How long can we sustain the unsustainable?
The rapid increase in the world's population as a whole, the presence of many people that live below the level of any equitable living standards, the emergence of large and rapidly developing economies such as India's and China's, and the profligate model of the American lifestyle (and to a slightly lesser extent, the Western European) have all contributed to concern over the "carrying capacity" of the planet. How many people can obtain adequate amounts of clean water, food, and shelter, let alone automobiles, computers, and a constant supply of consumer goods? The environmental group Bioregional.com calculates that if everyone on earth adopted the British lifestyle, it would require three planets to support. The American lifestyle would require seven planets …. but we still only have one. Will wars and catastrophes be the only way to know when those limits have been reached?
The growing awareness of environmental consequence, and the sense that "we can't go on this way" without serious adverse consequences for future generations underlies the development of the term sustainability. The expression was first put into widespread political use by the United Nation's World Commission on the Environment and Development, which issued a report in 1987 known as the Brundtland Report, named after its chairperson, Gro Harlem Brundtand, the former prime minister of Norway.
Although it draws on scientific study and environmental forecasts, the concept of sustainability is a political and moral term, like justice or freedom, and the history of sustainability as as much social, political, and economic as it is environmental. Sustainability addresses three E’s: Environment, Economy, and Equity. (see Caradonna, Sustainability) It is an explicit attempt at establishing a framework for "environmental justice" and equity in living standards. Sustainability's primary moral injunction applies to inter-generational equity, "to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." But the Brundtland commission also addressed equity within generations, not just between them. It regarded widespread poverty as a significant contributing factor to environmental degradation and as an obstacle to long-term global stability.
The term sustainability thus contains arguments that are both political / ethical as well as environmental, and both set of questions are deeply contested. Who can morally endorse the unsustainable? But how can sustainability be gauged or measured? And how can it be implemented? Through the actions of individuals?
Much of the creative and productive design energies in developed countries go towards consumer goods that are aimed at individuals: clothing, automobiles, personal electronic devices (i-pods, i-macs, i-phones). As many critics of consumer society have pointed out, obsolescence is routinely built into design. Every consumer purchase adds to the waste heap, and the consumerist economy relies on excess and waste to create a "hedonic treadmill" of new desires, new commodities, and a perpetual process of making and remaking self-identity on symbolic consumption that relies heavily on fashion and novelty. The symbolic aspects of consumption have come to overshadow the use of goods to meet basic needs, but in the process the material impact of consumption is increasing. The seductive images of the consumer lifestyle are disseminated worldwide, through the entire spectrum of advertising, branding, and entertainment. The culture of design is a balancing act that invokes the disinterested pleasures of art while serving a system of ever-increasing consumption, often associated with the latest developments in technology. The design professions: from fashion designers, product designers, to graphic designers, interior designers, and architects are deeply invested in the constant creation of those images and in the stimulation of the desires they incite. Most design serves primarily as a mark of luxury and status, and the arrival of a self-conscious design culture is a sign of success in the emerging economies. Today, the pleasures of design provide a vision of the "good life" that is environmentally and socially unsustainable, and raise further suspicions that calls for sustainability and "green" consumption come primarily from those who seek to hold on to their benefits, those whose lifestyle is basically "not up for negotiation,"to use George H.W. Bush's expression.
Most designers serve the economies of the developed world, because that is where the money is, and design clearly flourishes under conditions of abundance. As much as elegance and economy are praised as aesthetic virtues, extravagance, display, and affluence saturate the "images of desire" created by designers. Their professional models are linked to the automobile industry, to the clothing and sports equipment industries, to commercial furniture and houseware design, or to the creation of unique and expensive pieces of architecture. The mediated world of branding, celebrity, and style support and disseminate this model of design in the developed world.
But clearly the world contains many people that live below the level of any equitable living standards, as well as those who live well above them. What could the design professions contribute to the different requirements of easing some out of wasteful habits and enabling others to increase their health, productivity, and welfare? If designers are essentially facilitators and enablers for commerce, can they really have much socially beneficial effect? Do the ethical dimensions of sustainability require different activities, different modes of thought from contemporary commercial design?
To address these questions, designers need to extend their frames of reference, away from the tasteful shaping of objects for the market, towards genuine welfare-based and anticipatory activities. They must find a way to practice design for a constituency which is not simply defined through consumption, but through citizenship as well. Both rich and poor countries need "cultures of sustainability" to use a phrase of Victor Margolin's. The local forms of those cultures will differ. But we can already see many of their general outlines. We may already be witnessing a sea-change of attitude. At least let's hope so. But what would such a design culture look like in a developed country like the United States? What problems would it need to address? And how?
