The Meaning of Social-Environmental Sustainability - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 126

Human inequality has to do with fear and its economic companion, con-
trol. The person who harbors the most fear also harbors the greatest need to
be in control of his or her external environment; the need to be in control is
always fed by the need for the “inequality of enemies” from which one can
(presumably legitimately) steal individual rights.
For example, I (CM) spoke at a forestry conference in Victoria, Canada, in
March 1988. While there, I listened to an eloquent speech by a hereditary
chief from a community of aboriginal Canadians on his people's right to the
land on which they lived because they had never signed a peace treaty. Their
traditional land had simply been wrested from them. To my complete aston-
ishment, an indignant timber company executive wanted to know what right
they —as Indians—had to own any land or cut any timber.
Inequality, which is simply another word for injustice, carries over into
every institution in our land; but it is perhaps clearest in those agencies
whose missions are to uphold and fulfill the legal mandates of protecting
environmental quality for all citizens, present and future. Often, decisions
about environmental control—or lack of it—bend to the political pressure of
the economic elite at the expense of society as a whole, present and future.
Decisions about the commons (such as clean air, pure water, and fertile
soil, which are everyone's birthright) can create more injustice than in any
other arena, because intergenerational equity is immediately and innately
involved. There have been times, however, when equality and justice counted
for something; as Thucydides said of the Athenian code, “Praise is due to all
who . . . respect justice more than their position compels them to do” (Book 1,
Chapter 3, page 75). 3
It is now the beginning of the 21st century, a century in which once-abun-
dant, natural resources are rapidly dwindling toward scarcity while the
world's human population grows at an exponential rate. We citizens of this
planet must now address a moral question: Do those living today owe any-
thing to the future? If your answer is “No,” then we will simply repeat the
20th century to the everlasting, progressive, living damnation of each suc-
ceeding generation.
But if your answer is “Yes,” then we must now determine what and how
much we owe future generations, lest our present collision course continue
unabated into the future, eventually to destroy environmental options for all
generations to come. But what direction must our renewed sense of personal
and social justice take? We are not without historic guidelines.
Each great civilization has been marked by its birth, maturation, and
demise; the latter brought about by uncontrolled population growth that out-
stripped the source of available energy, be it loss of topsoil, deforestation, or
economic ruination due to avarice. But, in earlier times, the survivors could
move on to less-populated, more-fertile areas as their civilizations collapsed.
Settlement and population of the North American continent, along with the
frequently cited national story of the founding of the United States, are our
most common references to the firm, cultural belief in the omnipresence of