In Lesson One, Origin and Definition, we looked at our collective home (the earth) as if it were a spaceship. This is a useful way to see the earth when it comes to systemic issues such as sustainability. We can use a crisis in a fairly simple system – the control panel signalling a malfunction on a spaceship – to represent a far more complex system – the climate crisis on earth. But first we’ll get the definitions out that way.
What do we mean by systemic? I know this word is thrown around these days and is used to signal thoughts of frightening, large scale problems: systemic racism, systemic sexism and so on. In a social or political context, systemic often means as a consequence of issues inherent to a system, scary because the system is rarely defined in the news and media, leaving us to wrongly construct a malicious ‘system’ in our heads which the source of all of society’s ills. This is neither accurate or constructive and throws the blame around to the point of the cause becoming obscured by ignorance. There are many social systems that sexism and racism exist within like a nation, an economic system, the judiciary system. Which one is it, Vox? Let’s not fall into the Vox under-thinking trap. A system is something with a boundary, within which interactions give the system certain characteristics. By this definition, we are all systems, with our skin the boundary and the various biochemical interactions happening inside us giving us the pretty neat property of living. With our spaceship-earth analogy, the boundaries are the metal and glass exterior of the ship and the atmosphere of the earth; both boundaries that mark the point where lifeless space becomes a habitable environment. The interactions that occur within these boundaries are physical chemical reactions like combustion and social exchanges, which give rise to characteristics of the system such as technological advance and climate change. Looking at something as a system prompts us to look at the whole first, the big picture, before getting bogged down with complexities – it’s all about making the infinitely complex simple. A few thousand years ago Aristotle noticed the following:
The whole is more than the sum of its parts
That is to say, that the properties of a system cannot be explained (or solved) by looking at its component parts, just like consciousness cannot be explained by the individual neurones in your brain. Similarly, we can’t explain our unsustainable collective behaviour by looking at single policies, individual actors or events.
Why is this important?
Recognising that our species’ destruction of the living world is a characteristic of a complex social and physical system rather than the result of the actions of one orange man is a tough pill to swallow (and by tough I mean it takes a different way of thinking in order to get your head around). Thinking in systems that have interactions, emergent characteristics and boundaries is something that is a little abstract, but it is the only correct way to view a problem like sustainability and its solutions.
We must start to look at some of the more comprehensible characteristics we know are apparent in our global system (because we’re measuring them) and the interactions that have led to our crisis. Seeing in systems works as a tool for thinking about solutions too, and this is made especially easy when we know what our system, spaceship or planet has got to look like 100 years from now. Next time we will look at the system of spaceship earth in today’s crisis state next to a future world that is aligned with sustainable visions for the future. We will use this comparison to determine the interactions and characteristics that need to occur in order to achieve a system that is in equilibrium with nature.
Now that we have covered the more science-y need for the rise of the sustainability concept, we’re ready to explore the positive actions people have taken over the last sixty years or so to grow this potentially humanity-saving idea.
This lesson will take you through some of the major events and ideas that have shaped what sustainability means today… but first we should start at the beginning.
The emergence of stable agrarian civilisations some eight to ten thousand years ago suggests a planned strategy for survival, alongside nature within these communities. Polynesian communities have survived on small islands with limited resources for three thousand years using rahui, a form of environmental governance restricting access to certain resources.
Sketched reconstruction of a Māori horticultural settlement 600-700 years ago (Source).
Environmental preservation to an end of sustained wellbeing is as much an instinct as it is a philosophy or technology. Just as your dog doesn’t like to go to the toilet near their bed, we have created an external environment based on these instincts (now common knowledge), that have allowed us to live in cities of tens of millions.
Now let’s get familiar with the graph/timeline concoction you see above. The graph bit shows how often the word “sustainability” appears in books. The timeline bit shows a selection of notable events or ideas that have shaped our understanding of sustainability over the last sixty years (Source 1, Source 2). If we use the abundance of the word “sustainability” as a proxy for popularity in science and culture, we can see the effect of each event on the prevalence of the concept over time.
