The Challenge of a Globalized Concept

Wolfgang Schluchter

The societies of industrialized countries, including Germany, have so far been relatively unperturbed by the fact that they consume the lion's share of many of the world's scarce resources and that the degree of environmental pollution and environmental destruction they cause stands out of all proportion to their actual demographic size which is a mere fifth of the entire global population. Through the particular means of production they employ and the living standards they enjoy they have secured a "civilized" quality of life that serves as a model both for developing countries and those on the threshold of development. However, were the other 80 percent of the global population in these countries to emulate such a model, this would result inexorably in catastrophe.

The challenge of sustainable development constrains us to modify our production and lifestyle so that resources are conserved and the environment is not degraded beyond the limits that allow for short term regeneration.

Such a challenge is in concord with the basic thinking behind the Rio Earth Summit whose two main concerns were to sustain the life-giving capacities of the earth and to secure the fundaments of life and quality of life.

According to UN pronouncements the quality of life in industrialized nations is in steady decline, even if, as is apparent, the opportunities for consumption are on the increase. Yet by now the use of resources to fuel this consumption has given rise to such a catalogue of depletion and destruction and stress as to vitiate the benefits of such production to satisfy people's needs or at the very least to call it into grave doubt.

The chances for acceptance of changes in production and lifestyles increase if we take full account of the underlying causes and ramifications of present conditions.

Leading a good life, being free to choose one's life, finding pleasure in consumption - these are goals and achievements which, ideally, may be cautiously changed and which are capable of setting new models for one's own, as well as for other societies. Strategies that aim to discriminate against and abolish such goals and achievements will only cause resentment in the majority of people and are doomed to failure.

In the complex polemic on cause and effect of erroneous courses in ecological development, the private household as the organizational form of private life style design and personal sustenance plays a key role that often receives but scant attention, being considered as permanent and unchangeable. The private household functions as both an active agent in consumption and as passive agent enduring the negative effects of environmental depletion caused by current consumer patterns. Thus the lifestyle of private households is at once a function of consumer gratification and anxiety. Members of private households in Germany, taking an average over all areas of activity, cause around one third of all pollution to the natural environment. If we further take account of the pollution caused by private cars and the production of goods and services bought and financed by private households, then this figure rises to well over 50 percent. Accordingly any changes in life style and demand of goods and services from the market must to a large extent be emanate from the private household sector itself.

For a long time people in the highly industrialized countries have adhered uncritically to a belief in progress, in unimpeded economic growth and in the ability of advances in technology and chemistry to solve problems. And yet parallel with a growing awareness of the dark side of this one-way street there is also a growing awareness of the difficulties involved in bringing about effective change. For instance the capital outlay involved in average household furnishing (in terms of kitchen, bathroom, living space, entertainment, transport, garden, leisure and do-it-yourself facilities) may now be compared to the cost of equipping an industrial work-place. German households show a capital expenditure including investment (without premises) of around 700 billion DM as against 900 billion DM in private industry. Annual household investment in technical appliances alone amounts to 170 billion DM. Through such equipment households produce services and end-products to cater for household members. And this is concomitant with increasing dependency on the production system that supplies them.

The comfort and convenience that are associated with such appliances has led to significant increases in the level of energy consumption, in particular in the areas of household heating, hot water supply, electricity, lighting, small-scale consumption and transport. Of particular import, in this context, are the effects of the combustion process: the United States produces the highest global level of CO² emission reaching 19.8 tonnes per head of the population and is followed by the People's Republic of China with 2.5 tonnes per capita - in other words eight times less. At 3 billion tonnes, the present CO² emission of the People's Republic represents almost 14 percent of total global emission and thus, if China's production and consumption patterns continue on their present course, we may expect further drastic increases.

As long as there are no significant changes in the highly industrialized nations themselves, their calls to the developing countries of Africa and Asia to shift away from the consumption-oriented models they have adopted from them, will remain hollow and insubstantial. Accordingly, any sustainable global perspective for development can only emanate from the very countries which up to present have derived the greatest benefit from the depletion and destruction of ecological resources. Such a process must proceed from us. Sustainable development bears the imprint of the following elements:

The degree of exploitation of the ecosystem is determined by both by the economic system and by lifestyles which use natural systems as sources (raw materials, energy, land) and as re-sources (air, earth, water). If over-exploitation is to be avoided and sustainable life and economic activity on earth made tenable, then the rules of sustainable development must be adhered to. These stipulate that resource exploitation must be limited either to that which may be replaced by natural processes of regeneration or to that for which an equitable substitute may be found.

