize is an essential limit on how much life the planet can support. Importantly, more than 1000 times as much solar energy reaches the Earth than is captured by photosynthesis, so while photosynthesis is driven by solar energy, it leaves the vast majority of it utilized only as heat.

Total global photosynthesis (called gross primary production) has been estimated at about 120 billion metric tonnes (we’ll use “ton” for 2000 English pounds and “tonne” for 100 metric kilograms, about 10 percent heavier) of carbon captured from the atmosphere per year. About half of this—60 billion tonnes—is fixed by plant growth as net primary production, the energy supply for all other living things. Researchers at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna estimated that, from 1910 to 2005, “human appropriation of net primary production” (HANPP) doubled from 7 to 15 billion tonnes, 13 to 25 percent of global terrestrial net primary production, primarily through agricultural activities such as crop production and livestock grazing as well as forestry. Population more than doubled during that century, meaning that per capita HANPP fell, an important accomplishment, yet the overall impact presses against the limits of the biosphere.

At first, you may think that if humans are only using a quarter of the Earth’s ecological capacity, what’s the problem? But think again. Even 25 percent is a very high proportion because at least 10 million non-domesticated species of plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms must live on the remainder. They are having a great deal of trouble doing so; the rate of species extinctions is now at least 100 times and perhaps over 1000 times faster than it has been over long spans of time in the past. Looking at just mammals, 36 percent of the total weight is humans and 60 percent is domesticated livestock, leaving a mere 4 percent for wild mammals from bats to elephants, Yet wild mammals outweigh wild birds by 3 to 4 times. While fish are more abundant, the total weight of fish in the oceans is only about 10 percent of what it was a few centuries ago. So humans are driving non-domesticated animals to a few remaining marginal ecological niches.

Moreover, humans depend on natural ecosystems for services as essential to human life as oxygen production, the delivery of fresh water, the buffering of natural disasters, and the pollination of crops. Therefore, we must conclude that human appropriation of net primary production is rapidly approaching the limits of what can be harvested from Earth’s biosphere. Remember this inconvenient truth because it is a key factor in natural resources sustainability.

What this means is that the size of the human ecological footprint can no longer continue to rapidly rise (as illustrated in Figure 1.3). This makes the 21st Century fundamentally different from the 19th and 20th Centuries when it doubled nearly every generation.

In 2006, Paul Crutzen first termed the new era where human activities dominate Earth’s metabolic processes as the “Anthropocene,” a new geologic era like the “Pleistocene” or the “Miocene.” Johan Rockstrom and numerous other environmental scientists have identified several planetary boundaries; crossing these is a clear sign of unsustainability. Currently, humans are within the safe operating space for ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone loss, phosphorus flux to the ocean, global freshwater use, and land system change, but have crossed the boundary for climate change, rate of biodiversity loss and nitrogen fixation.

At first, this seems like a deeply discouraging thought because improvements in human welfare such as lengthening life expectancies and increases in economic goods and services that make our lives better have, for the last two centuries, been closely tied to increases in natural resource use and economic growth. An end to the expansion in natural resource use seems to imply an end to human progress. Fortunately, this is not necessarily so. In fact, one key to sustainability lies in decoupling improvements in human welfare from increases in natural resource use.

Perhaps the steepest challenge of our time lies in simultaneously meeting these two overarching goals of improving human well-being while restraining humanity’s ecological footprint. But there is reason to think that it is doable, beyond the assertion that it must be done, and in fact even some evidence that this great transition, this decoupling, is already underway. Figure 1.4 adds two new measures—energy consumption per capita and energy consumption per dollar of goods and services produced. Note that the amount of energy the average human consumes, measured as tonnes of oil per year, increased from 3.3 in 1850 (though at that time it was mostly wood and coal) to about 12 tonnes in 1990. It then peaked, however, and now shows signs of declining, if only a bit. This means that the doubling in the value of goods and services that the average human received between 1980 and 2000 was achieved without increasing their average energy consumption. That’s an encouraging trend.

