A philosophical diatribe to start your week. I have no idea if this makes sense--but I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments.
I've always had a problem with the idea of sustainability. I'm not opposed to sustainability of environmental and economic systems (who would be?), I just haven't had anyone give me a definition of sustainability that I can get my mind around. Every definition of sustainability that I've seen requires that we define the path of consumption in terms of the unknowable future. But if the future is unknowable, how can we dictate the present?
For that reason, there has been a fairly recent move away from sustainability as a working concept for economic and environmental systems toward resilience. But is resilience any better than sustainability for decision making?
Resilience, as I understand it, is the ability of complex systems to absorb shocks and keep going. Or put a little more precisely, the ability of complex systems to "resist disorder." Unfortunately, that's about as precise a definition as I can give.
Growing from engineering systems--how do we define production systems to be flexible enough to absorb changing economic and business conditions?--the ideas behind resilience are starting to be applied to economic and environmental systems. The simplest question resilience asks is: Is the economic/environmental system capable of absorbing unanticipated shocks? But there are two fundamental problems that make this question impossible to answer:
1) If the shock is unanticipated, it is impossible to plan for. It is logically impossible to design a system that is capable of handling all unanticipated shocks. If a shock is unanticipated then it cannot be planned for, unless we always plan to avoid the worst possible outcomes. Sounds an awful lot like the precautionary principle. A loose application of the precautionary principle would have us design a system capable of handling the worst imaginable consequence, not matter how unlikely. But resilience takes it a step further--plan your system to avoid the worst unimaginable consequence.
2) Resilience is self-fulfilling. An example might help. The digital revolution have been held up an example of resilience worthy of investigation. In 1970, no one could have possibly anticipated the impact of computers and the Internet on everyday life. Therefore, the system is resilient. An unanticipated shock that the system absorb and kept chugging along. But, can we name a shock that the system can't absorb? Can't we always find a definition of the outcome that claims the system was resilient? Or do we need a target? The system is only resilient if it maintains a path defined as ___________. But isn't that just the definition of sustainability?
I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this, but I'm pretty sure it helps to convince me that environmental economists are on the right track. Consider all knowable costs and benefits--economic and environmental, today and in the future--and make the best decisions we can. In the presence of an unknowable future, I see no alternative but to make decisions based on the knowable, and then watch from beyond as future generations adapt as our unknowable becomes their reality. Isn't that how it has always worked?
