Progress without growth?

Harris would be wise to dance to this tune

    I remember when the word ‘sustainable’ appeared in the Green lexicon. The fellows from the United Nations Environment Programme brought it with them to Brazil in 1992 for the Earth Summit in Rio. I heard it at a UN-sponsored conference ‘Poverty in the Caribbean’ the year before. I was the Virgin Islands representative, selected for the honor by the board of the Virgin Islands Environmental Society of which I was an officer (and major arm twister).

    After four or five days of meetings where representatives of the various Lesser Antilles islands reported on the topic at hand. We learned many things. One was that Haiti was so poor even then they couldn’t afford to send a representative. The other was that Cuba, which was represented by a very sharp and diplomatic woman originally born in New York, considers the U.S. embargoe on Cuba actually a blockade, which put a different light on that situation for me. As I felt about the Viet Cong soldier I once battled, I was sympathetic to her and her cause, which put me at odds with the official U.S. government position, not for the first time.

    When we finished we all sat down at a big mahogany table to write out our report. That naturally fell to me and armed with my Occam’s razor I paired back their verbosity, and they were mostly all PhDs  and kinda showy-offy so when I say verbose, you know what I mean. When we were through, they respected me, but not with a lot of love in their eyes.

    Just as we were ready to call in the UN folks, one of them came into the room and distributed copies of Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living, a perfect bound 227 page booklet. My immediate feeling was that they had just insulted us. We thought our work would be included in the final agenda, but here was the agenda already printed and distributed, although my copy says, EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE ON 21, OCTOBER 1991.

    Now with several years since the Caribbean poverty conference I realize they needed our work in order to have a more complete picture of the Caribbean and what it’s poor people were up to.

    The book is a sad reminder of how much we haven’t done. It has three sections under Users guide for Caring for the Earth; the first is ‘Principles for Sustainable Living’; the second is ‘Additional Actions for Sustainable Living,’ and the third ‘Implementation and follow-up.’ So ‘Sustainable’ is named twice and, unfortunately, is probably the most important concept to come out of the Rio Earth Summit in ’92.

    I’m wondering about the juxtaposition between ‘progress’ and ‘sustainable’? Economic growth is inherent in today’s definition of ‘progress’. But what happens when you throw ‘sustainable’ into the mix? Doesn’t it seem there is a carrying capacity beyond which growth is destructive? Tim Jackson thinks so. (See beyond the Paywall.)

    In Section 2 #11 Business, industry and commerce, Caring for the Earth takes on the thorny question by rising above it to somewhere just south of Cloud 9, where, we have heard, “you can be what you want to be. You ain’t got no responsibility. Every man in this life is free,” and regrettably, “you’re a million miles from reality.”

    UN Caring says, “New technology will be needed to clean up the mistakes of the past, and achieve new industrial growth without disaster. It will be largely invented by industry. … Terms of trade will need to be reformed so that markets may be opened for new products from the developing world.”

    Under ‘Priority actions’—“Industry, business and commerce must play a key part in the development of sustainable societies.” The first action they recommend is a little tune Harris should be waltzing to: “bring governments, the business sector, and the environmental movement into a new dialogue.” I suggest Coach Walz for the job and I promise to lend him my copy of Caring for the Earth for guidance.

    But wait, there’s more. Hint: Love is coming.