Conservationists have long been concerned about protecting wildlife, open land, and natural ecosystems. Meanwhile, environmentalists have been concerned about litter, pesticides, plastic bottles, cleaning products, energy efficient buildings, and a myriad of issues that fall into the categories of materials, energy and toxics. But it’s as if these two groups had never met each other.
What we call ‘sustainability’ is in essence the production of goods and services in a manner fundamentally aligned with natural systems. And we’ve had two different communities of advocates in the United States, each getting more educated, more sophisticated, more powerful… one working on the ‘goods and services’ part, and one working on the ‘natural systems’ part.
Sustainability is about integrating the natural world into the economy, and that’s going to require real shifts for both conservationists and environmentalists. It’s becoming clear to both camps that laws which stop the worst kinds of development and the worst impacts of business just aren’t enough anymore; after 50 years of environmental laws in America it’s no longer primarily illegal activities which are damaging the environment, it’s the combined impacts of totally legal activities.
In order to address this, we’re going to need more than new laws and regulations, more than donations from foundations or grants from the government. We need a whole new way of doing business. One that has a new kind of relationship with environmentalists, and one that is proactive about its dealings with the natural world.
We’ve developed an alphabet soup of environmental law: ESA, CRCLA, RCRA, NEPA, CWA, CAA, and so on*… and it’s clear that these laws have made an enormous contribution to our well being and quality of life. But at its core all that law said one thing, which is: stop it. Stop polluting, stop littering, stop damaging things, stop harming the environment. These laws were essential steps towards more responsible corporate behavior, but we’ve gotten to the point where new laws on top of the ones we have are hard to pass. The cost for each benefit used to be really obvious for environmental laws, but now that business and development already comply with 50 years of regulations, it’s harder to justify all the time.
And what’s worse, the way the ‘stop it’ laws work has left us engaged in an odd process of hair-splitting. Let’s say there’s a law that limits pollution of a certain kind to 10 parts per million. If the air or water emissions from my factory have eleven parts per million of the substance, then I’m a criminal, but if they have ten parts per million then everything is fine. How can this be right?
If I invest in reducing the pollution to nine parts per million, then I have costs my competitors don’t. How does this send the right signal to business?
And how did we get to the number ten anyway? It’s usually as much a result of political compromise as it is of scientific expertise. And this same process goes on all over, whether we are talking about how many housing units are allowed per acre, how many trees are allowed to be cut and how many feet from the stream, or how much CO2e** should be allowed in the atmosphere.
Environmentalists, meet Conservationists. Conservationists, meet Environmentalists. Together you have to tools to do what needs to be done: integrate ecology back into economy so the right signals get sent to the people making the business and investment decisions that affect us all.
**CO2e is “Carbon dioxide equivalent”, and is used to measure the concentration of energy trapping ‘greenhouse gasses’ in the atmosphere. This is used instead of CO2, because there are a number of gasses that trap energy, not just CO2, so to measure and describe what’s going on the amount of these other gasses are ‘converted’ to their effect as compared with the effect of CO2. So, for example, one molecule of methane (CH4) = 23 molecules of CO2, so the CO2e of an atmosphere with one CH4 and one CO2 = 24.
