Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the flexiBle concePt of sustainaBle develoPment
The end of the Cold War was more important, in more unexpected ways,
to the politics of global warming than scholars have recognized. In part, the
changes wrought by the end of the conflict represented extensions of some
of the very forces that brought the Cold War itself to a close. One major
change in climate change discourse— and, in fact, in environmental dis-
course more broadly— that coincided with the end of the Cold War was the
rise of economics as the key rubric for environmental decision making. At
its core was a new buzzword associated with both economic globalism and
international environmental protection that would help define the politics
of both the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol:
sustainable development.
Introduced in part as a foil for the pessimistic ethos of austerity char-
acteristic of the 1970s, sustainable development was a notoriously slippery
concept. It also has a contested history. The 1987 report
Our Common
Future,
by the World Commission on Environment and Development
(WCED) chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, brought the term into main-
stream usage. “Sustainable development,” the report explained, “is devel-
opment that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
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But for economists,
the concept was nothing new. As economic historian Emma Rothschild
notes, the concept of sustainability introduced in the so-called Brundtland
Report was a variation on a much older concept of “maintaining capital
intact,” an economic principle fleshed out by A. C. Pigou, Friedrich Hayek,
and John Hicks in the 1940s that cautioned against reducing capital stock
for the sake of profit. Robert Solow and Ronald Coase each later expanded
definitions of capital stock to include elements of the environment.
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Even
these early forays into environmental economics were not entirely new,
however. As historian Paul Warde points out, German and Italian forest-
ers and farmers have argued for the maintenance of natural capital in the
form of soil conservation and silviculture since the 1600s.
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The roots of
sustainability as a concept, broadly construed, thus run much deeper than
the Brundtland Report.
But “sustainability” generally and the “sustainable development”
championed by the WCED were not the same things. The Brundtland
Report was not just about the maintenance of capital. The WCED pre-
sented a particular version of sustainability geared toward reconciling
