Reflections on work in a sustainable society

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 1996 by Francis Wilson

It would perhaps be well to start by saying what this article is not. It is neither a neat summary of the main findings of the workshop whose deliberations provide the focus for this issue of The Ecumenical Review, nor is it an "overview" in the sense of providing the sort of survey which offers readers a reasoned review or critique of all papers presented. What is presented here is altogether more tentative and fragmentary: more in the nature of a report from a front line where the air is full of smoke and uncertainty, and where the outcome of the battle is by no means sure.(1)

The nature of the challenge is clear enough, but the question of what to do about it, or even how best to think about it, is complicated and difficult. The significance of the Visser 't Hooft consultation in June 1995 is that it marked an important attempt by the churches, using their comparative advantage, to get to grips with an issue that quite literally may be a matter of life or death to humanity in the 21st century - which lies just around the comer of this decade. It is our hope that the articles reprinted in this issue will stimulate deeper thinking leading to action around the world in the years ahead.

What then is the nature of the challenge? And what comparative advantages, if any, do the churches enjoy in helping humanity to understand that challenge? The first of the Visser 't Hooft colloquiums (1993) focussed on the question, "Sustainable Growth: A Contradiction in Terms?" and began with the knowledge that reality, for this generation, has changed in two fundamental ways. For the first time in history humanity has a sense of the fragility of the spaceship earth in which we travel and which now shows numerous signs of becoming full, if not overcrowded. The combination of global population increase with rapid industrialization is clearly creating stresses which were not visible when the world was an emptier place. Reports of holes in the ozone layer above the Antarctic, of massive oil spills destroying miles of fragile coastal marine life in North America, of acid rain destroying forests in Western Europe, of environmental catastrophes in Eastern Europe (genetic damage from radioactive fallout from nuclear accidents or the immense damage done by the process of Soviet economic development to the Caspian and other inland seas) or of unbreatheable air in the polluted mega-cities of Asia or Latin America - all these raise troubling questions about the capacity of the planet to absorb the high levels of population and material production which have now been reached and which continue to rise. These questions are compounded by the realization that resources once seen as indestructible are indeed vanishing. Topsoil itself continues to erode at a rate which, in some parts of the world, threatens their capacity to grow food or sustain life as they once did; tropical rain forests are being cut down far faster than they are being replanted; thousands of species are becoming extinct each year.1 Water itself is increasingly seen to be a finite and vulnerable resource.(3) The Montreal Protocol of 1987, which brought together a number of diverse governments in a surprisingly tough agreement to move towards the elimination of substances that deplete the ozone layer, was an acknowledgment of the changing reality. Care of a fragile planet is now on the agenda; a point hammered home by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Against this background the first Visser 't Hooft consultation defined sustainability as a condition "which leaves the world as rich in resources and opportunities as it inherited" -- meaning "that renewable resources are consumed no faster than they can be renewed, that non-renewable resources are consumed no more rapidly than renewable substitutes can be found, that wastes are discharged at a rate no greater than they can be processed by nature or human devices". The attempt to grapple with possible. contradictions inherent in the pursuit of the double goal of sustainability and growth led to a second, no less difficult, question. If growth must be curtailed in some way because of its damaging consequences to the planet, could this be done in such a way as not to harm whatever prospects there are for reducing, if not eliminating, the widespread poverty and particularly the growing levels of unemployment? To put it another way, if sustainable growth was a contradiction in terms, was there not an even more fundamental contradiction embedded in the second reality of widespread unemployment in many different parts of the world where the only solution appears to be yet more economic growth? If the first Visser 't Hooft consultation was right in insisting that poverty, the lack of basic resources -- food, clean drinking water, shelter, energy -- from which millions of people suffer around the globe "must be seen as an integral part of the environmental problem", could that insistence be reconciled with policies pushing for sustainable patterns of production and consumption, and possibly lower growth, in the richer industrialized countries? And if it could be reconciled, what about the growing problem, not least in Western Europe, of increasing unemployment, marginalization and exclusion? What do we do in a society where some people are no longer economically needed at any stage of their lives? The crisis of unemployment is widespread and deeply disturbing, as may be seen in the number of major reports on this in 1995 alone -- whether by international organizations or individual governments.(4) Nor is the problem confined only to poorer countries. Lester Thurow writes: