Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Non-substitutability - what can fill the holes in the ozone layer?
Uncertainty - what can replace the oceans' role as a climate regulator?
Irreversibility - human-made capital cannot (yet?) replace an extinct species.
Equity - the poor are more often disproportionately affected by environmental
degradation than the wealthy.
Related to these concerns and the critical unease with conceiving the biosphere
as another form of capital and one that logically can carry a price tag, the subdiscipline
of Ecological Economics has explored the relationship between the scale of human
productive activity and the natural environment, biosphere and 'services' the ecosystem
provides. If the human productive economy grows too big with the biosphere being
unable to support it, then development is literally unsustainable. The ideal condition
for development is therefore 'sustainable development' - a relational concept, series
of practices and processes that stay within the 'carrying capacity' of the planet.
Sometimes known as the 'Strong Sustainability Condition', this idea insists that over
time there should be no decline in Natural Capital, that future generations must
inherit the same amount of natural resource stocks as previous ones. As with so
much else, policy makers, academics, sustainability practitioners and others throughout
the world rarely seem to agree - at least fully. Consequently, alternative sustainability
conditions have therefore been conceptualized - namely, the 'Weak' (no reduction
in Critical Natural Capital) and the 'Very Weak' (the loss of Natural Capital must
not be more than the increase in Human Capital and Human-made Capital).
The substitution of natural capital with human-made capital can be quite expensive.
Heal (2000) discusses how the Catskill watershed provided New York City residents
with natural high-quality water for many years. Then, in the 1990s the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) suggested that a filtration plant would soon be needed
because of uncontrolled land development and intensive water consumption costing
the city up to $8 billion, with annual operating costs around $300 million. This
prompted the city to restore the watershed by improving sewage treatment and
purchasing land to head off further development. Although still costly for this course
of action, estimates came in at less than $1.5 billion. There are frequently other
issues too. For Norton (2005), the real problems arise when communities and profes-
sionals of various descriptions speak different languages of sustainability. He argues
the need for a radical shift in attitudes, that environmental policies should be derived
from long-term adaptive plans based on the values embedded in each community
or locale. Too often disputes, environmental management practices and policy conflicts
arise between those who wish to place a financial price on the value of nature and
those who fervently do not see nature as being intrinsically valuable. An approach
that reconciles these positions needs to encompass short-term goals, which may be
primarily economic or employment related, medium-term goals that may need to
encompass local and regional imperatives like water or land conservation, and more
long-term goals that must encompass planetary survival, the health and well-being
of future generations and the regulation of population increase. For Norton, adaptive
management means human ingenuity and practice working as an integral part of
nature rather than simply on nature, for human beings help constitute these wider
ecosystems. Sustainable development projects need to articulate that. For Norton,
there is not just scarcity in the economic sense but also scarcity of good ideas and
effective action. In the words of Homer-Dixon (2002), there is 'an ingenuity gap'.
 
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