 

Now take a look at energy consumption per thousand dollars of gross product. In 1850 it took 11 metric tonnes of oil equivalent to produce a thousand dollars worth of goods and services but this has steadily fallen to 1.8 tonnes in 2000, even correcting for inflation. This is excellent news because it shows that humans have steadily gotten more and more of what they really need—nutritious food, comfortable and even fashionable clothing, solid housing, accessible transportation, entertainment, quality health care and education, and so forth—for every unit of extraction of natural resources from this finite planet. The reason I can be optimistic about the prospects for natural resources sustainability is that I think we can accelerate this process, along with bringing population growth to a halt, in the 21st Century. Keep this hopeful vision for a sustainable and prosperous future in mind, not only because it is a central theme of this text.

What Sustainability is and is Not

In March 2009, Scientific American published a short article entitled “Top 10 Myths about Sustainability” that is very useful in keeping us from getting off on the wrong track. Here’s the list of myths and a response that puts us on the right road.

Myth 1: Nobody knows what sustainability really means. We’re already on the road to exploding this myth. In Chapter 7 on ecological economics, we’ll nail down an even more precise definition.

Myth 2: Sustainability is all about the environment. It’s also about sustaining human welfare —indefinitely—by making sure the environment is always there to sustain us.

Myth 3: Sustainable is a synonym for “green.” Green is a marketing term, a political party, and, incidentally, a color; sustainability is a principle.

Myth 4: It’s all about recycling. Recycling is a good idea but is not even the tip of the iceberg in reducing our ecological footprint through reforming agricultural, energy, industrial, and other social and economic systems.

Myth 5: Sustainability is too expensive. Sustainability is about making our lifestyles less expensive—when we count the environmental costs.

Myth 6: Sustainability means lowering our standard of living. To become more sustainable, we need to be willing to change more than to sacrifice. When we do so, our standard of living will be better, not worse.

Myth 7: Consumer choices and grassroots activism, not government intervention, offer the fastest, most efficient routes to sustainability. Government policies can block or advance sustainability in critical ways as we will explore in depth, especially in Chapter 15. The right government policies enable consumer choices and grassroots activism by giving them a downhill coast rather then an uphill climb toward sustainability.

Myth 8: New technology is always the answer. Sometimes it is very helpful, as can be illustrated with the examples of hybrid cars, wind turbines, solar panels and LED lights but many sustainable technologies are as old as applying manure to crop fields or living close to where we work or go to school.

Myth 9: Sustainability is ultimately a population problem. We will explore this idea in depth in Chapter 5 and find that the Earth’s 8 billion can live sustainably or unsustainably—depending on their lifestyles.

Myth 10: Once you understand the concept, living sustainably is a breeze to figure out. If that were true, this would be the only chapter in this text. Instead we have to apply the sustainability concept resource-by-resource, place-by-place, and you will still have to figure out how to apply it in your own life.

Geographer Robert Kates and a long list of colleagues proposed in a 2001 article in the prestigious journal Science an interdisciplinary field that they call “sustainability science.” Natural resource sustainability is thus at the heart of sustainability science, keeping in mind that this is not a theoretical or laboratory science, but a multi-faceted applied science where nature and people, principle and practice come together.

Sustainability as a Commitment to the Future

Paradoxically, we can know the past, but we can’t affect it. In contrast, our actions in the present can and do affect the future, but we can never know with certainty what tomorrow will bring. Nevertheless, we can often develop a sense of the future and, if we’re smart, identify key factors that will govern outcomes down the road.

I’ll bet you’ve seen the 1997 disaster movie Titanic. Midway through the film, in the absence of radar (which was invented 23 years after the 1912 disaster), the shipmate on the bow first saw the fateful iceberg about a quarter mile dead ahead on a calm, cold night. Doing his duty, he immediately informed the captain, who ordered “reverse engines” and a hard turn to the left. Just before ramming headlong into the iceberg, the ship did start to slow down and turn, but it was too little, too late. Five compartments in the lower decks were torn open by the ice and began to fill with icy seawater. From that point, it was a mathematical certainty that the elegant ship was doomed to sink to the bottom of the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage. All those who couldn’t fit into the inadequate lifeboats would perish from hypothermia.

