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I originally wrote the first draft of this blog post on January 26th, 2009 but did not post it.

3% annual growth in economic activity per annum and associated consumer spending to fund the 3% growth was until recently seen as a good thing. In fact it was seen as the best thing since sliced bread in fact there was so much bread that everyone was starting to put on too much weight. This was seen as a bad thing, people in the media started to ask embarrasing questions about our increasingly obese friends and relatives like who’s going to pay their health care bills and do all the work that people in the media don’t like to do and how irritating it is that the mortality rate will start be greater in children than adults.

Then there was the question about sustainability. Sustainability? A word with many definitions:

From Wikipedia:

Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity of maintaining a certain process or state. It is now most frequently used in connection with biological and human systems. In an ecological context, sustainability can be defined as the ability of an ecosystem to maintain ecological processes, functions, biodiversity and productivity into the future.

From the University of Reading

Brundtland (1987): This is the most commonly quoted definition and it aims to be more comprehensive than most:
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations to meet their own needs.

It contains within it two key concepts:

The concepts of needs, in particular the essential needs of the worlds poor, to which overriding priority should be given, and:

The idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environments ability to meet present and future needs.

Harwood (1990):
Sustainable agriculture is a system that can evolve indefinitely toward greater human utility, greater efficiency of resource use and a balance with the environment which is which is favourable to humans and most other species.
etc. etc. etc.

Now our heroic advertisers and marketeers picked up on the issue of sustainability and decided that it was emenently possible to continue to increase sales of things, products, artifacts and other such consumer goods and have a sustainable future. How was this going to be done, by what amazing alchemy? It turns out that the answer was for organisations to write … a policy. The policy would be a statement of the actions that the new caring organisation would take in order to carry on doing exactly what they had always done but at the same time save the planet.

Most of the action plans included items such as increasing their existing or starting a new  recycling programme and/or putting up posters (made from nice fresh crisp paper) telling staff to turn off their lights when leaving their office.

Consumers at home also engaged with this whirlwind of conflicting activities, buying and saving the planet by buying more stuff but also recycling more.

What a lovely world we had created, everyone getting richer and buying more stuff and saving the planet. What could go wrong?

Now we know.
http://goo.gl/gN5e
http://goo.gl/2Zv8
http://goo.gl/knOK
http://goo.gl/T3if

Funny how things turn out sometimes. We now don’t have anywhere near 3% annual growth (The EC now expects the UK economy to grow by just 0.6pc in 2010 – Daily Telegraph, Published: 7:42PM GMT 25 Feb 2010). It’s going to be interesting to see the impact of this lower consumption on the environment over the next couple of years. The moral of this story is that to create a really sustainable world it’s not possible to grow and consume and expect the environment to be able to manage. We may need to learn how to recycle more now as a result of the downturn.

(The government has today unveiled plans for a wholesale review of waste policy in England designed to accelerate improvements in recycling rates and maximise the economic benefits associated with waste management. –  James Murray, BusinessGreen, 15 Jun 2010).

I’ll leave this post for a year or so like a time capsule and then update a little more.