Sustainability

Concept Development

The concept of sustainability originally developed out of concern over local environmental problems in the 1960s and 1970s, such as smog in Los Angeles and London, polluted rivers in Ohio and Germany, and oil spills off the California coast. Yet before long, it became clear that these environmental issues could potentially have a more widespread impact. The pictures of Earth taken from the first lunar landing showed the beauty and interconnectedness of the globe and led to widespread thinking about the global nature of sustainability problems. Environmental economist Kenneth Boulding's metaphor from 1966 of “Spaceship Earth” also expanded the idea of environmental issues being global in scope, and Boulding's work emphasized the limits to unfettered development in this type of a closed system.

Boulding's ideas were further expanded by the group that came to be known as the Club of Rome, founded in 1968. In Limits to Growth, a book commissioned by the club and written by MIT systems scientists, various scenarios were laid out that presented harsh future choices given unrestrained economic growth and concomitant environmental degradation. While some, like Julian Simon, decried these doomsday scenarios and argued for a [Page 1614]continuing cornucopia of resources at humans' disposal, the Limits to Growth debate laid the groundwork for more serious discussions of what an alternative to unfettered economic development might be and also provided a foundation for later deliberations over sustainability. The organization of the first Earth Day celebration in 1970 by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson succeeded in providing a populist face to these growing global concerns.

Biologists soon joined economists in talking about what the impact of humans was on the natural world and how this impact could be lessened over the long term. One of the most influential ideas to come out of the early 1970s was the “IPAT equation,” created out of a discussion between Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren (who later became President Barack Obama's science advisor), and Barry Commoner. The equation states that forces of population (P), affluence (A), and technology (T) combine to cause an environmental impact (I). Ehrlich's popular book, The Population Bomb, published in 1972, argued that the doors to Spaceship Earth needed to be closed to any further growth in human population, echoing concerns that biologist Garrett Hardin had raised in a widely read piece in Science magazine a few years earlier on what he called “the tragedy of the commons,” whereby increasing use of common resources by a growing population would rapidly exhaust these resources. These authors exemplified the early approaches to global sustainability, which were marked by a strong concern about global overpopulation and the limits to natural resources available for human use as a result of this excessive demand.

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