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BY SALLY ACHARYA
A university has a moral obligation to the future. That much is clear in its very mission; its scholars devote their lives to preparing the next generation. In the early twenty-first century, that aim invites a question: what role can a university play in bringing about a future in which sustainability is not only a vision, but understood deeply enough to become a reality?
One thing is to reduce its “ecological footprint,” which refers to the impact of a person, a building, or even a country on the environment. AU is doing this with plans for a new green School of International Service building. Yet AU has another positive and expanding ecological footprint. The imprint it makes on the intellectual landscape.
Many faculty who work on key global topics—and that’s a long list at AU—have been addressing the issue of sustainability for years and bringing their findings and thought-provoking questions to the classroom.
American magazine spoke at length to AU faculty asking how the vision of sustainability is being translated into practical form in the fields of law, business, public policy, media, science, and international service. Those answers follows.
GLOBALIZATION
The Role of China
What will a changing China mean for the global environment?China expert Judith Shapiro, SIS/PhD ’99, studies the environmental challenges faced by the booming nation of a billion. .
There is a broad recognition that as China goes, so goes the planet. That is particularly obvious in terms of climate change. China will overtake us in [carbon emissions] in the very near future. On a per capita basis, however, China’s emissions are a tiny fraction, so China can justifiably argue that most of the carbon in the atmosphere was put there by developed countries and it’s up to developed countries to find the solutions.
That said, China is interested in participating in solutions and wants to work cooperatively to allow developed countries to invest in the Clean Development Mechanism (an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol that would give credit to developed countries for investing in emission reducing projects in developing countries). It’s much more cost effective to clean up a dirty smokestack in a developing country than to try to clean up a relatively clean one in a developed country.
China itself has some of the best environmental laws in the world. It is enforcement and implementation that are problems. Its cars are required to be cleaner than cars in the U.S., and they really are. They have passed a renewable energy law that requires 15 percent of energy to come from renewable sources by 2020. I’m somewhat optimistic that China will be able to deal with its air pollution, as severe as it is. But population pressures are so huge that it’s hard to imagine how biodiversity can be protected. Trade and wildlife aspects are also difficult to deal with because it becomes a deep cultural issue, a matter of Chinese medicine and fashion and status.
I think that a preoccupation with face and China’s role in the world may sometimes lead China to make development decisions that are not ultimately sustainable. For example, the railroad going into Tibet is terrible news not only for the Tibetan people but for the environment, because it will facilitate extraction of natural resources, which had not been possible before.
[Face] can also mean that freedoms are circumscribed. In Mongolia, the herdsmen are being forced to stop their nomadic lifestyle and settle down in town because the Chinese are arguing that overgrazing causes sandstorms, and that would be embarrassing during the 2008 Olympics. In fact, the [ecological dynamic] probably has a lot more to do with Han migration into the area, which threw off the natural balance between population and land.
There is [also] a legacy from the Cultural Revolution—a legacy of disillusionment with public goals, mistrust of government, and what’s called a values crisis—which has led to tremendous materialism and public display of wealth. That doesn’t bode well for China’s adopting what Aldo Leopold calls a sense that one has a humble place in the ecosystem.
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Making a World of Humans Sustainable
Environmental activism has evolved over the years from looking at single issues to looking at the whole planet and including people in the picture. The expanded meaning raises questions on a smaller scale, too—questions that AU students have been tackling during the planning for the new SIS building with AU professor Professor Paul Wapner, SIS.
For most people, the modern environmental movement started in the ’60s and ’70s, initially as a movement that tried to protect nature from the onslaught of human beings. Pollution was a big issue in the early years. Certainly in the ’60s, Rachel Carson was warning us against the buildup of pesticide residues, and Paul Erlich was warning about the population overusing resources and also producing pollution. That early activism was crucial to awakening the world to certain risks, but it tended to focus on the nonhuman world, locking up pieces of wilderness and so forth. We left out people and questions of social justice.
The environmental movement has changed in terms of recognizing we can’t protect the nonhuman world without protecting people. You saw this in the Third World a lot—launching campaigns to protect rainforests without [considering] people. But you have to think about economic well-being and social well-being, and that’s where the concept of sustainability emerged.
