Physicist urges colleagues to include "sustainability" in curriculum Environmental Analysis and Sustainability
by Albert A. Bartlett
To understand sustainability we turn first to the most widely quoted definition, which is for sustainable development: "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." (The World Commission on Environment and Development, Gro Harlem Brudtland, Our Common Future (Oxford, 1987)) But we need a more detailed understanding of the meaning of sustainability than we can gain from this one statement. Sustainability has to mean "for a time period long compared to a human lifetime." Moreover, exponential arithmetic shows that steady growth of numbers of things for long periods of time is impossible. The inescapable observation that follows from these facts is that the term "sustainable growth" is an oxymoron!
Now let's look at a quotation from our national leaders:
We will renew America's commitment to leave our children a better nation -- a nation whose air, water, and land are unspoiled, whose natural beauty is undimmed, and whose leadership for sustainable global growth is unsurpassed. (William J. Clinton and Al Gore, Putting People First: How We Can All Change America (Times Books, New York, 1992), pp. 94-95)
All of the problems with air, water, and land are caused by population growth. None of these problems can be "solved" if population growth continues. Clearly, our leaders' lack of understanding of sustainability is a major problem.
Physicists tend to worry about physics, while leaving the problems of society, and in particular the problems of sustainability, to others. Physicists have a tremendous stake in the global future. Compared to survival, physics is a luxury that can exist only in a stable society. The immediate consequence of overpopulation is the decline of democracy, followed by political instability, which seems to be on the increase in all parts of the world. In an unstable society, physics will be an early casualty. Can you imagine trying to do physics in the former Yugoslavia?
Is there anywhere in the large introductory physics course where we can reach large numbers of students with discussions of the problems of growing populations and sustainability? This question gains great urgency from the fact that we live in a world that worships growth and talks about "sustainable growth," which is a clear impossibility.
We know we are facing limits; yet we deny this critical fact. The population continues to grow, and physicists who have the ability to understand the problems, by and large, don't speak out in our classrooms or to the public that we serve. We pride ourselves on our critical thinking, yet most of us fail to apply our critical thinking abilities to the contemporary problems of society.
For example, we individually are the beneficiaries of the wonderful advances made in medicine. By themselves, these benefits result in population growth. We have taken these benefits and have ignored the responsibility that goes with them: to lower fertility so that there would be a stable population. If we had a stable population, a larger fraction of the world's people would experience the benefits of the better life that comes with technology.
Scientists and technologists have given people the belief that science and technology can solve all of our resource problems, forever. To some degree this is understandable. After all, in physics and engineering, much of the emphasis of our courses is on the solving of problems. This belief that science and technology can solve all of our problems gives rise to the nonscientists such as Julian Simon (Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), who recently wrote, "Technology exists now to produce in virtually inexhaustible quantities just about all of the products made by nature -- foodstuffs, oil, even pearls and diamonds. . . ." "We have in our hands now -- actually in our libraries -- the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population of the next seven billion years." "Even if no new knowledge were ever gained . . . we would be able to go on increasing our population forever."
People in Washington love to hear this sort of thing: they don't want to worry about the real problems of population. They welcome a Ph.D. "scholar" who says that there is no need to worry. Somehow, critical thinking about everyday things has disappeared from American education. We have an obligation to help restore critical thinking to the educational process.
On page 16 of the August 1997 issue of Scientific American Bruce M. Alberts, President of the National Academy of Sciences, says that scientists "have to think more broadly about what they respect." He bemoans "intellectual snobbery" that values only work that probes the deepest mysteries. Alberts maintains that "the future stability of the world" could depend on whether researchers can, for instance, "provide the world's poor with rewarding ways to live that do not entail moving to overcrowded cities."
The concept of sustainability addresses the fundamental question of the survival of society. Education for sustainability must start in our classrooms. We have the obligation to work with the large numbers of students in our introductory classes, to lead them to explore the meaning of sustainability, even though it is not now in our textbooks or curricula.
In our education for survival of society we must focus on 1) exponential arithmetic as applied to populations and resources and 2) heat and thermodynamics as they apply to our uses of energy and other resources and to our understanding of processes, especially irreversible ones. Most of all, though, we must, through example, inspire our students to be critical in their thinking. The explosion of knowledge and communication has been accompanied by an explosion of anti-knowledge. If students leave our classes and are unable to separate sense from nonsense, they will be of little value to a society that is going to face enormous real problems.
(Editor's Note: Al Bartlett is Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, and has written and lectured widely on the consequences of exponential growth. His views on the concept of sustainability have already been reported in our Fall 1995 issue. This article is based on his paper of the same title to the American Association of Physics Teachers at the University of Denver on 16 August 1997.)
Adams and Jefferson on Sustainability
Joseph J. Ellis has written books about the character of our second and third Presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, fellow champions of American independence who both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the proclamation of its Declaration. Between the time of the Declaration of Independence and the celebrated correspondence which filled the last years of their lives, these two men were often at politically opposite poles, and Ellis found their characters to be quite antithetical. Yet he found in each of them an element which advocates what would be termed sustainability today. On pages 110-114 of American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (Knopf, New York, 1996), Ellis observes that in 1789 Jefferson subscribed to the concept of "generational sovereignty." According to a Dr. Richard Gem, "one generation of men in civil society have no right to make acts to bind another." In his own words to James Madison, Jefferson wrote that "by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another . . . the earth belongs always to the living generations." And on page 232 of Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (Norton, New York, 1993) he wrote that "Memorials will only be erected to [Adams] . . . when the exaltation of 'the people' is replaced by a quasi-sacred devotion to 'the public'; when the cult of the liberated individual is superseded by the celebration of self-denial; when national development must vie for seductiveness with conservation; when the deepest sense of personal satisfaction comes not from consumption but production; when the acceptance of national and personal limitations seems less like defeatism than a symptom of maturity."
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