Mything out on ‘sustainable development’— why it ain’t happening

And where to go from here

At a key point in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1973 novel, Time Enough for Love, the main character remarks that one should “Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.” This memorable meme makes a simple point—if someone or something is inherently incapable of doing something, then it’s futile to try to make them do it. Which, with a little bit of intellectual stone-skipping, brings us to consider scientists’ attempts to redirect modern techno-industrial (MTI) society onto a sustainable development track.

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Backstory

A quarter century after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (which helped kick-start the environmental movement) and 15 years following the Club of Rome/MIT’s (in)famous study, Limits to Growth, the UN Brundtland Commission’s 1987 Report, Our Common Future, finally succeeded in forcing ‘environmental’ concerns onto the political agenda. This landmark document can be credited with catalyzing the past nearly 40 years of research, debate and anxiety concerning industrial society’s quest to achieve sustainable development, defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This somewhat ambiguous—and thus able-to-be-loved-by-everyone—formulation, became the world’s most cited definition of sustainable development.

Hmm…

How things turned out

Since 1987, the human population has ballooned by 66%, from five to 8.3 billion, on its way to a projected 10.3 billion. With the increase in both human numbers and per capita consumption, annual carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions climbed by over 90%, from ~21 billion metric tons (gigatonnes or Gt) to 40 Gt; climate-busting atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ increased 23% from ~350 parts per million (ppm) to a record ~430 ppm and rising, along with mean global temperature and climate-related fatalities; to feed the growing human family, chemical fertilizer consumption increased by 60%, from 129 to 206 million metric tons; this is particularly necessary since 40% of the planet’s arable land had been lost (by 2015!) and farmland continues to be degraded—including by excessive fertilizer use—by millions of hectares annually, up to 100 times faster than it regenerates; marine dead zones—areas deprived of oxygen due to decomposition of algae and other organic matter from blooms originally stimulated by excess nutrients (eutrophication) derived from fertilizer and domestic sewage runoff—have expanded exponentially in recent decades reaching 250,000 sq km by 2015; meanwhile, displaced from their habitats and food sources, up to 100 vertebrate species have been extinguished since 1997 and the extinction trend continues (Surviving monitored vertebrate populations have dropped by 73% since 1970.); etc., etc….

This gloomy real-life scenario has generated a looming structural problem for MTI culture. As energy and material demands increase on a finite planet, humanity is rapidly reaching the point where economically accessible reserves of petroleum and several key mineral and metal resources may soon be inadequate even for basic maintenance. Infrastructure in much of the industrial world is aging and reaching such a state of entropic decay that upkeep, never mind replacement, is become problematically expensive. Economists and techno-optimists argue “not to worry”; higher prices will stimulate human ingenuity, “the greatest resource.” We will find new reserves, get more efficient or invent new technologies.

Very reassuring—particularly since demand for crucial metals and rare earths is set to explode as the world attempts a massively energy- and material-intensive renewable energy transition and AI data centres threaten to take down fragile electrical grids (a key component of our failing infrastructure). The energy and material crunch can only worsen if nations continue to blow up so much existing wealth, including infrastructure and like physical capital, in wars over land and resources. (The Israeli/US vs Iran conflict provides an instructive preview of the pain likely to be caused by future resource bottlenecks.)

Meanwhile, our governing elites seem (willfully?) ignorant of the fact that the human enterprise is already deeply into ecological overshoot, i.e., consuming, dissipating and polluting the biophysical basis of its own existence.[1] Continuous economic growth remains the main plank in every major government’s policy platform under the guiding control of financial and corporate interests who benefit the most—extraction to depletion for profit is in the operational DNA of capitalism and other forms of industrialization. Assuming economic reserves last, anticipated global growth means that the human economy will be extracting 165 Gt of raw materials from the Earth annually by 2050, a 60% jump from 2020. (Read that definition of overshoot again.)

And, of course, most of the mining, refining, transportation and subsequent manufacturing using these materials will be powered by fossil fuels since electricity won’t/can’t do the trick. In 2024, fossil fuels supplied 85% of direct primary energy consumption; wind turbine and solar panel (W&S) electricity gave us only ~3%. In fact, promotional hype aside, the alleged green renewable energy transition, led by W&S, is barely underway. New energy sources mainly add supply to existing sources—fossil fuel use is at an all time high and rising (though petroleum is approaching production limits).

So much for halting global heating, reducing pollution of air, land and waters, and slowing biodiversity loss.

