Back to contents

Page 2 of Keynote Address of Education Seminar, by Richard Douthwaite

Held on Wednesday 28th November 2001 at Tipperary Institute, Thurles, Co Tipperary

Limits

So there are limits. This is one of the most significant things about the World Bank's acceptance of the four capitals approach [in 1992]. For the first time, conventional economists were accepting that there were limits which ruled out further trade-offs between various components of the four types of capital.

We know that we have exceeded the limits in many areas ­ for example in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, global warming. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now the highest it has been for 60 million years, as a result of human activities. We don't know what's going to happen to the climate. There is a real risk of a sudden climatic flip - that we will move from one stable climatic regime to another which might be warmer or colder, we just don't know.

Priorities

Using the four capitals approach means that you have to track a range of indicators which you have selected as guides to the status of the four capital stocks. Any indicators which suggest that a component of a capital stock is declining you naturally want to reverse. You give priority to those that are getting close to the unacceptable area but you give absolute priority to those that have already passed the sustainability limit, that have taken us into the unknown. So you cut back on chlorine compound emissions and on greenhouse gas emissions and you do that before you attend to other indicators which might be falling but are still falling within the 'safe' area. You attend to the ones that have exceeded the limits first.

The current World Bank attitude to this approach is disappointing. There was a meeting in London about this time last year [November 2000] called by the World Bank to discuss their latest environmental policies. I asked one of the economists who was there what had happened to the four capitals approach. She looked rather embarrassed and told me that it wasn't something they considered too much any more, because they realised that if they assessed their own programmes according to it, it would prove rather too hard a task master and very few would be able to go ahead.

Criteria for indicators

FEASTA has a major project on indicators. We're looking to see whether over the last 10 years Ireland has become more sustainable or not according to the four capitals approach. At the moment we're just gathering statistics. What is the difference between an indicator and a statistic? It's important to distinguish them. Lots of people talk glibly about indicators but for something to be a genuine indicator, three things have to apply. First of all you've got to be prepared to act. If a statistical times series shows a deterioration you have got to be prepared to do something about it. Otherwise your statistics just stay statistics. And action means that ideologically you've got to be prepared to intervene in the market, something that conventional economists say governments should not do. But I'm not convinced, FEASTA generally is not convinced, that the market works well enough to be safely left alone. It is very short term. It does not concern itself with the interests of generation after generation into the future in a way that enables it to act [for sustainability]. So collectively, through our governments, we have to be prepared to act. This requires a major ideological switch but it's coming about.

Secondly, you may wish to act in response [to an indicator], but you have got to have the freedom to do so. And generally we don't. Governments around the world are inhibited by the globalised system from acting to protect the environment or to stop society being eroded by the economic process. Let me explain a little bit more about why this is. Sustainability has to be achieved at two levels. One is short term sustainability - we need to eat tonight, wages have to be paid at the end of the week, you've got to pay your mortgage. This short term sustainability is the thing that governments have to pay most attention to. If as a result of jobs not being provided wages were not paid, then that would be a crisis. The trouble with our economic system is that, because of its over-competitiveness and other aspects which I don't have time to explain here, it takes all the government's efforts to achieve short term, immediate economic sustainability. Governments don't have the freedom to act to protect social sustainability or environmental sustainability if it adversely affects economic sustainability at all. The Irish Government has got to maintain Ireland's competitiveness, otherwise jobs will be lost here and the whole economy will wind down (in a way that it is threatening to do at present). So what we have got to do, and one of the things that FEASTA is looking at, is to find a way in which we can take the economic pressure off to give governments more freedom to go for these longer term and no less important forms of sustainability - social and environmental.

The third aspect is where every discipline taught in third level institutions comes in. You have got to know enough about how each system (represented by each indicator) works in order to be able to do something about a decline in an indicator. You need to know for example that if we change management practices in agriculture we will get more birds, will the decline of the thrush will be reversed? And so, as Séamus Purséil was saying, every discipline is involved in this process. We need all the knowledge that we've got to be able to make sustainability work. We've overexpanded human impact on the planet and the more limits we approach, the more indicators we're going to need to follow, because the more care is going to be needed not to go over those fatal thresholds.

