Introduction to Climate and Sustainability

History of sustainability

Misha Velthuis

m.velthuis@uva.nl

Thu 3Wed Oct 2024

Content

Overview:

Key thinkers and ideas

Overview:

Different schools and sentiments

Caradonna (2014)

Thinking about sustainability

Key thinkers

Ideas have causes and effects

White men thinking about sustainability

Other voices

The history of what?

From Latin /sustinēre

sub = up from below

tenere = to hold

The history of what?

For a renewable resource - soil, forest, fish - the sustainable rate of use can be no greater than the rate of regeneration of its source.

For a nonrenewable resource - fossil fuel, high-grade mineral ores, fossil groundwater - the sustainable rate of use can be no greater than the rate at which a renewable resource, used sustainably, can be substituted for it.

For a pollutant the sustainable rate of emission can be no greater than the rate at which that pollutant can be recycled, absorbed, or rendered harmless in its sink.

Early modern roots

Deforestation

Btw

BTW

But yes, deforestation

Two responses

Response 1: Hans Carl von Carlowitz

The history of what?

For a renewable resource - soil, forest, fish - the sustainable rate of use can be no greater than the rate of regeneration of its source.

For a pollutant the sustainable rate of emission can be no greater than the rate at which that pollutant can be recycled, absorbed, or rendered harmless in its sink.

Btw: reinventing a very old wheel?

Caradonna on incipient sustainability in the colonies

“The irony here is that there would not have been a need for conservation had early European settlers not destroyed island forests - forests which had been used sustainably by local inhabitants for centuries or, in the case of uninhabited islands, had never dealt with an invasive species of homo sapiens.” (Caradonna, p. 44)

Response 2: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Noble savage

Romanticism

Two different sources of sustainability thinking

Imperialist

Human control over nature

Flora and fauna mere objects of dispassionate analysis

Arcadian

Restoring coexistence with other organisms

Deep, humble reverence for all living beings

Roots in industrial revolution

Industrial revolution (1760-1840)

The imposition of technology

The destruction of the past

The ordeal of labour

The manufacture of needs

Three sources of critique

Socialist

Friedrich Engels

1820-1885

Social conservatist

Thomas Robert Malthus

1766-1834

Capitalist liberalist

John Stuart Mill

1806-1873

Socialist critique of industrial revolution

Luddites

Social conservatist critique of industrial revolution

Malthusian catastrophe

Capitalist liberalist critique of industrial revolution

John Stuart Mill on stationary state

I cannot, therefore, regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by political economists of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very consider- able improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.

John Stuart Mill on stationary condition

It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on.

Roots in the 60s and 70s

New awareness of pollution

Rachel Carson 1907-1964

Environmental disasters

Torrey Canyon oil spill

Santa Barbara oil spill

Social movements

Decolonization

Civil right movement

'68 student protests

Second wave feminism

Although…

Ideas have causes and effects

New perspectives: limits to growth

Spaceship economics

Frontier (cowboy) economics

Spaceship economics

In the meantime

Parasitism, predation
enterprise, gregation, service

Sustainable development

Primitive/ animal state: British empire

Modern/human state: Nazi Germany

Advanced/ spiritual state: nothing yet

Education in the UK/US, but very different conclusions.

At the present time, all national organizations that depend upon colonial production or on exploited labour are Parasitic. The British Opium Trade with China, the British Slave Traffic with Southern States of America, King Leopold's exploitation of the West African Estates, and the dependence of British manu- factures on Indian markets are parasitic in that they spell ruin to their victims.

The Islamic culture, with its ethnical solidarity and unity, where there is no distinction of colour, White, Black, Red, Brown or Yellow, nor of estate-prince or peasant, is definitely of the Gregarious type. The recent acquisitions to this group are the Nazis and Fascists. These are highly group-conscious, though of a violent type, especially to those outside their circle.

(Positive (or at least not completely negative) views on Nazis in India has to be seen in the context of India's own decolonial struggle against the enemy of the Nazis (the British). See for example Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose. (At the same time, there are also simply "authentic" fascist tendencies in India, in which fascism is admired for its own sake)).

As yet we have not evolved any large social group which can be cited as an example of this order. Though the ancient conception of the Brahmins was an approach to this stage, yet, the modern sect, so

Connections with degrowth?

Rejection of materialism

Christian and Gandhian values ("trusteeship")

Satisfying human needs and challenges

Rooting out socio-economic conflict