Across the Rubicon

One wouldn’t think that it would be overly difficult to agree on what a word means, but a remarkably large number of meanings seem to get attached to sustainable. There are nearly as many definitions of sustainable and sustainability as there are suggestions on how to achieve them. Not surprisingly, there is also a rather strong correlation between how the terms are defined and the problems or objectives they are used to discuss.

Therein lies a bit of a problem – it’s rather difficult to arrive at any consensus on a subject if people are using the same word to mean different things. Since policy debates require consensus, this is not a trivial problem.

The term sustainable development was coined in a 1987 report by the World Commission on Environment and Development titled Our Common Future (a.k.a. the “Brundtland Report”) sponsored by the United Nations. In it, sustainable development was defined as:

…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The report goes on to recommend numerous policy priorities directed at various social, economic, and environmental concerns in pursuit of that aspiration of sustainability.

Over 30 years later, the precise meaning of sustainable and its practical implications remain subjects of some debate. One fairly recent analysis (Moore et al. 2017) identified more than twenty distinct definitions of “sustainable” being used in articles on sustainability – and that’s just in healthcare! Currently, the UN’s Sustainable Development website lists seventeen distinct goals identifying targets for sustainability efforts.

It really isn’t surprising that both policymakers and the public get a bit vexed by figuring out what sustainable means and how to promote it in practical terms. Conversely, it also leaves a lot of room for critics and opponents of sustainable development efforts to gain traction.

If a word can mean anything,

then it essentially means nothing

This sort of ambiguity is not unexpected for such a complex subject. It’s fairly common in academic research for terms to take a long time to arrive at common definitions and meanings. At one point, for example, there were nearly 200 definitions (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952) being used by anthropologists for the term “culture” – one of the most important terms in the field of anthropology.

The word merely became a stand-in for whatever aspect of culture someone was studying, which obviously would not apply for someone studying some different aspect. Unfortunately, that also meant that there was no way to evaluate between them. Each definition only worked within its own scope of interest, and rarely made any sense when applied to anything else.

Sustainable is falling into much the same predicament. It is defined largely in terms of whatever aspect of sustainability is being addressed at the time. Each meaning is distinct, often contradicting other definitions, and overly specific to a narrow subject area. The lack of common definition, however, tends to be a major obstacle to properly framing the problem and can lead to largely unproductive debates.

The sustainability movement is still going through just these sorts of growing pains. While the idea of sustainable development is more established, equivocal definitions can’t frame the problem in a way that easily points to obvious and practical steps to achieve its goals.

Sustainability, an archaeologist’s view

The truth is that, despite appearances to the contrary, most definitions of sustainable are not all that different once you look behind the jargon. The common yet often implicit theme being expressed through them all is a simple question – what happens if it isn’t sustainable? That consistent thread is very familiar to those who have studied archaeology.

Why would that be so familiar to archaeologists? Simply because the majority of the societies that we study are no longer here. At some point, their cultural institutions and practices could not be sustained. When archaeologists talk about the “collapse” of a group or civilization, that’s what we mean.

It’s not that they died off (although that did sometimes happen) but that their larger social institutions and normal behavior were no longer feasible to continue. Even after Rome fell, there were still Romans trying very hard to figure out how to get by and what to do next. People are highly adaptable, but institutions tend to be very slow to adjust to change.

While there is no single cause for a civilization’s collapse, in nearly all cases the culprit is that the institutions failed to adapt to changes in their physical, social, or political environments. Those should sound familiar to people working in sustainable development – they’re essentially the three “pillars” of sustainability. They can also be thought of as environment, social, and governance (ESG) factors for those in the business and finance worlds.

Archaeologists study the historical evidence of the successes, and the failures, of how people used their environment and resources or adapted to changes in climate and landscape. We study the remains of how people navigated periods of political and economic upheaval. Archaeologists have devoted a lot of time to studying what successful and unsuccessful adaptation looks like.

Our contemporary concerns are not significantly different from those in the past. Only the particulars have changed. There is little new under the sun, after all.

Sustainability, adaptation, and the three-body problem

The practical upshot is that sustainability is really just the ability to successfully adapt to change. Sustainability is a strategy rather than an outcome. Overly narrow or technical definitions can create obstacles to success by promoting fixed targets and metrics. Those may be easier to measure and manage, but they don’t sufficiently address the underlying need for adaptability.

Worse yet, such plans tend to give the impression that our problems can be best tackled by preventing change instead of adapting to it. Too many seem to view sustainability as a means to either limit change or otherwise continue some version of current needs and wants into the future. That problematically assumes that the needs of the future are merely an expansion on our needs now.

That isn’t quite the point. The point is that we really don’t want to go the way of Rome… or any of the numerous other empires and civilizations that tried, and failed, to continue on as though they were immune to changes around them.

For sustainable development to emerge as a collection of successful adaptive strategies, we also need to consider the three pillars – environmental, social, and economic/political factors – as interconnected facets of the same problem. Confronting only one dimension of the problem is futile, since each is affected by the others. We cannot successfully address environmental issues without simultaneously balancing them against their socio-political and economic consequences. Addressing a just single problem area results in a never-ending cascade of reactions with no feasible solutions.

In many ways, balancing strategies between the three dimensions of sustainable development can be seen as the classic three-body problem. To find a stable state of balance between the interacting requirements involves continuously adapting dynamic solutions, rather than fixed or static remedies. This is not to say that current aspirations such as “net-zero” emissions or circular economy resource protocols aren’t worthwhile. It does mean that considering those strategies only in terms of the need to make our current systems viable… isn’t really a viable long-term solution unless we successfully balance them against all other interacting systems. It doesn’t help to solve one problem by creating or exacerbating others.

Sustainable strategies

When viewed as strategies of adaptation, sustainable development becomes a systemic imperative towards balancing needs and resources across all aspects of society. Current definitions for sustainable and sustainability have an unfortunate tendency to flatten the terms towards specific technical goals or solutions. More worrisome is the tendency to think of it as a means to preserve and maintain the status quo through fixed measures and policies. Instead, we need to be thinking about how to evolve our current practices within constantly changing conditions.

Otherwise, we could find ourselves becoming yet another case study for future archaeologists…

References

Kroeber, A. L., and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Vol. 1. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology 47. Harvard University.

Moore, Julia E., Alekhya Mascarenhas, Julie Bain, and Sharon E. Straus. 2017. “Developing a comprehensive definition of sustainability.” Implementation Science 12 (1): 110. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-017-0637-1.

World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf.