The emphasis that the environmental community and the United Nations has placed on "sustainable development" made it the international slogan of the 1990s.
"Sustainable development" is used in two quite different senses by the development community. The first is project specific and the second is process or condition specific. The first generally takes an article before the phrase, as in "a sustainable development", and the second generally does not.
Let us consider briefly the first meaning, that is, the meaning of "a sustainable development", as it is used for example by the World Bank. In this context, it refers either to an economic or an institutional calculation.1 In the former, one question is whether the project under consideration can "sustain" a careful economic analysis when it is compared with alternative ways in which the monies that will be spent on it might be spent. A second question is whether the project can "pay for itself". For example, if a dam is planned for irrigation, one might say it was sustainable if those using the water are expected to receive enough added return from the use of the irrigation water that they would be able over a period of years to pay back the cost of the project out of their increased earnings (high project standard) or would be able to pay for the maintenance of the system (low project standard). In relation to an institutional "calculation", the questions are primarily maintenance questions, but could include environmental hazards such as the probability of rapid silting or a landslide destroying a new facility. Perhaps the best example of this use of sustainability is in relation to a road construction project. Here, the first question to ask is whether the new road is likely to be maintained, that is, will anybody be responsible for it? This will require answers to additional questions such as " "Do those responsible have the capability?" "Will they have the funds?" and "Will they have the motivation?" The last question may come back to an economic question, such as, "Will the advantages of having the new road be sufficient to make the society put out the effort (or funds) to maintain it?" If the answers to such questions are negative, then the project is "not sustainable". In this project specific sense, sustainable development has a potentially clear and useful meaning. We will not be concerned with this meaning in the remainder of this paper.2
It is with the more general concept of process- or condition-specific sustainable development that we will be concerned below. It is the ascription of "sustainability" or "nonsustainability" to a general process or condition that needs to be more carefully thought through.
The importance of the general concept for the Indian policy discussion is suggested by its prominence in the government's "National Conservation Strategy and Policy Statement on Environment and Development".3 Unfortunately, the document does not define the concept beyond declaring that "we must ensure that the demand on the environment . . . does not exceed its carrying capacity for the present as well as the future".
For an example of recent literature that attempts to develop the concept further, let us consider the special issue of The Indian Journal of Public Administration that was devoted to the question of sustainable development in 1993. This relatively thick issue contains discussion of a wide range of topics relating to environment, culture, social justice, economic theory, administration, community participation, forests, tribes, health, and so on. Hardly a topic that graces the editorial pages of India's newspapers escaped the attention of the authors. This included, of course, those questions of personal, social, and international morality that are so frequently a topic of editorial wisdom.
Efforts to define the concept in this issue were similarly wide ranging. The editor, T.N. Chaturvedi, clearly thought of the term in the most general terms. He considered "sustainable development" to be an intellectual successor to plain "development" (or perhaps "economic development"), and "development", in turn, to have been a successor to "growth".4 One need not quarrel with this brief history of popular terminology.
However, the concerns he addresses are hardly new. It has been a very long time since any society or group of planners simply pursued growth or development without the use of verbal and policy qualifiers. In the United States, for example, development has long been qualified by environmental concerns. The extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and the near extinction of the American Bison nearly 100 years ago, and the creation of a "dust bowl" in the southern Plains in the 1930s served as wake-up calls for American society. The American National Park movement began well back in the nineteenth century, while American national and state forests were established early in this century. The first movement was preservationist, the second conservationist. Such movements have had the support of many nongovernmental pressure groups and an increasing body of law. The often maligned recreational hunters and fishermen have had an important role in the conservation movement since its inception, particularly in the establishment of wildlife reserves and the improvement of fresh water fish stocks. The cumulative results of the combined efforts of many groups with many differing ideologies have been significant: the United States now has more forest cover than it did in the late nineteenth century, and many species of plants, animals, and birds have recovered from near extinction.
Many articles in the IJPA special issue attempted to give the concept a somewhat more precise meaning. For example, R. P. Misra offered what he called "ecological perspectives". He began his discussion with reference to the Brundtland Commission report, "Our Common Future". Here sustainable development was defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the future. He then proceeded to cast a wide definitional net. Sustainable development, he informs us, is different than general development in that:
1. It cannot be achieved in the short run; 2. It is based on equality and justice; 3. Its approach is balanced and integrative; 4. It has a common goal but different routes; 5. It accepts nature not only as a resource for development but also as the earthly womb for the survival and development of humankind; and 6. It is participatory in nature.
