Ret h i n k i n ~ ’ In t h e F u t u r e JOAN MARTIN-BROWN United Notions Envimment Pmgmmme Woshington, DC 20006
ll
oday the world is engaged in seemingly endless discussions about sustainable development: What is it, how should it be done, and what should be the results? The economic paradigms of both communism and capitalism fail to reflect the roles, values, and requirements of ecosystems to support human endeavors. This failure is at the heart of the sustainable development challenge. Sustainable development is about the need to retain or recover the capacity of ecosystems to support economic systems and life. Key to meeting this challenge is the application of technology. Technology has had both negative and positive effects on society, is heavily influenced by economics and politics, and, historically, has not been designed to be sensitive to issues of the environment and uublic health. Two decades ago, fruskted with the imposition of environmental, cultural, health, and economic costs by technologies on society, the US. Congress established the Office of Technology Assessment. Yet partnerships between science and technology during this period have led to new understanding of how human endeavors affect ecologies, and have exponentially expanded understanding of the links that connect varied ecosystems horizontally, vertically, locally, and globally.
ron. Sci,Fechnol.,.Vol. 26, No.,@;
To achieve sustainable development is to challenge many technologies that are harmful to nature. The partnership of science and technology holds great promise for reconciling people with ecosystemic capacity. However, this reconciliation requires a profound reorientation of political and economic decision making. The public easily understands the environmentally destructive impact of technologies associated with war, but they are less willing to consider so-called peacetime technologies-many of these produce consumer goods-as equally destructive to ecosystems. Thus, we require a new understanding about the world’s environmental systems, their capacities, and what they imply for people’s quality of life and their economy. Technology must be developed within on environmentol poradigm; ethics and values reflectinn environmental literacy must be k s e r t e d by people making technological choices. We must selectively recover those human values and processes of the past that posited the capacities of ecosystems at the center of society, and apply that traditional wisdom to 2lst-century technologies. Sustainable development invites innovation and new technological and economic techniques and formulations to advance ecosystemic management. Conversely, ecosystem requirements must be inte-
grated into the formulation of economic and technological processes. This mutual integration promises a renaissance in research, production, marketing. and ,economic activity. This scenario is not promising to those with vested interests in obsolete or inappropriate technologies. Nor are the ethical implications of a new alliance with nature, calling for accountability to generations unborn, reassuring to vested politicians, industrialists, or scientists. Historically, challenges to powerful vested economic and technological interests have led to wars and civil conflict. The social-technological ordeal engaging us at present is the agony of transitionsaying good-byeto many 20th-century technologies to save the environment and thus ourselves. According to press accounts, the Japanese, Germans, French, and even the British, all conservative, tradition-
advance social inequity by dumping waste into counties or counfxies occupied by low-income, and thus politically powerless, constituents. Enlightened economics avoids placing new obligations on public funds,creating threats to public health, or generating the inevitable gmwth in government needed to regulate, monitor, and restore degraded environments. Waste reuse is maximized and the generation of waste is minimized. Enlightened economics advances technologies that do not destroy or exhaust soil systems; produces waste whose composition and volume can be absorbed within the natural disposal capacities of ground, air, and water systems; protects the human immune system and the nutritional value or content of food: avoids the misuse or widespread use of pesticides; sustains stratospheric ozone, forest systerns, coastal areas, or terrestrial systerns; and avoids c l i m a t e change.
Ethics reflecting environmental literacy must be asserted by people maw technological choices.