Part 2. A sustainable Design Culture?
One contemporary response to the demand for a "culture of sustainability" can be seen in the tsunami of "eco-" and "green" advertising that has swept through the imaginary of the consumer culture. The message is: Feel good! You can have your cake and eat it too. (at least for those who can afford it). The new marks of design distinction are a hybrid SUV (or at least a Prius), an energy sufficient townhouse (or at least a "cradle-to-cradle" office chair), "artisanal" ice cream (or at least an organic breakfast cereal) etc. These marketing strategies have produced the "big organic" produce sold by upscale supermarkets like Whole Foods, the phenomenally successful global supply chain, the world's largest retailer of natural and organic foods that promotes itself as an "alternative" to the dominant norms of the food industry. While the origins of the organic food movement are both resolutely counter-cultural and deeply suspicious of technology, at least in its large-scale and commercial applications, green consumerism promotes a resolution of conflict between nature and technology, between a consumer lifestyle and some notion of the "good" life. (see Michael Pollan’s entertaining descriptions in The Omnivore’s Dilemma). And today, Green can be Better Business -- so bring in the greenbacks!
These days, there is a burgeoning interest in "eco-efficiency" in buildings. Like "big organic", Modernist eco-efficient buildings, too, promise a reconciliation of technology and nature. Many of them are futuristic in their allegiance to new technologies, evoking images of Buckminster Fuller's "spaceship earth." Others appeal more to tradition and locality. A non-profit organization, the US Green Building council, promotes and issues Leed Certification in building design and construction. This certification plays much the same role as Organic certification does in foods. And like the promise of Whole Foods, eco-efficiency provides the hope that increased consumption (fancy new buildings) is still possible as long as it is certifiably designed. A chicken raised under quasi-industrial conditions (but without the antibiotics) can be labeled free-range and organic. A spanking new high-rise office building in Dubai can be Leed certified -- even if it was built in a desert by impoverished migrant workers for the oil-rich and the ostentatious.
Something is missing from these definitions of "green" production. Technical solutions alone do not seem sufficient to address the issues of sustainability. They may improve the quality of production, whether agricultural or architectural, but they do not do not provide a measure or a brake on consumption. And they do not provide a global ethical or political matrix for making decisions, either at the individual or collective levels.
It is easy to poke fun at high-end green glamour, at the Marie-Antoinette moments of those who can afford to eat both petit fours and peasant breads, at the latest foodie follies, at ecological vacation homes and all the other indulgences that appeal to the desires and apparently unlimited capacity for complacency of those who can afford them. But these are only one set of symptoms of a culture of consumption designed to disempower, to depoliticize, to resist all attempts at establishing a political economy of citizenship by catering to individual choice severed from social consequence. The culture of consumption has become a global phenomenon that is simultaneously a monoculture and a finely differentiated narrative of identity that adapts to every local condition. As the fast food advertisement that speaks to billions of consumers puts it, Have it your way.
How can design culture promote an ethic of sustainability? Ethics cannot simply be a matter of personal preference, a project that an individual can freely choose to sign up for or not. Ethics require a social matrix based on shared values. In order to cultivate the values of sustainability, design culture can and must make design part of a project of civic formation, to help provide tools for citizenship in a world that is both increasing global and increasingly local in form, to contribute to forms of solidarity that connect individuals rather than atomizing them. To put it a bit tritely, the task of a sustainable design culture is to encourage mindfulness and to help create a social matrix for mindfulness as a value. To put it a bit more pointedly, design must confront its role in political economy. It must enable a move from consumer to citizen.
But citizens of what? Of One (democratic) World? Isn't it unrealistic to hope for a global citizenry that can take on the planetary environmental issues resulting from human activity as whole? Is citizenship even the appropriate concept for building an ethos of solidarity beyond the nation-state? (whose concepts of citizenship include drawing lines between "us" and "them".)
Design culture(s) must function in multi-scalar ways, both adapting to the myriad gradations of relation between small and large and binding them in networks that move from scale to scale.
What is lost and what is gained in the economic evaluation of environmental issues? The gains are the direct result of quantification. In the case of natural resources, for example, extending economic evaluation could enable more accurate assessments of cost and provide a rational framework for policies. Utilitarian considerations of human benefit, Jeremy Bentham's "felicific calculus" could be applied to the evaluation of positive or negative human consequence. But the issue of ethics will still remain between "knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do." (Potter Stewart).