Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Kirschenmann: Redefining Sustainability: 'Greening' to self-renewal

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By FRED KIRSCHENMANN, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow

Despite efforts to reduce unsustainability, global resource consumption continues to grow. There is an urgent need for a better understanding of the dynamic, adaptive behavior of complex systems and their resilience in the face of disruptions, recognizing that steady-state sustainability models are simplistic. -- Joseph Fiksel, Co-director, Center for Resilience, Ohio State University


"Going green" seems to be the new sustainability catchphrase designed to save the planet. The question is: If we all go green, will that get us to sustainability?

A typical dictionary definition of sustainability is "to maintain," "to keep going," "to keep in existence." As a broad overview that is a useful definition, but it calls into question exactly what it is that we want to maintain.

In today’s discourse we generally view sustainability from a quantitative perspective. How can we maintain or improve crop yields? How can we maintain the growth of the economy? How can we improve the energy efficiency of our vehicles so we can continue transporting goods from one part of the world to another in the face of rising energy costs? How can we increase the cod population to maintain our seafood industry?

Both environmental and commercial sectors have been captivated by this approach to sustainability.

More recently we have added the "greening" component to this quantitative perspective. Recognizing that we are reaching certain thresholds that could fundamentally change the functioning of the planet, we are beginning to focus on improving efficiencies, reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, switching from fossil energy to renewable alternatives and recycling more of our wastes. On the surface these seem like laudable activities, but will they lead us to sustainability?

Inspired by the insights of ecologists such as C.S. Holling, a new professional society called the Resilience Alliance has emerged during the last 15 years. Following Holling’s description of natural systems and how they function, the Resilience Alliance has concluded that this quantitative approach to sustainability is based on false assumptions.

"In a world characterized by dynamic change in ecological and social systems, it is at least as important to manage systems to enhance their resilience as it is to manage the supply of specific products," the Alliance claims. Using the quantitative approach, "we have assumed that we could manage individual components of an ecological system independently, find an optimal balance between supply and demand for each component, and that other attributes of the system would stay largely constant through time." However, this is a flawed assumption, the Alliance says, given how both social and ecological systems function. All social and biophysical systems are constantly changing.

The basic message from the resilience thinkers is that doing more of the same – new technologies, greater efficiency, more control and command, more intensification, more single tactic strategies – without addressing the resilience of systems will not lead to sustainability. A central problem is that the kind of efficiency that leads to optimization tends to eliminate redundancies, the key ingredient of resilience. Additionally, the achievement of such efficiencies tends to cause rebound effects. More fuel-efficient cars inevitably lead to more driving.

So the kind of greening that pushes the pedal to the metal a little harder – more efficient technologies, better command and control, input substitution – ends up worsening the problem we intended to solve. We delude ourselves into believing that working smarter will solve the problem, but more often it simply reinforces the problem since we have not approached it from a dynamic social/ecological perspective.

The central issue here is that we can never control whole systems, nor can we totally control any part of a system in isolation. Consequently, while greening may bring about desirable short-term results, it will never lead to sustainability. Our world is a complex adaptive system that is interconnected, interdependent and constantly changing. Accordingly, all systems are unpredictable and proceed in a nonlinear fashion. In the end we never can hold a system in an optimal, sustainable state. We only can design systems to enhance their capacity for self-renewal.

This is where some of the prescient wisdom of Aldo Leopold is instructive. Leopold reminded us of two important realities with respect to resilience that we have largely ignored, but that seem essential if we truly are interested in sustainability.

First, he wrote that it is futile to calculate the value of conservation "wholly on economic motives" because "most members of the land community have no economic value," yet they are vital to the stability and integrity of the whole. We also now know that each biotic community is so complex and dynamic that it is impossible to determine which species are essential to its sustainability. Consequently, using a cost/benefit analysis as a basis for judging the value of sustainable practices is a fool’s errand.

Second, Leopold recognized that we could not "preserve" the biotic community in any given state of equilibrium. Since biotic communities are dynamic and interdependent, they are constantly in a state of change. Therefore, conservation perceived as an activity to preserve things in their "natural" state also is an exercise in futility.

What we can do, however, is to understand and preserve the biotic community’s capacity for self-renewal and that, according to Leopold, requires the nurturing of an "ecological conscience."

Leopold writes: “A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.”

Nurturing Leopold's concept of conservation is essential to any quest for sustainability.

For a longer version see The Networker, July/August, 2008, published by the Science and Environmental Health Network, http://www.sehn.org.

Back to Leopold Letter Fall 2008