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Kincaid's Site

Building a Sustainable World

No matter what other changes are made in society, if the resulting system cannot provide for the world's people -- all of them -- while preserving the ability of the environment to carry us, there is no future.

To get there, we have to do three things.

We have to get a handle on population

If the environment is to continue to carry us, we will have to stabilize the human population. There are indications that this will happen sometime around the middle of the coming century, after maybe one more doubling. We must therefore continue the changes that are encouraging the stabilization -- most importantly, the rise in the status and power of women around the world.

But we cannot, as some people urge, hope for a decrease in the over-all population.
If nothing else, it would involve the deaths of large numbers of people. Those who die will be drawn inevitably from the least powerful elements in the community -- and most assuredly not from the groups who are calling for a decrease.
And even if the moral arguments are not persuasive, we must remember that a world in which life is cheap will not be a stable one. Those groups which are scheduled for destruction will not sit still for it but will do everything in their power -- and even the powerless can make a lot of trouble -- to bring the system down. And there will be no reason they should not.
So instead, we have to keep our eyes on stopping the expansion of the population and providing for people at the level where it stops.

We have to continue economic development

Again, we cannot listen to those who want us to return to a preindustrial or pretechnological economy. Again, it would fail to provide well enough for enough people to avoid being torn down by those who were excluded.

Technological change will have to continue, but directed in ways that neither destroy the environment nor use resources for some at rates which cannot be sustained for all. We need technologies that stress the use of renewable resources and ever-increasing efficiency -- whether or not the "free market" gives them to us.

To get there, there must be a greater degree of deliberate control over the direction of change. And that -- like it or not -- means more political control.

We have to make sure the productivity of the system is distributed so as to provide for all the people.

Again, people will not stand for an economic system which fails to provide for their needs, and there is no reason that they should.

To make sure that the system meets the needs of the people, it will have to be under their control -- it will have to be politically democratic.

That will require some adjustments from the free-market absolutists who have been having things pretty much their own way the last few years. But the market alone will not create the fair and more or less equal distribution we will need in the new society. Nor can any elite group be trusted to watch out for the needs of the community as a whole. It will have to be majority-rule democracy.

Fortunately, there is evidence that these three tasks reinforce each other.

Some of it is obvious. Controlling the future development of technology and making sure that the products of the economic system are fairly distributed both depend on the establishment of democratic control over the economy. When eeducation levels and living standards -- and especially the status of women -- rise, people have fewer children and population growth slows.
Some of it is not so obvious. There is evidence that people make more careful, less wasteful use of resources when their living standards are higher.

That, at least, was the conclusion of the World Commission on Environment and Development (commonly called the "Brundtland Commission") which examined the whole problem under the auspices of the United Nations in the 80's. (Check out a page from the United Nations Association on this topic.)

There is a lot to be done, but with everyone's help, it can be.

A sustainable society must not be a seriously unequal one. On the one hand, those who are excluded will not tolerate their inferior position and will quickly render such a society politically unstable. On the other hand, there is ample reason to believe that an egalitarian society is more likely to use resources less wastefully. So we have a page on Equality Issues.

Just as a sustainable society cannot be an unequal one, so it cannot be politically stable if cultural groups within it are denied basic respect. So we have a page on Multicuturalism Issues.

Creating a sustainable world will require the creative contribution of as many people as we can draw on -- creativity that must take the form of full participation. At the same time, a truly sustainable world will only work if it "pays off" for the vast majority -- ideally all -- of the community, and that can only happen if the people have the final say in how the community is run. So we have a page on Participation Issues.

But the participation and equality on which sustainability depends cannot themselves be sustained if people are not free to ask their own questions, define their own values, and form their own alliances. So we have a page on Freedom Issues.

• Environmental Issues, including links to resources on population.
• Alternative Economics, which will have to play a major part in setting up a more pro-ecological system.
• Eventually, we hope to link to resources on new technologies. (Anyone with ideas that aren't too bizarre, please drop us a line.) We know many environmental activists don't believe technology can save us and that the way out is to go "backwards" technically. But doing that voluntarily is even less likely than accepting a drop in population. (We will never voluntarily drop the population, but it might be done for us by some kind of environmental collapse.) And besides, "gee whiz" technologies are fun to read about. So check back.

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