Need I go on? Mountains of data show that ‘forcing environmental issues onto the political agenda’ has done little to temper MTI momentum or protect the ecosphere; ironically, the major contribution of thousands of books and articles on ‘sustainable development’ may well have been to accelerate rampant deforestation. The prevailing pattern of global development is fatally unsustainable; it is depleting even self-producing and replenishable resources faster than they can regenerate, its entropic wastes are polluting everything including our food-supplies and bodies, it mainly serves the interests of political and oligarchic elites, it is not meeting the needs of a billion people in the present and is compromising the billions of lives of future generations.

In sum, the world community has failed dismally to rise to the challenge posed by even the UN’s loose definition of ‘sustainable development’. Scientists’ efforts have done little more than ensure that any future generations will have an exceptionally detailed record of the factors and trends that led to the collapse of MTI culture.

Roots of the problem

Of the many causal factors of cultural dysfunction two seem to stand out, one bio-social the other more strictly biological. I have discussed these in previous posts, but they are worth a re-cap here.

The bio-social cause is H. sapiens innate tendency to ‘socially construct’ elaborate narratives and then live out of these made up stories as if they were real and true.[2] MTI culture—especially the major financial, corporate and political ‘influencers’ who are running the show but pretty much everyone else born into it—is living a hubristic meta-narrative that abstracts humans from the natural world, exempts us from biophysical laws, and asserts that human ingenuity (technology) can find substitute for any good or service provided by nature. The living Earth is reduced to a mere backdrop for the unfolding human drama.

This seemingly liberating mental algorithm has created a veritable cognitive parallel universe for MTI operatives. Once fully committed, afflicted parties float free in a fantasy world unconstrained by the gravity of reality; their natural expansionist tendencies, reinforced by mythic construct, become fixated on achieving perpetual economic growth. So intoxicating is this self-induced spell that beneficiaries’ minds are impervious to the needs of others or the cascade of contrary biophysical data. This alone is enough to ensure that the MTI pig can never learn to sing the sustainability lullaby.

But there is a second, related, cause, one less obvious and potentially more controversial. H. sapiens has arguably been socially and ecologically dysfunctional since the emergence of large civilizations 6000 years ago.

This may seem outrageous, but consider the following. If we compress all of anatomically modern humans’ 350 millennia history into a single day, then ‘civilization’ occupies only the 25 minutes before midnight (~2% of H. sapiens’ evolutionary history); virtually all of modern science, political organization, geopolitics (including global exploration and modern colonization) and economic development (including the vast bulk of resource extraction/depletion and pollution) has occurred since ~1500—i.e., in the two minutes before midnight. Most importantly, all the major technologies we consider indispensable today, from television, the internet and personal computers, through jet aircraft and satellites, to the James Webb space telescope didn’t exist just a century ago—and since then, our population has increased >4-fold from about two billion to 8.3 billion. In short, on our compressed time scale, the modern techno-avalanche, with all its good and horrific impacts, has occurred in only the past 25 seconds—and has seemingly unstoppable momentum (‘AI’ anyone?).

This is problematic on two crucial counts: first, the above history shows that cultural evolution has vastly out-paced bio-evolution. Human evolution is slow; our mental capacities have been left behind in the dust. The social and biophysical environments of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the environments in which we evolved, posed only limit challenges to the evolving human brain. This is why we can still process information at only 10 bits/second and think in simplistic, reductionist ways. Our cognitive reach and mental pacemaker are hopelessly inadequate to cope with the mind-numbing and over-lapping systems complexity of contemporary social and biophysical reality. We generally don’t ‘get’ complex systems behaviour and cannot even connect the dots between structurally related problems.[3] In short, we are irreparably maladapted to the present: the pace of cultural evolution has rendered our brains functionally obsolete for life in the modern environment of our own making.

Second, the advent of ‘civilization’ had a revolutionary yet little-known impact on crucial human social relationships. H. sapiens is a fangless, clawless, slow-running, relatively weak naked ape for whom solitary life is not an option. Cooperative behaviours therefore prevail by necessity in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies. Anti-social behaviour no doubt exists, but is difficult to pull off; deviousness ‘sticks out’, is obvious and known to all and so is suppressed by social feedback— shaming, ostracism, banishment or worse. Such small-group behavioural dynamics also ensures social equality among group members—hoarding would be obvious. In short, small-scale selects for cooperation and egalitarianism. This was arguably the normal form of social behaviour for 98% of human evolutionary history.