—
Okay. Starting in 1962 I’ll take you through to today with some James Bond-related reference markers
1962. The same year that the first Bond film was released, Silent Spring hit the shelves. Rachel Carson (left in the image below to avoid confusion) was an environmental scientist whose book looked at the use of synthetic pesticides (notably DDT) in the US agricultural system. The title of the book comes from the absence of birdsong in springtime as a result of pesticidal use. Now named one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of the 20th century, Silent Spring has been hugely influential, leading to the banning of DDT, establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency and small but penetrative grassroots environmental movements in the US. David Attenborough named Silent Spring as the book that changed the scientific world the most, second only to Darwin’s Origin of Species.
1972. A decade and six Bond films later and on the eve of the last Sean Connery appearance, Limits to Growth was published. This rather academic book was commissioned by the Bond-villain-supergroup-sounding Club of Rome, and set out to find the limits of our world. The authors looked at the world like one big spaceship (like the analogy used in Lesson 1) and simulated the complex, systemic interactions between humanity and our natural world – all very complicated but I will return to this in Lesson 3. The main take home from Limits to Growth was that if we carry on with the trends of resource use and population growth as they were in 1972 we would hit a crunch point in 2072, where humanity would experience a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity” – big talk. Their predictions were however criticised for not accounting technological solutions, so please don’t take their doomsday prophecy with a pinch of salt.
If Silent Spring tugged at the general population’s heartstrings, Limits to Growth put a tear in the eye of our scientists. With the dawn of the silicon age and with it the ability to handle large data sets and model global scenarios, Limits to Growth set the ball rolling for what the climate scientists are doing today with their graphs and forecasts. This was a very important book for the scientific community because it made us look at environmental issues and sustainability at a global scale and far into the future. Perhaps even more importantly it laid out the simple message that business as usual means a threat to our very existence (note this message was given 50 years ago – yikes!).
1987. Eight bond films and at the end of the Roger Moore era, Our Common Future (The Brundtland Report (Ms Brundtland on the left) was published. This was one of the first major international governmental reports on sustainability. The term “sustainable development” was defined in its modern form here. The report placed environmental issues firmly on the global political agenda, pushing for intergovernmental cooperation to solve these large scale problems.
We can see from the sustainability-popularity graph that it is at this point that sustainability begins to become more of a household term.
1988. At the midpoint of Timothy Dalton’s short run as Bond, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is established. This marks a significant international push to monitor climate change so that the world’s governments can make climate positive, evidence based decisions.
1992. In the midst of a six year bond-film hiatus, the Rio Summit is held. This marked a major effort for countries to collectively combat global problems such as climate change and deforestation.
1997. In the heyday of the Pierce Brosnan epoch, the third of the yearly United Nations Climate Change Conferences (known as COP3) was held in Kyoto Japan. On top of symbolising more efforts towards international cooperation to fight climate change, what’s important about this one is the Kyoto Protocol. This was the first legally binding agreement between countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within given timeframes. A watershed in international environmental treaty making, the Protocol introduced emissions trading and clean development mechanisms as tools for countries to meet these targets. The efficacy of this agreement was largely undermined in 2001 when the Bush administration rejected the protocol.
2006. With the dawn of the Daniel Craig Bond franchise, another film takes to the theatres. An Inconvenient Truth was released when I was 11 and is my earliest memory of the wild climate graphs we see today. It raised global awareness of the effect of human-made greenhouse gasses and showcased the debate, especially in the US, to whether climate change was a human or natural phenomenon.
2009. A year after Quantum of Solace we entered the Copenhagen climate negotiations. COP 15 held high hopes to reach an agreement regarding emissions reduction commitments beyond the Kyoto Protocol which was set to end in 2012. This agreement is widely regarded as a failure due to the fact that the Accord was not legally binding. The Accord also set no real targets and was only drafted by five countries – ouch. The momentum for progressive countries shifts to national and regional efforts to reduce emissions.
2015. Spectre is released as representatives of each country gather in Paris. Here, the “well below 2°C” (sometimes 1.5°C) target is set. This is the biggest agreement since Kyoto almost 20 years and sets a clear target for countries to adhere to. Again, it is not legally binding and there is no penalisation for countries breaking the rules. In this same year the UN Sustainable Development Goals were established as a blueprint for a sustainable future.
