Sustainability and the Sustainable Growth Fallacy

Sustainability roots are the words “ability” and “sustain”, therefore the ability to sustain. In the case of ecological sustainability, the ability to sustain a ecological system or social sustainability, as the ability to sustain a social system.

The idea of sustainability has become over the years so disseminated through so many different areas and so little attention has been given to its real meaning that it is often confused with the traditional definition of sustainable development, i.e., use our resources without compromise the needs of future generations, which is the result of sustainability.

To fully understand this “ability to sustain” it must be brought back some dimensions to the concept that are related to how long that ability can be maintained, how it is maintained  or lost, and the systemic configuration need for its existence.

This paper brings back the sustainability concept to its more broad definition and some considerations on how the lack its correct perception is driving mankind to its most, probably more everlasting, collapse.

Open and closed systems.

The ability of a system to be sustainable depends if it is an open or a closed system.

An open system is always interacting with other systems importing and exporting matter and energy (Von Bertalanffy, 1950). This interaction with other, open, systems is responsible for maintaining the systems operating at a delicate equilibrium between each other. Due to this a constant interaction, the amount of energy flowing through a open system is constant, with the inputs equal to the outputs.

A closed system lacks this interaction regarding matter flows and depends only upon its own internal resources. Since it’s constantly consuming its own resources it can be predicted that those will eventually cease to exist in a useful state through energy transformation processes. It is a direct consequence of the second law of thermodynamics which states that at an isolated system, its entropy will always increase irreversibly. After an energy use, entropy is the output of energy (residual heat) that cannot be used to produce any suitable work. 

A differentiation must be made between closed and isolated systems, being the last ones those that exchange neither matter nor energy with other systems. As recent study demonstrated, absolute zero temperature, i.e., absolute entropy, cannot be attainable at a finite period of time (Masanes and Oppenheim, 2017), pure isolated systems cannot exist since, at a given moment of time, there must be some energy exchange to avoid the absolute entropy situation. 

Even at planetary scale there is a constant inflow/outflow of energy, from solar energy and gravitational energy from the Moon, and irradiated energy exported to space. As an absolute isolated system is not possible, this status directly conflicts with traditional technocentrism paradigm that human systems, mainly economics, can operate in an isolated way (Gladwin et al., 1995) in the meaning that its effects on other systems have no influence into its own operation (Campos Jr, 2003).

Earth as an isolated system?

As stated, isolated systems are not a realistic representation of natural systems, can Earth be considered as one?

To answer this question one characteristic must be considered. Life. Every single other object know by man outside our planet limits operates as open systems, with a near zero balance between input/output of energy Life however, at its beginning, added a distinctive characteristic to the system since it changed this input/output relation of energy, evolving to store as much available energy as possible and keep the export at a minimum level. 

Sun energy, that otherwise would be irradiated back to space, is kept into the planet biosphere as biomass through photosynthesis while the irradiated energy feed the atmospheric climatic systems and Moon gravitational energy converted into tidal energy feed oceans processes. 

So, as life on Earth accumulated the energy received thorough the ages, the interaction between biotic and physical systems allowed the planet to evolve to balance which kept life flourishing in a reinforcing feedback, which major result was a change in the atmospheric composition allowing the planet to maintain a life supporting average temperature of 17^oC (Clarke et al., 2013). Consequently, as the biosphere complexity increased it started to rely also upon the stored energy, with the evolution of more complexes life forms, as herbivores and carnivores. 

Although without the Sun energy life would be impossible, with only its energy, the current life complexity would also be impossible.

Therefore, if as a planet Earth is not an isolated system, for it does exchange energy, although composed exclusively by complexes open systems it is, as a planet, a closed one as there is no input/output of mass (Von Bertalanffy, 1950).

Sustainability, Attractors, Homeostasis and Resilience

The evolution of any system to a sustainable state is given by a logistic curve, which presents distinct phases: a initial lag phase with a slower growth due to the small size of the system; a exponential phase where the system grows based on a abundant resources availability; a maturity phase where the resources scarcity starts to stress the system growth; and the stability phase, where the system reaches its equilibrium.

