The Challenge of Sustainability

Have you noticed an increased use of the term “sustainable development” recently? Maybe it’s the increased environmental awareness that causes people to fall back on this term in an uncritical way. In the same way I have also noticed an increased use of the term “sustainable prosperity”. Who could be opposed to sustainable prosperity? Don’t we all want our prosperity to be sustainable?

One way to think critically about these concepts is to ask the question: sustainable for whom? For example, sustainable development of the forest industry may not lead to forests that can sustain all the animals that now live there. Similarly, sustainable prosperity for cities may not lead to sustainable rural populations.

In the 1970s, ethicists working for the churches recognized that environmental health also required an increase in social justice. At that time they began to speak of the need for just, participatory and sustainable communities and societies.

In the 1987 Brundtland Commission Report on Environment and Development, the authors called for a global set of ethical principles to guide the transition to sustainable development. People hoped that the nations gathered for the Rio Conference on the Environment in 1992 would pass such a document but not enough nations would agree. In 1994, the Canadian Internationalist Maurice Strong teamed up with former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to renew this effort and three years later the Earth Charter was released. It has since been endorsed by over 2,000 organizations representing millions of people and is thought to represent an international consensus.

The third of the Charter’s 16 principles calls us to “build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable and peaceful.” Over the last 20 years there has been a definite shift in international circles away from the language of sustainable development and toward the language of sustainable communities. In this context, sustainability becomes a moral imperative to remove the barriers to justice and a fair distribution of resources, so everyone can be empowered to protect the other communities of creation with whom we share this planet. Another term for this is ecojustice.

One of the ways sustainability is understood by the Earth Charter is in terms of sufficiency. One of the sub-principles calls on all of us to “adopt lifestyles that emphasize the quality of life and material sufficiency in a finite world”. Over the last 30 years, anthropologists have begun to use the term “moral economy” to describe the principles used by rural and farm groups to justify their rebellions against widespread economic change. These rural groups do not rise up in response to just any change. They rise up against changes that threaten their very livelihood. They rise up against forces that challenge their ability to even exist. The principle of sufficiency requires us to recognize that sometimes my desire for more threatens your ability to get anything at all.

The future of rural Canada does not depend on a strategy of sustainable development or sustainable prosperity. It depends on the whole of Canada pursuing a strategy to create sustainable communities. That means a strategy that recognizes the link between social justice and environmental integrity, and claims sufficiency as a necessary goal for everyone.