:;?;;;:?e;
a1 cultures, more comfortable seem with goodbyes to promotes new alliself-defeating techances among scinologiesthanherentists, industrialicans. Americans ists. economists, and labor in pursuit may find some comfort, however, of technological in “turning in” choices that e n their present-inappropriate techno- hance the capacity of people to delcgies by viewing this divestiture as a velop products and processes that way of slamming the door on the are environmentally appropriate, are 20th century and on costly techno- healthy, and generate income. Enlightened economics advances logical practices that lead to competitive disadvantages globally and a technologies that assign value to other forms of life and do not render bad domestic economy. ecosystems unable to sustain viable Enlightened economics populations of other species. Tech“Enlightened economics” is the nologies advanced by enlightened devising of economic and technolog- economics compel the extreme conical solutions that are culturally ap- servation of fossil fuels and other propriate and user friendly within air-polluting energy sources; prothe operational requirements of eco- mote decentralized energy systems systems. Enlightened economics that do not pollute land, air, or wadoes not employ the public com- ter; and accommodate the economic mons (land, air, and water systems) participation of men and women on to dispose of waste. Nor do& it use M equitable basis. these systems to mitigate production cost and maximize profit, shifting en- EnvironmentalPlayers As we end the 20th century, envivironmental management costs onto the taxpayer. Nor does it reflect and ronmental scientists are finding new
allies among theologians, reconnecting science and philosophies in ways unthinkable for past centuries. Parliamentarians, nongovernmental organizations, women leaders, and youth groups are forming alliances as the appropriate response to their newly developed environmental literacy and seeking appropriate technologies. An important expression of spreading citizen literacy about ecosystems is reflected by the changing selection of consumer technologies, cars, and food products. People are amenable to so-called “green” products. In many industrialized nations informed citizens are attempting to “buy” the market into environmentally friendly products, systems, and technologies. On the individual level, every day a person can make a technology decision that can determine the quality of life for other people in faraway places. On the other side of this reality are many business and industry leaders, as well as labor leaders, particularly in the United States. Labor dreads the implications of technology transition, as it often leads to unemployment (or is presented as leading to unemployment). Business leaders in some nations seem forever wedded to short-term policies, dependent on the public commons a n d public funds to manage their waste and environmental destruction. They are now falling faster and farther behind the competition in the global marketplace. This situation threatens to become more common in the future, Trade barriers become the solution, at the time when the goal is to eliminate such barriers. A world agenda Long-term planning, employing the environmental context, leads to a convergence of knowledge and new technological options. The convergence of knowledge, and the ability to share it through massive communication systems, comes at a time unique for human inventiveness. This is placing all nations on a par. It has emboldened many smaller nation states in the negotiations leading up to the UN Conference on Environment and Development to assert themselves as equal partners with the superpowers in establishing a world agenda. The free-ranging development of technology, aided and abetted for more than 300 years by the disaggregation, or compartmentalization, of knowledge necessary to understand the world better, now needs a new and common regime. Sustainable development in the
21st century requires that we connect disciplines to perceive their interrelationships. Making these connections will reveal more appropriate technological solutions. We will discover that the knowledge of the biologist, when enhanced by knowledge of the engineer, will lead to new efficiency and effectiveness in technologies complementary to the capacities of nature and cultures. Discussions for Rio The UN Conference on Environment and Development focuses on the relationships between economics, technology, science, and environment in a political context. At this juncture it appears that both global North and South deny their common destiny with nature. Will the imposition of inappropriate technologies prevail through the influence of political and economic cartels? Are the visionaries in the business, industry, finance, research, and science communities seeking out each other to move beyond vested interests, whose perceptions and predilections are rooted in World War II? If they fail, they deny a sense of the possible. When confronted by the realities of nature, we must draw upon the rich resources inherent in the diversity in peoples, their cultures, and ecosystems. Within this diversity are a multitude of technological innovations from which we all can learn and benefit. Humanity cannot negotiate with nature because each of us requires 14,000 qt of air every day, and water forms 70% of human bodies. Soil and sea feed us. People, as citizens, must define the obligations of science and technology, economics and development, to sustain their capacities. The either-or options of jobs or the environment, economic growth or the environment, technology or the environment, are false dichotomies, intellectually bankrupt formulations of reality, which are as cruel in their effects as demanding that we operate in the world as if it were flat. Today there are enormous debts on the world’s economic book reflecting the loss of ecosystemic capacities, and economic obligations requiring staggering amounts of money to reclaim nature’s capacity. In response, many governments seek technological solutions. The fear is that technological solutions will be so slow in coming that global and local ecosystems will become increasingly dysfunctional
1102 Environ. Sci. Technol., Vol. 26, No. 6, 1992
and pose serious threats to the future of human welfare. Love Canal, Chernobyl, and Bhopal are testimonies to what is wrong with technology. The next chapter should illustrate what was, is, and can be right about technologies, with ecosystems instructing the content. Scientists, not economists, must instruct. The environmental scientist is, today, the best hope to regenerate the world’s economy. Today much of the world is at risk because temperate zone assessments, products, systems, practices, and values are employed in nontemperate zone ecosystems, devastating people and their ecosystems. We need to understand technology’s role in this. Cultures of the past did not have the scientific and technological capacities which many nations possess today. Our state of knowledge about the carrying capacity of the Earth’s land, air, and water systems can instruct technology. Our state of mind, our inclinations, must lead us to construct values and ethical frameworks for technologies that recognize our obligations to other forms of life and the future. Our sense of place is denied if we set apart our inventions from community and nature. Ultimately Nature will prevail, whatever the human conduct, for her shadows reach well beyond us all, and the Earth will go on even if we choose to design ways to destroy ourselves.
Joan Martin-Brown is chief of the UNEP (Washington, DC) office. She worked with the US.government and nongovernmental organizations on the 1972 Conference on the Human Environment. A s the National Public Affairs Director for EPA, she established the EPA Journal. In 1984, Martin-Brown served as head of UNEP’s delegation and Outreach for Women and initiated UNEP’s activities during and since the 1985 World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the UN Decade for Women in Nairobi. She has a B.A.degree in political science from Allegheny College, took part in a senior m a n a g e m e n t and government program at the J.F.K. School at Harvard University, and i s finalizing her M . A . degree in liberal studies at Georgetown University.