Globality which is understood in sustainable development discourse as a global concept, resulting from the finitude of the earth.

Long-term planning which allows for gradual adjustments. Sustainable development is a concept which can only be realized through long-term gradual adjustment.

Irreversibility in which the clock cannot be turned back. Thus projections of the future are possible only within an extremely limited scope and the process of change must be accomplished in an incremental and iterative manner.

A holistic approach is another ecological, economic and social feature. Sustainable development implies that the goals of ecologically sound policies, successful economic management and their reconciliation on the social and international level must all be pursued at one and the same time. Under the aegis of principles of social and international justice we must seek to harmonize the imperatives of environmental protection with the needs of the economy. A holistic approach also implies interpreting sustainable development as a science of life.

Finally sustainable development also requires the implementation of pre-emptive policies - in other words the private household sector needs to develop a cautious and nurturing approach in its consumption of the basic natural necessities of life.

The above points form the groundwork of two developmental strategies. Firstly, considerable savings may be achieved without impacting on the level of consumption if a more efficient use of production resources is adopted. Secondly, by a change of focus - spot lighting the concept of sufficiency, as a number of recent studies in Germany have done, should lead to changes in consumer patterns and thus in lifestyles. This strategy could be subsumed under the banner headline "Consume less and live better".

Because of its inherent complexity, it will be possible to introduce the idea of sufficiency into the whole of the social fabric only over a very long-term perspective. Essential for the effective implementation of the efficiency and sufficiency strategies is a high degree of general awareness about their goals, instruments, methods and time horizons. This will involve initiating a number of public discourses and indeed we may say that without the aid of public discourse there can be no change of track in highly industrialized countries. Thus there is a need for a new social paradigm in these societies. First and foremost this means motivating and empowering people, introducing awareness campaigns about development, planning and design in their local, municipal and regional contexts as well as providing a wide range of consultancy measures.

Such strategies should not be geared to direct attacks on the range of consumption opportunities, but should rather aim to address underlying motivations which lead people to reject saving and embrace superfluous consumption. However, superfluity arises only when there is more around than necessary. Thus strategies must aim to raise the general level of awareness about what is really necessary and indispensable. Such consciousness-raising processes must further be grounded on categories of consumption and damages - in others words proper consumption means avoiding nefarious effects.

In the implementation of these strategies the "win-win" principle should come fully into force. Everybody must be a winner, even if some people are more winners than others. "Losers" would simply pour discredit on the transformation strategies, blocking effective shifts in the revaluation of prestige-oriented behavior and status symbols.

For the time being it doesn't make much sense to try and delineate "efficiency" as distinct from "sufficiency" since from the perspective of increased efficiency, as it is now practicable, sufficiency appears merely as a property of the transformation of role-models - in other words it is a component of efficiency.

Even so, efficiency patterns that are worthy of the name will only be able to establish themselves on the basis of a wide spread social consensus compounded of factors such as optimism or pessimism with regard to the future, fear of environmental degradation or other threats to life.

In the Federal Republic of Germany the readiness to take action is by far greater than the range of concrete effective openings for action. The need for clear political directives has become glaringly apparent - for transformation in the production and distribution lines of consumer goods and for incentives and sweetners for changes from hard-grained habits to new behavioral and action paradigms. Such changes lie at the heart of the concept of damage-limitation as a useful and beneficial strategy. We avoid making damage not because we are constrained to but because if we do we are not then obliged to deal with the mess afterwards. And that is an advantage which is not merely the prerogative of certain social strata but which may be ascribed to the society as a whole.

If we assume that the main motive of individual behavior and decision-making is highly colored by individual egoism and that such a pattern will remain unchanged in the future, then we need a functional "egoism model". We need to establish a collective goal as counterweight to short-term individual behavior patterns focused on immediate and effective gratification without any thought of secondary negative effects. This collective goal would also take egoistic gratification into account, but would also seek to limit the secondary negative consequences which most probably in the long run would limit or totally block further gratification. Thus long-term gratification would be legitimized whilst short-term gratification would be discredited. If this were persuasively spread, a phenomenon of "self-regulation" would surely soon arise. If people consider their behavior to be reasonable and acceptable to others, if others behave in exactly the same or a similar manner and show it, then patterns of "automatic" behavior emerge as before traffic lights where red means Stop! and green means Go! If automatic behavior cannot be adhered to because, for instance, all traffic light colors are shining at once, decision-making becomes necessary to regularize an irregular situation. People fall back on "rational choice" whereby agents will decide and act in the manner they think will bring them the greatest benefit. If this is transposed to the level of long-term egoism and made a model of discourse, it could serve as a model to solve the global dissonance between rich and poor nations, between technologically advanced and technologically less advanced societies.

