Ministry

Sustainability is the fundamental challenge of our era. Our dedication to the principles of sustainability can secure for present and future generations the benefits of a healthy environment and a decent, just and sustaining society. In the words of Thomas Berry,

 

“The time has come to lower our voices, to cease imposing our mechanistic patterns on the biological processes of the earth, to resist the impulse to control, to command, to force, to oppress, and to begin quite humbly to follow the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends.”

 

                        

 

PREAMBLE to the Earth Charter

We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations. 

 

The last lines of Earth Charter: “Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.” 

You may have seen or heard on CBC news recently the fascinating story of a decision by the king of the tiny nation of Bhutan to give his people the gift of democracy. Being content with the rule of their beloved king, the citizens didn’t want it, but out of respect for him they went ahead with their first election.

 

Bhutan is a tiny country high in the Himalaya Mountains, squeezed between China and India. Early in the 1970s, its king came up with the revolutionary idea that “happiness is more important than economic prosperity.” So instead of continuing to use the almost universal indicator known as Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, to calculate his nation’s progress, he decided Bhutan would measure Gross National Happiness, or GNH. It signalled his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture, based on Buddist spititual values  During the following decades, Bhutan led all its neighbours in education, health care, environmental protection, social stability, income and spiritual values. 

 

Now, the idea is catching on. In 2005, an international conference on Gross National Happiness took place in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, sponsored by several universities and governments. As the concept becomes adapted to varying conditions around the world, it remains based on four pillars: the promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.

 

We begin a new year with hopes, as well as fears, for the future of our children and the world they will inherit. Like the King of Bhutan and his people, we all have goals, grand or modest, as individuals or as a society. But we need to find better ways of navigating toward those goals, because the ones we use don’t seem to be helping. I want to suggest that the way we measure what we do as a society can have enormous impact on human well-being and environmental integrity, and therefore our choice of indicators will involve quite profound ethical judgments.

 

Our world faces enormous challenges on many fronts. Accepting his Nobel Prize for Peace last month, Al Gore said, “Without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself”….“The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed,"…"It is time to make peace with the planet."

“Peace with the planet” is another way of describing “sustainability,” the key issue of our time. During the past year I worked with a group on a project we called “Sustainable BC,” whose vision for our province included “dedication to the principles of sustainability in order to secure for present and future generations the benefits of a healthy environment and a decent, just and sustaining society.”

 

There are of course other ways of describing personal and collective goals, some of them grounded in carefully thought out moral and ethical choices. The Earth Charter is one of the best. Our Unitarian principles provide a guide toward a better world. Having selected our goals, we need to be sure we are moving in a direction that will achieve them, and we need to know how far and how fast we have travelled.

 

We usually think of measures as simple, concrete and beyond debate – a thing is a foot or a metre long, it’s a mile or a kilometre from here to there, something weighs a pound or a kilogram. But it’s not always so simple. Those of us who were around when parliament decided Canada would adopt the metric system remember the impassioned debate involved with that choice.

 

The fun really begins when you add time to your measuring system. If you plot changes in your measurements over time on a graph, you will be able to see trends that are occurring, and this may give you information you need for making decisions.

 

One of the best known trend lines is that of global population: for thousands of years it is little more than a flat line as human kind struggles to survive in a difficult world. That changed with the introduction of agriculture, and then industrialization, and by 1900 the population of the world was about 1.6 billion. Then an explosion – during the twentieth century, in just 100 years, population quadrupled, reaching about 6.5 billion people; and we are still adding about 76 million people to the human family each year. On the population graph the line shoots almost straight up.

 

 Now if you combine rocketing population growth with the consumerism that overwhelmed North America after the Second World War and quickly spread to every corner of the world that could afford it, the demand for “stuff” very quickly strained nature’s ability to provide raw materials, space, and sinks in air, water and land sufficient to contain the waste created by a rapidly growing economy. Though every study shows that greater material wealth does not mean greater happiness or fulfillment, people who grew up in this time of unprecedented growth and change usually consider it to be normal, something to be sustained at all costs. A rapidly growing economy became the ultimate national goal.

 

One of the reasons governments prefer lots of growth is that it enlarges the economic pie that people must share, and that avoids to some extent the need to wrestle with problems of sharing and distributing wealth. The rich are less likely to be called upon to share with those less fortunate. So it is not surprising that economic growth has become the pre-eminent goal of governments, business organizations and economists, and its ebb and flow is the fodder of endless media reports and analyses.

 

Growth is of course an essential element of life. But in excess it can be fatal. If certain cells in our bodies grow excessively, they may become cancerous. Similarly, Thomas Homer-Dixon tells us that “endless material growth is incompatible with the long-term viability of earth’s environment.” To understand why, we need to consider the relationship between the economy, our society, and the environment. It is common to describe them as interlinked systems. But their relationship might better be viewed as a layer cake, with the economy on top, supported by the social system, and both of them dependent on the natural system, which makes up the bottom layer. In other words, the human economy is entirely dependent on the ecosphere, on nature.

