As succinctly argued by Kai N. Lee (1993), professor and director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Williams College, sustainable development is more than a problem of policy and administration. It is more than a union of ecological science with development of a political strategy. It is likely that any approach to sustainability will lead to a redefinition of the role of the human species in the natural order, and that this redefined role in itself will alter the form of how we do things. Sustainability will probably necessitate a new global ethics. A society can be affluent by having much or wanting little. If we cannot continue to grow forever as a global community following the industrial pathway of the past hundred years, then at some time, we must ask whether affluence means having much or wanting little. Whatever the case, the path to sustainability is not clear.
Lee proposes three conditions that must be satisfied by any path to sustainable development. These are the equity, legacy, and continuity conditions. The equity condition states that the concept of a sustainable world is difficult unless sustainability can become feasible for a majority of the world population. Many of the developing countries of the world have been affected by colonialism. In general they are poor, and their natural resources are being rapidly exploited. Their poverty levels are now so high that to return to a traditional way of life is virtually impossible. They must develop within the bounds of the global marketplace. At present, wealth, income and power are unevenly distributed throughout the world. Lee concludes that in order to preserve the biological heritage of the weaker and poorer nations, and thus achieve a sustainable environment, there will need to be either substantial redistribution of wealth and power among nations or the formation of some sort of dependency relationships among nations that are stable over many lifetimes of ecological systems. The objective probably cannot be one of equality of wealth and power but an equality of economic conditions that is sustainable. Among other factors, equality of conditions will depend on cultural values.
The legacy condition implies a linkage between present and future genera . What we do today in terms of the environment and economic growth links our fate with that of future generations. This legacy includes the economic growth of the past three centuries. Growth was the result of scientific and technological advances during this period and was accompanied by environmental changes unprecedented in most of the geologic record of change. A question arises as to whether growth will continue. With finite resources, it is difficult to see how economic growth can expand forever without reaching some limit. But the limit can be postponed by finding of new resources and discovering new kinds of resources through investment in research and development. The assumption of continued economic growth makes sustainable use of natural resources very difficult to reconcile with that growth. Because rates of return for investors are determined by the marketplace and almost always are not zero, the monetary value of a resource in the future, such as a forest, is lower than it is at present. This is because an investor can take a smaller sum of money today and invest it and make an equivalent or greater amount of money to that obtained in the future. The difference between the future amount and the lesser amount today is the discount rate. The less the discount rate, the greater are the profits over the long term. The consequence of such investing has important implications for preservation or sustainable development of resources. Lee concludes that "if resources are traded in markets, the value of conserving them for ecologically significant lengths of time is set by markets, not biology; usually, biological conservation turns out to be worth very little" ( p. 192 ).
There are arguments that offset this conclusion. The first is that technical progress can make once valueless parts of nature worth something, and these can displace that which was being exploited. The second is that the ownership of property can lead to husbandry of resources. The third is that cultural values can limit the extent to which resources are treated as commodities. The fourth is governmental controls that regulate economic decisions.
The greatest barrier to the legacy condition is the assumption that economic growth will continue. There is no analytical foundation to this belief, but it engenders behavior that makes the assumption inevitably incorrect. To meet the equity condition requires a change in behavior and actions of the world's peoples for a sufficiently long period of time to modify the path of economic activity.
The continuity condition recognizes the fact that 25% of the world has achieved a remarkable level of wealth and material advantage through economic growth and relative political stability. The strong correlation between global industrial carbon dioxide emissions and global gross domestic product for much of the twentieth century is one indication that economic growth has become the major forcing to global change in the industrialized world. The inequity in economic growth between the industrialized countries and the developing world has led to overconsumption of resources and materials in the former and underconsumption and mass poverty in the latter. The historical record of wealth creation in rich nations through economic growth has left much of the world in an impoverished state, one reason for higher population growth rates in the poorer countries.
The hope to extend prosperity to the developing world is the continuity condition. It is very likely that the extension of prosperity will necessitate technology transfer and monetary programs involving the rich and poor nations of the world. It is to the benefit of the world community to pursue this course. To ensure a path of sustainable development in both the developed and developing worlds is a form of insurance. It protects against wars of redistribution of resources and the formation of spheres of influence that continue on the pathway of unsustainable practices. In the longer run, it gives to the developing world some sense of sharing in part of the wealth produced by economic growth in the industrialized nations fueled significantly by the resources of the developing world. Also it provides markets for goods and services of the developed world and stabilizes political situations in the developing world.
Sustainable development will be a difficult state to attain for the world community. To meet the three conditions of equity, legacy, and continuity will require political decisions on a scale rarely seen to date. Sustainable development is a direction toward which the world community moves, not a goal in itself but more like the concepts of freedom and justice. There seems to be little recourse than the movement toward sustainable development for the planet. The views of Earth from space showed the global nature of the continents, atmosphere, and oceans and the extent to which humanity and its activities are distributed over the globe. These human activities both contribute to and are affected by global environmental change. We are part of the ecosphere and as members we cannot continue to plunder the very system that maintains us. We must husband, nurture, and respect that system and cultivate a world in which we can live together in a mutually beneficial way.
Lee, K.N., 1993: Compass and Gyroscope, Integrating Science and
Politics for the Environment: London, Island Press.