E3G

The Quest for Climate Justice

By John Ashton

Sustainable Development

That is why it is worth coming back, as I promised, to what we really mean by sustainable development. We often talk about this in terms of an imaginary triangle, with economic growth at one apex, social equity at another and the environment at the third. But the longer I stay in this business, the less satisfying I find this metaphor.

It implies that sustainable development choices are essentially about making trade-offs between economic, social, and environmental considerations. Of course trade-offs and compromises are always part of politics. But a trade-off perspective misses the essence of sustainable development. We need to look deeper, for alignments instead of trade-offs. No responsible business would borrow unsustainably, or steal from its shareholders or employees, in order to provide an artificial short-term boost in salaries: look what has happened to some of the businesses that have tried this recently. Equally there is no economic sense (if economics means anything useful at all) in an approach to wealth creation today that squanders the stock of ecological or social resources we need in order to be able to create wealth tomorrow.

The triangle also implies that the tools at our disposal for analyzing what takes place at each of the corners are adequate. But they are plainly not. If GDP were anything more than a partial and imperfect measure of welfare, we wouldn’t have a problem with unsustainable development.

So can we look through the triangle to a more useful perspective? The dynamic that is shaping all our possibilities - economic, social and environmental - is the explosion in connectivity now taking place. Because of globalization, the choices we make affect more people than ever before, across ever-greater distances. Some of those choices carry us across natural limits. And the damage we do to natural systems sooner or later undermines our ability to meet human needs.

Sustainable development, at least for me, is about coming to terms with a world in which we must take more responsibility for the consequences of our choices: not only the direct, visible consequences for our physical neighbours, but those operating over much greater distances of space and time. We need to globalize responsibility as well as opportunity.

There is increasing evidence that a sense of fairness is a basic human instinct, guiding from early childhood the way we deal with other people. But equally, history shows that we are willing to go to far greater lengths in pursuit of fairness inside the group – family, community, nation – to which we belong. Those outside the group, those we identify with what is sometimes called the “other”, do not qualify for the same level of concern.

The difference now, at this very special moment in human history, is that there is no “other” any more. We have connected our interests to such an extent that, whether we like it or not, we are now a single global community. Runaway climate change would be a disaster for everyone. If we do too much harm either to other people or to the environment we end up harming ourselves. In such a world, there is no longer any such place as abroad: we are all neighbours. When we look into the mirror in search of ourselves, there are six billion faces looking back at us.

At present, we don’t have the language to talk about ourselves or deal with our problems in a way that reflects this. We don’t have the institutions, the politics, the diplomacy, the cultural reflexes, or the breadth of vision.

But this is a spiritual exercise as much a temporal one. And we do have, rooted over thousands of years in many faiths and systems of belief, some of the spiritual tools we will need to cross the threshold at which we now stand. The essence of this passage was well expressed by someone who transcended specific faiths, and who knew the human spirit very well. Let me end by bringing together three typically penetrating statements made at different times by Mahatma Gandhi.

“I make bold to say that the Europeans will have to remodel their outlook, if they are not to perish under the weight of the comforts to which they are becoming slaves”.

Here Gandhi happened to be talking about Europeans, but in this broader context his observation applies equally to all who consume unsustainably. And by “comforts”, I like to think he meant not physical luxury so much as the comfort of inertia, of not having to subject ones assumptions and ways of doing things, and sense of identity, to examination. In truth we will only make the transition to sustainable development if enough people come to see it not as a sacrifice but as a benefit.

Gandhi also said:

“The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. He frees himself and shows the way to others. Freedom and slavery are mental states.”

In other words, liberation from slavery, in this case the slavery of unsustainable development, starts with how we see ourselves.

And then he summed it up, in these ten words:

“Be the change you want to see in the world”.

This is a challenge to the spirit. To be an agent of change it is necessary to reconstruct your own identity – perhaps the most difficult thing a human being can do – around the change you want to bring about. If we want to manage the future, that is what we need to do. Thank you.