‘Civilization’ upset and redesigned the socialization applecart. Large-scale societies and social institutions fostered myriad previously unknown social phenomena: dominance hierarchies, division of labour, corruption, inequality, and every species of urban pathology emerge inevitably from latent human behaviours let loose in the opaque structures of large-scale societies. People so-inclined could now get away with self-serving behaviours hidden by complex bureaucracy and institutional architecture. In short, large-scale rewards and selects for competitive, selfish, deceitful, remorseless, behaviour. Bent personalities—including psychopathic narcissists—therefore often rise to the top of major organizations, including governments. (There’s a lot of this going around lately!) Everyone else is forced to find a comfortable—or at least tolerable—place in the arguably abnormal social hierarchies and institutional structures generated by ‘civilization’. Many cannot even do that so live on the fringes in poverty, often afflicted by family violence, mental health and substance abuse issues.

Most such aberrations have been possible for only the ‘civilized’ 2% of human evolutionary history. Six thousand years is simply not enough time for humans to have evolved the socio-behavioural repertoire to live sustainably or for long in large-scale complex societies—which may well help explain why collapse is the norm. Like pigs who don’t have it in them to sing, humans don’t develop socially just, ecologically-refined, large-scale societies because we don’t have it in us to develop socially just, ecologically-refined, large-scale societies. I call this the ‘human maladaptation syndrome’

Epilogue

Industrial society is living from a mental parallel universe cognitively abstracted from reality. The result is culturally paralytic and potentially catastrophic. On the one hand, overshoot in the real world is destroying the regenerative capacity of the ecosphere and threatens to take us down. On the other, our institutions breed oligarchs and billionaires who profit mightily from, and thus have a defensive stake in maintaining the destructive status quo (not to mention ample financial and political means to resist serious efforts at reform).

The rest of us, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, go along for the ride.

In fact, ordinary people—even the most impoverished denizens of MTI culture—are also captive to the status quo. Most citizens of techno-industrial societies have been absorbed into a growth-bound, symbolic, artificial system of mind-numbing complexity over which we have negligible influence. This system’s essential structure and function are controlled by elites; it is sustained by numerous cultural prosthetics­ from globalization, with its fragile ‘just-in-time’ supply chains, through the internet, to indispensable (but climate-wrecking) fossil-fueled technologies (diesel fuel, anyone?). Even well-informed and highly-motivated individuals cannot easily defect because their lives, often including jobs they hate, depend on things remaining just the way they are. Where would we be without electricity, heating and air conditioning, transportation systems, potable water, reliable food supplies, fossil fuels, etc., etc., and even the demeaning employment that provides access to these necessities of life? In MTI societies, peoples at all social levels are structurally compelled to maintain the continuity of things that are literally primed to kill them.

This is a true predicament, not a solvable problem.

In this light, it makes no sense to try to save the modern world. We are living a madness and must let it go.

But then what? The best of scenarios might see: a) individuals helping each other to learn the essential skills they will need to survive the coming contraction; b) small-scale community groups self-organizing, pooling their skills and resources and developing plans to lessen the impact of the crash. Such groups would also have to focus on ‘writing’ a new tribal narrative. If any form of sustainable human society is to emerge from the ashes of the MTI burn-out there must be a personal to civilizational transformation of how we think about ourselves and humanity’s place in nature. What are cultural beliefs, values, assumptions and behaviours that precipitated the fatal meta-crisis? and what are their opposites that might help us to avoid a ‘next time’. We have to socially construct a less abstracted, more immediately-relational, even mutualistic way of being on Earth. Can we imagine small-community life-styles by which fewer people can live materially adequate and spiritually satisfying lives, more equitably, within the biophysical means of nature?

And if so, the crucial question becomes ‘how do we make this happen?’ How do we catalyze the necessary transformation in a world of self-interested, competitive nations fractiously divided by socially-constructed political, economic and religious narratives that do not ‘map well’ to either social or biophysical reality? What would motivate today’s self-absorbed, often individualistic upper and middle classes to agree to an 80% reduction in energy and material consumption and embark in solidarity on an unprecedented journey of voluntary simplicity? I am not aware of any theory of deliberate social change that could rise to these challenges in the time we likely have available. Even the well-known, moderate, but at least explicitly contractionist degrowth ‘movement’ has gained little traction after several decades. And if there is such a strategy, need it be deployable all at once on a global scale or could local groups go it alone, hoping that the sparks they make will set the world on fire?

Please, someone, toss us a bone!

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[1] Note that overshoot is a terminal condition by definition.

[2] The tendency is genetic; the content of the narrative are socially determined.

[3] Consider society’s preoccupation with climate change, only one major co-symptom of overshoot. This simplistic focus results in ‘solutions’ that are not only not fixing the climate but are worsening overshoot, and its cause, excessive industrialization.