One can hardly quarrel with these desiderata; they should characterize most general policy discussions (although the "earthly womb" reference might be rephrased). The author goes on to pepper his discussion with such current expressions as the "carrying capacity" of ecosystems, or their imminent "destruction". He then moves on to discuss an ecologically resplendent past in which Indians lived in harmony with nature and one another.5 Many other articles in this issue made similar points. Misra is quoted here because his contribution represents one of the fuller attempts at definition.
It is not appropriate at this point to quarrel with the details of such discussion, but it is appropriate to suggest that it represents a failure to take seriously the concept that is being examined. And a serious examination must be the starting point of policy analysis. Anyone who examines a currently fashionable concept should begin with a critical stance rather than a posture of uncritical embracement. One should think of any fashionable concept as probably akin to an emperor with no clothes, or perhaps only a very skimpy covering. What, for example, do "human rights" really mean? Who initially proposed that these were universal? Who has had a mandate to continually expand the list of rights? How do we, spokespersons for the elites of the world, have the presumption to insist that women should be in every respect the social and economic equals of men? Or that people should not be stoned to death for adultery? When do so- called human rights conflict with one another? When does respect for human rights actually harm other major human interests, and what should be the balance? It should be clear that one cannot deal adequately with such questions by repeating the litany that we all must respect human rights.
Similarly, a discussion of sustainability should begin by questioning critically what may be meant by the term "sustainable development", if anything is actually meant at all. It should ask whether the Brundtland commission was in important respects misguided, just as the Limits to Growth discussion ultimately was shown to be misguided.6 They must differentiate those aspects of the concept that appear to have strong evidence or argument behind them and those which do not. Since sustainability is essentially a concept related to the history of humanity, it would seem incumbent on anyone dealing with it to attempt to show which developments in human history, that is, changes in particular environments and ecologies, appear to have been sustainable and which appear not to have been, and why. To raise such questions one need not have substantial evidence, but should at least be able to suggest what sorts of evidence should be looked for in such an undertaking. It is not enough to repeat that dangers lie ahead if we do not repent. An argument must be developed about the past and it must be shown that this argument applies when we consider the present and the future.
The foregoing suggests that it is past time we (that is, the intellectual community concerned with such matters) take time out to consider what we might mean by the term "sustainable development" and the extent to which it can be used as a useful guide to evaluation and action.
In understanding the meaning of words or phrases, it is not generally useful to go back to their original etymologies, but it is necessary to consider the often multiple meanings that are being placed on them by our contemporaries, and what might be their potential meanings in the light of this usage.
We begin our exploration by noting that the word "development" has meaning both as a process and a condition. The model for most people's understanding of the word is probably "child development". The child goes through a growth process that if successful results in the production of an adult. We might say that the resulting mature person is "developed". Similarly, a country goes through a process of change, the development process, that produces in the end a "developed country".
The difference between these two cases is, of course, that development for a country is an ever-receding target. To our modern way of thinking, a country is not expected ever to reach stasis. It is expected to continue to change, and, optimistically, this change will continue to be positive. However, recent usage implies that the expression "developed country" can be used to refer to a fixed condition, much like "mature adult". A "developed country" in late twentieth century usage appears to be defined as a country that has gone through the industrial revolution and the demographic transition. After growing relatively rapidly for several generations, its GNP/Capita growth rate has slowed down. It has long since attained virtually 100% literacy. Its health indicators match or nearly match those of the "most advanced" countries. Such a country is imagined to have reached a developmental plateau in many measures; future movement above this plateau is expected to be increasingly difficult (due to material satiation, the genetically determined limits of human life, etc.).
Therefore, by "sustained development" we may mean either that a process of growth and change that is underway will continue on to its goal (the achievement of the "developed" appellation) or that a condition already attained somewhere along the continuum from undeveloped to developed can be maintained without backsliding. When speaking of a developed society, most people mean by "sustainable" the maintenance of an "advanced" condition; when speaking of a developing society, most people mean by "sustainable" the maintenance of its forward momentum.