 

James Karr of the University of Washington suggests that excessive growth of the economic layer of our cake has overburdened and eroded both of the supporting layers, in particular the natural systems layer which supports the entire structure. This is confirmed by assessments of the state of our natural capital: fisheries, forests, soils, water, and biodiversity are all declining rapidly in quality and quantity, while the economy and population continue to expand, already consuming 40 percent of the earth’s productivity each year. This means, says William Rees of UBC, that we have exceeded the long-term carrying capacity of the earth – that is, the global economy consumes renewable resources faster than nature can produce them, and generates wastes faster than nature can assimilate them.

 

Clearly, economic growth is undermining the ecosystem services provided by nature on which economic activity and human well-being depends. And growth is overwhelming the global commons—the atmosphere, oceans, water cycle, and biodiversity.

 

The great economist Kenneth Boulding put it very simply; he said, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

 

Economists and governments use a measure called the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, to signal whether the economy is achieving hoped-for growth, or falling short. This GDP is a curious creature – it is simply the grand total of everything we spend on goods and services, whether for good or for ill. The GDP increases just as rapidly from the costs of cleaning up a gigantic oil spill as from selling wheat; it values the construction of a jail as highly as building a university. It includes the value of logs sold, but not the reduction in natural capital as a forest disappears; it takes no account of the $33 trillion worth of ecosystem services contributed to the economy by nature without charge; it included the Atlantic cod when it was caught and sold but didn’t count as a cost the collapse of the fishery due to bad management.

 

Recognition of the completely amoral nature of the GDP is not new - back in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy said, “The GNP (as the GDP was then called) measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

 

Conventional economics, and most government and industrial policy, is based on the assumption that the economy is separate from nature, and operates like a machine with an inexhaustible supply of inputs, and a bottomless pit into which waste can be disposed. Simple observation shows this to be a grossly misleading picture. The world is finite, we can’t add more air, water, land or biodiversity to it. But some economists and most governments behave as if we could. A local example: the BC government’s Gateway Program will build many kilometres of freeways and bridges in the lower mainland to speed container trucks from an expanded Deltaport to Eastern Canada and the United States. The billions of dollars spent will add greatly to the GDP, but nowhere will it register the enormous loss from paving hundreds of hectares of the best food-producing land in the world, destruction of highly productive shallows at the mouth of the Fraser River, freeways rolling through parkland and historic communities, and essentially an end to the Greater Vancouver “Livable Region” plan.

 

Another example: In the debate over salmon farming, it is easy to add the wages of plant workers and the value of fish exports to the GDP. But a cost attributable to the farms that won’t be reflected in the GDP will be the likely decline of wild salmon populations and the huge web of life that depends on them, far upstream in coastal rivers. And how do you calculate the loss of salmon to societies built on their abundance over many centuries?

 

Yet another case: tar sands development in Alberta adds mightily to the GDP, but no deductions are made for the vast amounts of water consumed; or for using natural gas to steam oil from sand, rather than heating homes. The GDP will not include the cost of polluting the Athabasca River watershed, or the destruction of vast areas of boreal forest ecosystems to get at the oilsands. It’s a very lopsided balance sheet, particularly in the light of recent studies that show the value of ecosystem services provided by the boreal forests far exceeds the GDP contribution of extractive industries like the tar sands.

 

So if economic growth is destroying the natural capital upon which we depend, and the GDP is not telling us the truth, surely a more ethical system of goal-setting and measurement is needed. What, after all, is an economy for?

 

Here’s how McGill University economist Peter Brown replies. “I would say the purpose of the economy is not growth … I would say it is the stewardship of the Earth’s natural systems for the purpose of the prosperity of human beings and all the other species that live here.”

 

In his book, “The Sacred Balance,” David Suzuki tells us we are asking the wrong questions. He suggests, “Instead of, “How do we reduce the deficit?” or “How do we carve out a niche in the global economy?” we should be asking “What is an economy for?” and “How much is enough?” What are the things in life that provide joy and happiness, peace of mind and satisfaction? Does the plethora of goods that our high-production economy delivers so effectively provide the route to happiness and satisfaction, or do the relationships between human and non-human beings still form the core of the important things in life?”

 

Brown and Suzuki are not alone. Many others are searching for ways of measuring progress that fit with their ethical and moral convictions. After thirteen years as his country’s president, Czech writer Vaclav Havel, said, “I don’t understand why the most important deity is the increase of gross domestic product. It is not about GDP. It is about the quality of life, and that is something else.”

