Home > Some issues you may encounter in discussions of sustainability
Home > Some issues
you may encounter in discussions of sustainability
Cece Headley works with timber, operating
a one-person business in what’s sometimes called the reforestation field.
Her work is changing.
On her 30th birthday Headley replanted trees in a harvested area. The day she
turned 40 she did a timber stand exam, sizing up the harvest potential of trees.
She turns 50 later this year, and these days many of her contracts are for jobs
like cataloging all the vegetation and wildlife in an area, or collecting the
seeds of native plants.
"In the days of the big cuts, everything was about board feet of timber,"
said Headley, of Eugene, whose work takes her from the Coast Range all the way
across Oregon and as far east as Montana. "This is the time of looking
at the forest as a complete forest."
The changes in Headley’s work, and similar changes in the work of some
loggers and others in the timber industry, are driven by a topic people often
discuss when they explore issues orbiting around the word sustainability—the
impact of humans on the natural world.
Sustainability is not a code word for environmentalism, say many working under
the rather large sustainability umbrella. But most efforts are rooted in the
belief that the health of economic and social systems is directly linked to
the condition of natural resources and ecosystems.
If that’s true, there are reasons for concern. Examples include a dwindling
supply of oil, dirty water and air, eroding topsoil and climate changes related
to human activities.
It would take a library of books to explore all the ways the natural world and
various theories about sustainability intertwine. Following are a few concepts
that seem important, and some examples of related issues that seem relevant.
Carrying capacity—Biologists define carrying capacity as the maximum population
size (in this case, human) that an area can support without reducing its ability
to support the same species in the future. Damages to the natural ecosystems
of the world diminish carrying capacity.
Ecosystem services—All living things, including people, depend upon natural
"services" that ecosystems provide, including the stratospheric ozone
layer that protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation, the fertile soil
we grow our crops in and diverse, naturally functioning grasslands, forests,
wetlands and oceans. Humans do not know how to replace these systems and services.
Ecological footprint—Environmental educators use the ecological footprint
concept to help individuals develop a better understanding of what they consume
of nature. (You can estimate your own ecological footprint by answering 13 questions
about your diet, housing and travel habits at the "Redefining Progress"
web site: http://www.rprogress.org.)
Tragedy of the commons—A "commons" refers to a shared resource
that belongs to everyone. Our rivers, the air and the ocean are all considered
to be commons.
Consider factories, cities, farmers, foresters and others all discharging pollutants
into a public—common—body of water or air. Without some way to manage
everyone’s use of the common resource, it is likely that the resource will
be degraded beyond use by anyone. Therein lies the "tragedy of the commons,"
a concept popularized by population biologist Garrett Hardin in a controversial
article published in Science magazine in 1968.
A global example of the tragedy of the commons is climate change. Increased
greenhouse gases, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels in cars, factories
and power stations, are trapping heat in our atmosphere. The United Nations-sponsored
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of 2,000 of the world’s
leading climatologists and other scientists, has projected an increase in average
global temperature by an average of 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the
next century. The scientists are predicting more unstable weather due to climate
change, including harsher droughts, heat waves, tropical storms, sea level rise
and adverse effects on agriculture, health and water balance.
The energy crunch—At current consumption rates, a 30- to 50-year supply
of oil is left, some estimate. If oil supplies are depleted, humans will run
out of inputs such as fuel and fertilizer for activities such as farming. Agriculture,
as it is currently practiced in many parts of the world, will not be sustainable.
Challenges in Oregon—According to the 2000 Oregon State of the Environment
Report—Statewide Summary, produced by a scientific panel for the
Oregon Progress Board, Oregon has environmental trouble spots including:
If the natural world is damaged as seriously as the examples above suggest,
is there hope for the future? It depends on whom you ask.
Many people involved with sustainability efforts seem to believe a key to solving
the problems is synchronizing human economic activities and social systems with
nature.
Ecologists, sociologists and economists working together in recent years say
they have developed a deeper understanding of how the natural world provides
economic—as well as environmental and social—value to society.
For example, "ecosystem services" supplied annually to humans are
worth many trillions of dollars, calculate ecologists such as Gretchen Daily
from Stanford University and Jane Lubchenko of Oregon State University.
Worldwide, and certainly in Oregon, businesses (such as the timber industry,
mentioned at the beginning of this article) are searching for ways to protect,
and in many cases restore, the natural world and make a profit doing it. If
they’re successful, that will have a stabilizing effect on social systems
such as communities.
However, some people caution that natural resource protection and restoration
will have costs—that setting limits on resource use, biotechnology, genetically
modified crops or land use may hurt society.
"How are we going to continue to make the advances we’ve made in the
past and not run into the antitechnology activists?" asked Terry
Witt, executive director of Oregonians for Food and Shelter, a Salem-based
not-for-profit organization that lobbies for responsible natural resource management.
"We’ve kind of hit, or been through, several major leaps in our ability
to produce food more effectively: Mechanization, the introduction of commercial
fertilization, crop protection with chemicals, and now biogenetics or genetic
engineering seems to promise the next leap.
"We’ll never feed the growing population in the future unless we’re
willing to convert more and more land to agriculture, timber, etc., or we’re
willing to find out how to do things more efficiently, to continue to make these
leaps," said Witt.
Others say we’ve made environmental progress over the last few decades.
"Environmental quality started improving dramatically in the mid-1980s,"
asserted John A. Charles, environmental policy director at Cascade Policy Institute,
a libertarian think tank based in Portland, Ore.
"Private companies, driven by competition to become more efficient, instituted
a myriad of technologies to reduce both resource consumption and pollution."
Still others assert that cleaning up industry and making things more efficient
should begin with the government—that regulations and incentives are necessary
for the private sector to change. They point out examples where government and
industry worked together for a better future.
For example, the Federal Clean Air Act mandated stricter air pollution laws,
then industry changed designs in cars and factories to clean up the air.
One of our big challenges, some assert, involves the social part of the sustainability
puzzle. How do we help people and families and communities make it through the
transition as the jobs and industries they work in evolve into forms that are
profitable and more in balance with the natural world?