But what if the shipmate had seen the iceberg a half mile off? What if the captain had ordered the change in course even faster, or the workers below deck could have altered the ship’s tremendous momentum with greater agility? The ship would have slipped harmlessly by the iceberg and only cruise ship enthusiasts would have heard of the Titanic.

Sci-fi movies such as Don’t Look Up have proposed an asteroid or comet on a trajectory to smash into the Earth, like the one that struck the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico 65 million years ago and brought the dinosaurs to a sudden end. If we could send out a space ship, say with nuclear weapons, capable of changing the asteroid’s trajectory, nudging it as little as an inch when it was still out near Mars, that would be sufficient to keep it from hitting the Earth at all, but if we waited until it had passed the moon, there might be no force capable of preventing a catastrophe that could send humans into the abyss of extinction to join the dinosaurs.

What these examples show is that oftentimes the earlier we can identify and act upon threats or opportunities, the greater the leverage we have over the ultimate outcome. The present has power over the future (that is, your future) if there is a vision and an ethical commitment to improve future circumstances that we value, such as the quality of human life, and, perhaps, the bounty of non-human life on Earth, either for its own sake or for all that it offers us.

Sustainability as a Social Movement

Think globally, act locally—you’ve probably heard that before. Above, I hope to have given you the beginnings of a sense of how to think globally about natural resources sustainability. If progress is to be made, however, it must happen, to quote President George H.W. Bush, at “a thousand points of light.”

As a global social movement, sustainability has evolved partly from the American tradition. We associate the Conservation Movement of the late 19th and early 20th century with John Wesley Powell who explored the Colorado River and established the U.S. Geological Survey, President Teddy Roosevelt, who established the first National Parks, Gifford Pinchot, who established the U.S. Forest Service, John Muir, champion of wilderness and founder of the Sierra Club, Hugh Hammond Bennett, champion of soil conservation, and Aldo Leopold of Sand County Almanac fame. They also established a land ethic whereby the natural capital (though they never used the term) contained in forests and soil needs to be conserved for the prosperity of future generations.

The modern environmental movement emerged in the 1960s as rapid industrial growth generated severe air and water pollution, dammed the rivers, sprawled the suburbs, and inundated “consumers” with goods, not all of which were wholesome. It coalesced with the civil rights, women’s rights, and peace movements of that decade. Beyond conserving natural resources for use by our children, Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader, and many other leaders focused on the threat of toxic pollution and flawed consumer products to human health and the beauty and permanence of intact natural ecosystems.

It was under the Nixon Administration (1969–1973) that many of our most important environmental laws were passed: The National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act. These were followed by the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, Superfund, and other regulatory laws, largely administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, which President Nixon established in 1970. These laws remain the means through which government protects the environment, and thus us, from abuses emerging from private sector industries. In this way, the environmental movement evolved from an upper-class white male issue into a concern for environmental justice. Why is it always the poor and people of color that suffer from the health and aesthetic impacts of industrial development while the affluent build summer homes in scenic recreational areas?

Sustainability takes this evolution to the next level. The economy has now become globalized, and so the movement must follow suit. Protecting the environment is largely about protecting people. But this can’t be accomplished entirely through greater regulatory constraints, imposed in detail from Washington, on private-sector economic activities. It has to be grassroots, local, centered in non-governmental organizations and within farms and companies as they re-examine how to produce goods and services in more environmentally sound ways. It requires an ecological consciousness, a deep sense that in a world crowded with people, humans need to live in a manner consistent with the welfare and survival of other living beings. Like in the popular 2009 movie Avatar, the natives have grown restless of the exploitation and are organizing to resist.