Sustainability is something that really has a moral dimension to it. The official definition comes from a document called “Our Common Future” in which it’s defined as meeting the needs of the present generation without sacrificing the needs of future generations. This emphasis on meeting needs, this obligation now to people who are incredibly poor, means that a part of environmentalism is caring about them and caring about future generations as well. Some people talk about it as extending our moral concern across space to other people, extending it across time into future generations, and extending it across species.
Some people have talked about “environmentalisms” rather than the movement as a single element. I think that’s still true today. Activist groups work on green issues, wilderness protection, some on “brown issues” of urban renewal, some still on pollution issues. But what’s happened is that initially we were thinking of these issues domestically, and during the ’80s and ’90s it became clear they don’t respect national borders. Climate change, including the challenge of energy conservation, is the biggest challenge we have now, and so it’s gathering tremendous attention and worry and enthusiasm in the environmental community.
On campus, sustainability is being put into practice by AU students who are doing research projects on specific materials to be used in the new SIS building, trying to identify those that are not just environmentally sound but socially just. It’s important for students not just to know about and be scared about environmental issues but to develop ways of responding that they feel are meaningful and make a difference.
We made recommendations for solar energy on the roof and had students who figured out the load we’d want to carry and the array of solar panels we’d need. We looked at the roof as prime real estate and asked what we’d want to use it for. There was talk of having an edible garden on the roof and growing vegetables to provide food for area residents.
We did some calculations about how much soil would be needed, and how symbolic it would be versus how functional, and we decided it was not a good use of our funds. We argued that, because of climate changes, the university had to take a stand on energy and that we could have a bigger impact on environmental challenges by going after the carbon question.
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Are the Poor a Danger to the Environment?
Almost everything that is needed for the environment is also needed for sustainable development, says Robin Broad, SIS, who specializes in the environment and development and looks closely at the role played by the rural poor.
The UN report called “Our Common Future” defines sustainability as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. If one looks carefully at the definition, there is much to consider.
First, the word it uses is “needs.” That means sustainable development is a kind of development that prioritizes the poor. It has an economic component based on needs. Another aspect of the definition is the idea of limits. You’re not to compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs. But it doesn’t just say “the environment.” It also implies social sustainability—workers, community, equity. And it has an intergenerational aspect. It’s not just the present; it’s also the future. The implication is that you have a package of sustainability—social, environmental, and economic.
I learned about sustainability issues by living among villagers in an indigenous community in the Philippines. They were poor peasants trying to keep their land and ensure that their children and grandchildren could have at least as good a life. So these people were really concerned about development issues: How can I make sure I can grow enough rice and corn to feed my family next year? How do I get fish? That development concern actually led them to be, at the core, the strongest environmentalists I have ever seen, although they would not call themselves environmentalists. They understand that natural resources have to remain intact if their children are to have a future.
One of the myths about development is that the poor are the problem. What I’ve found is that ordinary poor people, in poor countries or even in richer countries, understand why they need natural resources. To the extent they take actions that degrade those resources, it’s because they have no other choice, because there are forces beyond their control. Another myth is that areas with the greatest population growth rate have the greatest amount of natural resource degradation. Population may be an exacerbating factor, it may be contributing, but we can’t say that it is the root cause across the board.
One of the root causes is the development model that countries follow. There are not one or two interest groups—there are the elite, the middle class, the poor, the nearly poor, the very very poor. Each has a different relation to the environment. So it’s not that “the north treats [the environment] one way, the south treats it another way.” For instance, the poor may be getting pushed off the land not just by transnational corporations but by other people, including domestic elites who might be planting monoculture sugar because the price of sugar is very high, or by big aid institutions wanting to build a hydroelectric dam to help electrify bigger corporations in the cities.
So we’re not really talking about just the environment. Almost everything that’s needed for the environment is also what’s needed for sustainable development—that prioritizes social needs, not just economic needs.
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MEDIA
Sometimes They Care and Sometimes They Don’t
Global warming is a hot topic not only for the public, but for Matthew Nisbet, School of Communication, who studies how the media covers controversies. He’s been tracking the coverage of global warming and message construction by interest groups .
Over the last 20 years or more that scientists have studied climate change, the consensus around the idea that human activities are contributing to global warming has increased significantly. Given that kind of linear trend in terms of the amount of scientific knowledge and the increase of scientific certainty, if media coverage was just a reflection of the real world, you’d expect it would also flow in a linear way. But in fact, attention to the environment in the media has waxed and waned, not based on science, but rather on major dramatic political moments. There is always a baseline level of attention to scientific data and reports, but for coverage of any science topic, the spikes in attention come when it becomes redefined as a political issue and spills from the science pages onto the political pages.
