State of the World 2013 is a powerful collection of articles than ever, it addresses a broad and fundamental question: sustainability (not to be confused with “sustainababble”). How did you structure the project? Are you satisfied?
Tom Prugh: We laid out the report in three sections, because we felt that structure mirrored the situation humanity faces. The report starts with a critique of how the word “sustainable” has become corrupted, co-opted, and almost meaningless. A great deal of talk about “sustainability” is, in fact, what we term “sustainababble”—basically gibberish. We wanted to try to restore real meaning to sustainability, and to do that we felt that it was necessary to look at what science has to say about where the Earth’s limits lie and how close humanity is to approaching them (worryingly close) or, in some cases, overstepping them already.
The second section samples a number of policies and ways of viewing our relationship to the global ecosystem that, if we adopted them at scale and rapidly, would put us firmly on the path to sustainability. The third section—“Open in Case of Emergency”—assumes (with pretty good reason) that we will not adopt those policies fast or aggressively enough to avoid major environmental and social troubles. It offers some suggestions for coping with those possibilities.
The report seems to resonate with a lot of people and is selling very well, so judging by its reception the structure seems to have captured a bit of the spirit of the times.
An important first step would be to give up the cultures of consumption: consumerism has turned out to undermine both human well-being and the planet’s life-support functions. But it is a willfully engineered way of living, supported by huge amounts of money... how can we do to break it?
Erik Assadourian: In truth, the odds are stacked against us in the short term. Just the US$500 billion spent each year in marketing the consumer way of life is enough to keep up the momentum of consumerism. But in the longer term, consumerism is doomed. We cannot make growing amounts of consumption the meaning of the lives of 7 (or 9) billion people on a finite planet.
The options are either to proactively transition to a sustainable culture or wait until systems break down and the Earth forces us down a sustainable path. The only difference will be the amount of suffering this transition will create. Ideally, cultural pioneers will act now to help accelerate the transition and plant seeds of a sustainable culture—seeds that can bloom as the consumer culture increasingly withers and dies on the vine. There are many ways to act: from changing small-scale cultures like school curricula and municipal law, to global efforts like harnessing Hollywood to make new myths and stories that help normalize a sustainable way of life.
The democracies that most of the industrial world lives in are systems designed, second the political theorist Benjamin Barber, “to keep men safely apart rather than bring them fruitfully together”. One antidote to this is deliberation. Would you briefly explained the concept of deliberative democracy?
T. Prugh: Most current democracies are not true democracies, but republics. They give most power and decisionmaking responsibility to elected representatives, rather than letting the people take part directly in decisionmaking on the issues that are important to them. One result is partisan gridlock and the high susceptibility of elected officials to outside influence. In the United States, for instance, Supreme Court decisions over the years have established that there is essentially no difference in civic standing between individual citizens and corporations that spend billions of dollars on political advertising, lobbying, and propaganda.
Barber calls this sort of democracy “politics as zookeeping”—systems designed, as you noted, to keep people safely apart. But there are major potential advantages in bringing people fruitfully together in the political arena. Paradoxically, one of the weaknesses of liberal democracy may be not that it asks too much of its citizens but that it asks too little. Having mostly handed off all responsibility for assessing issues and setting policy to elected politicians, voters are free to be irresponsible in their positions. They can indulge themselves in narrow and virulently asserted positions rather than having to come together, work to perceive the common good, and plot a course toward it.
One antidote to this is deliberation. The essence of deliberative democracy, according to social scientist Adolf Gundersen, is “the process by which individuals actively confront challenges to their beliefs.” In the public sphere this generally means engaging in pairs or larger groups to discuss issues, compare notes, probe (not attack) one another’s assertions, and take the opportunity to possibly even change one’s mind! People in such settings have the chance evolve their personal positions in order to forge a collective one. What’s this got to do with sustainability? Gundersen says that deliberative democracy “connects the people, first with each other and then with the environment they wish not simply to visit, but also to inhabit.”
Deliberation is not easy. It’s a “conversation,” he says, “not a series of speeches.” Conversations involve respectful listening, not just waiting to talk. Yet Gundersen’s research suggests that it could help us act in a collective way for our collective interests, which is what is required to achieve anything like sustainability.
