Few would disagree with the goal of sustainability—using and managing
resources so that we can meet present needs while ensuring that future generations
will have enough resources to meet their needs. But how will we achieve this
goal?
One approach calls for changing the ways we think about and use industrial and
environmental resources. Another approach relies more on technological solutions
to future problems, or what some call the technofix.
In their 1992 book Beyond the Limits: Global Collapse or a Sustainable
Future, authors Donella and Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers noted,
"… the evolving industrial culture has implanted within the human
mind the expectation of ever-continuing growth.... Society tends to assume away
the possibility of limits by placing a profound faith in the powers of technology
and the workings of a free market."
Although the authors were describing a world view, their words describe the
American outlook as well. The tendency to rely on technological solutions is
very much in character for Americans. Our faith in human resourcefulness and
the technology that flows from it goes far back in our national history.
The United States’ long-standing love affair with technology brought us
19th century technowonders like the steamboat, cotton gin and telegraph and
continued unabated through the 20th century, bringing us the space age, computers
and the internet.
Historians say American inventiveness sprang from the endless tasks confronting
a people consumed in founding a new nation.
"We are an inventive people," said the U.S. commissioner of patents
in 1868. "Our merchants invent, our soldiers and sailors invent, our school
masters invent, our professional men invent, aye, our women and children invent."
Pioneers heading west in the mid-19th century to settle in a new land had to
be inventive and resourceful. Their day-to-day survival depended on it.
But how does pioneer spirit with its inventiveness stack up against the challenges
Americans face in the 21st century? Do we now live in a time that requires more
caution?
Our perhaps overly romanticized notion of the pioneers and their indomitable
spirit conjures up visions of American settlers struggling through a long journey
to a new land with seemingly unlimited resources. Upon arriving, the settlers
began taming and developing the countryside as they believed it was their destiny
to do. They staked out land claims, started building towns and cities and began
enjoying the abundant resources the land offered.
The western landscape the pioneers knew has changed significantly over the past
century—there are more people, more towns and cities, and more pressure
on the land to produce the natural resources that supply everyone’s wants
and needs. How would those early pioneers react to what the West has become
today? Is there a place in the pioneer spirit for the concept of sustainability?
"Certainly the behavior of the first white settlers in Oregon was the antithesis
of sustainability," said William Robbins, Oregon State University history
professor and author of many books on the history of Oregon and the Pacific
Northwest.
"In the 19th century, people in Oregon believed in the ethic of abundance,"
Robbins said. "Oregon was a land of abundance and that impressed one and
all, and it probably led people in the direction of not behaving in a manner
that one would call good stewardship. That idea of stewardship developed much
later.
"We’ve lived a full 20th century coming to grips with an unquestioned
assumption that resources are limitless," said Robbins. "Resources
are not limitless. We struggle with it still."
Can our attitudes toward abundance change? Must we brace for a leaner future?
Absolutely not, according to Norman Myers and Julian Simon.
In their 1994 book Scarcity or Abundance, A Debate on the Environment,
the two wrote, "Sustainability has become the buzzword, the implication
being that life as we currently know it and enjoy it is not sustainable….
Should we be impressed by that? … The answer is no. Future generations
will consist, after all, of rational animals, resourceful people like our ancestors
and (I hope) ourselves. They will be able to cope. The human species has made
a decent or better than decent life for itself in an incredible variety of ‘ecologies’
… It is astonishing how contemporary humans can overlook the resourcefulness
of their fellows in all of this recent cant about ecology…. There is …
no resource problem of consequence for the globe."
In a 1981 book, The Ultimate Resource, Simon wrote, "The main
fuel to speed the world’s progress is the stock of human knowledge. And
the ultimate resource is skilled, spirited, hopeful people, exerting their wills
and imaginations to provide for themselves and their families, thereby inevitably
contributing to the benefit of every one."
Simon believes utterly that the ultimate resource on the planet was and is human
ingenuity, which is perhaps another way of describing pioneer spirit. Of course
no one would disagree that human ingenuity is a key to our survival. However,
there are many who doubt that human-engineered solutions in the form of technology
will be enough to save us from environmental challenges ahead. Consider:
Will technology solve these problems? For his part, Robbins flatly disagrees
with the notion that it will be our salvation in the challenges that lie ahead.
"The 20th century response to the argument of diminishing natural resources
is that we can find technological fixes for all human problems whether they
be decreasing supplies of timber, fewer fish in the river, or ecosystem health,"
said Robbins. "I don’t buy it."
There are many instances of the technological fix leading to even greater difficulties,
Robbins continued.
"For example, we’ve tried to find a technological fix to declining
salmon runs by building fish hatcheries," he said. "We’ve found
that fish hatcheries carry with them their own environmental Catch 22 in that
hatchery fish destroy the wild runs of salmon, the wild runs of steelhead and
so forth. Now [because we value the genetic diversity of wild runs of salmon
and want to preserve them] the effort is to limit the impact of hatchery fish
in streams."
That brand of optimism inspired by belief in technological solutions is misguided,
Robbins stated.
Some critics contend that clearly one condition of the traditional pioneer spirit
no longer exists. Whereas the settlers of the Old West could "use it up,
then move on," as Ernest Partridge put it in his essay "Holes in the
Cornucopia" in the 1999 book The Business of Consumption: Environmental
Ethics and the Global Economy, today there is no place to move on to.
There are no more lands to conquer, no more great reserves of untapped resources
to access. In this situation, the pioneer spirit might find itself somewhat
cramped.