[For instance] there was this startling societal discovery in 1988 when James Hansen (director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies) testified to Congress during one of the hottest summers on record. Then media attention climaxed in 1992 with the agreement to work toward the Kyoto Protocol. During the mid-’90s, however, there were relatively low levels of media attention.
After the 1994 congressional elections, Republicans controlled the agenda on climate change, which meant they could either keep it off the agenda or, when they did hold hearings, were able to stack the roster rolls with “climate skeptics.” So you didn’t see issues coming out in media coverage. The Republican-controlled Congress essentially deflated some of the attention to the issue but, more importantly, activated the journalistic norm of balance, so we got a 50-50 split in coverage, with the consensus view in line with accumulating scientific evidence and this kind of maverick, climate skeptic view. Conservative think tanks produced their own reports, actively framing this topic by reducing it to two messages: that the science is uncertain, so you don’t need to act; and second, that it’s an economic burden.
The next major spike in attention was the Kyoto meetings in 1997. It was this dramatic moment that journalists could build their coverage around, because you can’t have an unending story with no beginning or end. How do you make a story about climate change that’s happening on a daily basis? It’s either a release of a new scientific study, which is ghettoized on the science page; or it’s some sort of dramatic moment, some kind of summit, that then activates political reports and op-ed writers.
Then coverage declined, and the next major historic spike was in 2001, when Bush came into office and announced that the U.S. would formally withdraw from the Kyoto process. There was a seismic reaction from Europe, and that drove the attention to the political pages. Then Sept. 11 happened, we went to war, and there was a lot of competing noise out there. Media attention went back down. But by 2006 it had gone up to an all-time high. There was no single political moment. It appears to relate to a confluence of scientific, environmental, cultural, and political activity around the issue.
Yet statistics show that large segments of the public currently don’t really care. People tend to pick a [news] outlet based on their ideology, and you do have leaders and commentators saying the science is still uncertain. People use their partisanship and the selective nature of their media outlets as their information shortcut to make up their minds about an issue. Even among Democrats and independents, the issue still scores relatively low in terms of political priority, and that makes a difference. The dominant interpretation offered by environmental groups—a “looming disaster”—has already activated as many people as it will, and it opens environmentalists to claims of being alarmists.
The challenge is to figure out how to make the issue personally meaningful. One possible successful idea that’s appearing is that it’s not a partisan political issue; it’s a moral and religious one. That kind of message could be really important in activating conservatives as well as liberals and providing an alternative message that connects with who people are as human beings.
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SCIENCE
Scientists’ Role as Advocates
Today’s scientists are increasingly encouraged to bring their message to the public. Yet the message often defies easy characterization, as is shown by the research of marine biologist Kiho Kim, CAS, on endangered coral reefs.
Coral reefs are important for a number of reasons, but mostly because, biologically, they provide food for many coastal communities—and for places like the Florida Keys, they act as a barrier to storm surges that would pound Florida into oblivion.
With global warming, one thing that is going to happen is coral bleaching. The symbiotic relation between coral and the algae that live inside coral breaks down because the temperature is too warm. The algae are important because all algae and green things make food out of sunlight, and some of this food is delivered to the coral host. When the water temperature warms for longer periods, the coral begins to starve.
Like many of the ecosystems on land, not only is there warming, there is pollution, over-harvesting, disease. The primary source of nutrient pollution is nitrogen flowing off land sources—sewage, agricultural runoff—which affects ocean chemistry. We know lots of pollutants wash into the Gulf, and we know it causes huge ecological havoc. So, is something similar happening in coral reefs? It’s common sense to identify that as a possible explanation, which is what science does, and then systematically test whether that explanation holds up.
But the science connecting nutrient pollution and coral decline has been pretty tenuous at best. The initial problem is that no one has been keeping water quality data for more than 15, 20 years. So a couple of my grad students are analyzing coral samples that have been collected and deposited in the Smithsonian. That should give us some window into the last 150 years in at least some parts of the Caribbean, which will give us an answer about whether what’s happening now is really bad compared to the past.