 

Mark Anielski is a professor of business and economics at the University of Alberta. His career as an economist, as a practitioner of what is often known as “the dismal science,” has convinced him that economics is more like a religion than either art or science, a religion whose principles form the guidance system of modern states. He challenges the gospel of economic growth and the promise of capitalism by presenting a new economic model — "Genuine Wealth" — based on the premise that economic development can be oriented towards genuine well-being and happiness. He asks why our measures of economic progress do not reflect the values that make us happy: supportive relationships, meaningful work, a healthy environment and spiritual well-being.

 

With others, Anielski is developing a “Canadian Index of Well-being” (CIW) that will measure the changes in our country’s human, social, economic and natural wealth that determine our well-being. They are convinced that the index would help foster a common vision for Canada’s future that more nearly reflects the real interests of Canadians.

 

One of the most promising systems of measurement is known as the “Genuine Progress Index,” or GPI. It provides a truer measure of well-being by including social and environmental costs and benefits. Unlike the GDP, it distinguishes between activities that harm society and the environment, and those that are beneficial. A comparison of GDP and the Genuine Progress Index can be quite startling, since it may reveal that a rapid rise in wealth does not necessarily increase human or environmental well-being, even though governments insist that such growth is needed to pay for social benefits. In Alberta, for example, a GPI measurement beginning in 2001 shows that in spite of enormous economic growth as reflected by the GDP, the Genuine Progress Index reveals that the growth has been costly for the environmental, social, and even the economic well-being of the province.

 

Another interesting measure of a quite different kind has been developed at UBC and is now in use around the world. It’s called the “Ecological footprint,” and it analyses the amount of land and water required to supply the food , energy and other needs of a person – or a city, or any other unit you wish to study. Needless to say, the ecological footprint of a North American is far bigger than that of an African. William Rees sums up one result of footprint analysis: “The global average per capita ecofootprint is about 2.2 hectares, but there is only 1.8 hectares of ecologically productive ecosystem available per capita on the planet.”

 

Which means we are today living, in part, by cutting into our endowment of natural capital, instead of limiting ourselves to the productivity of that capital. And that means less natural capital will remain in the endowment to support future generations – a condition we would have difficulty justifying to our descendents. 

 

We have discussed how scholars and others are searching for ways to use numbers and indicators to help us rebalance our relationship with the natural world. But people have been trying for a very long time to find just the right words to explain that relationship.

 

In 1915, Albert Schweitzer was steaming upstream on a river in Africa, filling the time with his continuing struggle to work out a universal conception of ethics. He writes, “Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase “Reverence for Life.””

 

Schweitzer’s name and “Reverence for Life” have ever since been indissolubly linked, and many who have followed him have elaborated on the concept. For example, McGill economist Peter Brown recently wrote, “I accept this idea – reverence-for-life – as foundational but unfinished, and I propose to build upon it a capstone concept: the commonwealth of life.” From this perspective, he explains, most “natural resources” are already being used, either by humans or other species. For instance, suggesting Canada has a surplus of water is a purely human-centred idea, since all water is already fully used to support natural communities. For Brown, traditional economic arguments for using land and resources must take second place to the need for preserving ecosystems in a fully functioning state.

 

In his 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac, American forester Aldo Leopold describes a “land ethic” as simply enlarging the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. His description of a “land ethic” is one of the best known quotations in environmental literature. He writes, “Quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

 

Such ideas are entirely foreign to the governments, conventional economists and business interests who cling to economic growth as the prime goal of our society, and the GDP as the way to measure our progress in that direction. They seem not to understand that unending growth on a finite planet is impossible, and that it is already eroding the natural capital required to sustain future generations. The GDP with which we measure our rate of growth is fatally flawed, and promotes unsustainable development.

 

Can we change? There are those who say, “We have no choice” or “there is no alternative” to our current practices. But we have seen that there are indeed alternatives to the guideposts which are presently leading us in a dangerous direction. And our society has in the past shown itself to be capable of extraordinary change when it is needed. As we learned from the story of the Kingdom of Bhutan and its index of Gross National Happiness, good ideas can come from what might seem unlikely sources. I don’t think change for the better needs to be as slow as suggested by the Israeli politician, Abba Eban, when he said, “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

 

The common thread, the word which acknowledges our responsibility to the generations that will follow us, is “sustainability.” New indicators like those we have discussed can help us measure whether or not we are heading toward that goal. They will provide vital information as we seek to make responsible, ethical decisions about our relationship with the Earth and our descendants. 

 

 Closing Words

 A sense of community that includes not only our fellow humans but also all those species, with which we share this marvellous world, will ensure that we fulfill our ultimate obligation. That is to pass on to our descendents a world as beautiful and as productive as that, which has been momentarily ours. In spite of the abuse it has suffered, we live in one of the most varied, beautiful and favoured landscapes on earth. We must decide if we are willing to take responsibility for the future of this magnificent gift of nature, rejecting the domination of globalization and the tyranny of endless growth. We may choose instead a sustainable future for our province and our country and our world, ensuring a permanent, productive home for the people who live here and those who will follow. As Tennyson wrote, “. . . Come my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world.”