Logistic behavior evolution and homeostatic balance characteristics

At any given point of the logistic, not only the stable point, the system is evolution restricted by its homeostatic limits. At the final homeostatic balance, this unstable balance oscillates based on internal interactions of the system and external influences. This can be exemplified by population development models (Hixon et al., 2002) such as the traditional predator-prey system where the sub-system (predator population) is controlled, and control as well, the resource sub-system (prey) (Campos Jr, 1993).

Predator-prey oscillatory model

As stated, sustainability can be defined as the ability of any given system to remain sustainable (hereby defined as operationally stable) and since a system that grows, reaches its climax and collapses afterwards lacks sustainability, its capability to remain stable must then be related to how long it can remain at such situation.

When an open system is considered, a constant input of resources allows it to keep its sustainability for a period of time as long as the resource source is available. For how long a system can be stable and strong is its stability depends upon its homeostasis and its resilience.

Homeostasis, originally a term originated from medical sciences and can be defined as the capability of a given system to operate around a stable equilibrium point, also known as stability attractor (Cannon, 1939, Walker et al., 2004, Edelstein-Keshet, 2005, Leonov, 2008). 

This stability is not based on a steady state one but rather an oscillatory stability based on fluctuations inside defined operational limits due to constant system adjustments to internal or external influences. These limits are originated from the interactions within other systems and as these limits change, the system flexibility to self-adjust is changes and, therefore, also its homeostasis. 

For the purposes of this paper, those limits can be defined by resources abundance or scarcity for the system. While those limits are stable, i.e., when the system is in equilibrium with other systems, the homeostasis can be maintained as well the system stability. If the limits range is reduced, the capability of the system to self-adjust to the disturbances is reduced and its homeostasis, as well resilience, are compromised.

Lost of homeostasis due narrowing of self-adjustment capability.

The importance of the homeostasis to understand the sustainability resides in the fact that in closed systems, its whole stability is derived from the delicate internal balance between its open sub-systems, which allow them to operate as close as possible to a homeostatic stability. 

Therefore, for a given system, its sustainability can be understood as its ability to maintain its homeostasis for an indefinite period of time. The ability to remain at a homeostatic state is given by the system resilience, which is its capability to return to its equilibrium situation after any given disturbance (Walker et al., 2004).

Resilience however is an internal property of complex systems and is a emergent property originated from the interactions of its internal functional diversity (Holling, 1973). Since how those, complexes, interactions occur are unknown and its results are, by consequence, unknown, it is not possible to determine how much disturbance a system can sustain before the lost of its resilience. 

Depending upon the strength of the disturbance, the system will move to a stability attractor and resilience state, but not necessarily back to the same one as before the disturbance. If the disturbance causes a significative lost of functional diversity, the system can collapse to irreversible a non homeostatic steady state attractor, such as the desertification of a forest area. 

Since resilience is most based on the functional diversity (functions derived from system diversity) of the system, rather than it’s structural diversity (determined number of species), a system can return to its previous homeostatic state after a disturbance, it will keep working as previously, providing the same functions, but not necessarily with the same previous species.

Possibilities of change in system resilience due to a disturbance

Sustainable growth?

As previously presented, at a specific phase of a system development it does uphold a sustainable growth towards its equilibrium point. During this phase, the resources availability is almost unlimited and the system can grow at is maximum rate. This growth, however large, can only be sustained during a very limited period of time, after which the resources scarcity will force the system to stop growing, unless, as an open system, its input of resources is kept indefinitely from an external, infinite source. 

Although small sub-systems of a closed system do work as open systems, over time the competition with other systems for the same resources will make its limits, and its global, closed structure, apparent.

The main result of this open/closed systems competition will define the sustainability of any of them.  When the interference between the systems occurs in a homeostatic way, as in the predator-prey example, all the involved systems, and even the full system from which they are a part of, will work under a sustainable state. 