Traditionally, scientists and activists have maintained separate roles in working to save the environment. As scientists, we need to stand back and say, “OK, what’s the evidence?” You have to be willing to walk away from your pet theory, which is difficult to do. But the media wants the “whole story,” and activists have a completely different agenda and are more than happy to say, “This is the problem.” That causes a bit of a conflict, which is why traditionally scientists have been prevented from being activists. Which is why, when I was a grad student, my professors thought talking to the media was something you did if you had nothing better to do.
But the field has become more supportive of people wanting to reach out to the public. Now there is a crop of scientists who are quite media savvy. And this sea change is almost institutionalized. The National Science Foundation, which is the biggest granting agency, requires a significant [application] section on public outreach to expand scientific knowledge beyond the academic realm. Scientists now are supposed to be active in getting the message out.
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LAW, BUSINESS, AND POLICY
Nudging People Towards Solutions
The law is shaping the parameters of the permissible, and that makes a sustainable future more possible, says David Hunter, WCL, director of the program on International and Comparative Environmental Law.
The term “sustainability” reflects an emphasis on trying to more explicitly integrate or reconcile environmental issues with the economy, with an emphasis on future generations. The law, even when punitive, is shaping sustainable practice, shaping what is acceptable and not acceptable in practice. Something like an environmental impact assessment is a deliberate way to force or urge companies to do this integration and evaluate the environmental impact of their behavior.
I tell students that the law has to set the incentive structure so engineers and technical people can come up with the right solutions. If the question we’re asking ourselves is, “How can we move a family of four to the movie theatre?” the answer is, “Today’s automobile.” If the question is, “How can we move the family of four to the movie theatre without greenhouse emissions?” that’s a different set of questions.
The law can shape the questions. It can do that with punitives or through setting up structure. My particular field has to do with setting priorities and creating structures for international cooperation to support technology transfer or financial assistance [for environmental solutions], and in that respect, the law can be facilitating.
We really have transformed the global economy with respect to CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons] and other substances. That’s a very clear example of where an international regime helped address a specific environmental problem—and that, incidentally, was done with a pretty high compliance rate by developed countries and a deliberate effort to help developing countries meet the requirements with technology transfer and assistance. We have to separate those [countries] that are unwilling to comply, versus those that are unable to comply. For a lot of developing parties, it’s not a matter of unwillingness, but they don’t have the governance and institutional structures to do so.
It’s hard to compare what the situation would be without these laws and treaties. Yes, we see a lot of violations—but murder is against the law, and look at the murder rate. Laws will always have violations. However, most countries comply with most international law most of the time.
I think everybody recognizes now that climate change is the dominant issue and is going to be the dominant issue in international environmental law. The debate in science has been over for a decade, but it’s now over in the popular press as well. Everyone is now resigned as to the need to address it to some extent. The states are starting to address it, and the inevitability of carbon regulation means companies are starting to deal with it. The cities are doing things, Al Gore is out there, and even Exxon-Mobil is starting to make overtures. You see proposals in the Senate and House, some of which are quite strong. Europe is moving forward in quite serious ways. On every level, you see reasons for optimism.
At the law school, we held a conference this fall that we made carbon neutral by investing in carbon offsets to cover how far people traveled. A couple of organizations have a calculation to show how much it costs to remove a ton of carbon. So we had people fill out forms about how they traveled and calculated what it took for them to get here and to keep the lights on and serve them dinner. We didn’t get all the economists in the world together to get it exactly right, but we made the effort, rounded it up, and made a donation to go to a forestry project or solar power or investment in biofuels.
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Doing Well by Doing Good
There’s a profit to be made from sustainability, says Kathleen Getz, Kogod,an expert on global corporate citizenship.
Business looks at sustainability as an opportunity to reduce expenses. Some look at it for growing revenue, but for the most part environmental waste is just a cost for them, so businesses practice sustainability in a self-interested way. For instance, we throw away a lot of paper. Recycling is a great idea, but it costs more than not using the paper in the first place. It costs more to the environment and more to the business. So storing things electronically saves money.
If you want to take the idea of waste further, think of a manufacturing company. Anything that goes out of a smokestack has some other use. Whether it’s carbon or some other effluent, there’s another company out there that can probably use it as an input. A chemical engineer would say there are ways to get just about anything if you’re willing to spend the money for it. Despite the expenses associated with cleaning up and reusing effluents and the technological limits at this point, companies will work to figure out ways to make it cost efficient. They would rather reuse or sell than waste. If it goes up into the air, they’re not making money on it.