The discussion of sustained development is further complicated by the fact that it is used to refer to both social and physical environments. We may call these the two central aspects of the sustainability concept.
The physical environmental aspect is the more obvious. To search for an answer to the question of whether current or developing conditions are sustainable we ask whether a country (or sometimes the world) has the resources to maintain either the desired condition or the continuance of the desired process. By "physical resources", we mean both the conventional or "old" concept of resources and the extended or "new" concept that includes resources such as clean air and water.
The discussion of the social aspect of sustainability brings us immediately onto much more slippery ground. Here the least controversial subconcept might be that of "human resources". In the modern context a less developed society may be said to be not able to sustain its development if it lacks a sufficiently educated or trained population to employ as it attempts to move toward a more advanced state. However, the concept of social sustainability is often used to cover a much wider list of social desiderata. For example, many writers imply that without a certain level of social justice a society cannot continue in its present condition — or continue to rise on the development curve if it is not yet classified as developed.
Let us consider these aspects in turn.
The stronger and more plausible arguments are those that relate to the physical aspects of sustainability. We know that certain societies developed in such a way that they ended up destroying their physical basis for existence, and so declined (or suffered some other catastrophe). These were isolated cases, but offer analogies to current concerns. Perhaps the most famous case is that of Easter Island (Rapa nui).7 Its development over a few hundred years by a Polynesian people apparently ended with overpopulation and environmental overutilization that included most dramatically the destruction of its woodlands. As a result, the soil was degraded, and the seafaring Polynesians who had come to the islands in wooden boats and had depended on them for their fisheries lost their ability to go to sea. The result was starvation, endemic warfare, cannibalism, and population collapse. The unique culture disintegrated. (The people couldn't leave and new cultural inputs became impossible until the coming of Western sailing ships.) Because of population pressures, many other peoples, such as the Mayans of Mexico and Central America, came to increasingly limit their agricultural production because of population pressure to the highest calorie crop available (maize in the Mayan case). Unfortunately, a single, high calorie crop is unlikely to provide a sufficient range of nutrients. In the Mayan case, as a result, the people became progressively smaller and weaker. In addition, a single crop leaves a people much more exposed to the possibility of a disastrous crop failure than does a wider range of food sources.8 This exposure was an important reason for the fate that overtook the Irish in the 1840s after the introduction of the highly productive potato had led to a population explosion. The island had become "overpopulated" (in terms of its available technology) and overdependent on the potato. Subsequently, repeated crop failures due to a new potato blight led to massive starvation and emigration. The population of Ireland today is still less than in 1840.
The foregoing suggests two classes of historical examples. Many others might be cited. For example, many believe that on a larger scale and over thousands of years, overgrazing in the Middle East greatly diminished its agricultural potential and changed its climate.
The relevance of these cases of past error is unclear, however, because they occurred in a preindustrial world in which the technologies of the time evolved extremely gradually. Technological progress was so slow that a people could easily back itself into a corner in a few generations — particularly if it were relatively isolated on an island.
However, we now live in a world in which physical resources by the old definition are nearly always fungible. As one resource becomes less available or its continued exploitation comes to be regarded as having too many undesirable side-effects (such as the chlorofluorocarbons), societies turn to other resources or other processes. As a result, nearly every prediction in the twentieth century that a country or the world was about to run out of a particular physical resource has turned out to be wrong, or in the end irrelevant. This has been particularly true for predictions of the imminent exhaustion of petroleum supplies. Yet today, it is petroleum that is perhaps the most important critical resource that is now projected to actually (and finally) be exhausted within a few generations. Fortunately, many technologies are available to surmount this problem: the simplest approach is to shift to coal, a resource with at least a century or more to go before exhaustion in India,9 and several centuries worldwide.
Physical resources understood in terms of the new definition pose more of a problem. Yet on the individual country level we can now see that they are solvable. There are many examples in recent years of the restoration of particular environments, particularly the restoration of the flow and quality of water.10 On a more general scale, several wealthy countries have been able to stop their rise in energy use and to reduce the pollutants in their air, water, and soil in spite of continuing growth in GNP/capita. For example, The Netherlands, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and a continuing magnet for immigration, is managing to improve its environmental and social indicators across the board — and expects to do even better in the future. (See the accompanying appendix, Sustainability: The Netherlands Experience). On a worldwide basis, this kind of environmental improvement alongside continuing economic growth has been retarded because many fast growing countries do not have the wealth, or, in some cases, the will to make the efforts that are necessary. When they are ready, there are technological solutions to even their most serious local environmental problems. Some worldwide problems may be more intractable. Probably the most serious long-term, negative environmental trend is the global increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, evidently the increase can be arrested by a switch to non-carbon energy sources such as solar and wind. The primary constraints on the general use of these technologies today is the marginally greater cost of using these renewable resources than that of continuing to utilize petroleum and coal-based technologies.