2021. We’ve got a new Bond film on the horizon, No Time to Die, and a new COP. COP26, to be held in the freshly Brexited UK, could be an important one. With a crisis such as Covid-19, change tends to happen more freely and this could be an opportunity to rebuild the global economy in a more sustainable fashion. But that’s just political drivel, let’s see if anything meaningful can come of this year.
Thanks for taking this journey through time with me. I hope you now understand how perfectly the major events in the global sustainability movement align with the succession of bond actors. I will talk about how these events and developments have (or haven’t) worked to actually tackle the problem of climate change and global biodiversity loss in Lecture 4.
In early 2019 I travelled halfway across the planet from London to Bhutan to live, study and research sustainability in the world’s most sustainable country.
I lived with students at Royal Thimphu College, a campus that must be up there with the most beautiful in the world. Waking up and opening the curtains to a 50m tall meditating golden Buddha perched a few km away in the snow-capped Himalayas was a sight that inspired awe, fascination and a profound interdependence between me and the country I was lucky enough to inhabit. You can read more about Bhutan and my time in Thimphuhere.
Great Buddha Dordenma sits 54m tall looking over Thimphu valley. The Buddha houses over one hundred thousand smaller golden Buddha statues.
Bhutan is the world’s only carbon negative country and I was there to find out why. Is it by function of the national Buddhist tradition? The synthesis of this ideology and Bhutan’s unique development models, institutions and policies? Or simply down to Bhutan’s fortunate hydroelectric capacity coupled with a scarcity-enforced low-impact lifestyle of Bhutanese people.
The answer is not simple and took months of late night reading, meaningful conversations and fieldwork to (at least in part) uncover.
First off, I’ll dig into some of the terms in the title:
The circular economy is a model, or more of a utopian vision of an economy that is ultimately closed loop. This closed loop mostly refers to material (closed by recycling or reduced consumption) and carbon (closed by renewable transition and efficiency gains or reduced consumption). The concept of a circular economy began to circulate in the EU around 2015 and this year andtoday stands as a pillar of the European Green Deal.
I have written about the technology and innovation that it takes to actualise the circular economy throughout my degree in Denmark, a front-runner in the global race to cultivate renewable energy technologies. Though I am familiar with the concept from a technical standpoint, I had always been puzzled by the lack of societal focus in circular economy literature. A meaningful change in the behaviour of European society (consumption patterns) can undoubtedly compliment the technical advances that steer an economy from linearity to circularity, and at a relatively low cost compared to a solely technology drive approach. Two hands on the wheel will change direction faster than one. This deficiency of a societal dimension of the European circular economy is what I call a societal blindspot.
To illustrate this blindspot I will draw on a quote by American sociologist Edward O. Wilson.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
E. O Wilson
If we take god-like technology in the context of the circular economy as the alternatives to a fossil-based economy, then the Palaeolithic emotion is our behavioural approach to solving the same problem.
The three principal reasons for the presence and need to recognise the societal blind spot are:
Jevson’s paradox: A paradox which states that efficiency gains always lead to increased consumption in today’s economy (that is, without changing the patterns by which we consume).
There is an overall blindspot within academia (an absence of papers). The theory that supports a circular society (and the policies that support this behavioural transition) is therefore not readily available to European decision makers today.
The circular economy is a growth-driven idea (as it must be to gain any support politically these days) and supports our current consumption patterns. This stands as a paradox of sorts that need some deep thinking to overcome.
A Buddhist Economy is closely related to a circular economy and holds important ideas that can be used as a blueprint for what a circular society looks and thinks like.Buddhist Economics is a heterodox approach to economics developed by E. F. Schumacher in the 50s which can be said to be the active political and economic model in Bhutan. As a political philosophy, Buddhist Economics is embodied in Bhutan through theGross National Happiness conceptualisation of socioeconomic development.
There is an epistemological parallel between the cyclical world-view of a Bhutanese Buddhist and a member of a circular economy. I propose then that the transfer of the societal elements held in Buddhist values that make the Bhutanese population sustainable would be beneficial to the circular economy movement.
I set out then to define what these elements are, their theological basis and relative importance in Bhutan compared to other forces that influence circular/sustainable behaviour. Through looking at three core elements of Buddhist Economics I explore the potential for Buddhist ethics to be superimposed onto a European societal context.