I would like to illustrate this by citing a project from the energy supply sector. May I first fill in some background.

With our present level of insight into environmental questions we know that the greater part of present production and consumption patterns cannot be viably sustained in the future. The increasing use of non-renewable natural resources must be put a stop to if we are to leave the coming generations room and opportunities for their own independent decisions and self-fulfillment. It is also imperative to implement practical strategies against the increasing threats to the life and quality of life of present generations and this can only mean implementing methods and techniques that furnish comparable levels of consumer gratification and maintain an acceptable quality of life while using substantially fewer natural resources and causing substantially less environmental stress. Thereby we are not only making a contribution towards maintaining the regenerative capacities of nature but also paving the way towards future sustainable social development - development that is not plagued by wars and conflicts over the remaining few resources. Human beings are dependent on nature and its resources - this fact alone should enjoin us to the greatest efforts to transform present production and consumption patterns and develop new models.

Taking into account factors such as the current problems of resource depletion and environmental degradation, the current development of ecologically friendly models that encompass all members of society, the pressing need for a change of paradigm in consumption and behavior patterns and the highly advanced technological and technical options of our industrialized countries, we have addressed the question of how to bring about change in one important sector using the means and organizational forms currently at our disposal.

From no matter which angle we address this question it is safe to assume that our industrialized society possesses all the knowledge necessary for the organization of our lives. However such theoretical insight and technical know-how is for the most part organized according to sectors and compartmentalized so that a view of the whole and the anticipation of unintentional effects seldom goes beyond committees of specialists. The much vaunted call for the "intermeshing" of disciplines with one another and for an "inter-disciplinary" approach to problem-solving comes up against its limits here. There is no "common thread" spun by all participants together and to which they can refer back, bringing in their know-how, experiences, visions, and wishes and their enthusiasm to change things. And we are not talking here about research and development of totally new technologies, procedures or applied techniques.

In center stage stands the common field-working tractor together with agricultural machinery such as the combine harvester or field chopper. These machines require a considerable capital outlay although they are only in full use for a relatively short period of the year. Their use is lopsided - more in one part of the year than the other - and we may calculate that altogether they are used at only around 20 percent of their total annual capability. This makes the capital outlay on them inefficient even though the machinery may be highly efficient with respect to the jobs they are designed to do and may be made still more efficient.

Thus the problem is how to even out this lopsided usage and apply the tractor and other agricultural machines to other supplementary uses.

When a tractor is in use it releases kinetic and thermal energy so it might seem obvious to try to retain and exploit these two forms of energy by driving an electric generator and channeling the thermal energy over a closed system attached to the cooling radiator so instead of being released into the air it is captured and used for heating "on the spot" or in a heat reservoir. Thus we have an alternative use for agricultural machinery as an power station with a very high degree of efficiency in a transition from a mobile to a stationary form of usage.

The technology of electricity-to-heat coupling through a block-heating-station makes obvious sense when there is a need for electricity or heat in the immediate vicinity of the place of production.

A further source of energy has been created that may supplement other energy sources that may not always be available due to climatic factors such as sunshine or wind. This is the case in many regions. Moreover it is particularly relevant for regions of the developing world which are insufficiently supplied with electricity.

The goal here is to develop a functional regulation for agricultural enterprises which can open up sustainable perspectives better than is the case at present and which is also capable of conserving and nurturing both environment and resources. It is a new functional regulation and allocation for land usage, representing a change of paradigm for agriculture. Such a development model could be exemplary in demonstrating that changes in technical paradigms are by no means to be always associated with reduction in quality of life or in opportunities for consume satisfaction. In an industrialized country like Germany the focus of such a project lies on the tradition of technical development that pays full attention to sustainable and ecologically friendly parameters. In this respect there are already a number of proposals based on the principle of self-regulation, on communication, on a new transparency and adequate review mechanisms during implementation and above all on the regional nature of such development processes.

It is indeed fitting that the new paradigm for industrialized countries should be "Less means more"!

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