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Stuart Franklin
Magnum Photos
On Sustainability
One of the major questions about sustainability (especially the sustainability of biological diversity) is: can we manage to sustain our species diversity by saving small patches of the landscape in special reserves while exploiting the rest of the land as we wish? The American conservationist Aldo Leopold, writing in 1966, thought not.
He wrote: ‘Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism’. (Leopold, 1993)
Yes, the land is one organism, but because of population pressure and need to feed the world’s increasingly urban population (today half the world’s people live in urban areas), we may have to make compromises. In 1987 the Brundtland Report stated that, ‘sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. (WCED, 1987) This definition, according to the report, contained within it two key concepts; one was concerned with essential needs of the world's poor, the other with technological limitations. Although the Brundtland Report lamented the loss of coral reefs and tropical forests, its message was anthropocentric and in the words of one critic, ‘a good political fudge ... on deeper analysis a vague, contradictory, even meaningless concept’. (Richardson, 1997)
If a strictly anthropocentric view of sustainability is ‘meaningless’, then what of an ecocentric perspective that sees humans as just one element in a shared universe? First, let’s be honest: it’s impossible, as Aldo Leopold has suggested we do, to ‘think like a mountain’ when musing on our environment. We think like humans because we are human. Also, we all think differently and no humans think the same about their own needs. But someone or some group of people has to put their head above the parapet and think super-humanly about the survival of planet Earth for future generations—if we allow them that right.
Given that right they may think that the sustainability of species diversity is a desirable goal: more so than when the 23 commissioners collaborated to write the Brundtland Report 21 years ago.
So, just to recap, if we accept the definition of sustainable development as caring for the needs of the world’s poor as a priority, then we can’t ask the poor, in the same breath, to ignore their own needs and accept that we care more about the survival of rainforests or threatened species than we care about them. We need a new definition that prioritizes both people and the environment equally. Furthermore, without a clear roadmap as well as a global fund in place to manage the dichotomy we are left watching the rainforests of the less developed countries gradually disappear as a result of people’s actions—the rich and the poor.
The ‘world’s poor’ is, in any case, an abstract concept. First, it leaves the meaning of poverty unclear, and second, it leaves the potential mass of the poor’s needs unexamined. When the Brundtland Report was published in 1987, there were under 6 billion people living on Earth. Today there are 6.6 billion people with a projected population of 9 billion in 2050 (UNDP, 2007). Over 90 percent of the population increase will take places in less developed countries. So, considering the Brundtland Report analysis, the needs of the poor do not necessarily correlate with the survival of the planet since resources and land might become unmanageably stretched. In any case perhaps the problem is not about the needs of the poor or the rich—but the needs of people.
The second aspect to the problem concerns scale, both spatial and temporal. At the largest scale we could consider the whole galaxy, planet Earth, or the global commons such as the oceans. At a smaller scale we could consider a field on a small farm. If we think of the sustainability of fisheries it’s clear that we have to decide, returning to Brundtland’s definition, between meeting the needs of the present and meeting the needs of future generations; then we have to decide who will make the decisions about needs, and who will control the way needs are described and met. This is especially important in the light of disappearing tropical forests.
Species-rich tropical forests are a major resource for both governments trying to balance their economies and local people making choices at the forest frontier. Do we accept that a global tropical forest protection force has powers over and above a) the needs of the state and b) the needs of local people? To answer these questions we have to go back to both Leopold’s and Brundtland’s statements to see that the art of sustainability is not about either a) an entirely holistic approach to land management or b) a managed approach to the needs of the world’s poor that does not lead inevitably to the destruction of the remainder of the Earth’s tropical forests or wetlands.
Sustainability cannot be achieved by way of grand presumptions or meta-theories.
Sustainability, in today’s world, is achieved by a negotiated settlement between different people in different places at different times. Take the example of the small farmer’s field.
On the Hebridean island of Colonsay in Scotland the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has negotiated with local farmers and paid them to delay the time when they harvest their hay meadows for silage from June to October. They pay farmers to exist with just one summer crop of silage instead of two. The aim is to protect rare European ground-nesting birds, such as the corncrake (Crex crex), and to augment their numbers. Many grassland bird species are threatened by modern agricultural techniques such as mechanized mowing and the use of pesticides and fertilizer. Birds represent only a small element of a complex hay meadow ecosystem. Here different species of bumble bees, moths, butterflies and wildflowers also struggle to survive.
Because there is limited species diversity in Scotland and Europe (and a stable human population), it is possible to sustain diversity and both extensive and intensive farming by applying a range of different approaches to land stewardship. As a result, in Scotland they are both cultivating more food than they were 50 years ago and increasing the abundance of the corncrake and other rare birds by applying a mixture of land management practices that have nothing to do with grand theories about sustainability. Once again sustainability is achieved by a negotiated settlement between the stated needs of the people while making allowances for the needs of European flora and fauna.