As an aside, it should be repeated that the "Limits to Growth" argument based on the idea that individual countries or the world as a whole is faced with a steadily worsening environment goes against most of the evidence. It was true that in some instances early industrialization had significant effects on the sustainability of life (producing, for example, toxic air in the London of the 1890s because of the use of soft coal). However, in recent years the only case we know of in which rapidly industrializing countries degraded the sustainability of human life, on balance, is that of parts of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union discussed below. This was no doubt due to the fact that the universal drive to enhance production in industrializing societies failed to be balanced by organizations of workers and citizens that could complain effectively about deteriorating conditions through a free press and elected representatives. Otherwise, all generalizations relating to the effect of environmental degradation on human health in the recent past (and this clamor has been with us for at least 40 years) can be shown to be most doubtful by simple reference to steadily declining infantile and general mortality rates. The same can certainly be said for India. Medical care is not the primary reason for such improvement. It is improvement in environmental quality, including sanitation, rather than medical care that is primarily responsible for improvement in human survival in recent years.11 The comparison of Indian rates of population growth before 1920 and rates since then suggest, then, that the environment today is much more conducive to human life than at any time in the historical past.12
A different type of new resource concern is the preservation of biodiversity. The argument for the seriousness of the decline in natural biodiversity has several strands. The most general is the idea that evolution proceeds through taking advantage of the multifarious niches offered by evolving and differentiating environments. The result has been the creation of an enormous "bank" of life forms that can be drawn upon when confronting changing conditions (such as the introduction of a destructive blight that will destroy a crop on which a people depends). This bank also offers humanity an as yet only partially explored treasury of life forms that can be used for cross-breeding to produce new forms or for the extraction of substances of medical value. A second argument for biodiversity is area specific. It is raised when it is alleged that a particular environmental change, such as the draining of a swamp or the clearing of a forest, will reduce the number of species present in an area, or will lead to the extinction of particular species that are only present in this area.
Let us consider the second argument first. It is obvious that the expansion of humanity has repeatedly changed the biota of particular regions. The destruction of forests and the clearing of swamps that made possible contemporary European landscapes no doubt had this result. The arrival of human beings and animals associated with human beings (such as rats and dogs) seriously disrupted the biota of many islands. In some cases, there was no doubt simplification and reduction in diversity. But as the environmentalist and biologist Rene Dubos points out, in many cases, including that of the Hawaiian Islands, these changes actually led to a more diverse and richer environment than existed before. Human intervention has often created a diversity of micro-habitats that could not previously exist, and it has often led to the introduction of new species that created a new ecology at least as favorable for human beings and natural organisms as that which existed before.13 In any event, it is difficult to show that changes of biota in most cases had catastrophic results for the human beings involved. Often a former ecology (that is, a former set of ecological relationships) was not "sustained", but human life was sustained and prospered on the basis of a new ecology — which might be simpler or more complex depending on the balance of extinguished and introduced species.
The more general argument for the importance of biodiversity overall, particularly that provided by the remaining tropical forests, is more serious. However, one suspects that its seriousness has been greatly undermined by the possibilities opened up by genetic engineering. New species and organisms, even new biological tools for fighting disease, will tend increasingly to be "engineered" organisms or organic products rather than those provided in biological repositories based on past evolution. These repositories will continue for some years to provide the "leads" for such engineering and the raw material, but they will become increasingly unimportant in themselves.
The primary reason for preserving biodiversity, then, becomes a matter of human values rather than human necessity. This is an argument that cannot be refuted by appeal to evidence. It is based on the assertion that we should not as a race lightly destroy what evolution has wrought. In many ways this is similar to, and perhaps as compelling as, the argument for preserving cultural diversity discussed below. One can be sympathetic to both arguments without concluding that there is a strong rational or positivistic argument for either.
