I realise I’ve been guilty of overlooking two aspects of sustainability: social and economic.
Economic? I remember when the New Labour definition of sustainability was unveiled in the late 90s. Sustainability had long been a pillar of ecology and ecological politics, but that was explicitly environmental sustainability. The other pillar of ecological politics is social justice, because this is human politics and one without the other is neither sustainable nor just.
It’s worth emphasising this point. Where the rights of the poorest and/or indigenous people have been forgotten, attempts to protect the wildlife of countries like Kenya have led to conflict; the people who need to migrate in and out of National Parks to feed their cattle have been excluded to land that cannot sustain them through drought. Conversely, socialist states that focused on unfettered heavy industry to make the people rich have created little more than wasteland.
Economic growth was added to the official definition, which has since been adopted globally, because it would otherwise conflict with the orthodoxy that wealth creation is what’s needed to improve everyone’s situation while competing with other nations. That was the orthodoxy that green politics set out to oppose in the first place, so the inclusion of economic growth in the definition of sustainability was an un-subtle but successful attempt to subvert the use of the word.
Thankfully, subsequent definitions have been tempered to include “economic development”, which is at least broad enough to encompass more holistic development. But it still leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
So, I have been remiss in not mentioning social justice (or the social dimension to sustainability, if you prefer). But there are as many concepts of social justice as there concepts of liberty invisible to the mind of George W Bush. Our rights, as has often been pointed out, are often in conflict with one another: my right to live as I please conflicts with yours and everyone else’s, not to mention every other creature on Earth.
That’s why it’s “social” justice. Like environmental ecology, human ecology is all about striving for balance. Human ecological systems are societies, communities, families, networks. Starting with the almost infinite number of concepts of social justice, searching for a balanced system in any given social group will only leave a limited set of solutions.
The working solutions for one human eco-system will be similar but different from any other, which is one main reason why we need self-determination. The other main reason being that self-determination is a right in itself.
The fact is, sustainability and social justice are not just two principles in synergy. They are two inseparable parts of the same thing. As such, there is a social element in sustainability. But then, what New Labour really meant was the contradiction of “sustainable development”.
