Sustain What?
In 2008, I wrote a piece summarising what I’d read about sustainability for a since extinct magazine.
I don’t think anyone read it then either but re-reading it now in the light of XR, I do wonder where the time in between went, but at least it seems the tide of opinion is now irreversibly turned.
So I think I’m getting the message. If I’m reading around the subject correctly, we have about seven years left in which to get our act together on sustainability. By 2015 we must have reached a point where the human contribution to global heating goes into decline, or else face communally assured destruction – and that’s if we’re lucky. Starting today, that’s gives us about one or two product development cycles within which to effect drastic change. Even if we pull this off, and manage to peg the temperature rise some way below 2°C by the middle of the century, we’ll be living in a more hostile and even less bio-diverse environment than we currently experience.
Which is, to say the least, annoying. It's a tedious legacy to have been left by our forefathers from the Industrial Revolution. It is such a great irony that the same engines of civilisation that gave us the tools to assess the fragile state of our biosphere, have simultaneously helped erode our chances of a continued existence within it. And it really doesn’t matter whose fault this is. Even if it is just the tide of natural forces turning against us, we quickly need to try and stem it – not for the sake of the planet anymore, but to save ourselves. Given the stakes, it would seem quite literally a waste of energy to argue about it. The better bet seems to lie with adopting the ‘precautionary principle’, whereby we err on the side of safety, even if our present predicament turns out to be just a blip in the output of the Sun. The bald fact is, we are the ones who are going to have to tidy up after the carbon party. But at least it gives us something to do.
The question of what we can actually do does seem legitimate. Mankind probably remains powerless against the really big forces of destruction, be it asteroid collision, mega-tsunami or supervolcanic eruption (all currently overdue, by the way). And as Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal has pointed out, we have plenty of man-made ways other than climate change to get ourselves into a mess, ranging from high-energy physics experiments that could go catastrophically wrong, to dastardly nano-accidents that would progressively turn all life into ‘grey-goo’. We have far more thrilling visions of Armageddon than the Bible could ever conjure. Perhaps it’s our destiny to seek them out.
Romantic notions of sustainability seem to suggest that we might yet find a harmonious balance whereby man and nature strike a truly symbiotic deal. Mongolian nomads probably still manage this, but is it really possible with anything like the lifestyles the rest of us lead today? When did we last live truly sustainably? Before we invented the plough and put down roots? I’d like to see some definition of quite how long we expect to be able to sustain ourselves at the current rate of population expansion. But, just as a further safeguard against hubris, it’s maybe worth reminding ourselves that nothing lasts for ever, anyway. Not even in the wildest space-faring conjectures of physicist Freeman Dyson do humans make it all the way to the end of time. And certainly not on this planet. Even the most sustainable future will come to its natural end, eventually. But perhaps that's all so way past our bedtime that we shouldn’t worry about it. What we’re actually talking about here is the very real chance of things turning nasty within our own lifetimes.
Given the radical reshaping of our behaviour that will be required to reduce greenhouse emissions by up to 95 per cent over the next 35 years, it would be tempting to abandon all hope now. I think we need to take a decision as to whether we bother with environmental responsibility, or we instead fulfill our terrible potential as a species of ‘consumers’ and go for broke. Use up all the resources and dump the waste in the sea. Last one standing: don’t even bother turning out the lights. Obviously we’ll each be hoping that we’ve personally had our fill and checked out just in time, before society collapses into grubby all-out civil strife. I can’t believe that this is what we really want, but if it is (and with the way we’re heading it rather looks that way), then we should probably make that choice quite deliberately, right now, while it still is a choice to make – and make it by consensus. A return to the carefree, gas-guzzling tangerine-kolored days of the 60s and 70s. Hey, shall we party on?
Yet even with a less nihilistic mindset, it is easy to feel personally defeatist. Yes, we can all do our bit to recycle, insulate and attempt to feel spiritually complete without being photographed in front of every last Wonder of the World. The local efforts of each of us citizens, enacted on a global scale, must be a huge part of the solution. But they only go so far. Some of the really big ‘wedges’ of change, that author Mark Lynas argues will be required to shore us up against disaster, are beyond the reach of any of us as individuals (except perhaps as voters). Instruments such as nuclear power, taxation, population control, rationing and the other big sticks that may eventually herd us into line, are the preserve of government. Yet it is hard to see anyone winning the very next election on such a mandate. We have enough difficulty accepting even a relatively benevolent nanny state as it is. We’ll probably only demand such action when it’s already too late to change.