Thus, although one can make a plausible sounding case for lack of sustainability resulting from the several threats to both old and new physical resources that development often produces, it is a very difficult argument, given the alternatives continually opened up by an expanding technology.
The argument whether a society will prove socially sustainable is even more treacherous: we simply do not know enough to say that a social system is going to develop or last. Nor can we make a convincing case that a certain social (political, cultural, economic) system will or will not prove sustainable. We know of past disasters that were related, at least in part, to non-sustainable social, political, or economic systems. The Mongols once conquered half the "known world". But their horizons were so limited by a culture that had been developed on a simple basis of nomadism and warfare that they were unable to do more than destroy the more developed peoples and societies they conquered. Some areas, particularly in Central Asia, were so thoroughly devastated that they never recovered. The bloodthirsty Aztecs had reached a peak of power before the arrival of the Spanish, but they appear to have so alienated the surrounding peoples that they had subjugated that the Spanish found many willing allies among them. With their assistance, the Spanish easily destroyed what the Aztecs had not already destroyed of Mexican Civilization. In our own time, the Soviet Union and its satellites developed a political-economic system that in the end alienated its own people to such a degree that it collapsed without firing a shot. The failure could particularly be seen in the fact that the USSR and several of its eastern European satellites had the distinction after 1970 of being the only "developed" countries in the world with declining life expectancy for men.14 The failure of its system to avoid developing horrendous pollution problems, especially in Eastern Europe, was in itself good evidence for the lack of sustainability of the Soviet system.
We remember that Marx predicted that capitalist society was socially unsustainable, that it would be replaced by a more egalitarian society. He was both right and wrong. He was wrong in that "the revolution" he anticipated never occurred in the industrialized world — it only occurred in preindustrial societies such as those of Russia, China, and Vietnam. He was right in the sense that the capitalism characteristic of his time did change into a softer, more egalitarian capitalism under the influence of new ideas and the spread of democratic institutions. Today, both Marxists and non- Marxists often assert that India cannot survive with its present injustices. But then it will not have to, for as time goes by these injustices will be ameliorated. The consideration of the social aspect of sustainability does not lead us to imagine discrete solutions analogous to the "technological fixes" that we proposed in the discussion of the physical environment above, but we can predict that positive social evolution will occur under the pressure of changing ideas. In this sense, to say something is "socially unsustainable" appears to say little more than that it will change as ideas change.
To form an idea of the broad range of social conditions said to be necessary for social sustainability, we need only to refer back to the special issue of the IJPA referred to above. However, for our purposes here, let consider the following list of "dimensions" of "Sustainable Human Development" proposed by the United Nations Development Programme in India:
In considering this list, we will note that items (5) and (7) overlap with questions of physical sustainability. Item (6) suggests rightly that development cannot proceed in any event unless economic policies are such that growth is allowed and fostered. However, since it is the presumption of the general sustainability argument that too much attention has been paid in the past to strictly economic questions or narrow economic concerns, this aspect of the concept lies outside the scope of our present attention.
Social sustainability would seem, then, from the UNDP perspective to require emphasis on "people" or cultural diversity, the elimination of poverty (and more generally economic injustice), the advancement of women and child development (education, health etc.), and emphasis on employment. Others would add items to this list. For example, one might consider development to be sustainable only if a broad spectrum of modern human rights were promoted, such as those of freedom of expression or freedom from arbitrary imprisonment.
In a longer historical perspective, there is no simple way in which we can determine which, if any, of these desiderata are actually necessary for a developed condition or a process of development to continue. Certainly nations have developed in the past. For example, Rome, Greece, China, India, and Western Europe had periods of substantial development long before the twentieth century. Yet at the time of their early development, there was little concern for the equality of women or the elimination of poverty. Indeed, "poverty will always be with us" is an aphorism that might be considered to have had almost universal currency until very recently.