However, if the interference causes the lost of resilience of any of the systems, which are interconnected by cause-effect feedbacks, the systems will start to move towards an unsustainable non homeostatic equilibrium and its consequent collapse. The strength and how many systems make up this non homeostatic situation will determine if the larger system can maintain its sustainability (Walker et al., 2004).

Human systems as open systems.

For a long time the natural system was perceived as an infinite source of whatever the mankind needed. Although it was true when human population was not larger than a hundred millions (the lag phase of logistic curve), as our population began to grow due to technological development, culminating at the industrial revolution, we entered the exponential growth phase. 

Without the technological aid, under the control of the homeostatic limits, mankind would certainly already have reached the sustainable homeostasis. But the technological advances, allowing the constant increase in raw matter production/exploration kept that perception of infinite resources alive, and with that, it continued the idea that a productive system could grow forever.

However, after a few centuries the cumulative interference of human systems over natural systems started to constantly increase the pressure over ecosystems’ resilience, which is now perceived as a, probably, irreversible way to the collapse many of Earth ecosystems. 

Although the global systemic feedback controls do work, its impacts over the productive system only recently began to be perceived and solutions have been searched by the productive system to avoid its own collapse. The problem is, the productive system wants to grow sustainably.

The progress, technology and efficiency fallacy.

The solution for the search of the holy grail of sustainable growth is based on the belief that more progress, based on technological development, will allow a continuous and permanent improvement in the efficiency of resources use, re-use and recycling, allowing the desired sustainable growth.

Since the productive system belongs to a closed system, the fallacy of the “efficiency solution” can be demonstrated by two ways. 

The first is based on the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases. Since, except by the constant input of Sun energy and the Moon gravitational energy, every other source of energy / matter on the planet is finite, and therefore the Earth works as an isolated system for what concerns the human system and the entropy law applies.

Entropy is the transformation of useful energy into unusable energy, i.e. heath. The increase in entropy leads to a steady state situation, previously described as non homeostatic. 

Indeed we can now harvest energy from the Sun and Moon, and its derived sources as winds, waves and tides, this harvest however has a limit, either thermodynamically or geographically. There is a physical limit on where and how many power plants can be built. The same limit applies to renewable biomass sources, which also compete with natural systems for resources.

Therefore, the more energy is used in a process, the more entropy is generated and the system is further from homeostasis. This is the case of recycling and circular economics, which proposes to mimic nature cyclic systems do not realize that those systems are a set of open subsystems that are constantly importing energy/mass and exporting entropy. 

At every single step of the process, every complete recycling loop, both entropy and waste will be cumulatively increased while the availability of energy and resources for the process will be cumulatively reduced. 

Examples on how entropy concept could be applied to matter, producing matter that cannot be used or even collected, are presented by one of the most known environmental problems and one of the most increasing proposals for energy solution. 

• The environmental problem example is the water pollution by plastic. It’s a well known fact that plastic waste is accumulating in water bodies and in the ocean, with impacting images as well as cleaning technologies circulating through the media. How does the entropy apply to this problem? The plastic waste by itself is not a significant problem since it’s composed of manageable components, which can be collected and given a proper destination. The plastic problem actually occurs after some exposition to solar radiation (weeks to months depending on the kind of plastic). This exposition causes the plastic to degrade into micro and nano particles which, not only are impossible to be collected or manipulated, but are contaminating aquatic organisms by its ingestion and also moving up through the food chain

• The energy solution problem is the energy recycling projects which gives a final use for waste, by using it as fuel at thermoelectric power plants. Again the problems apply, and manageable waste is being converted into gases and micro / nano particles, which could partially be contained from being released to the atmosphere, but at the cost of adding more energy and matter to the process.

