ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES: SYNTHESIS AND APPLICATION

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TUESDAY, APRIL 22 SUSTAINABILITY We will begin today with a discussion of the carbon budget exercise, and then proceed to the topic of the day: Composing a general examination question for a graduate student in Environmental Anthropology, I once wrote: " 'Sustainability' is one of those words that is very much like "God" in three ways: a. It means everything, or anything, and thus means nothing. b. If it didn't exist, someone would have to invent it; in fact, it may not exist, (see a, above) but it has been invented, and we have to work with it. c. People worship it. Thus we begin our discussion of the most vexing term in all of environmental studies. To begin to get a hold on how slippery this concept is (since it's slippery, you can't get a hold on the concept itself, can you?), read the first three chapters of the so-called Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, which got the whole ball rolling. Think of some of the following questions, which will form the basis of our class discussions: When we talk about sustainability, what are we talking about sustaining, in a mathematical sense? A level of resource use, a rate of growth in resource uses, a standard of living, an ecosystem, etc? How would we graph it? In algebraic terms, what variable in the equation (you make up the equation) are we trying to "sustain"? To answer this, you need to define "sustain." How does the question of sustainability relate to the question of temporal scale? To help answer this question, also refer to Robert Solow, "Sustainability: an Economist's Perspective," and also look at a little graph of the problem. Is sustainability really a useful concept, and if so, for what? You can start by reading David Orr's "Four Challenges to Sustainability. If you are writing the sustainability option for paper #2, there are a lot more resources at the website of a class on the topic of sustainability that Bob Francis and I taught in Spring 2006.