The Hidden Messages Within Sustainable Development
Citation: Sharon Beder, The Hidden Messages Within Sustainable Development, Social Alternatives, vol.13, no. 2, July 1994, pp. 8-12.
This is a
The Hidden Messages Within Sustainable Development
Citation: Sharon Beder, The Hidden Messages Within Sustainable Development, Social Alternatives, vol.13, no. 2, July 1994, pp. 8-12.
This is a final version submitted for publication.
Many of the key voices in the drive for sustainable development have an agenda that most environmentalists would not accept were it made explicit. For this reason environmentalists should be wary of grasping onto what seems to be common ground in the fight to protect the planet without first examining the implications of such liaisons.
Sustainable development is not about giving priority to environmental concerns, it is about incorporating environmental assets into the economic system to ensure the sustainability of the economic system. Sustainable development encompasses the idea that the loss of environmental amenity can be substituted for by wealth creation; that putting a price on the environment will help us protect it unless degrading it is more profitable; that the `free' market is the best way of allocating environmental resources; that businesses should base their decisions about polluting behaviour on economic considerations and the quest for profit; that economic growth is necessary for environmental protection and therefore should take priority over it.
Sustainable development represents a cooption of the term sustainability which once represented ideas of stability and equilibrium and harmony with nature. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the term was used in the context of the limits to growth debate as part of the argument against economic and population growth. For example the editors of the magazine The Ecologist argued that economic growth could not continue on into the future without disaster:
The principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is that it is not sustainable... By now it should be clear that the main problems of the environment do not arise from temporary and accidental malfunctions of existing economic and social systems. On the contrary, they are the warning signs of a profound incompatibility between deeply rooted beliefs in continuous growth and the dawning recognition of the earth as a space ship, limited in its resources and vulnerable to thoughtless mishandling.
In contrast, advocates of sustainable development in the 1980s sought to find ways of making economic growth sustainable, mainly through technological change. In 1982 the British government began using the term sustainability to refer to sustainable economic expansion rather than the sustainable use of resources. Third World environmental activist Mohamed Idris argues,
The term `sustainable' from the ecological point of view means the maintenance of the integrity of the ecology. It means a harmonious relation between humanity and nature, that is, harmony in the interaction between individual human beings and in their interaction with natural resources. The term `sustainable' from the point of view of non-ecological elites means `how to continue to sustain the supply of raw materials when the existing sources of raw materials run out.'
The term development is also ambiguous and in the context of sustainable development, development is a synonym for economic development, and therefore economic growth. The editor of the environmental science journal, Ambio, Arno Rosemarin, wrote in April 1990:
The two words sustainable and development are in a strict sense contradictory. Sustainable implies the elements of long-term renewal, maintenance, recycling, minimal raw material exploitation and management of people's needs on a collective basis. Development can be interpreted in many different ways but according to our present industrial-based culture it implies short-term planning, minimal maintenance, waste, maximal exploitation of raw materials and emphasis on the individual.
With this change in conception of sustainability and the focus on economic development has come a more pervasive use of economic language in environmental discussions. Much of the discussion of sustainable development describes nature and the environment in economic terms, as natural resources or natural capital, and the community's stock of assets. Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Britain, has described environmental protection in these terms: "no generation has a freehold on the earth. All that we have is a life tenancy - with full repairing lease".
The extent of the takeover of the environmental agenda by economists was indicated by a speaker at an OECD workshop in 1990 who observed: `one can track the evolution of environmental concern over twenty years by watching it move from the back page of major newspapers to the front page, and now to the financial page'.
Sustainable development means incorporating the environment into the economic system. David Pearce and his colleagues, in their report on sustainable development to Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister at the time, said that the principles of sustainable development meant recognising that `resources and environments serve economic functions and have positive economic value.' Considered as a component of the economic system, the environment is seen to provide raw materials for production and to be a receptacle for wastes from production.
D.J.Thampapillai, a lecturer in Economics at Macquarie University says in his text on Environmental Economics;
Clearly, the natural environment is an important component of the ec