CIAO DATE: 07/01

Sex, Drugs, & Sustainability

Benjamin A. Goldman _*

November 1996

The Clarke Center at Dickinson College

Overview

I heard somebody joke the other day that the concept of "sustainability" reminds us that life isn't just about winning and losing.

Of course not!

It's also about...money. And sex.

And maybe if drugs and rock and roll were added to the mix, "sustainability" or "sustainable development" would become more popular.

But instead, these phrases have come to signify so many different things to so many different people that they've gone straight from a period of controversy to one of vague meaningless-ness. And along the way, skipped the important step of general public understanding and acceptance.

My talk today is about

• the skewed way in which sustainability issues are portrayed in public dialogue
• how sustainability often involves clashes of cultures and interests that can change people's perceptions
• how environmental protection is good for jobs and the economy.

And, finally, how the notion of sustainability needs to incorporate social as well as environmental and economic concerns.

We'll see if we can also throw in some sex, drugs, and rock and roll — to make things a little more interesting.

Sexual Innuendo

Contemporary politics portrays sustainability issues as tradeoffs between economic development and natural resource protection. For example, several of the 90 state initiatives around the country in last week's election focused on jobs versus the environment themes. In Florida, voters rejected a penny-a-pound tax on sugar cane grown in the Everglades, which would have paid to restore that sensitive ecosystem from decades of damage caused by sugar farm runoff. In Maine, a ban on forest clear-cutting was passed up in favor of an alternative referendum that instead limits the practice.

In typical fashion, environmentalists and industry lined up on opposite sides of these campaigns, as well as those for individual candidates. Sugar growers and timber companies spent millions to defeat the environmentalists' proposals in Florida and Maine, and apparently convinced voters that they would be too costly for local workers and businesses.

In Massachusetts, on the other hand, activists funded TV ads showing little pussycats caught in traps and did manage to persuade voters to ban that kind of hunting in the State. Now I'd bet most voters in Massachusetts have limited understanding of how this kind of initiative might affect rural livelihoods and ecosystems. Pests enjoy reproducing as much as humans do, and both can have problems of aggregate population size as a result.

But sex doesn't have that much to do with it. The Massachusetts electorate voted for pussycats, not sustainability.

Altered States

Most of the time, people just don't see how environmental and economic goals can go hand in hand. This is only partly due to the adversarial portrayal these issues get from the media, from elected officials, and, for that matter, from business and environmentalists. The notion that Greenpeace and Georgia Pacific, for example, could see eye-to-eye seems a bit too we-are-the-worldish to be taken seriously.

The fact that we all live on the same planet, share the same resources, and ultimately face the same environmental constraints may be an accepted notion within certain circles on college campuses. But it just doesn't cut it in most day-to-day decision-making battles. Most of the time, families and companies are just trying to get by. They can barely see past the dictates of their shortest-term interests–be they shareholder demands for quarterly earnings, or landlord demands for the monthly rent. Feel-good, earthy-crunchy nostrums that we should overcome our petty differences and look beyond our most immediate wants in order to seek a more sustainable common ground seems well suited only for academic dreamers, UN visionaries, and insulated policy wonks. Yet a key aspect of sustainability is finding ways in which environmental benefits can accompany economic development and jobs, rather than always being at odds with each other.

And sometimes the process by which people from opposing interests come to agreement can be as important as the outcomes.

The last thing a fisherman or woman wants is some regulatory bureaucrat telling them they can't use nets anymore, because endangered whales will get snagged along with their intended catch. But if government scientists and fishing industry reps could just sit down to work out their differences, they might find that by simply putting inexpensive sounding devices on the nets, the whales will steer clear, reducing costly damages to the nets as well as reducing risks to an endangered species. Not to mention the jobs it might create for whoever manufactures and sells the widgets that need to be put on the nets.

I was recently at a meeting of the President's Council on Sustainable Development or PCSD, which President Clinton set up to identify federal policies that could join economic development and environmental protection goals. The PCSD includes twenty-five leaders from industry, government, environment, labor, and civil rights organizations.