Lesson 1: Finding the Way
The first of these ideas is The Middle Way. The Middle Way is defined by a central notion of absence of extremes, extremes of sensuality, indulgence, materialism, and extremes of self-affliction, self-mortification, and asceticism. There are some clear parallels with environmentalist attitudes and The Middle Way, but that is not the most interesting thing to a circular economist.
In the same sermon that Buddha first mentioned The Middle Way, he also outlined the way that humans can follow this path. This starts with defining the middle, or the norm to which flows of carbon and materials must be directed towards. This is defined by knowledge production which, in Buddhism like in a circular economy, must adhere to strict ethical guidelines. The best representation of this Middle is the planetary limits (such as atmospheric concentrations of CO2 above 400 ppm) and an economy that functions in a circular way to meet the needs of people and nature.
The end of most knowledge production today is profit, growth or developing technology that fetches economic return. This end is not in accordance with the Middle that we have set. The importance of seeking this Middle cannot be more relevant considering what is at stake — our very existence.
Lesson 2: Exploiting our Inner Resources
The central Buddhist concept of interdependence states that everything exists in virtue of a cause and does not exist if that cause is absent. Basically, we exist because of what is around us, from the breaths we take down to our deepest thoughts of being. Blindness to this fact has cultivated the destructive anthropocentric worldview that exists in global society today, a view that we exist outside of and are superior to our surrounding environment.
A deep understanding of our interdependence with nature is something that 20th century Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss noticed is of vital importance for people to develop environmentalist world views, especially for the European citizen. Næss thought that a true understanding of people’s position relative to nature (which is inherently a circular, sustainable world view) is something that is acquired, just like Nirvana is acquired through following Buddhist teaching.
“Through deep experience, deep questioning and deep commitment emerges deep ecology”
Arne Næss
Deep experience and deep questioning are the keys that unlock a worldview that sees nature as more than a dead machine to be manipulated and used for human gain but as a living part of us, responsible for our psychological and physical wellbeing. This is something that is unconscious and extends past rational scientific understanding to wisdom.
So do we have to become monk-like to behave in accordance with circular visions of the future? The short answer is yes, but we won’t have to swap our Balenciaga trainers for sandals any time soon. In the same way that Attenborough’s blue planet triggered a shift from plastic to recyclable straws, exposure to true nature, exposure to true nature can shift one’s entire worldview to one of depth, interdependence and sustainable behaviour. (An amazing fact that I always keep with me is that the majority of European countries have no natural forest, only replanted forests that are far less diverse, and unimaginably less intriguing than the ones we cut down to whittle into arrows).
This education-based approach is by far the most cost-effective strategy to steer a society towards circularity but will always exist on the fringes of popular European thought because it is not economic.
Lesson 3: Stepping back
“When on the edge of an abyss, the only thing that makes sense is stepping back.”
Leopold Kohr (1989)
This quote I think is the perfect analogy for society’s position today. The abyss we’re standing in front refers to the systemic imbalance between what we emit as a human economy and what the natural world is able to sequester. This imbalance will lead to a kind of slow-motion ‘crunch’ where irreparable damage is done to nature as a result of long term stress.
Stepping back is a little trickier to understand. When on the edge of an abyss, the only thing that makes sense is stepping back.
In looking at this analogy past its face value, the problem is not the ‘abyss’ per se, but the fact that a societal intention to ‘step back’ is not being actualised. This raises some interesting questions regarding the nature of a society that is engaging in activities contrary to the thing that ‘makes sense’.
If we think of a man on the edge of an abyss, we assume he got there as a result of not seeing the world in the right way; he is not in his right mind, maybe due to intoxication or a psychotic episode. He no longer sees beauty in the sunset and has made a decision — simple and rational to him — that it is not worth sticking around to see another. Is this the condition of European society at present? Though a substantial simplification, I do believe that there is value in viewing the problem though this simplified lens to expose a condition of society that is best explained by social psychology, looking into the consciousness of our society.
There’s only one rational direction to step, right?