This being the case, what could it possibly mean to say that sustainability requires the elimination of poverty or the attainment of gender equality? The literature suggests it might mean one of three things. First, it might mean that it is assumed that the poor and women "will not take it any longer". The implication is that in the future they will block development by refusing to cooperate with those who wish it, or that they will revolt against a society that denies them justice. Secondly, it might mean that regardless of the intentions of disadvantaged groups a society that does not grant these equalities will not develop as well or as quickly as one that does grant them (for example, because a larger percentage of people will be uneducated, or women will not be sufficiently involved in reducing fertility rates). In a world of competitive economies this might ultimately mean no development at all. Thirdly, it might mean that unless a society conquers poverty and improves the lot of women no one will have the right in the light of the modern consciousness to speak of "development" having occurred. Countries without these desirable traits could not then ever be defined as "developed". This would be proof by definition.
Let us look a little closer at one particular aspect of this listing of the dimensions of sustainability — respect for cultural diversity. This again could mean several things. It could mean simply that people should not insult others because they live in terms of different cultures; that is, it could simply mean intergroup tolerance. Or it could mean that the larger society (or its elite, or foreign institutions) will not in the course of promoting development interfere with the cultural traditions of the peoples it is trying to help.
This last seems like a plausible meaning, but unfortunately we cannot rationally accept it. Developers (read modernizers) cannot accept it primarily because if they are to attain other aspects of what they regard as necessary for social sustainability, it will often be impossible to respect all the deeply held beliefs and practices of a developing people. To take an obvious example, many peoples believe men to be superior to women, and on the basis of this belief prescribe a variety of secondary beliefs and practices that reinforce the inequality. (It can be argued that these beliefs and practices represent only the male culture of the people concerned and that there is always a parallel female culture that rejects the idea of essential inequality. However, in most traditional societies it appears as though the women have been "brainwashed" into accepting much of this male culture as their culture as well.) Examples such as the inequality of rights to divorce in Muslim cultures or female infanticide in many cultures are numerous. Another common premodern belief is that people should marry and have as many children as possible. This is certainly enjoined in the Christian Bible. This is not, however, our modern belief. Since it does not accord with what most believe development requires today, that it is not in fact a "sustainable belief"; developers are bound to want to change the belief more than to respect it.
So, if respect for cultural diversity does not mean noninterference with premodern beliefs, values, and practices when they get in the way of our modern ones, what might it mean? Many Western intellectuals, and many Indian, have come to see this aspect of sustainability in terms of preserving as many cultures as possible. In other words, while they would not say that we should accept and work with all the details of all cultures, they would insist that those who promote development should strive by their actions to preserve as many cultures as possible in the name of preserving cultural diversity (as well as respect for group rights). This is a laudable goal in the abstract. It has, however, two problems that we must consider in our search for the meaning of sustainability.
First, it is a reasonable speculation in the light of anthropological evidence that part of the story of humanity since it spread over most of the world perhaps 15,000 years ago, has been that of a progressive diminution in the number of cultures in the world at the same time as the number of people has increased. It is, of course, hard to define what is a "different culture"; boundaries are fluid and always changing. However, a conventional and relatively easy way to define cultural boundaries, and thus cultures, is to consider the boundaries of mutual linguistic intelligibility. People who are seen by experts or by themselves to speak different languages are said to have different cultures.
Assuming this as a rough means to "count cultures", it is a common observation that the areas with the widest variety of different languages, even of different families of languages, are those areas that have had the least contact with the rest of the world. These are the areas that a previous generation of anthropologists might have called the "most primitive". The peoples found in California when the first Westerners arrived, or those on the island of New Guinea are good examples.16 Partly, this fact is due to the relative isolation of small groups in the primitive world. Partly it is due to the fact that peoples dependent only on themselves for the requirements of life had little reason to share a common language with their neighbors.
Many reasons for the reduction in the number of human languages can be cited. As formerly isolated peoples with distinct cultures grew in size and developed a more highly structured division of labor, they began to develop trade across cultural boundaries. Specialization led to interdependence. In these new conditions, the opportunity to learn one another's languages and the value of doing so increased. Gradually the peoples of a trading area would abandon their distinctive languages in favor of a common language. Relations of dominance and submission also played a part in the growth of numbers of people speaking the same language. Conquerors frequently sought to impose their language on the conquered, so that ultimately the language of the conquered became extinct, or the languages of conquerors and conquered melded together. The history of the British Isles presents some well-known examples of these processes. The Norman Conquest destroyed the separateness of the Anglo-Saxon English language, while the spread of Anglo-Saxon before and after the Conquest resulted in the progressive decline and even extinction of the Celtic languages formerly spoken in the Isles.
