Can We Measure Sustainability? 

[EWerb at aol.com]

GLOBAL CITIZEN 

A weekly rumination on sustainable living by Donella Meadows

Can We Measure Sustainability? 

by Donella H. Meadows  02.22.00 

Every year at the peak of the Alpine ski season, the world's movers and 
shakers, the heads of the largest corporations and wealthiest governments, 
head for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This year an event 
occurred there that was largely unreported but possibly historic. The 
attendees were presented with a ranking of the world's nations according to 
environmental sustainability.

The search for sustainability measures is hot right now. The United Nations 
has a mandate to produce them. Many nations and states and cities are 
developing their own. Academic groups argue endlessly about them. The search 
is based on a darn good question: How long can we keep this up? To what 
extent is our frantic economic activity eating into the planet's resource 
base, its waste absorption capacity, its life-support systems?

It's great that this question is being asked. It's like the moment when a 
young spendthrift who has inherited a fortune finally wonders, "Hey, is this 
money going to last?" Or like the long-ago breakthrough when some bright 
accountant first realized the difference between capital and income.

You would think that concept, so basic to every business and household, would 
have been applied long ago to national and world accounts. But it never has 
been. We have been mesmerized by the measure called GDP or GNP, which counts 
only spending. That's about as useful as a dashboard that tells us our speed 
but not how much gas is in the tank. We have never kept good track of our 
fundamental forms of capital: the natural systems that give us vital streams 
of materials and energy and clean water and air, and the social systems -- 
families, communities, all kinds of organizations -- that produce, raise, 
educate, maintain, heal, inspire, and fulfill human beings.

It's hard to imagine that folks who call themselves capitalists have done 
such bad capital accounting for such a long time. But we have. As a 
consequence we pride ourselves when GDP goes up, while forests, soils, 
waters, families, and communities go down. Finally, like maturing wastrels, 
we're beginning to notice that our wealth is shrinking and to ask questions 
that can only be answered by new measures.

That we don't yet know how to do sustainability accounting is demonstrated by 
the apologetic tone of the report just delivered at Davos and by the 
silliness of the rankings. "A number of serious limitations in the available 
data relevant to environmental sustainability drastically limit the ability 
of the world community to monitor the most basic pollution and natural 
resource trends," say the authors (mostly from Columbia and Yale) in academic 
report-speak. "The methods used are experimental and should not be construed 
as definitive statements about precise levels of environmental 
sustainability."

In short, the numbers are dubious and the rankings are tentative. We can take 
with a grain of salt that the five "most sustainable" nations are Norway, 
Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden and that the five "least 
sustainable" are Zimbabwe, Egypt, El Salvador, Philippines, and Vietnam. And 
that the United States comes in 16th among the 56 nations listed.

What's most glaringly wrong with this list is that it may tell us where these 
nations are relative to each other, but not where they are relative to 
sustainability. Norway -- which imports virtually all its food, which has 
fished out its rich offshore cod stocks, whose income and machines depend on 
oil deposits that will run out in a few decades and that, while they last, 
are changing the climate -- is nowhere close to sustainable. Maybe no more so 
than Egypt, whose burgeoning population crowds the narrow zone of polluted, 
depleted soil and water along the Nile. Switzerland, a source of toxic 
chemicals and nuclear waste and luxurious consumption based almost entirely 
on imports, has no call to pride itself on being more sustainable than the 
Philippines, which has decimated its forests and fisheries while enriching a 
corrupt upper class and impoverishing everyone else.

I wouldn't bet that any of these nations can maintain its current way of life 
for the next 100 years or 50 or 30. Having spent considerable time in Oslo 
and Zurich, having friends in Manila and Cairo, I wouldn't say that any of 
these ways of life contains much wisdom about what life is for.

I don't want to be too hard on the Davos environmental sustainability list. 
I'm delighted that it exists and that it was delivered to people in high 
places. I hope there will be more such lists, growing in sophistication, 
accuracy, and connection to what is important in the world. I just don't want 
people in high places to think that the Davos numbers give us any idea of how 
quickly we are spending down irreplaceable wealth or achieving real human 
development.

We can learn at least as much about sustainability by turning our eyes away 
from numbers and noticing the soil washing down the streams, the clearcuts 
where forests once stood, the changing climate, the smell of city air, the 
places on earth too contaminated to live in or too desperate to be safe in, 
and the hectic emptiness of our lives. Some day we may have numbers to 
measure these blatant signals of unsustainability. In the meantime we can 
admit that we already know. 

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Donella H. Meadows is director of the Sustainability Institute and an adjunct 
professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.