This article was written anonymously and submitted under a pseudonym (William Calendar), in response to the 'War of the Worlds' article written by Mark Everard. It provides this individual's perspective and represents personal views of the author to stimulate thought and discussion. It is not an opinion of the Institution of Environmental Sciences as an organisation.
As a membership organisation, we provide a convening space where members can share their views and engage in healthy debate, so if you have a perspective on these (or any other) issues, please get in touch. We intend to publish a short series of papers from different IES members and stakeholders, leading to a discussion event later in the year where members can share their views.
Sustainability is an existential concern, not a political debate
The environment and sustainability are increasingly becoming politicised as parties in the US, the UK, and across Europe seek to build coalitions of support by deriding environmental action or challenging the necessity of responding to climate change.
This is a problem: sustainability is an existential concern, not a political debate. If we do not act, we all lose, regardless of the colour of our ties or how many favourable reactions we won on social media along the way.
Worldviews
Debate exposes us to other worldviews and values, allowing us to challenge and develop our own beliefs, better understand what others believe, and reach a consensus, compromising on the things that don’t matter so we can achieve the things that do. We value compromise between legitimate worldviews because it fulfils the ideal that we can connect and progress as a society, reconciling our beliefs so that all people benefit.
Yet there are some worldviews which we recognise are not legitimate. They are not legitimate because they demand that the rights of other people are lesser, or because conceding to them would cause irrevocable harm and go against our ideal that the world can be a better place. With these worldviews, we do not compromise, because doing so divides people more than it unites them. These are values without value: they would pollute any unity derived from them with selfishness or hate.
Linear thinking has convinced us that short-term economic growth is a fair and desirable pursuit, with the potential to benefit all people. The truth is increasingly stark: growth today means recession for future generations. The more we consume now, the less will be available in the future.1
Regardless of good intentions, decisions to preference raw economics over human lives or long-term sustainability and resilience are rooted in an ideology that says lives in the future matter less than lives lived today: ‘we got here first, so we can take what we want and anyone who arrives later will have to make do with less’.
The economics of sustainability
Proponents argue that these beliefs have always been a part of human success. They haven’t. While economics, trade, and capitalism are long-lasting, radical deregulation in pursuit of single-metric GDP growth is still young as a concept. In the form of a Friedman-esque approach to total market deregulation, it’s existed for less than fifty years, and those decades have been characterised by stagnating wages relative to the cost of living and repeated periods of economic crisis.2
Where these approaches are most prevalent, they are broadly unfair. The USA has seen rising wealth inequality since the 1970s when growth increasingly began to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the majority.3 The UK saw the same trend between 1980 and 2000. Even as wealth inequality has stabilised, the attainability of wealth remains unachievable.4
Internationally, inequality has dropped as countries develop, but developed countries fall into two stark camps: those that have retained relatively high equality and those that rebound into inequality, like the UK and the USA.5 Different countries face different fortunes, so we know that the choices we make, and the emphasis we place on deregulation and growth, have real consequences for whether or not economics serves all of humanity.
Scientists know all too well the pain of a metric that no longer captures what it was meant to measure. Great efforts are expended in pursuit of indicators for biodiversity and water quality that have not led to meaningful gains for environmental quality.6 GDP finds itself in the same position: in the 2020s, it is often a better measure of the successes of the wealthiest, rather than of society as a whole.7
Even when growth does trickle down, any short-term successes are built atop a slag heap of environmental degradation, set to collapse and bury future generations if we do not act. The impulsive pursuit of growth has no capacity to create a resilient society in the face of the interlinked environmental and social challenges facing our world.8 What we measure matters. If we continue to measure our success through a narrow, short-term economic lens, we will never take the opportunities to seize successes for society and our environment, either now or in the future.
