3 Sustainability
Being sustainable is no longer enough. We need to regenerate forests, train people with green skills, help local communities and indigenous people become more resilient, and more. These are improvements in the physical systems around us, leaving them better than we found them
3.1 UN Sustainability Goals
Beslik
The United Nations General Assembly adopted 17 global sustainable development goals (SDGs) in 2015, which may be described as our—humanity’s—global strategy for a sustainable world:
1 End all forms of poverty, everywhere.
2 End hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.
3 Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all.
4 Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
5 Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
6 Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
7 Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.
8 Promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all.
9 Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation.
10 Reduce income inequality within and among countries.
11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.
12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts by regulating emissions and promoting developments in renewable energy.
14 Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development.
15 Protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
16 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels.
17 Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.
[Beslik (2021)] https://esgonasunday.substack.com/p/week-33-where-the-money-tree-grows)
3.2 Global Suicide
Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth’s ability to support complex life.
A strange sort of faith lies at the core of mainstream climate advocacy—a largely unexamined belief that the very system that got us into this mess is the one that will get us out of it.
What policy wonks call “absolute decoupling”—the only kind that would do the climate any good—turns out to be a fantasy akin to a perpetual motion machine, a chimera of growth unhindered by material constraints. One recent analysis of 835 peer-reviewed articles on the subject found that the kind of massive and speedy reductions in emissions that would be necessary to halt global warming “cannot be achieved through observed decoupling rates.” The mechanism on which mainstream climate policy is betting the future of the species, and on which the possibility of green growth rests, appears to be a fiction.
3.3 Ecological Crises and State Breakdown
Hartley
The last decade has seen more political instability, more social polarisation, and a growing realisation that natural resources and sinks are finite. This has renewed research across academic disciplines into states that have undergone periods of conflict, growing inequality, and resource degradation in the past.
First, neo-institutionalists (NIN) examine the institutional trajectories of states, wherein crises are thought to arise both from systemic institutional processes and from shocks that provoke institutional change.
Second, socio-ecological systems (SES) researchers examine the collapse, or loss of resilience, of states in terms of a lasting breakdown of cultural and productive processes, population, and resource acquisition
Third, demographic-structural theory and its variants (DST) focus particularly on changes in population and demographic structure as factors in the political instabilities which herald state crisis
Fourth are world-systems approaches (WSA) that examine the rise and decline of different hegemonic states within the rise and decline of broader systems of tribute and trade
Fifth are peace and conflict researchers (PCR) who investigate the conditions for peace and the causes of conflict in modern states
The state is broadly conceived as a political apparatus with coercive power over a population within some territory. State crises occur when that political apparatus state is seriously challenged, and there is a strong chance that the state will not persist in its current form. Dramatic outcomes of state crises include violent breakdown and collapse.
entrenchment and reform are thus also potential outcomes of state crisis, alongside the potential for breakdown and collapse.
systemic theories of scarcity rest upon a common mechanism of diminishing returns, though differences remain regarding precisely which returns are diminishing and why.
state crises arise when the state starts to become perceived as ineffective or unjust - decline in the legitimacy of state structures - adverse or disruptive regime transitions
state instability, focusing on the questions of whether “the crisis move[s] toward repression, coup, civil war, or something else”, and on whether “the state can reform”.
Giovanni Arrighi’s investigation of how capital accumulation, financial markets, public debts, and state formation interact… [but] Arrighi only deals with one phase in this cycle—a final phase
adaptive cycles at different levels in a panarchy become aligned at the same phase of vulnerability
disruption and diversion of trade flows
a state crisis is a decisive turning point where it is possible that the state might not continue in its current form.
two broad kinds of crises: those that occur in conditions of ecological-economic sufficiency, and those that occur in conditions of worsening scarcity. Institutional factors are also theorised to play a role in the genesis and evolution of crises. A distinction is often made between states that are ‘open’ democracies and those that are ‘closed’ autocratic states I add an intermediate third category of ‘partial’ states, reflecting the recent consensus among peace and conflict researchers that this third category is crucial in explaining the incidence and severity of crises in modern states I use the word ‘partial’ to mean ‘partially open and partially closed’; the word also has connotations of the bias and discrimination typical of these partial states.