The second way to verify the fallacy of resources efficiency use is the “rebound effect” also known as Jevons paradox. Jevons, in 1865, observed that the less coal used to produce a single product, due to increase in coal use efficiency, the machinery as well the number of equipment used could be extended either to produce more of that given product, at lower production costs, or a new range of products. 

As result, no matter how little coal could be used at a given process, the total amount of coal used would increase. The reason is based on the reduced production costs that lead to lower consumer prices and increased demand by whatever is being produced by an increasing range of the potential consumers as the prices drop. 

Translating to today’s world, the more products are sold, the more resources are consumed, no matter how efficient the production process can become.

While some criticism points that the paradox applies to energy use, it must be considered the historical period when it was observed and, most importantly, the historical evolution of technology and resource consumption after that. 

Many examples can be put to demonstrate the paradox, for instance: while the automobilistic industry, mostly in recent decades, hugely increased the fuel efficiency of automobiles, the number of cars produced per year increased from around 39 millions in 1999, to 89 millions in 2014, which is a 228% increase in the number of vehicles and resources consumed in their production, while the fuel use efficiency per car at the same period, went from 25mpg to about 27mpg.

A management failure and mankind chronic illness.

There is no easy and sustainable way out of the efficiency fallacy for the economic sector that won’t involve degrowing, reducing profits and sales and cutting consumerism cycle.

However if the problem was only associated with our relation of the consumption of resources, although bitter, there is a solution. 

Unfortunately the efficiency / sustainable growth fallacy stretches away from man / environment relation and heads into the person-to-person realm, where, at a more and more interconnected world, we have the paradox of the more and more isolated people. Not only people from “developed civilizations” are losing their connection with nature, but selfishly, the connection with each other. Despite euphemisms addressed to people at the economic system, such as “collaborators”, for the ultimate pursue of positive results for the system, “collaborators” are only replaceable components.

New management theories such as PDCA (Bernal, 2014, Prashar, 2017), which is a cyclic proposal for problem solving based on plan–do–check–act or plan–do–check–adjust and, as a cycle, without a defined end, or also the Kaizen philosophy (Kamińska, 2015, Sharma and Kamlesh Kumari, 2016), have focused on one single target, the continual improvement of processes and products for the, so desired, sustainable growth. 

Although useful at some levels, its cyclic characteristic generates a continuous pressure to increase the corporation efficiency and costs reduction, searching at every cycle for any possible way to achieve these goals. Since there is a physical limit on how close to the goals it is possible to get, as the development curve of the procedure is also a logistic curve, at some point the more effort put at the continual improvement of processes and products, the less effective the effort will be.

As stated before, the obvious result should be a homeostatic state with the corporation operating within determined limits, environmental, social and economical. Since the economical system does perceive itself as an isolated system, those limits are not recognized, and the pressure for continuous improvement continues. 

The problem is that since effective sustainable solutions would collide with the pursue of a sustainable growth, the obvious final solution on increasing the efficiency falls on the only portion of the system supposedly not affected by the efficiency fallacy, which is the people, since people, for the economic system, are cheap replaceable components. But how does the efficiency fallacy applied to people disrupts the economical system?

Human body, as any other living being, works within defined operational limits in order to maintain its homeostasis (Cannon, 1939, Craig, 2003), which upper limit is the total stress level that a person can sustain. As a complex system the human body works on different kinds of homeostasis which can be classified into two, interconnected, categories, physiological and psychological homeostasis (Gianaros and Wager, 2015, Lovallo, 2015, Damasio and Damasio, 2016). 

Physiological homeostasis is directly related to the body’s direct needs to keep its metabolism working at an optimum level, such as food and physical exercises (Ramsay and Woods, 2014). Psychological homeostasis relates to the capability of the mind to remain psychologically stable and depends on access to intangible resources such as the amount of rest and leisure time (Tavassoli, 2009). 

As previously stated, homeostasis is an oscillatory balance between the operational limits of the system, and no system optimally operates stably when close to at any of its limits.