Paul Hawken’s 2007 book Blessed Unrest counts over a million organizations, mostly non-government, not-for-profit, that are active in the myriad aspects of creating natural resources sustainability. And that was over a decade ago. Like websites on the Internet, these organizations are not coordinated, but they can communicate and share information and points of view. Most are locally-based, and focused on one or two specific issues that relate to quality of life: water quality, access to transportation, the availability of safe, nutritious food. These organizations are acting locally.

Overview of this Text

The commonly accepted definition of sustainability comes from a 1987 convention of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development in Stockholm led by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland and the subsequent book Our Common Future: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” There are many other definitions of sustainable development and sustainability, but there is no good reason to depart from this one, which clearly leads the list. This book explores natural resources sustainability from multiple perspectives.

To complete Part I, Chapter 2 searches environmental history for the lessons it has to teach us. Has unsustainable natural resource use ever caused a human catastrophe? How have societies successfully avoided this outcome? Can we adopt some of these same strategies today?

In Part II, Nature’s Role, we will examine how natural resources are created through ecological, geological, and astronomical processes, why they are distributed unevenly across the Earth and over time, and even how our definition of natural resources changes over time alongside our needs and desires and, even more powerfully, our technological capacity to turn natural substances and processes into human value. In this exploration we will be guided by two relatively recent concepts from the emerging field of ecological economics: natural capital and ecosystem services.

In Part III, Society’s Role, we explore human population and then take a dive into the deep pool of economics and politics. Remember, the last two centuries have been characterized by economic growth, a 1000-fold economic explosion. How do various economic perspectives, especially neoclassical and ecological economics, view natural resources and how do they instruct us on how best to utilize, conserve, and allocate them? We will also explore the political system, not just the three branches of government (come on, you can name them), but even more deeply-rooted institutions such as property rights. Who owns the resources? What difference does this make? What powers do owners have and what powers does government, which may or may not represent the community, have over natural resources?

We also explore the contemporary debate about scarcity and abundance. Not everyone agrees with the perspective that I have outlined in the first few pages of this chapter. Some argue that the Earth has no natural resource limits that technological innovation and free enterprise cannot readily overcome, that conserving natural resources and protecting the environment will erase the progress in human welfare that has been so arduously achieved over the past few centuries. Others argue that any form of economic growth is anathema and will accelerate a global ecological collapse that is already nearly inevitable. To many, “sustainability development” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, or, worse, a vague and meaningless term that helps mask the normal pursuit of self-interest.

In Part IV Resource-by-Resource we will look in turn at each of the major natural resource sectors, starting with land and soil as natural resources for agriculture and forestry. We then proceed to fresh water, mineral resources, and energy. We will see that agriculture and energy, two irresistible topics, are the linchpins of humanity’s relationship to the Earth, but it is often water that makes both possible. No two places on Earth are the same with respect to this people-food-water-energy nexus, so we must explore the issues geographically, focusing on the United States, but drawing upon examples from elsewhere, to sift through the fascinating variations and possibilities.

Finally, in Part V: Policy and Sustainability, we will explore the realm of natural resources and environmental policy. What is policy? For one thing, it is not all-powerful; the founding fathers made sure of this when they built a system of checks and balances into the constitution (those three branches again), divided powers between the national, state, and local governments, while also ensuring a strong private sector and civic culture that includes churches separate from the state. Nevertheless, in a country where even giant corporations have to take the law very seriously, policies are very important in determining outcomes. What kinds of policies advance natural resource sustainability? What kinds of policies undermine it? By the time we reach the end, you’ll have a much better grasp of this, but no one has all the answers.

We close by digging deeper into the meaning of sustainability and develop a realistic vision of how the future can feature a less antagonistic relationship between humans and the Earth while, not despite of but because of this, human progress can continue for more astonishing centuries.

Further Reading

Hawken, P. 2007. Blessed Unrest. How the largest movement in the world came into being and why no none saw it coming. Viking Books.

Kates, R., et al. 2001. “Sustainability science.” Science 292(5517): 641–642.

Rockstrom, J and 28 others, 2009. “A safe operating space for humanity.” Nature, 461, 472-475.

Media Attributions

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