Finally, I distinguish a range of four societal responses to crisis. ‘Reform’ is where crises are resolved through relatively peaceful social or political change. ‘Entrenchment’ is where elites shore up state power and resist change. ‘Breakdown’ is where conflict becomes protracted, violent, and divisive. ‘Collapse’ is where there is extensive depopulation, socio-political devolution, and loss of culture.
Which ecological-economic conditions and which institutional circumstances increase the likelihood of societal crisis? And which of these factors influence the different societal responses that result?
buffering feedbacks mean that elites are able to rally and reconstitute the state.
scarcity crises occur when population growth and intensification leads to environmental degradation, in turn leading to increased conflict
a theory of diminishing returns (also called ‘declining’ or ‘decreasing marginal’ returns) posits that, all else equal, the return on inputs declines as more inputs are added
Much of the investment in human societies is in the form of increasing the complexity of organisations to solve problems. But these organisations in turn require increasing amounts of energy for their maintenance. At the point where additional complexity costs more energy than it returns, societies are no longer able to solve their problems via more complexity. Complexity becomes a less attractive strategy, and some parts of society may make efforts to break away since secession and rebellion become more attractive. As productive capacity and accumulated surpluses decline, there are fewer reserves with which to deal with any shocks that occur.
Tainter (1988: 195) writes that “[o]nce a complex society enters the stage of declining marginal returns, collapse becomes a mathematical likelihood”. Collapse is sometimes described as an appropriate response to a situation, and though often appearing catastrophic for elites, may actually be beneficial for others within the population (Tainter 1988: 198).
Populations are themselves theorised to be subject to diminishing returns as their numbers grow. All else equal, population growth increases pressure on ecological resources, and diminishing returns to labour. Diamond (2005: 6) lists several ways in which intensification can lead to ecological degradation, including “deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people”. As resources are used up or degrade, people must work just as hard to acquire fewer returns. This decline in per capita output increasingly immiserates the population; the point at which an increase in population produces negative returns is sometimes known as the ‘carrying capacity’, beyond which starvation or emigration brings the population back down
population pressure can also prompt technological innovations that increase per capita output But both institutional and technological innovation are themselves hypothesised to be subject to diminishing returns (Motesharrai et al. 2016: 93).
Population growth is also theorised to initially benefit elites. But elites eventually exceed what the general population can support, thus making crisis more likely. This phenomenon is usefully termed ‘elite overproduction’ to distinguish the mechanism from population growth more generally (Turchin and Nefedov 2009: 313).
state capture posit that dominant groups in society increasingly use their wealth to acquire political power, and thereby the state’s means of coercion
The decision of the wealthy to shift investment from production and trade to finance and coercion are motivated by declining profits in the more productive sectors of the economy, state captur
e is itself thought to be a consequence of the factors driving declining profits.
Even where some adaptation does take place, the actions taken in partial and closed institutional arrangements often tend to focus on increasing the overall capacity of the economic system to recover from shocks. In the terms of my typology, we might describe this as an attempt to turn conditions of worsening ecological-economic scarcity into conditions of sufficiency. But without institutional reforms that increase equality, such attempts can actually result in reducing the economic and political openness of the system even further (Van Bavel 2019: 63). Since the wealthy and powerful are more insulated from shocks, and the poorer and weaker more susceptible to them, the deleterious effects of poorly managed crises can become a cascading feedback loop bringing ever more economic and social polarisation upon each iteration
as long as the elites remain unified, peasant insurrections, slave rebellions, or worker uprisings have little chance of success
As states breakdown, a cascading feedback loop may arise, with ever more infighting between rival elites over the spoils they extract, ever more coercive extraction from the general population, and ever declining productive investment. Fighting can enrich combatant elites whilst further impoverishing the poorest, with increasing economic and political polarisation further undermining the legitimacy of the state.
a ‘sunk-cost account’ suggests that a society in which people have heavily invested in expensive infrastructure are less likely to abandon these investments. Instead, they will try to rigidly maintain their previously successful strategies even in changing ecological-economic circumstances, thus making local depletion and collapse, when it does finally occur, appear all the more dramatic
theories of worsening scarcity rest on a common mechanism: diminishing returns.