The troubles are coming (climate change, just to name the most visible threat), but there are better responses to that than stockpiling canned goods and weapons, for example “building resilience”. What is meant by this concept and how it can be achieved?
E. Assadourian: As State of the World 2013 author Laurie Mazur explains in her chapter, “resilience, in the simplest terms, can be defined as a system’s ability to mitigate and withstand disturbances and to bounce back afterwards, while continuing to function.” There are dramatic changes already built into our future—towns and cities will be lost to a rising sea, populations displaced, agricultural product reduced—all which our population is projected to grow by a few billion more.
Ensuring that communities, cities, and countries design their policies to be resilient—rebuilding coastal wetlands, preventing new development in low-lying land, increasing crop diversity, and rebuilding diverse ecosystems, for example, will be essential for weathering the ugly transition that is coming.
The good news is that resilience can be achieved at many levels: tribal peoples for millennia have chosen to farm multiple small plots instead of one large plot even though this takes more work and produces less food. But diversifying plots translates to smaller odds of starving in any season. Diversifying local economies and agricultural product and reducing dependence on the global energy infrastructure will help build resilience, as will planning for a warming world. The city of Chicago is already planning for the climate of New Orleans, adding more heat-tolerant street trees and other measures necessary to cope with the increase in temperature expected by the end of the century. We’ll need to do this all across the globe if we’re going to increase humanity’s resilience to the coming changes.
How do you consider the effectiveness of the global environmental movement? Suggestions?
E. Assadourian: Environmentalist Peter Berg once criticized the global environmental movement for being essentially a defensive effort—which prevents it from ever succeeding. By trying to stop the next crisis—whether climate change, a new powerplant or dam, ozone depletion, or GMOs—we’re at best slowing down the collapse of human civilization. Instead, the environmental movement must go on the offensive, creating a new ecocentric culture to replace the now dominant growth-centric consumer-capitalist culture. In my chapter “Building an Enduring Environmental Movement,” I argue that the best way to proceed with this would be to use the effective strategies of missionary religious philosophies: creating a strong holistic ideology and spreading it using a series of social enterprises and social service providers: from eco-schools and eco-clinics, to rehabilitative social farms, even eco-homeless shelters. This would not only help change how individuals live and help spread this way of thinking and being, but over the long term create a committed set of adherents who can help drive the transition to a new way of living on and with the Earth.
This doesn’t mean short-term campaigning should cease—we need defensive actions too, to buy us time. But this multi-century strategy should complement these short-term efforts and ideally help create a steady stream of activists. Just imagine if environmentalists had the equivalent of a “Mormon mission,” where young environmentalists raised money from their own communities and families to go on a two-year mission helping to spread the “good word” (or in our case “ecological wisdom”) and join local environmental activist campaigns. This might prove much more powerful than a professional environmental non-profit class that campaigns for a living—and thus sometimes chooses the less bold course of action so as not to alienate foundations and corporate funders.
Ideas for Report 2014? Hopes?
T. Prugh: The 2014 edition of State of the World will focus on governance, which we’re defining as the ways we humans manage our relationships with each other and with the biosphere. Clearly humanity is not doing that very well, in many cases, so we wanted to look at what could be done in terms of governance processes to improve those relationships, both in politics and in economics. Including the economic realm may surprise readers, but there are big differences, for example, in how people relate to each other in a shareholder-owned corporation versus a cooperative or a worker-owned firm, and also how those two firms relate to the natural world. We think that makes a difference in terms of how sustainable a culture can be.
We hope to make the book the beginning of a two-year project on governance for sustainability. It’s clear that sustainability is not really a technical challenge. We have all the technical know-how to get us there. What’s stopping us are social and political factors, and these have to be addressed through politics. We want to help kindle a grassroots political movement to amplify the momentum toward sustainability already being built by publishers such as Edizione Ambiente, organizing groups like 350.org, and many others around the globe. If we can’t make it happen that way, nature will impose sustainability upon us—on her own terms.