The corporations represented on the Council include some of the worst polluters on earth. They brought us DDT, Agent Orange, deforestation in the Amazon and Redwood forests, midnight dumping in New Jersey, brain cancers in Texas, oil spills in the Philippines, record fines for air and water pollution violations, herbicides in the Rhine, phenols in the Mississippi, benzene emissions in Philadelphia, etc. But there they were, talking with the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, the National Wildlife Federation, and so forth. A chemical company executive said when he came back from these meetings to talk with his business colleagues about sustainable development, they'd ask him what he'd been smoking. His environmentalist counterparts faced similar disbelief from their peers. Of course we know government leaders don't inhale, so this wasn't an issue for them.

The point is that the process of putting opposing camps into negotiation can result in the parties walking away with altered views that seem foreign to their own cultures.

For that matter, I'll bet voters in California and Arizona were not even thinking about jobs and the environment when they elected last week to allow the medical use of marijuana. But this initiative may well be as good for organic hemp growers as for patients needing their product.

So now that we've got some drugs as well as sex in the picture, let's talk about family values for a second.

Environmental Values

There is clearly a significant bedrock of electoral support for environmental protection. This sentiment backfired on the 104th Congress when its Republican leadership tried to dismantle existing regulatory structures.

So, are all of these pro-environment, pro-family Americans on drugs, thinking warm and fuzzily about what's good for the earth, rather than what's good for their own short-term self-interests? Of course not. People pay hard dollars for environmental amenities every day. You know which costs more, all else being equal, a house downwind of a stinky factory or congested highway compared to a house in a tree lined suburb with lots of parks and green-space?

Environmental quality has value that the market appreciates on a daily basis, in individual hard dollar transactions. In fact, there are entire industries that make their bucks selling environmental goods and services. Revenues in these markets total more than 400 billion dollars annually–that's as much as six percent of the entire seven trillion-dollar U.S. economy. It's also more than the annual revenues of the four largest industrial corporations in the U.S., and substantially more than what U.S. taxpayers pay for national defense.

About half of this sizable U.S. environmental market comes from businesses that Wall Street tracks within relatively well-defined environmental sectors. These include environmental services, such as solid and hazardous waste management and remediation, water treatment, consulting, and analytical services. Environmental resources are another significant component, including water utilities, recycled materials, and renewable energy. And environmental equipment is the third major sector, including businesses that sell air and water pollution control devices and so forth. But in addition to this 200-billion dollar segment of U.S. environmental markets, Americans buy another 120 billion dollars of so-called "green" consumer goods each year, ranging from natural beauty products to herbal insect repellants. Add to this 64 billion dollars spent on wildlife-related recreation, 18 billion on mass transit alternatives to automobiles, and 2 billion on organic foods, and you begin to get a sense of the potential magnitude of environmental values that are already registered in the marketplace.

Private support for environmental groups, in contrast, represents less than one-tenth of a percent of this total. Despite their tremendous influence in shaping government, consumer, and producer understandings of environmental issues, the combined budgets of all of America's environmental organizations is smaller than any sector of the environmental industry currently tracked by Wall Street.

From Control to Prevention

As you may already be thinking, about percent of the environmental business that Wall Street tracks isn't exactly the most likely candidate for sustainable industry of the future. Instead, it involves monitoring, treating, storing, and in myriad ways coping with the polluting wastes of modern society. We're talkin' dumps, incinerators, sewers, scrubbers, and so on.

Only about twelve percent of these business revenues are currently involved with the prevention of pollution in the first place. But the good news is that new processes and

prevention technologies comprise the fastest growing sector of the environmental industry, with expected annual growth rates over thirteen percent per year, compared to four to five percent for all environmental sectors combined.

