Our blue planet earth is a self-renewing factory of life orbiting the sun from which all its energy is derived. One species in the complex web of life has acquired remarkable powers to change the earth with exponential (geometric progression, repeatedly doubling) growth of its own numbers and of its impact on the natural systems of the planet. Paul Ehrlich’s formula I = P x A x T summarizes this impact (I) as a function of three exponential trajectories: population (P) affluence (A) and technology (T). The force of this human impact is now so great that ‘business-as-usual’ seems unsustainable. The capacity of the earth is finite and the exponential growth in its finite space can only be sustained until that space becomes full. This is the ‘wicked problem’ now facing our world-changing species.
In the following diagram the horizontal line represents the finite limits; the curved line the exponential increase in P x A x T that applies to population growth, economic activity, resource use, pollution, loss of bio-diversity and all the other concerns about the limits to growth.
For more than four decades this schematic overshoot has been forecast, as it is a mathematical law and the globalization of economic activity has now raised the stakes to a planetary scale. When the problem becomes global it assumes a ‘wicked’, uncontrollable nature as there are no global institutions capable of dealing with the fundamental driver of exponential economic and technological growth. Although contradicted by the laws of both physics and ecology, conventional economic theory assumes that growth and capital accumulation can be unending as do the promises of most national leaders.
Recently evidence has become available of how close some of earth’s systems are to finite limits or even overshoot. The Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) has identified nine ‘planetary boundaries’ three of which are already overshot. Human well-being and that of other species is at stake as global capital and credit move electronically around the world seeking to maintain the highest rate of profit and economic efficiency. Since the 2008 financial crisis it has become clear that credit-based ‘wealth’ is to a large extent illusory and increasingly concentrated in the hands of the rich and super-rich within and between nations. As wealth has accumulated it seems that social justice has not kept pace.
In February 2012 a wide-ranging Oxfam Discussion Paper on sustainable development, the SRC visual representation of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ was juxtaposed with eleven ‘social boundaries’, limits to human deprivation that threaten the well-being of a large proportion of people around the world to the point of social breakdown. ‘A safe and just space for humanity’ lies between these environmental and social boundaries what they term ‘the doughnut’ framework. (See the report at: http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/dp-a-safe-and-just-space-for-humanity-130212-en.pdf) Like many advocates of the ‘green’ and more equitable economy, the Oxfam framework implies that there can still be sustainable development or growth that stays within these boundaries, even though the SRC concludes that the planetary boundaries for greenhouse gases, nitrogen cycle and bio-diversity loss have already been overshot. The very idea of sustainable development is now being challenged.
The World Economic Association, is a group of scholars who radically oppose the assumptions and policy prescriptions of conventional classical economists and the prevalence of ‘free market ideology’. Their recent conference (http://sustainabilityconference2012.worldeconomicsassociation.org/) included papers critical of the very concept of sustainable development. ‘Sustainable growth’ is seen as an oxymoron. Some papers see that the only way to stay within the laws of nature is a process of economic ‘de-growth’ towards a sustainable ‘steady state’ global economy. In brief, three distinctions are as made:
· Sustainable growth – technological innovation greatly increases the efficiency in the use of natural resources, substitutes non-renewable with renewable resources and redistributes wealth to increase equity and eradicate poverty
· Steady state – ‘development’ for a stable global population is seen as qualitative improvement without increasing the demands on the physical world, a ‘circular economy’ in which recycling of resources replaces most natural resources and large-scale redistribution of wealth is achieved
· De-growth – slowing down and scaling down of human activity and a decline in global population to the point where relatively localised communities can enjoy ‘prosperity without growth’ and where global trading is largely curtailed
The so-called ‘ecological footprint’ of human activity on the planet is judged by some to indicate that since the 1980s humans have been consuming ‘natural capital’ equivalent to one and half earths’ supply. As one writer puts it, the sun-powered factory of the earth is now destroying the fabric from which it is made, in order to satisfy the insatiable demands of its ever-expanding population of consumers. If de-growth is to be viable as we add to the planet 1 billion extra humans every 14 years and double economic growth even faster, then we have a truly wicked problem on our hands. But are these wicked problems addressed adequately by educators around the world? And should they be?
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