The second problem with arguing for preserving as many cultures as possible is that it conflicts with the commitment of many developers to the rights of individuals to expand their individual horizons. Smaller cultures tend to be destroyed by education and communication, as well as by the movements of individuals toward greater opportunity for themselves and their children. Some of those who campaign for cultural survival often realize this. They wish to reduce contact (for example, by establishing exclusive reserves, or by stopping the building of roads through tribal areas). Others wish to have it both ways: they promote more education and contact and try to counter their effects by attempts to strengthen threatened cultures by such measures as subsidizing translations into their languages and requiring education to be offered in these languages.17 However, either approach may end up looking like an attempt to preserve differences much in the way in which we preserve rare species in zoos.
We must be aware of what we are really talking about when we speak of a minority group or people. "Peoples" are made up of individuals. In our desire to help a people achieve its supposed goal of self- preservation we should not forget this.
The individuals in the groups whose cultures we strive to preserve may see their interests quite differently from the way the cultural survivalist thinks they should define them. They may want the new and disvalue the old on their way to grasping the new. Many Indian parents send their children to English language schools or to overseas schools even if this means a progressive loss of their native languages and cultures. They do this because they feel that the greatest opportunities for their children lie in the English speaking world (even if this "world" be situated in India). On a different level, Urdu speaking parents in India may wish their children to learn Hindi and the Devanagari script even if this means that these children will no longer be able to read the Urdu classics. On still another level, one can be sure that many a parent in the smallest and most backward tribes in India view the opportunities of their children analogously — although for them the outside language may be Bengali or Tamil.
We could argue that respect for cultural diversity is necessary for sustainability for reasons analogous to those suggested above for defending the sustainability arguments associated with women's rights and the rights of the poor. We can argue that the people of other cultures (read: their political and intellectual leaders) will not cooperate with national development efforts unless the nation respects their cultures. They will fight against those who oppress them by trying to change them. However, most of India's thousands of cultural groups have relatively small populations. From a practical viewpoint, it may be less costly for India to override cultural differences rather than pander to them (an argument harder to make in regard to the poor as a class or women).
There is, then, no reason to suppose that cultural diversity is either a necessary or sufficient condition for development, and therefore to suppose it should be considered an aspect of "sustainability". This is not to say that one should not strive to preserve cultural diversity on the basis of a modern consciousness of what is right and wrong in cultural relationships — which would be adopting a policy position on the basis of a humanistic value judgment akin to what we suggested above as the most defensible basis for a policy in defense of biodiversity.
I am personally fond of the argument that the long-term progress of humanity requires the preservation of diversity. History suggests that cultures "wear out",18 If so, then once the world has reduced its cultural complexity to one culture, it might mean everlasting stasis. Stasis usually eventuates in endless repetition and general decline. Such a decline at high population levels might mean that like the people of Easter Island, the whole world could in its cultural isolation (imposed by universality) no longer sustain the level of life that had been attained. The cultural and technological flexibility that allowed growth and sustainability would have been lost. However, whatever its merits, this is a long-term argument that has little relevance to the question of respect for cultural diversity within the Indian context (which is primarily a question of the degree to which tribals are to be protected against change).
One can conclude, then, that both aspects of sustainability suffer from dependence on argument from propositions that are both hard to understand and hard to defend. Some arguments are plausible; many, particularly in the social area, are not. More generally, whether a condition or growth process can be maintained (sustained) will be known only after the fact. We can argue from plausible assumptions that it will or won't, but we cannot know.
What have we gained from this intellectual diversion? One can conclude, first, that when we speak of sustainable development in a society not yet "developed" by 1990 standards, we mean to say that it is following a course that will maintain its momentum toward the condition of a "developed society". If a society is already developed, then we mean by its sustainability that its condition is capable of being maintained indefinitely. In either case, to say that a system or condition is "unsustainable" is to say that it will change. But by saying it will change, in most cases we should not imply that its growth will cease or that it will slide downhill. We should mean that it must change in a positive way that will allow further movement toward further development or, in the case of a developed society, toward affluent stability. This being the case, one task of politicians, policy planners, and international agencies is simply to get out in front of the change, to note what is happening, and to urge it on in such a way that there is a minimum of friction in the process.