Trade-offs
We live in a complex world, full of complex systems. There are sparingly few truly short-term or long-term decisions, just decisions with consequences both now and in the future. Often, there are trade-offs between them: when we prioritise deregulation for rapid housebuilding now, we place additional strains on the people who will live in those houses in the future. We put them at risk of flood damage, limited access to water or power, or poisoning through the ground they live on and the air they breathe.9,10
When we make decisions, we need to have these trade-offs in mind. Sometimes, money matters. Sometimes it is the most important thing that matters, but it isn’t always. We need to have a better collective understanding of the things that bring value to our lives, so we can keep them secure and make the decisions that safeguard them.11
No matter how pressing needs are now, we cannot cater to them at the expense of future generations. We must accommodate both, for the simple reason that we were born into an abundant world and have a shared duty to afford the same privilege to future generations. If we are going to meet that responsibility and cater to the needs of people living now and in the future, we urgently need to put plans in place.
Losing the middle ground
This is the frustrating truth: there is a very important debate to be had about how we deliver sustainable development in practice, but it gets lost when we focus on whether or not we should do anything at all. Framing this as a debate confers legitimacy and importance. The idea that there is ‘no smoke without fire’ implies that there is equal validity to the views on either side, imagining the consensus lies somewhere between action and inaction.
In doing so, we over-privilege a tiny minority in these conversations. Just after the UK general election in July 2024, public support for reaching net zero by 2050 was 74%, with only 16% opposed. Yet in the months that have followed the election, policy and media have given half the debate to less than a fifth of the population.12 Rather than advancing public discussions on how we reach net zero in the next 25 years, which will have serious implications and require complex interventions, we have pandered to a minority and claimed it was necessary to reach a consensus.
Framing the debate in this way has real consequences. Many legitimate worldviews and values are now completely lost from the debate, as it becomes reordered around extreme positions. Nature-friendly farming, which will be essential to a sustainable and fair land use transition, is often hidden behind positions which espouse either an entirely economic approach to farming or the withering of food security for supposedly environmental ends.13 Rather than discussing how we can succeed together, the focus shifts to who will win at the expense of the other. As it does, the political pressure for funding nature-friendly farming decreases.
In the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, an entire working group was devoted to the physical science basis of human-caused climate change, which is largely uncontroversial.14 This was valuable science and has produced important outcomes, but it absorbed a substantial amount of resources, all to reiterate what we already know: that climate change is happening, has been caused by human activity, and has immediate and pressing consequences. Nonetheless, few to none of those who disagreed with those conclusions had their minds changed by this monumental effort of collective science.
So what?
Proponents of economic growth at the expense of sustainable development may think that they can win the debate, reaping dividends while they stall collective action. Yet this is not really a debate with other people; it is a debate against nature. The natural world does not respond with rebuttal or political arguments, it responds through cause-and-effect. Environmental systems adapt, so if we don’t move on, the world will. The challenge of transitioning to a sustainable society is an existential threat for us, not for the planet. All too often, we isolate ourselves from the natural environment, not recognising that we are embedded within it, and reliant upon functioning ecosystems.
Natural degradation begets natural disaster, so those seeking profit will quite literally reap the whirlwind: natural disasters are not disasters for nature, they are disasters of nature, and all the disastrous consequences will be ours to bear. Any perceived economic gains will be tribute to decreasing resilience and the overwhelming social and economic costs of a failure to deliver sustainable development.
We don’t have to live in this bad future, but optimism has to be earned through action.15 Pessimism is a self-fulfilling punishment for idleness or ignorance. We can still look after people without chasing growth at the expense of all other measures of human well-being. How we bring together different social, economic, and environmental goals is critical.
Yet we should remember, sustainable development is the outcome of those debates, not one side in them. The SDGs are an internationally agreed upon approach to creating a world where people are healthy, fairly treated, economically prosperous, and living as part of a thriving environment.16 Their mere existence should be enough to convince us that there is a better way forward.
When we are burdened by failing systems, they are like chains around our necks. We can decline with them, sinking into the strangled depths, or we can let them drop away. It is easy to believe that, because it was metal that once held the ship together, we should cling to it when we start to sink. Yet there is no buoyancy in chains, so we cannot blindly rely on them to keep us afloat.
This economic philosophy will not exist in 200 years. We still have a choice on whether or not humanity joins it: whether we overcome existential concerns, or whether we too sink into history.