Now, scale this up to the size of European society, a society on the verge of committing crimes against nature that are comparable to those committed in the world wars of the early twentieth century. The first generation of the Frankfurt School were intrigued by a reality of the early twentieth century that makes such little sense — the holocaust. By exploring the sociological reasons why a ‘developed’, rational nation full of doctors, philosophers and university graduates can commit such barbaric acts, the Frankfurt School stands as an important resource in examining the social forces that promote the destructive societal activities that constitute the sustainability crisis of the twenty-first century.
For the Frankfurt School, eighteenth century Europe’s movement towards reason as the principal belief-system (The Enlightenment) explains the ills of today’s society. When a pre-reason society uses a belief-system such as Christianity or Buddhism to arrive at knowledge, this knowledge is used to serve a higher purpose such as building Peter’s Basilica or Taktsang in Bhutan.
When society uses reason to arrive at knowledge, they use this knowledge to create the most favourable end for humanity, to create maximum utility. Because of this, when reason is the core of knowledge creation, knowledge is inherently anthropocentric. To the Frankfurt School, the enlightenment project was about domination of nature. Nature, through its exploitation and domination by technology and science, is the means for attaining an arbitrary and unreflectively formulated end and, in the capitalist tradition, this end is profit. To take control of their external nature, human society is thought to have had to reject their internal nature and conform to instrumental rationality, where nature is measured only by its instrumental value and is commodified. A member of a society which the above describes has lost its all true feeling of interdependence and their own naturalness — they are rationally irrational.
“At the moment when human beings cut themselves off from the consciousness of themselves as nature, all the purposes for which they keep themselves alive-social progress, the heightening of material and intellectual forces, indeed, consciousness itself-become void, and the enthronement of the means as the end, which in late capitalism is taking on the character of overt madness, is already detectable in the earliest history of subjectivity”
Adorno & Horkheimer (1972)
In Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972), a false system is described, created by a reason-based society, that will participate in such destructive activity towards both nature and humanity. One mechanism that is covered intensely by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and is said to be conducive to the creation of a false system operating under a false consciousness is the culture industry. The culture industry is the body of contemporary media: film, radio, and newspapers in Adorno’s day; Netflix, Spotify, and Twitter in 2020. These media, so deeply embedded in a corporate capitalist system, are described by Adrono and Horkheimer to manipulate society into passivity and mindless consumption by shielding people from the real calamities and true mindlessness of human activity.
An example of this manipulation can be seen in analysis of wildlife documentary filmmaking, specifically that of David Attenborough — perhaps the individual responsible for showing the wonders of the natural world, through film, to the most people in Europe if not the world. Through showcasing the serenity of natural systems in distant, exotic lands, Attenborough leaves the viewer in awe but also, more dangerously, content with the state of the world and far from as critical as one should really be. Though not made with malicious intent, the culture industry operates here to distort society’s vision because scenes of serenity sell far better than scenes of bleak monoculture. Through the culture industry, even the most well-intentioned people are perpetuating a system heading into an abyss without realising it.
Interestingly, a notable shift in British public attitudes toward single use plastics since 2017 can be partially attributed to Attenborough’s Blue Planet II, which depicts the destructive effects of plastics on marine ecosystems. The show, watched by one fifth of the British public upon release, caused 88% of this audience to change their behaviour, and a 100% spike in global internet searches regarding the dangers of plastic in marine environments.
Despite this faint silver lining, the immense influence of the culture industry in shaping public opinion and behaviour remains an unconstructive force in a societal shift towards circularity as long as capitalism remains the principal motivation for media generation.What I argue here is that the mode by which the media operates to disseminate such transformative information must be treated with great care as to not indoctrinate but liberate the societal mind.
The Buddhist concept of moha (delusion, confusion or ignorance) is a central teaching and one of the three poisons in the Mahayana tradition that cultivate craving, the root of suffering. This can be likened to the theory presented above where a false consciousness (a kind of delusion) cultivates the growth economy, a root of environmental destruction. Buddhists consider moha as a standard constituent of the human condition. I believe that it is far healthier to think about delusion and the destructive tendencies that come with this delusion in the mode suggested by Buddhism where there is no grand oppressive system to blame but simply our human nature. A perk of viewing societal delusion in this way is that the enemy of constructive human behaviour is transformed, rightly, from a system to ourselves. The solution is therefore within society and can be found, as is the case in Bhutan and the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, through a process of collective enlightenment, education and community.