Where it is more difficult to strike a balance through negotiation is in the world’s tropical forests. Tropical rainforests cover only 6 percent of the Earth’s land surface but they contain at least half the Earth’s species. They may contain 90 percent or even more of all species—5-30 million species (WCED, 1987). In regions where the most species-rich tropical forests exist the human population is increasing more than one hundred times more rapidly than in Europe. Although it may be true, to paraphrase Arne Naess, that a hundred babies born in one of the least developed countries may cause less interference than a single baby born in a rich country (Naess, 1997), local people do put pressure on tropical forests in a number of ways. Local politicians may sell concessions to log the forests, to replace them with palm oil plantations or to exploit them for oil reserves. In this way they may promise jobs or money and in turn a chance for them to be re-elected—what might be termed sustainable politics.
These state representatives (ministers, local governors, etc.) are not the world’s poor. On the contrary, they are the rich of the less developed countries, who use the money to ensure that they and their families will never be poor. The politicians justify their actions by creating national parks where, they claim, their national rainforest treasure is safely preserved. This is a fallacy. What is lost outside tropical rainforest national parks will be gone forever. Politicians rely on the public’s lack of education and desire for jobs and income to win their case. At the same time, the people who move to live at the forest margin see no reason not to burn the forest near their home. The soil will become very fertile in the first two or three years and they find the short-term advantages of burning enables them to meet their needs.
The difference between the EU measures used to protect the corncrake and the measures employed by governments to protect tropical forests is that meadows are able to maintain diversity in relatively small fragments; tropical forests are not. The sad fact is that cutting down any 10-hectare block of rainforest in Borneo, Sumatra, Papua New Guinea, Madagascar or western Ecuador means the loss of a considerable number of species that can never be replaced. It is not easy to understand this but in an unlogged forest virtually every adjacent tree is an example of a different species often unrepeated in the forest matrix.
Diversity does not correlate with abundance, just with diversity. Madagascar has only been colonized by humans for 1,500 years. Until the 1950s there were 12,000 plant species and around 190,000 animal species, most of them endemic. Over a short period of time 85 percent of the tropical forest has been destroyed, mostly by fire, to make room for a burgeoning population and more than half the original species, which exist nowhere else on earth, have disappeared.
What survives is a thin band of rainforest in the east, south of the capital and a threatened ‘spiny forest’ in the dry south. The current population of Madagascar is 19.6 million—about 30 percent of whom are illiterate. The projected population for 2050 is 43.5 million (UNDP, 2007). It is hardly the fault of this growing population that they are not aware of what it is they are at risk of losing: no one has set up effective education programs to inform them. The literacy problem is even worse in Papua New Guinea, another important centre of biodiversity, where 49 percent of women are illiterate.
If we say we want to sustain tropical forests for their species diversity, as a carbon sink, as a source of cures for childhood diseases (such as leukaemia—cured after finding the rose periwinkle in Madagascar), or the chance for future generations to enjoy the forests, none of the important ones should be cut down at all. However, because it is the world’s resource managers who would present such a case for sustainability to the people of, say, Madagascar, those managers have to come up with an alternative means of compensation or, as happened in Sumatra, they have to buy forests for the benefit of future generations.
Sustainability of species diversity in tropical rainforests needs a negotiated settlement between a global fund set up to protect them and the governments under whose sovereignty they lie. This is a very hard objective to achieve, partly because many forests cross national boundaries, and partly because of the complex way in which the fund would have to be managed. It would have to provide an alternative livelihood for people wishing to farm on tracts of rainforest. It would have to provide a broad literacy and education program—especially for women and girls—so that people are better informed and better able to make a living themselves. It would have to provide a secure means of protecting the forest from extractive logging and burning. That would necessitate the legitimation of a universal UN-style force capable of policing the forests. Finally, it would have to provide the administrative support for each and all of these initiatives.
Returning once more to the meta-theories of Leopold and Brundtland, we see they offer a limited solution to the practical job of sustaining Europe’s hay meadows and wetlands and the world’s tropical rainforests. What is needed urgently is support for the nongovernment organizations that already exist, whose efforts are helping to protect wetlands and hay meadows through negotiation with farmers or direct purchase of land, and a global fund designed to enable the protection of moist tropical forests among a wide range of other important ecosystems that should be kept for future generations, such as coral reefs.
This article began with a question—one of the major questions about sustainability (especially the sustainability of biodiversity) is: can we manage to sustain our species diversity by saving small patches of the landscape in special reserves while exploiting the rest of the land as we wish? Referring to the examples I have used it’s clear that the answer is both yes and no.
Yes, we can manage to sustain species diversity by careful land stewardship in regions of low species diversity where the human population is stable or decreasing (as in Scotland); and no, we cannot maintain species diversity by saving small patches of tropical rainforest in areas of high biodiversity where the population is increasing rapidly (as in Madagascar).
References
Leopold, A., RoundRiver, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1993.
Naess, A., ‘Sustainable development and deep ecology’ in Baker, S. et al. (eds), The Politics of Sustainable Development, Routledge, London 1997.
Richardson, D., ‘The politics of sustainable development’, ibidem.
UNDP, The State of the World’s Population, 2007.
WCED, Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1987.
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