The one great hope is the talk of ‘convergence’. On the one hand there’s the convergence, enshrined in international policy, between the developed world’s carbon crash-diet plan and the developing world’s increasing demands. The two hopefully will meet half-way to reach a fair and healthy balance. But there’s also the convergence between such top-down state-level ‘stick’ measures and the bottom-up ‘carrot’ approach of changing of our consumer appetites. And that’s what interests me as being the challenge for those involved in design. Where we do have the power (and obligation) to act is when we are at work commissioning or creating. On a daily basis we make decisions that affect others all around us. We need to devise the spaces, products and services that help achieve the less-than-2°C climate change goal. And we need to make them desirable, ‘sexy’, if you will. And that’s the greatest and most fascinating challenge of all. Anything with the feeling of a hair-shirt isn’t generally going to wash with us consumers.
As well as making saving the human race appealing, knowing how lazy we are, we have to make things easy for ourselves too – at least for the moment, while we adjust to the imperative. It’s all very well expecting us to unplug our phone chargers, but why not just design a charger you can’t plug in unless the phone is connected? Of course it’s no use being utopian about any of this either. We could replace all of our light bulbs, or demolish all of our current inefficient conurbations and replace them with perfectly engineered alternatives, but what a waste of embodied energy. There has to be an element of adaptation and intelligent re-use, even if it isn’t quite as neat.
There are of course many other pitfalls to the great crusade, as we can already observe. We need to be incredibly vigilant in scrutinising environmental impact through the whole cycle of creation and use. No more lauding of products as ‘green’ that take more energy to make than they save. Also, the economics of sustainable design don’t work, apparently. It’s too expensive to do the right thing. But do the cost calculations reflect the true long-term environmental costs, or are they underwritten by short-term gain? This is where a really honest agreement on what constitutes sustainability becomes so important – what really are the criteria? How much are we trying to save and how long for?
‘Gaia’ theorist James Lovelock argues that there’s no such thing as ‘sustainable development’; what we need is a sustainable retreat. However, even in a scenario of regression, we’re probably still going to want to take a few steps forward for each ten backwards. There’s still room for functional improvement in almost every area of what we create. More mega-pixels to cram in, faster speeds to achieve. But until we’re safely out of our current pickle, perhaps we might choose carefully which avenues we most want to spend our emissions budget pursuing. New, more sophisticated products, with greater energy efficiency and decreased depletion of resources seem like one fruitful trend. And if they can be miniaturised and made from recycled materials, so much the better. All that is solid melts into (MacBook) Air… there has after all to be some good re-use for all the aluminium from those soon-to-be-redundant no-frills airliners. Let’s blow some carbon getting much better at tele-conferencing too, capturing all the nuance, subtlety and fun of real human intimacy, so we can spend more time closer to home, but simultaneously have more enriching interaction with the wider world.
Maybe giving up isn’t that hard to do after all. Perhaps for the first time in the modern era, we are developing a sense that the paths of technological advance and progress are not necessarily one and the same. The ‘Concorde moment’ has been passed and we travel slower than we once could, but somehow life goes on. We may yet learn to survive without achieving all our cleverest dreams, but instead focus on a celebration of what we really value. I personally look forward to a leaner, trimmer, future. I think it will look better and feel better. Less is more, or rather, maybe less is enough.
There exists the possibility that, in a powered descent from our present position, as opposed to a chaotic free-fall, we may land upon something that is not ‘lifestyle’ as we currently know it, but something we actually prefer. After all, what is it that we’re trying to sustain here? Maybe there is a great techno-fix around the corner, like carbon sequestration, that allows us to carry on with ‘business as usual’. But do we actually want to? Why? So that people can carry on with soul-destroying commutes to work in faceless offices? So we can build more car-dependent suburban developments, enlivened only by trips to a superstore on a ring road? So we can snatch a trip to paradise that leaves you more tired than before you went? Our contemporary ‘developed’ civilisation – which, lest we forget, is in part the model for billions more aspirational consumers around the world – is neither sustainable nor especially desirable. Surely those two wrongs don’t make it right, do they?
First published 2008
'The Next Issue' Magazine
The Future Department, editor Steve Hare