Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2

10. Sustainability

A restaurant menu stuffed into my mailbox the other day offers “1/2 Pound Burger from Authentic, Artisan, Sustainable Cattle Topped with Sustainable Bacon, local Abby Cheese, local Arugula” ($14). For a lexicographer, no evidence is too humble. The hamburger from “Sustainable Cattle Topped with Sustainable Bacon” tells of a word that has vastly expanded its field of reference in recent years.

What the chef means is not hard to explain. “Sustainable cattle” are presumably animals fed on grass, not grain, and raised without the hormones that speed other cattle from birth to a profitable size for slaughter. Pigs do not eat grass, but there must be a similar rationale for “sustainability” in producing bacon. If the beef and bacon do not have to be trucked in from thousands of miles away, the restaurant and the diner accomplish another gain for the environment, reducing the costs of transport, packaging, and refrigeration. But whether eating beef and bacon is a “sustainable” practice at all is another question. It might be sustainable if it were restricted to a small aristocracy, as in the Homeric poems. I am not sure how many acres of pasturage beef cattle require per head, but it is not likely that Connecticut contains enough acres to sustain many “sustainable cattle,” or enough to sustain the state’s population. A food culture that includes regular doses of beef would not be sustainable under the grass-fed definition of sustainable cattle farming. And when the farmer’s accountant looks at the costs of leasing pasturage, or the opportunity costs of holding land in pasture as opposed to selling it for housing developments and shopping malls, the conclusion may be that sustainable farming is not economically sustainable, or not for long. In short, the word applies so generally, and to the objects of so many contradictory interests, as to give us reason to doubt that there is such a thing as “sustainability.”

Another example: the sourcebook State of the World 2010: Transforming Culture from Consumerism to Sustainability, published by the Worldwatch Institute, is full of apt critiques of consumerism but nowhere defines “sustainability.” The term has become a vague designator for a broad set of behaviors undertaken in order to avoid the destruction of natural resources, behaviors that may be mutually undermining but that have the common characteristic of breaking with the model of ever-increasing growth through increased consumption. And as in my menu example, the trade-off between consumerism and sustainability may be no trade-off at all, once sustainability becomes yet another consumer desirable (no less desirable for all that; I have not yet tried the sustainable bacon burger, but I’m sure it tastes better than its mass-produced rival).

What practices are sustainable? If a timber company scrupulously plants one seedling for every tree felled, and a few more to make up for failures to thrive, the operation is sustainable, assuming that the soil quality is not degraded over time. Every unit taken out of the ecosystem is replaced by a unit of input. With solar or wind energy, presumably the ecological cost of extracting the materials to make photoelectric panels and rotors is amortized, at least by human calculations, by the hydrocarbon-based energy generation they replace. With the pumping of oil, the quarrying of Carrara marble or the depletion of soil by centuries of agriculture, the return of the extracted unit is hard to envisage: most human activities are not environmentally neutral, and by that standard, are not “sustainable” for an indefinite future; they gain the showy label “sustainable” by being less brutally extractive than some other existing practice.

The equivalent term in some other languages, “durable,” makes a less exorbitant claim. Why have English-speakers elected to use “sustainable,” and to use it in so many contexts?

“Sustainable” became the obligatory word for the concept through the publication of “Our Common Future,” the 1987 report of the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development (chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland). The Commission declared: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

But where did the Commission get its choice of word? The answer lies in one of Buckminster Fuller’s deflections of the vocabulary of science and engineering, one of his attempts to shift the energies devoted to “weaponry” toward the purposes of “livingry.” In his free-verse manifesto And It Came to Pass—Not to Stay (1976) Fuller described his life activities thus:

The passage also encodes the proximate cause of the association between the word “sustainable” and the idea of an energy process that does not deplete its underlying resources, but returns as much in output as was put into it: namely the nuclear chain reaction. Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard’s atomic pile, built in an abandoned University of Chicago squash court in 1942, appeared to reverse the usual relation between energetic inputs and outputs with its self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. [1] The new world economy opened by atomic energy would operate on a different economic basis from the world of carbon-based fuels, Fuller reasoned. Something else happened: atomic bombs, superpower rivalry, consumption-led development. “Sustainable,” with all its ambiguities and vague aspirations, is the inherited mark of that moment of postwar optimism. It is the unread symbol of the reversal of economic laws that might be achieved if only human nature could be amended.