Conclusions

So that's to some extent the picture of the world and how we should respond to it that FEASTA is trying to develop. You see what I mean when I say that every discipline needs to be involved - that it's not just a case of economics, of what is dictated by the market. We need to know much better how the market operates and how it can be adapted so that we don't have to respond so much to its immediate requirements and have the space to attend to social and environmental things. The total effort is something which I think everybody in this room can join in some way, whether it's privately as an individual or through the teachings of your institution. It is what FEASTA and its quest for sustainability is all about. Thank you.

Questions

Question: The ideas expressed are very logical, but there is always a big gap between the ideas and the actions. Having heard from Séamus Purséil's very honest presentation that there is no great momentum behind the HETAC guidelines, how would you foresee your ideas or the HETAC guidelines being incorporated into say the engineering department of UCD or the study of bonds and shares in the Smurfit School of Business, or even Tipperary Institute?

Richard Douthwaite: That is an interesting question. The more you look into what sustainability means the more you will see that there is a real relevance to the educational sector. Take for example engineering. Let's look at transport. Roughly 50% of all the fossil energy that we use is taken up by the transport system. That's not just the energy that is used to run motor vehicles, planes, ships and so on - which is roughly 30% of all energy used. You've also got to factor in the amount of energy that it takes to build the roads and build the vehicles that go on them, and then to scrap the vehicles at the end. So that's obviously going to be unsustainable in an energy-short world. Yet we do need to be able to move things and people about so we need to be thinking of other solutions. There's a potential solution developed by John Gilmore at Dundalk Institute of Technology. He essentially says it is crazy that most cars have only one occupant, yet consist of a tonne of material that took a lot of energy to produce and takes of lot of energy to move around, and mostly it's only there to protect the car from other equally heavy vehicles. He's examining a lighter transport system and has come up with some very attractive potential solutions. Because a sustainable world is going to be very much different from the present one we need engineering solutions in so many areas. Where are we going to be getting our energy from? It is going to have to be coming from renewable sources - tidal power, wind turbines, photovoltaics and lots of other systems which haven't been devised yet.

You mentioned stocks and bonds. I was in Jersey on Monday to talk to 16 members of the Jersey legislature and some of their civil servants. Jersey has an acute sustainability crisis - 80% of the island's GNP comes from the financial services sector. They are worried about the sustainability of the sector because it is based on offshore money coming into Jersey and being lent out again. Because the world economy is going down people aren't borrowing so much. Jersey could be ruined. There is a real sustainability issue in the whole financial services area which people far beyond Jersey need to consider. Every area of life is going to have to change if sustainability is to come about and so every discipline needs to be thinking what that change will mean.

Question: We have had a short account of FEASTA and what it is. Does it have a national remit or does it take the world system as its 'palette' to influence? A related question is does FEASTA have a policy on population?

Richard Douthwaite: When FEASTA refers to itself we call it a Dublin-based organisation. We have organised a conference in Stockholm with the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility [INES - see http://www.inesglobal.org/]. FEASTA is heavily Irish, but we have members overseas and we get involved in activities overseas. And there is a good reason for this ­ you can't have a sustainable Ireland unless the globe is also sustainable.

We don't have a policy on population. Certainly any sustainable community has a stable population. I'm not sure whether I can claim that this will be accepted by every member of FEASTA but it's an idea I put forward in my own books - I see a sustainable community as having to be able to meet its basic needs from the resources of its own area. By basic needs I mean its energy and its food. If a community can do that, you then trade with the outside world out of choice rather than out of necessity. The community can never be caught, it can never be trapped because it needs, for example, to buy oil in. Our systems are dependent on oil - we're "addicted" in that respect. So we have to sell whatever we can produce at whatever price we can get (because we are price takers in the rest of the world) in order to be able to buy that oil at whatever price the outside producers demand. This could mean that we destroy our own sustainability in producing the exports that are demanded. FEASTA as a whole does not see a sustainable world being possible on the basis of a global economy with a global monoculture - everybody living in the same sort of way and competing for the same things. We see a diversity of economic systems, of people devising cultures which enable them to live within the confines of their own place and meet their basic needs from that place. They can trade surpluses. They can trade apples for oranges, they can trade for luxuries, for inessentials, but trade, unlike in the present system, would not be central to what they're doing, and they wouldn't need to grow economically, and they wouldn't need to compete in order to be able to survive. This is of course going against the whole grain of the present system, and some people here may be unhappy with that, but it is certainly an idea that needs to be explored.

Continue to "Greening the Institution" Discussion Group

Back to Contents