The rooster in the middle of this painting represents moha, one of the three roots of evil. The wheel of life is a common feature in a Buddhist home.
With this great potential of the culture industry to disseminate a false reality comes an equally great potential to disseminate truth and in turn promote collective enlightenment. I therefore return to the example of wildlife documentary filmmaking, and its sizeable effect on a wide British audience. A change in focus, from a reality that is false to true, a world that is pristine to a world that is vulnerable, can inform the public without coercion through knowledge, the same knowledge Buddha speaks of as to realise the middle way. But what is the difference between this knowledge and that of instrumental reason? The difference is the worldview that each is bound to: true interdependence and the market respectively. For stepping back requires true knowledge combined with a worldview that places humans within nature — a circular worldview as contained within the societal dimension of the Circular Economy.
I received a phone call from a friend of mine a few weeks ago to let me know he was applying for a job in design. He wanted some advice on sustainability and some good places to start for someone who hasn’t explored the concept past their own industry or the evening news. With sustainability now being woven into every job description, diet decision and dinnertime conversation from here to Honduras, I thought I’d give my take on the fundamentals of this complexity-riddled concept.
Despite the enormous amount of information available at our fingertips, there was no “one size fits all”, no introduction to sustainability and all of the concepts that surround it. This beginners guide to sustainability is for everyone, like my friend, who needs to embed sustainability into their jobs or for those who want to make better, more informed decisions about how we live our lives.
Before we begin this Sustainability 101 short course, remember you are attending the University of Oscar, so though referencing the important stuff, most of this is my take on the basics. (Before I squander all my credibility, I have studied the social and technical dynamics of sustainability for a few years, so it is a fairly informed take).
Lesson 1 – Origin and definition
There are many reasons for the “demand” for sustainability today, but I will give the two most concrete reasons: temperature and biodiversity loss.
1. This graph, probably first seen by many in the 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” shows the average yearly rise in global temperature over the last 60 years – an extremely extremely short amount of time in the context of climate science. We’re going to agree with 97% of climate scientists here, that this is because of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses released by humans by burning fossil fuels. Nature relies on balance for its health and we are throwing this balance off.
With these two facts in mind, we had to start thinking ahead, planning for the event that sustained life on earth may not be possible given our current human habits. Although we don’t like to think of it, humans are not separate from nature, we die when nature dies.
A good way to think of this is thinking of earth as a spaceship, with a control system (the world’s scientists), and a crew (the world’s population). The alarms have been set off by a malfunction detected by the control system and it’s now the job of the sci-fi movie protagonist to frantically float around adjusting dials and duct-taping broken tubing together. That’s us. The protagonist. Whether we’re frantic enough is up to you but some fixing will have to be done if we’re expecting a Disney ending. We’ll return to this analogy later, it’s a good one.
The concept of sustainability is fundamentally a strategy for sustained existence, thinking about how every action now affects the future – and this takes a hell of a lot of thinking. I think this is where the complexities begin. We have to think about abstract concepts like “global systems” and “the future” and “human existence” which is mind bending, and to be honest, no one really fully gets it. We however must place trust in those who do understand the complexities, our spaceship control panel, the IPCC and other scientific institutions.
In many ways sustainability is like religion, thinking about something bigger than ourselves and collective belief… and look, there I go! Getting carried away with complexities – that’s just how easy it is. Let’s keep it light.
A somewhat universally agreed definition of sustainability (actually sustainable development, but these two terms are so cloudy in what they actually mean they may as well be synonymous) is: “The ability to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This definition was coined in 1987 in the Brundtland Report, when the world was beginning to think of strategies for sustained existence on earth – more on this next time.
As we finish this first lesson a quick summary – Human actions over time now have led to the need for a strategy for the survival of future generations: Sustainability.
In our next lesson we’ll run through a timeline of sustainability.
Get in touch
Explore your next steps in sustainability with the Future Shift team.
Join the Shift Community
Join the Shift Community to keep up to date with Shift news, sustainability news and to join future Shift Community Seminars.
