Accelerating Social as well as Biophysical Sustainability
Lester Brown has recently argued that an energy transition to more sustainable forms of energy is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined even two years ago (http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/book_bytes/2010/pb4ch05_ss1). The work I was involved in during the 1970s and early 1980s confirmed, to my mind at least, that such an energy transition was actually not a problem from a technical and economic point of view. Delaying multiple decades makes it much harder, but I think Brown is right to point to the run-away nature of much technological change. To some important degree, such changes are self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing, once a certain level of change has occurred. At the same time, I don’t think a purely technological fix will be sufficient to get us where we want to go. It may work, as Brown suggests, on the environmental side (though even there it will depend on a whole host of associated behavioural changes). But if we don’t address issues of social sustainability: justice, poverty, equity, livelihood, etc. then the effect may simply be to shift the locus of unsustainability breakdowns from the environmental realm to the social one. I worry at our seemingly unquenchable tendency to focus on the supply side in the energy issue and the technology side of sustainability more generally, neglecting the demand-side and behavioural issues. What are the ways we can find the balance?