If you've never heard of 'sustainability,' you will very soon. Simply put, it's the philosophy that we humans had better start planning our society with the long-term in mind or else we're going to be in big trouble. To Robert Gilman of Bainbridge Island, it's more than just a field of study - it's his life's work.
ROBERT GILMAN
INTERVIEWED BY MARK WORTH
THE FREE PRESS
PHOTO BY JIM BURFORD
Many of us work to live in an environmentally aware way. We recycle. We ride buses. We eat less meat or no meat all. But is that really enough to ensure a healthy future for human society?
Not hardly, says Robert Gilman, a former astrophysicist who, like German Green Party pioneer Fritjof Capra, left the linear sciences to devote his life to become a guru of the sustainability movement. Gilman and his wife, Diane, founded the Context Institute, a think tank based on Bainbridge Island, Wash., that is at the cutting edge of environmental, social and economic theory and policy development. The Institute also publishes In Context magazine, a quarterly journal focusing on real people living sustainability.
Talking with The Free Press' Mark Worth, Gilman explains what sustainability is all about and why he believes society needs to embrace it as a way of life.
Basically, what is the theory of sustainability?
One of ways I like to describe sustainability is that it takes the idea of the golden rule and applies it to the future: We should do unto future generations as we would have other generations do unto us. In less moralistic terms, it means we should value the future as much as we value the present. Looking at it more technically, for the past few hundred years, we have been effectively draining down reservoirs of wealth, whether it's old-growth forest, fossil fuels or aquifers that we've been pumping faster than they have been replenished. In a sustainable system, reservoirs are nice, but you always have to look upstream of the reservoirs.
It's conservation ...
It's conservation put into a longer time frame. We wouldn't be so concerned if it weren't for strong, scientifically based evidence that shows if we keep on with business as usual, in the next few decades we will find that we've driven the systems around us to social and ecological collapse.
Tell me how sustainability is more than just an environmental movement.
The sustainability movement is a next generation of the various movements of the '60s. It's really more of whole-systems movement that grew out of what happens when you look at environmental, social and economic considerations all together. In a certain sense, for example, the environment doesn't have problems. The environment has symptoms of human problems, and we're not likely to deal with those symptoms until we look at all of the dysfunctional aspects of our human systems.
What would a sustainable society look like?
In a functional, sustainable society, all the material processes will be designed to be cyclical. There will be no such thing as waste or pollution, only outputs from one system serving as assimilatable or usable inputs to another. The driving physical energy will be renewable solar energy, either direct or in forms such as wind, hydropower or biomass. And the human population and the quantity of material goods will be stable in size or gradually declining. This doesn't imply a static society; changes in quality can continue. Indeed, they may accelerate.
Tell me how people, and large institutions for that matter, can actually save money by designing their lives and businesses more sustainably.
Look at this with an ecological analogy: If you start with bare ground, the first species to come out tend to grow quickly and use their resources inefficiently. The next group of plants and animals that come in grow slower, but they are more efficient with their resources and will drive out the earlier pioneer species. We have been living in a pioneer culture, and now we need to learn to be indigenous. Because of the pioneer attitude, we have adopted many wasteful practices. The good news is that we have lots of opportunities now to save both money and resources.
For example, in this country we use about $300 billion of energy a year. But with currently available, cost-effective technology, we could save at least half of that. One of the barriers that's kept people from using these techniques is that often they cost somewhat more in the beginning, but they have payback periods of less than five years.
Give me an example of where real people are successfully using sustainable technologies to solve real problems.
The city of San Jose since the late '70s has been applying sustainability principals to save energy and resources. The city is now saving $6 million a year and the community is saving $15 million a year. They're saving water and energy. They're repairing streets sooner, which produces a longer lifetime for the streets. Many of these ideas were damn sensible, financially and environmentally.
Most people these days look to the federal government to help them with their problems. Tell me what's wrong with that and how sustainable approaches fit in to your vision of problem solving.
As a society, we've tended to focus on either the federal level or the individual level. That means there are a lot of untapped opportunities in the community, which is the smallest level where whole-system solutions can really shine. It's easier to get a small group of people creating positive demonstrations at that level and the powerful, big-time special interests tend to ignore what happens at the community level. They don't think it's a threat; it doesn't come onto their radar screens. That's why citizen diplomacy between the U.S. and former Soviet Union was so successful. By the time it was happening, it was too late and there was nothing the governments could do about it.
Once you've got some functioning successes, it inspires other people to create similar examples, and each new example usually advances the learning of how to make that project really effective. Then it becomes much harder for people to argue that it can't happen.
Your work is international, but you're based in the U.S., the grandaddy of wasteful culture. How does this affect your strategies?
This is the home of unsustainability. Much of what you see in developing countries is a symptom of unsustainable practices that are rooted here and the rest of the industrialized world. What you can do is play one country off another. One of the few things that gets to the government and corporate powers that be is the threat that their competitors are doing something that will leave the U.S. behind.
Most people reading this already recycle, have cut back on their water use and have used public transportation at least once in the past year. What else can and should they do?
An important thing to do is getting to know your neighbors. Trade some of your time in front of the boob tube and going to the mall for talking to friends. Without communication and relationships, you can't discover the opportunities that are hidden right there in the community. Plus, when you need anything from a special tool to a new job, a strong network can let you tap resources without having to go through marketplace. If you can move that money flow of out of the governmental and corporate structures, it becomes invisible to them.
In the workplace, the best move is to develop an employee-owned business, because there you'll no longer have the conflict between the interests of the employees and the interests of the owners. It can open up opportunities for both a more humane and more resilient work life. It can and is being done today. From my point of view, even today's corporate CEOs would have a better quality of life in a humane and sustainable society.
We both know, however, how tough it is to get people to change the way they live.
People are changing all the time. Many of the personal changes don't have to be huge steps. And some of the bigger steps actually make a lot of common sense to the most people. An important part of changing one's attitude is moving from a focus on quantity of consumption to quality of life. In the old model, the only rational choice you can make about what job to take is to get the highest salary you can possibly get. In the new model, a good salary doesn't hurt, but you also want to look at the quality of your work life.
Money is a means to quality of life. If you can be more efficient in delivering a higher quality of life for less money, you won't need as much money. A sustainable society would probably have less overall flow of money, and certainly less consumption of resources.
What your saying sounds wonderful, if not utopian. But aren't you afraid that none of it could possibly become a reality without the "help" of a global economic or environmental cataclysm? After all, some people don't go to the doctor until their tumor grows to the size of a watermelon.
There are already cataclysms going on in the world. Ask the people of the Sudan or Bosnia how long they have to wait until cataclysm occurs. It's a tautology that we won't turn around until we hit bottom. It's impossible to predict at this stage how bad it will all get. But I know that the more we do now to make that transition easier, the less scarring will be left in the environment and in the human family.
The Context Institute is a private, non-profit organization that publishes In Context magazine (now available exclusively on the web), researches advances in sustainable technologies, disseminates its findings at conferences and other gatherings, and networks with groups and individuals working in the sustainability movement throughout the world.
The Institute can be reached at PO Box 794, Langley, WA 98260 USA, or by calling (360) 221-6044 or faxing (360) 221-6045.
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