This does not imply that those who subscribe to the more popular theses regarding the nonsustainability of societies without justice, adequate consideration of environmental factors, etc. do not play a positive role in working toward the political consensus that governs policy in India. They do. Gadflies are always necessary for society to function effectively. However, they would be much more effective in this function if they analyzed more carefully the issues they faced and the terms that they use to consider them. Well defined questions of sustainability could be examined in terms of past experience and projected trends. Such an analysis could examine the conditions under which a society, even in our age of progress, might fail to respond adequately to a particular physical or social problem, and thus allow its development to be compromised. In this way, a serious examination of nonsustainability might contribute effectively to the policy discussion.
They might also start to take on what I regard as a more daunting and intellectually challenging task, and one that is too easily overlooked in the fashionable repetition of the easy criticisms of what are likely to turn out to be the passing social and physical difficulties of the 1990s. It is to try through historical or analytical examination to determine those still undiscovered dead ends or traps in social and physical evolution into which our political, economic, and cultural leaders can lead us unwittingly through the devising and implementation of solutions to current problems. The author's conclusion is that at present we simply do not know what will prove in the end to be unsustainable, nor do we know how to find out. What conditions are truly unsustainable are unlikely to be found in the current fears of our environmental or social critics, for the very existence of their criticism is already moving society toward the resolution of these problems. Marx failed in part because Marx succeeded. If the future of a society or of humanity proves ultimately to be unsustainable, it will be for reasons that lie off the trend lines of the 1990s discussion.
1. For this paragraph, see Elinor Ostrom, Larry Schroeder, and Susan Wynne, Institutional Incentives and Sustainable Development: Infrastructure Policies in Perspective (Boulder: Westview, 1993).
2. It would be possible to ask some of the physical or social sustainability questions considered below of a specific project. However, since it is unlikely that any specific project will "destroy" a country's environment or cause a collapse of its social system, questioning a particular project in this way would seem to have only metaphorical or exemplary significance.
3. Government of India, Ministry of Environment and Forests, June, 1992.
4. "Editorial" in Indian Journal of Public Administration (IJPA), "Special Issue on Towards Sustainable Development of Society — Imperatives and Perspectives", July-September, 1993 (XXXIX, 3), Editor T. N. Chaturvedi, pages ix - xii.
5. R. P. Misra, "Sustainable Development: The Ecological Perspectives". IJPA, XXXIX, 3, July-September, 1993, pages 254 - 264.
6. Cf. Jay Forrester, World Dynamics (Cambridge: Wright-Allen, 1971); John Gribben, Future Worlds (London: Abacus, 1979).
7. See The New York Times, 24/1/84, III, 2:3; and 13/1/87, III, 1:1; and 6/2/93, I, 2:1.
8. On the general picture, see Ester Boserup, Population and Technological Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), and Mark Nathan Cohen, Health and the Rise of Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
9. For India, see P. D. Malgavkar, "Industrial Policy and Prospects 2001 A.D." (New Delhi: Centre for Policy Research, 1988), pages 58-62.
10. Cf. Rene Dubos, "The Resilience of Ecosystems: An Ecological View of Environmental Restoration" (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1978).
11. See discussion and references in R. D. Gastil, Progress: Critical Thinking about Historical Change (Westport: Praeger, 1993), pages 91-95.
12. For some figures showing the almost flat growth between 1000 and 1600 A.D. see I.G. Simmons, The Ecology of Natural Resources (London: Arnold, 1974).For a discussion of the more recent experience see a paper that originally accompanied this essay: "The Basic Paradigm for India's Development".
13. Rene Dubos, "The Resilience of Ecosystems", pages 14-20.
14. Nicholas Eberstadt, The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule (Washington: AEI Press, 1995), pages 76-82.
15. See "Sustainable Human Development: Closing the Gap", UNDP/India, March 1995.
16. For a more general discussion of this phenomenon see Mario Pei, The Story of Language (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1949), pages 384-391.
17. Cf. the implications of the discussion by K. Mohan Rao, "Ethnic Identity and Demographic Trends Among Tribes of Andhra Pradesh" in Social Change, issue on "Status of Tribals in India", 23, 2&3, June-September, 1993, pages 147-158 (especially pages 151 and 154).
18. See A. L. Kroeber, Configurations of Culture Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944).
Sustainability: The Netherlands Experience