Ironically, the growth of pollution prevention and avoidance technologies over time will mean the shrinking of the environmental sector as traditionally defined by Wall Street. If the paper industry switches to non-chlorine bleaching processes, for example, this could result in reduced demand for water treatment equipment and hazardous waste disposal. The much cleaner paper manufacturers would not become part of an "environmental industry" as currently defined, since their primary purpose will still be to make paper, not to improve environmental quality. But the net effect would be significant benefits for both the economy and the environment.

The fact is, different businesses often have different interests when it comes to particular environmental issues and policies. This is often overlooked by simplistic portrayals of sustainability as an environment-versus-economy dichotomy. As Saul Alinsky, the grandaddy of community organizing in America, used to say: there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies. Power is created by acting on shifting alliances of interests.

Even the hard-core environmental radicals at Greenpeace, for example, decided to join up with the international insurance industry in order to fight global warming. Various parts of the world could gain or lose from significant temperature change, but there's nothing worse for insurers than betting on the weather long-term–especially if it becomes even more volatile.

Change is a fundamental part of capitalism–what Joseph Schumpeter called its creative destruction. If the enviro industry dies as a result of widespread innovations in clean technology, it will likely be good for business in general–as well as for the environment.

Good for Business

There is overwhelming data on industries, communities, states, and nations that indicate superior environmental performance is usually correlated with superior economic performance. The logic behind these findings is obvious: if production practices are safer and more efficient, then profits can be higher and liabilities lessened. This is a major part of what sustainable development is all about.

Environmental protection makes good business sense from a wide variety of corporate perspectives:

• it enhances the productivity and availability of natural resources that industries use
• it yields cost savings from improved energy and materials efficiencies;
• it reduces exposure to environmental and occupational liabilities;
• it reduces vulnerability to economic and political risks brought on by dependence on unstable raw material supplies, social breakdown, conflict, famine, plague and war;
• it creates market growth for more resource-efficient and environmentally benign or beneficial technologies;
• it can lead to an enlarged pool of healthier and better educated workers and customers;
• it projects a better corporate image in host communities and world markets; and •in general, it builds greater confidence in a stable future, which is vital to a prosperous world economy.

Good for Jobs

From an individual and national perspective, on the other hand, environmental protection creates jobs – and lots of them. Fifty to 100,000 new jobs are created each year from the production of environmental goods and services as we speak. Whereas, reliable evidence exists for fewer than 1,200 jobs lost each year to plant closings associated with environmental regulation.

My colleagues and I will be releasing studies next year that show how more aggressive environmental policies than currently exist can create more than 5 million new jobs in the U.S. by the year 2010, and as many as 100,000 new jobs in a state like Massachusetts alone. We only looked at six sectors to derive these numbers: energy, transportation, exports, toxics, recycling, and water.

There are four basic ways in which environmental spending creates net increases in jobs:

First, there are geographic effects — basically stealing jobs through import substitution. If we can become more energy efficient, for example, or produce solar and other energy sources here in the U.S., that's less spending that goes out of country for foreign oil. More Americans are employed as a result.

Second, there are cost effects–if a production process is less polluting and hence more efficient and cheaper, it ultimately saves consumers money. Normal household spending creates more jobs than most industries.

Third, there are labor effects–these occur when more environmentally-friendly solutions are also more labor rather than capital-intensive. For example, nine jobs are created for every 15,000 tons of solid wastes that are recycled, but only two jobs if the wastes are incinerated, and only 1 job if they are merely dumped in a landfill.

Finally, there are competitive effects–the global market for environmental goods and services is growing two to three times faster than it is domestically. If U.S. firms can capture a growing share of these markets, awesome potential domestic job opportunities will result.

Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School guru on competitive strategy, sees innovation and advanced technologies as determining competitive advantage in the future; whereas, in the past, low-cost, abundant inputs and economies of scale were more important–not to mention more environmentally destructive. He argues that the way to gain a competitive global edge in the future is to have the most sophisticated and demanding markets for environmental technology at home. And effective government regulations that both maintain high standards and also allow industries to innovate solutions are needed for that. Businesses often anticipate exaggerated costs from major environmental laws, because they assume away the economic benefits of innovations that respond to the regulatory challenge.