Given that any system forced to operate at its maximum efficiency, i.e., closer to its top limit, will stay off its homeostatic balance and collapse, the same applies to people (Chrousos and Gold, 1992, Tavassoli, 2009). If not properly fed or given the adequate amount of rest, human body gets increasingly tired and stressed, resulting in toxins production (Maes et al., 1998), which in a normal situation are a natural byproduct of our metabolism, yet at higher rates it’s more than our body is capable of eliminating. 

This toxic buildup leads to biochemical disequilibrium resulting in a number of illnesses, the most disrupting ones being those related to mental health. 

Therefore, as people are stressed to be the most efficient and productive as possible, the result is not so obvious for management theorists, if kept working at its homeostatic limits they will lose efficiency (Lugtenberg et al., 2016). The cumulative loss of efficiency amongst all those components, results at the obvious loss of efficiency and productivity of the system as a whole. So, as species that are a part of an ecosystem, if people (as a component) collapse, the systems that rely upon them will eventually collapse as well, even with the excess of available, replaceable workers for the system. 

As a result, for instance, human resource policies of downsizing, often based on the fallacious belief in human multitasking capability, to reduce costs and increase the corporation profitability have only one practical consequence, which is a negative feedback that will keep the corporative system away from its optimum operational status.

The result of modern management practices was the proclamation of emergency of the depression as the “disease of the century”, in such a way, that the World Health Organization stated that dealing and finding solutions for mental health and illnesses such as depression should be the main priority for a successful global development.

Where to go from now?

The answer to the question “Can mankind fix this problem?”, as history teaches, can only be answered by the civilizations that will develop after our own. Our failure to learn historical lessons from previous civilizations’ collapses will lead us to the point of no return, if not reached yet. Our insistence in believing in technological, efficient solutions is a proof that we did not even learn lessons from the recent past. 

On the other hand, as the systems’ homeostatic balance is broken in such a way that it becomes a planetary problem, being no more than another single species on the planet, we shall have to wait for the global subsystems to become reorganized, into a more balanced situation. If that reorganization results in an extinction of species, as it happened many times before, it is not our concern, as we have no control over it. Our worry should be for the aftermath of this reorganization, which will be our species status. Will humans be extinct or not?

Can we manage the problem and make the collapse a less dramatic situation? Yes, we can. For many years now, scientists have proposed solutions in order to deal with the problem in such a way, that a sustainable future can be glimpsed. However serious the problem that our modern civilization deals with may be, it still remains our civilization’s problem. However, people fail to realize that there are population groups spread around the world which have lived in a very sustainable way for centuries or even over millennia. The solutions proposed, are to learn with them. 

Problem is that the road to a sustainable decline to a prosperous future is paved with the most needed, and rejected, fundamental materials: Structural and economical degrowth and dematerialization, which can translate into better living with less consumer goods, less resource consuming infrastructures and less unnecessary needs.

The ultimate modern paradox is that while we are focusing huge efforts to delivery progress, technology and efficiency to those populations without even asking if they need it, we fail to understand that it is us who need their concepts of progress, technology and efficiency.

Finally, if one asks “how far am I willing to go to deal with the problem?” the answer is simple: not far enough. Much has been said about the individual efforts to create and spread solutions, and those people deserve our deepest appreciation for they think about the “we” or “us” on a larger, collective scale, but as there are people with the “I” remaining in the question, then “we” won’t go anywhere. If the people who take the “I”, or an egotistical approach, don’t realize that every single human system, from government to corporations is a construct of which existence is only possible through the collective work of single individuals, and that “I” am not going anywhere without “us”, then the individualistic, selfish, characteristic of people that brought us into our current state, will also keep us here.

How far are “we” willing to go to solve the problem? Well, that question can, and must, be answered by every single person regardless of their social or economical position.

The bottom line is that the corporative management theories and policies must move their focus to people and the optimum results will be achieved as a consequence and the real question that must be asked by every single person, regardless of their role on the productive system should be: “How far are you willing to go to help us to deal with the problem?”.

References

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