Paper: Threats to Global Sustainability
[This paper isn't due until Monday - I finished it Thursday night. Enjoy!]
Executive Summary: Impediments to Establishing Global Sustainability
Ron Khare
The purpose of this paper is to identify and clearly explain the single largest challenge to the establishment of global sustainability.
Our working definition of “global sustainability” is the perpetuity of natural resources. The definition of “civilization” is ever-increasingly complex urbanization. This is distinctly different from “community,” with which it is often confused.
Summary
The only real factor that prevents global sustainability is civilization, or more specifically, the cities upon which civilization is based. Civilization’s basic structure is exploitative, destructive and unsustainable. The continued rise of civilization is the only true source of the destruction in the natural world. No amount of topical solutions will fix its fundamental need, which is to take, by any means necessary, the resources it cannot provide for itself.
Primary Threat: Civilization Itself
Civilization is marked as the shift of mankind from nature to city. As far as human pursuits are concerned, this may be for the best – higher concentrations of people and access to the benefits from the resulting greater division of labor have led to some amazing advances of arts and sciences.
Cities, by design, have one deadly flaw – they cannot support their dense populations with the resources contained within them. In order to survive, then, resources (like food) must be brought in from their surroundings.
Historically, the resource base for a city was strictly limited to what could be walked in by carts or by beasts of burden. The needs of these cities were fewer and simpler – food, primarily, followed by raw resources to be used by craftsmen.
This may seem innocuous at first, but the system of violence, imperialism and oppression is already firmly established in this model. The city relies entirely upon the ability of farmers to farm significantly more than they themselves need, and then expend the energy necessary to transport those heavy, time-sensitive goods to a city center. What follows is a list of the inherit problems with this system.
Resource Redistribution and Loss
In a sustainable agricultural model, most (if not all) of the nutrients in the soil stay on-site, and are eventually re-incorporated into the soil. The nutrients that cannot be recaptured can be replaced by drawing on established wild areas – leaf litter from forests, for example.
Pushing the lands to their limit for exportation to the city destabilizes the soil. The nutrients leave the farm in the form of produce, only later to be discarded by the city-dwellers in the trash or down a sewer system – never to return to the farm. This one-way flow of nutrients means the farmer becomes increasingly reliant on external fertilization means – the farmer becomes a threat, in turn, to the wild areas as his need to replenish the soil increases.
Soil is just one example of the problem with city consumption – any and all natural resources are subject to this one-way flow. The cities take these natural resources and produce ever-increasingly sophisticated and specialized items for human needs – or may lead to better knowledge, science and art. In any case, the resources themselves are never returned to the land from which they came.
The Rise of Civilization is the Death of Nature
Cities, by their nature, are unsustainable – although it is possible that a small city working with the people who live on the nearby land can last for a very long time. However, a successful city (by the common understanding of success) will become increasingly sophisticated, efficient and, in all likelihood, grow.
The city lifestyle is removed from natural processes, even while understanding of those processes may increase from higher learning and observation. Cities are lit up at night, creating an unnatural daytime effects. Roads and sewers are built to efficiently funnel traffic and sewage to predetermined locations. Soil is covered with stones or concrete. Waterways are straightened, and rainwater is flushed away. Views are obstructed by large buildings and walls. Sounds and smells are all of human origin. Animals are either slaughtered for food, domesticated as pets, or killed as pests. Vegetation, if it is allowed, is contained and cultivated for aesthetic properties. City gardens are typically herb gardens or small supplemental plots. As a city expands and increases in infrastructure and sophistication, it further removes those living therein from the natural world. At the same time, it continues to put increasing demands on the surrounding “wild” resources – and those who gather from or farm them.
Eventually, the needs of the city exceeds the yield limit of the immediate land. While it is possible that the city could take efforts to reduce its population, this is almost never the case. Instead, the answer has always been to reach father out, gathering resources from most distant lands.
It may be that those nearby farmers may have some sort of allegiance to the city based on economic or defensive purposes that could justify the loss of their resources. The farther you travel from the city, however, the harder it is to offer benefits that offset that loss. When the city realizes it must have those resources in order to survive and prosper, all too often the answer has been to take them by force.
There is no logical reason that someone living off of a piece of land should voluntarily create a one-way stream of resources off that land. Either those living on the land must be indoctrinated with an established set of illogical principles that support resource exploitation, or those resources must be taken by force. Either way, those living on the land that has city-valued resources is on the losing end of the deal – true sustainability precludes the perpetual exportation of resources.
Symptoms are Not Causes
Every threat to civilization Lester R. Brown mentions in his book Plan B 4.0 is symptomatic of an underlying planetary disease. The problems with climate change, war, water usage, agriculture, energy generation, transportation, peak oil, over-population, failing states and the like are merely the result of a firmly established “civilized” mindset. Resource extraction has advanced to the stage where many people can no longer live on their land – half of the world’s population have followed the flow of their resources to the cities. (source)
Civilization has had a few thousand years to perfect its justification for existence, downplay or re-word resource extraction, and so far remove people from nature that many people today believe that our only hope for sustainability is in the further development and refinement of civilization itself. One-way resource extraction and the exploitation necessary to continue that flow will abate, people say, if we can advance civilization just a little bit more.
Yet, in all the thousands of years that mankind has been developing cities, there has never been a satisfactory way to resolve the fundamental issue: too many people on too little land to support them. There is no guarantee that, if techno-idealist visions of “eco-cities” are realized (making even the largest mega-cities fully self-sufficient) that humanity will abandon the long-entrenched goals and values of civilization itself.
More importantly, even if every symptom of civilization was solved through the application of miraculous new technology, the disease of civilization will only continue to grow. New resources will be found vital to further development, leading once again to extraction, exploitation and scarcity, resulting in more advanced problems in sustainability that we’ve yet to fathom.
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