Another thing businesses are doing is finding ways to use less energy. For example, some companies have to heat things a lot. If they dump water that’s clean but hot into a stream, that’s bad for fish. If they can get government permission to use that hot water to generate heat in offices rather than buying power from the power company or get the power company to buy it back, they can save money. One challenge to these efforts is getting regulatory agreement, because electric utility companies are powerful in most states, and it’s costly for them in terms of increasing their operational complexity if they have to buy back. At some point, however, increasing complexity may be less costly than buying raw power, given the price of oil.
Over the last decade or so, the strongest thing that’s happened in terms of regulation of environmental issues is what’s called regulation by incentive. Companies are permitted to buy and sell what amounts to pollution allowances. At first it seems counterintuitive that they can buy the right to pollute. But what happens is that companies who can most easily reduce their pollution have an incentive to do so, and companies that have a harder time because of the business they’re in aren’t penalized. What that does is take advantage of the marketplace. It’s a growing effort, and environmental groups like it as well, because it gets them the quickest results.
At AU we’re trying to figure out how to purchase energy from sustainable sources like wind power, and we obviously have a huge recycling program. But we do use a lot of paper. In my office I try to reuse paper. It takes a collective effort, but everyone can do their little bit.
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Encouraging Environmentally Benign Behaviors
Managing for sustainability is a greater challenge than just punishing the polluters. But it's important for the eco-critics, from universities to government agencies, to model the right behavior, says Robert Durant, SPA.
The major trend in public environmental policy has been the movement from command and control regulation toward a focus on market-based incentives. It starts with the premise that there are behaviors we need to change in order to get better environmental protection. Presently those problems are very different from the set of problems we had in the “environmental decade” of the 1970s. Then the focus was primarily on single polluting sources, [say] a polluting factory.
We’ve made great progress along those lines. Today we look at a more dispersed population of potential polluters, such as agricultural runoff from multiple farms, so-called “nonpoint” pollution. Our goal is to try to alter basic decisions, such as applying excessive amounts of pesticides to crops, through market-based incentives. The idea is to minimize “perverse incentives,” eliminate the subsidies that encourage [polluting] behavior, and introduce new incentives to [encourage] environmentally benign approaches.
For example, we’re involved in a push toward ethanol. While there are benefits in that, there’s fear that there will be incentives to grow more and more corn, closer to streams that might then carry pesticides into waterways. Anything we [policy makers] try to do has unanticipated consequences. We have a kind of rule of thumb in policy: try not to make it worse than you started off with.
Ideally what you’d like to do is get the true social costs of production into the price of a product. It has proven very difficult to get rid of subsidies, given the power of constituencies and interest groups. But I think the good news is that various forces at work, particularly globalization, have led to stricter environmental regulation. The international standards movement, for example, promotes the idea that it’s in the best interest of business, particularly those doing business on a worldwide scale, to take environmental concerns into consideration.
You don’t want to run 12 different production lines to build a car in order to comply with a whole host of different government rules and regulations. So as governments get more aggressive in setting standards, industry tries to head that off with the idea that it’s better to begin some sort of self-regulation than to allow the political process to run its course and be caught unprepared.
Companies are also getting pressure because they don’t want to meet 50 different state standards. We call it the California Effect. So if a large segment of population, of the potential market, is adopting standards stricter than the national government—if you can get California, the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, to adopt stricter standards—it becomes imperative for industry to say, “We’d rather have single national standards where you have a level playing field.”
Finally, there’s the movement coming from social investors, and more and more companies doing business on a large scale have to take those factors into consideration. You’re starting to get a demand for those companies to lay out how they are anticipating what regulations are coming in the future—whether they’re being good citizens. So large pension funds, for example, nationally and internationally are beginning to demand information about how, how much, and to what extent corporations are anticipating environmental problems. Businesses that “go green” are driven by hard and fast market decisions.
Universities can play a major role. How can you expect to hold private actors accountable when your behavior exhibits what you’re trying to regulate, or the same thing you are criticizing? The new SIS building says symbolically that sustainability is important. I think it’s incumbent on a university to take the lead. top |
