Politics of sustainability

July 7, 2003
The politics of a presidential campaign might sharpen thinking about sustainable development.

The politics of a presidential campaign might sharpen thinking about sustainable development. It's a serious but fuzzy subject. Oil and gas companies persistently attest to their commitment to sustainable development. But what, exactly, is it?

The phrase grew out of a 1987 report by the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development, which offered this definition: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Under many interpretations this has come to mean development that uses up nothing and disturbs as little as possible on land, at sea, and in the air.

Is development able to occur under those conditions really sustainable? The political campaign now taking shape might shine useful light on the question.

Unsustainable boom

Political tradition credits or blames any US president for whatever economic conditions prevail while he or she is in office. This is so even though economic conditions at any moment, to the extent they relate to official policy, nearly always reflect measures undertaken many years earlier. For the next 16 months, therefore, Democrats will gush about how splendidly the economy performed under former President Bill Clinton. And they'll just as earnestly blame the Republican administration for the economy's comparative torpor since President George W. Bush took office. Republicans, of course, will insist Bush inherited economic problems that became aggravated by events beyond his control.

The point here is not who's right and who's wrong in this inescapable spat. It's that, no matter who deserves credit or blame, the US economy's spurt of the 1990s represented the ideal of sustainable-development activists but proved to be altogether unsustainable. The growth didn't result from a surge of resource development. It didn't take off from a flurry of energy-intensive manufacturing. And it didn't last. Why?

The boom of the 1990s was a stock-market frenzy. It centered on capital, leveraged by supposition that the internet had inaugurated a new economy in which clever people could make quick fortunes with ideas alone. Now all that can be said on behalf of the retire-by-age-30 crowd is that its constituents didn't kill many ancestral trees.

An economy needs to generate wealth in order to develop. And it can't do that for long by flogging capital. The so-called new economy produced awesome software, cute video games, and flashy if sometimes fraudulent company brochures. But sustainable development—the creation of wealth sufficient to raise living standards for whole populations—requires much more than that.

Truly sustainable development requires not just that people invest in stock markets but also that they extract raw materials from nature and bestir themselves and their physical surroundings in order to make the full range of things able to be sold. The process needn't be destructive, and it can be sustainable. It will falter, however, if sustainability degenerates into limits on the economic use of land and labor.

The new economy collapsed because capital produces nothing without contributions from the other factors of production. The popular reading of sustainable development heads for a similar fate by proclaiming the needs to withhold land, by limiting resource development, and to restrain labor, by discouraging energy consumption. Like the new economy, sustainable development as popularly conceived would overextend capital, not through excess promotion and accounting fraud but through excess cost. An economy denied full use of land and labor would squander capital on unprofitable processes and fail to create enough wealth to satisfy expanding human needs. It would, therefore, be unsustainable.

The legacy

The popular reading of sustainability further asserts the need to forgo development now to assure the availability of resources to future generations. This view sounds generous. But it uncharitably discredits the creativity of people not yet born and discounts the knowledge and skills they'll inherit.

Discussions about sustainable development should accommodate questions about the value to future generations of locked-away resources, underdeveloped economies, and eternal fights over energy. They should envision a richer legacy. That vision should embrace general prosperity, universal freedom, and confidence in the potential of adequately empowered people to use resources at their disposal to improve the world. The politics of sustainable development must orient itself to progress, not prohibition.