The Leader

NOTHING IS 'SUSTAINABLE'

31 August 2002

Contained within the concept of sustainability is the presumption that there exists some theoretical nirvana in which mankind can live in a healthy and unchanging state, plucking the fruits of Eden no more quickly than they can be replenished, co-existing with an equally unchanging global inventory of plants and beasts. No such state ever has existed and neither will it, for the simple reason that greed and short-termism characterise the behaviour of all living beings in their consumption of the world's resources. Even if Man were removed entirely from the equation - as the extreme end of the environmentalist movement, a sect called the 'human extinctionists', advocates - bunnies would continue to procreate unsustainably without a thought for global carrot stocks, and pandas would carry on gobbling bamboo until they had eaten themselves to extinction.

The environmental lobby is correct that many human activities are, in simple terms, unsustainable. There is, presumably, a limit to the supply of fossil fuels - though the oil industries' geologists continue to confound the Jeremiahs who once predicted that the last drop of petrol would disappear into the tank of some Chevrolet around 1990. But, given that fossil fuels are in finite supply, it makes no difference whether we keep on buying bigger and better cars or stick to the Kyoto protocol: any level of usage of oil is ultimately unsustainable. To conclude from this that the Western way of life is doomed is wrong. The history of mankind's progress is one of passage from one unsustainable activity to another. Each time, technology has moved us on to better things before the crunch point has been reached.

The mediaeval settlement of England depended on consuming vast quantities of native woodland. Between 1500 and 1700, a million acres of English woodland were destroyed in the quest for firewood and ships' timbers - a rate of consumption which would have seen England's last tree axed by 1900. So much for the 'sustainable' pre-industrial way of life. Just as wood was replaced by coal, so oil and gas will give way at some point to other fuels. But it won't need an 'Earth Summit' to bring it about: the market alone will decide the point at which oil has become so scarce that some other means of powering machinery is to be preferred.

This is not to say that every concern raised in Johannesburg this week is unjustified. Many developing nations, whose principal aim is the enrichment of their peoples, have legitimate concerns which are entirely contradictory to those of the self-flagellators of the environmental movement, whose sole desire is to see mankind punished for its ill-treatment of the world. The conference's warm-up sessions - before Western leaders arrive at the weekend - were dominated by demands from developing nations that the West stops subsidising its farmers and opens its food markets. We sympathise entirely: it is absurd that Western aid budgets are dwarfed by the sums taxpayers are spending on protectionist measures designed to freeze out competition from farmers in poor countries. Yet the very idea of global trade offends Western environmentalists whose creed of sustainability is based on us all eating local produce.