Social Justice

But sustainability is not just about the environment and the economy. It also requires a stable social fabric to succeed. I'm sure you have heard other presenters speak the ecological needs for sustainability during this symposium. And we've touched briefly on some economic aspects here. But as important are social justice concerns.

Last year on the 25th anniversary of Earth Day–along with the pundits' praise for improvements in environmental protection that have taken place over the years–came news that U.S. income distribution has become the most unequal in the industrialized world, and more unequal than it has been here at home for more than three decades.

Academics are only just beginning to explore the complex relationships between inequality, economic performance, and environmental degradation. But it makes sense that just as superior environmental performance is often correlated with superior economic performance, the reverse is also true. If production practices are more hazardous and wasteful, economic performance will suffer because of increased inefficiencies and liabilities. And the argument can be switched around in yet another way: greater wealth can afford greater quality of life and environmental protections. Poorer economic performance, on the other hand, often leads to short-sighted, environmentally destructive short-cuts. Sure enough, the evidence is overwhelming that communities, facilities, and countries with the least wherewithal tend to be the most polluted.

In fact, targeting economic development investments in areas that are most in need not only alleviates inequality, but can often lead to the greatest environmental bang per buck. Abandoned, contaminated properties are cleaned up, inner-cities can once again become magnets for economic activity, counter-acting urban sprawl, and unsavory practices become more difficult to hide amongst the rubble of depressed and overlooked communities.

Hence environmental justice and sustainable development are two sides of the same coin. Environmental injustice means that certain communities are ravaged so that others may prosper. Sustainable development means we cannot afford this trade off. In the words of the U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development, "a world in which poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes."

Webs v. Waves

I like to pull together all of these themes into what I call the "web of sustainability." The web is anchored in sets of issues, values, and institutions, which are woven together by myriad strands.

We've examined some of the complexities of the environmental, economic, and social issues with which sustainability is concerned. These three issue areas are connected to and balanced by three values that are also at the core of sustainability: viability, quality, and justice. And the three major sources of institutional power in our society–business, government, and community–are needed to focus action on these issues and values, in order to bring about a more sustainable future. Any policy initiative will be caught somewhere in this web.

So will "sustainability" become part of mainstream American political and economic thought? Will green technology be the next industrial revolution? Well you know, life isn't just about winning and losing. And we've talked a bit about money and politics, sex and drugs. So maybe if we got an enviro rocker like Michael Stipes or Sting or someone more current on stage for a riff, this sustainability idea might become more popular.

And in some ways the most important thing about sustainability – which is usually overlooked in the rigor of academic analysis, and the day-to-day battles of politics and the economy – is its success will enable people to enjoy life on earth a little more.

An economy based on more environmentally friendly technologies will not simply avoid, control, monitor, and remediate. Sustainability means people will need to seek enjoyment, not through quantitative increases in consumption, but through qualitative changes that will improve and enrich our foods, leisure, travel, and general working and living conditions.

The agricultural revolution kept us from starving, and the industrial revolution gave us wealth and convenience. The information revolution will make producers and consumers smarter and more efficient.

But unlike the metaphor of waves made popular by the Tofflers and Newt Gingrich, which can have potentially awesome destructive force, leaving those who are less well prepared washed up on a shore of outmoded skills, the web of sustainability is intended to hold together vital social strands that may otherwise burst asunder in the face of dramatic changes in the global economy. Like the worldwide web of electronic information, this web of sustainability interconnects diverse interests, values, and institutions.

It will take an environmental revolution in our economy to provide a better quality of life on the planet for all of its inhabitants, and to expand our opportunities to enjoy the riches we have created and preserved.

 

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Endnotes

Note *: Former Executive Director of the Citizens' Network for Sustainable Development, the President's Council on Sustainable Development and the Environmental Protection Agency's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Back.