I’m Jonathan Levy and I’m the Director of IES, the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability. I’ve been asked to say something about the meaning of sustainability. As Director of IES, I’ve given a lot of thought to this over years. What I’m sharing here should be considered just some of my personal thoughts and ruminations and not necessarily reflect those of IES or Miami University.
IES was founded in 1969 as the Institute of Environmental Science, just one year before the first Earth Day and one year before the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. It was founded by a group of very forward-thinking Miami professors who believed that we were facing a myriad of challenging environmental problems, and to solve these problems would require a truly interdisciplinary approach, one that combined the social and natural sciences. A master’s program was created that brought students together from many different disciplines to address what were considered problems that have a distinctive character separate from any single natural or social science.
IES was restructured in 2010 with the name change to include the word sustainability. Why this change? Personally, at the time, I wanted the name to reflect something more than just a particular kind of science. I remember a former colleague in Geology saying to me that everyone in Geology was an environmental scientist because they studied the geologic environment. I argued that we meant something more than that. We were dealing with values and ethics and that we actually desired certain outcomes, something that natural scientists don’t do as part of their disciplines. To me, the word sustainability reflected that sentiment. It implied that there was an outcome involved.
The most popular definition of sustainability comes from the 1987 United Nations Brundtland Commission that defined it as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This in fact, is the definition of sustainability that is on the upper-floor wall of the Armstrong Student Center. And perhaps, this definition was what we all had in mind when we changed the name of IES in 2010. However, in the early 2010s, I attended a conference where people were discussing this question and I was greatly influenced by a talk given by a speaker whose name I don’t even remember. His talk made it clear to me that I was not satisfied with the Brundtland Report definition. It is too vague. What do we really want? What are we trying to preserve?
I have embraced the speaker’s idea that embedded in the definition of sustainability is a set of values. It’s not really a scientific concept at all, but an ethical one, and perhaps that is what makes sustainability so messy and why it can mean such different things to different people. To me, sustainability comprises a generational ethic, an ecological ethic and a social ethic. The generational ethic says that we owe something to future generations. This is clearly part of the Brundtland definition and an ethic that most people take for granted. (How many generations is a trickier question. Landfill liners are bound for failure eventually and many, if not most will fail within 100 years.)
The ecological ethic is not explicitly part of the Brundtland definition. It could be part of it depending on how we define the needs of future generations. We could certainly argue that future generations are dependent on healthy ecosystems. However, this raises the question of whether ecosystems and non-human organisms have value in themselves or whether their worth is based on the service they provide for us. Do we fret about the extinction of polar bears or humpback whales because without them ecosystem damage would eventually hurt us? Do we worry about other species because we fear a lessening of our quality of life without them or do we believe that other species are worth preserving because they have value that transcends our existence? I don’t have the answers to these questions; I’m simply pointing out that the answers depend on our philosophies and even religious views. However, I do believe that the lack of explicit mention of ecology in the Brundtland definition of sustainability is problematic.
The social ethic, like the ecological ethic, is not well-accounted for in the Brundtland definition of sustainability. To me, it is clearly not good enough to preserve what we have for future generations because currently all people do not have equitable access to resources and are not equitably exposed to environmental hazards. In the United States, about 8300 liters of water per person per day are consumed in the production of our food and manufactured goods. Compare this to only about 2100 liters for a person in Bangladesh. For domestic water use, the average American withdraws about 590 liters per day compared to about 11 liters for a citizen of Mali. African Americans are subjected to higher levels of air pollution than are white Americans, regardless of income. Inequities like these are not acceptable. Technically can could sustain these conditions, but to do so does not fit my definition of sustainability.
Given what I have accepted as part of the ethics of sustainability, I propose a new definition:
Sustainability is the implementation of strategic systems to develop and use natural resources in ways that promote ecological and human health, quality of life and equitable distribution of those resources for the current and future generations.
It is much wordier than the Brundtland definition, but it’s more explicit in what we desire the outcomes to be.
One common way to talk about sustainability is to describe three pillars on which it stands: social, economic and environmental. This perspective has much in common with the ethic-based definition that I have described. One difference might be in the treatment of economic concerns. In my definition, not doing undo economic harm would be part of maintaining quality of life. However, I sometimes fear that elevating economic concerns to one of three pillars is a business perspective that I don’t necessarily share. The economic pillar is often associated with a desire to enact environmental practices while maintaining economic growth. The need for economic growth is rarely challenged. It is usually assumed that the more economic growth, the better. In the US, Democrats and Republicans will fight about environmental regulation and what constitutes social justice. They may debate the best ways of achieving economic growth, but you will not hear any politician arguing for slowing economic growth. Please understand that I am no economist, but there are economists who are increasingly questioning the concept of growth. As the European Environmental Agency put it in 2021:
Economic growth is closely linked to increases in production, consumption and resource use and has detrimental effects on the natural environment and human health. It is unlikely that a long-lasting, absolute decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures and impacts can be achieved at the global scale; therefore, societies need to rethink what is meant by growth and progress and their meaning for global sustainability.
This is an area that I would like to learn more about, but for now, the idea that sustainability and economic growth might be incompatible is enough for me to not prefer the use of the three pillar definition.
I have already gone on way too long, but I did want to bring up one more aspect of defining sustainability. Recently, Miami redesigned its Miami Plan for Liberal Education and created a category of courses called Signature Inquiry, designed to engage students in interdisciplinary learning outside of one’s major around a few big societal topics. One of those topics is “Sustainability and Resilience,” defined as courses that “investigate how resources—whether natural, scientific, technological, ecological, creative, educational, artistic, historic, or sociocultural—have been and can be sustained, engineered, and deployed to meet the needs of current and future generations.” In this definition, sustainability includes the continuation of just about anything. In this context, sustainability strays far from the meanings that have been discussed above. This example highlights the problem of how broad the term can be.
Last year, I was asked to propose a theme for Miami’s 2023-2034 academic year Focus program, and it was suggested that we do Sustainability. Because of the issues that I have described, I rejected that term and instead chose Environmental Justice. Environmental Justice is also a huge and unwieldy topic, but it unambiguously represents the two pillars on which my notion of Sustainability stands: environmental and social. If you’re reading this, then I hope that you will be on the lookout for the many speakers and events that we have planned to advance the theme of Environmental Justice knowing that from my perspective, it is synonymous with sustainability.
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