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Home , Sustainable development

Björn Johnson Gert Villumsen November 2017

Sustainable Development in the (DRAFT)

Our aim with this paper is to introduce the notion of the Anthropocene to the IKE group and to discuss how the Anthropocene changes the notion of ‗‘, which, perhaps, is a part of an implicit normative base of studies.

1. The Anthropocene.

This paper is about how the notion of sustainable development changes, in fact partly dissolves, when placed in the context of a transition from the Holocene geological epoch to the Anthropocene. We will discuss major aspect of this conceptual change and tentatively suggest some alternative signposts for development strategy and policy.

The Holocene denotes the geological epoch following the last ice age, 11,700 years ago according to the International Chronostratigraphic Chart of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. This Commission is expected soon to decide if a new epoch called the Anthropocene is to be introduced into the Chart, and, if this would be the case, on a date of time for the succession of the Holocene epoch by the Anthropocene.

It has often been noted (see for example Chesworth 2010) that only during the Holocene the (understood as a geological/environmental entity within the possessing attributes dependent on climate, hydrology, soils, organisms, and historical development within which human societies are placed) has taken on for us well-known forms, i.e. with forests, lakes, rivers, grasslands, swamps, polar ice sheets, , hydrological cycles, and so on. The Holocene has been a period with a remarkable stable climate with regular rainfall patterns and average global temperature staying within a range of 10C. This is widely believed to have helped, and maybe preconditioned, the development of human civilization. The ―Holocene stability‖ is now coming to an end. Human activities such as production, and transportation are increasingly affecting the landscape. Some of the consequences for nature and for human societies depending on ―natural ‖ are on a global level, (especially by ), soil degradation, and of many abiotic as well as biotic resources.

On this background, it has been proposed that the we do not any longer live in the Holocene but in the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002). The Anthropocene denotes a new geological epoch in which human societies have become a planetary force, comparable to volcanism, tectonism, glaciation and weathering making all ―Anthropogenic‖. This may at first, at least to some people, sound like a good thing: The Anthropocene is ―the age of Man‖, when we (the humans) ultimately take control over nature, which has niggardly dominated us during our whole existence and establish a ―sustainable and equitable of Earth's ecosystems for optimal functioning

1 both globally and locally‖ (Singularity University). We can now manage the biosphere according to our needs and wants. At last, Francis Bacon‘s prediction that science will establish ‗Regnum Hominis‘, the kingdom of Man, can become reality and nature reduced to an instrument for human needs.

But a moments reflection reveals this as wishful thinking. Civilization is developed under and depends on crucial stability of the biosphere like predictable seasonal winds, temperatures and rainfall patterns. If the Holocene stability comes to an end and gives way to radical changes in the behavior of the Earth System, seen as a total system in which the biosphere, the cryosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere and the lithosphere constitute interacting subsystems, the Anthropocene implies that much of the existing about the interactions between human society and its becomes obsolete. Our power to affect nature vastly exceeds our knowledge about the consequences.

One important aspect of leaving the Holocene stability is that the rate of change of Earth System characteristics like atmospheric green- gas concentration, stratospheric ozone distribution and concentration, , tropical forest loss, global warming, biosphere degradation (for example loss), etc. increase significantly. This will make it much more difficult and costly for societies to adapt to such changes.

On an aggregated (and quite abstract) level Gaffney and Steffen (2017) has described the idea of the Anthropocene as an increased rate of change of the Earth System due to human activities: In general, the Earth System (E) changes as a result of Astronomical forcing (A), Geophysical forcing (G), Internal dynamics of the Earth system (I), and Human forcing (H). The rate of change of the Earth System can, thus, be written as:

‗A‘ includes radiation and gravitational effects of the sun and other planets and impact events from big meteorites. ‗G‘ includes volcanism, tectonism and weathering. ‗I‘ includes evolutionary processes in the biosphere interacting with the geosphere. ‗H‘ includes results from activities like production, consumption and transportation in an increasing .

In a geological perspective of ―deep time‖ H is an entirely new forcing. It is unique in the sense that it now dominates the ―old‖ forces and drives the changes of the Earth System. It also substantially increases the speed of the different sub-process within the Earth system. For example, over the past 45 years the rate of temperature change has risen to 170 times the Holocene baseline. Therefor we can at the highest rate of abstraction write the ―Anthropocene equation‖ in the following way (Gaffney and Steffen 2017):

where A, G and I are approaching zero. (A, G, I 0)

In the Anthropocene, the characteristics and processes of the biosphere and the whole Earth System change by human action, but so far not by human design. There is no clear reason to believe that a spontaneous order of benign stability of the Earth System will emerge within a for human societies

2 relevant time horizon. The Anthropocene is a concept that places the state of the biosphere and the present environmental problems within deep time. Nobody knows if a new, from the perspective of human civilization sufficiently stable landscape will eventually emerge out of the present transition phase of the Earth System. Normally changes in the structure of the Earth system occur in a time scale completely different from what human societies operate in.

Local level interactions between changes of the landscape and human societies have been quite common during the Holocene and some of them are well documented. Sometimes such interactions have led to severe landscape degradation with critical consequences for social life and sometimes even to collapse of societies and cultures. (See for example Diamond 2005 and Martini and Chesworth, eds. 2010, ch.4, 6, 7, 9, and 23). However, the Anthropocene challenges societies in ways and on levels never experienced before and the risk for collapse moves from the local to the regional, national and even global level. (Johnson et al. 2017) The accumulated effects of human activities are forcing the Earth System out the relative stability of the Holocene. It is now in transition to another, yet unknown, state. Seen in a deep time perspective this is not very remarkable. The Earth System has gone through dramatic changes many times before, where long periods of relative stability have been followed by (in a deep time perspective) fast transitions into a new relative stability. The dominant view of the development of the Earth amongst geologists today is not one of gradual incremental change over its almost five billion years of existence, but a rather more ―catastrophic‖ view where the structure and behavior of the system has changed many times. Every transition from one geological epoch to another is a kind of generalized disruption. This probably means that returning to the Holocene stability through a reduction of our present environmental impacts to more modest levels of earlier times is not an option. If it is correct, as we think it is, that the Earth System already is in transition from the Holocene into something else the Holocene can‘t be preserved by keeping within some specified ―‖. The transition process may be affected by policy but it can´t be reversed. (Johnson & Villumsen 2017).

We should observe that there is an important factor missing in this way of describing the onset of the Anthropocene. Even if ‗human forcing‘ is taken as the driver of the disruptive change of the earth system all kinds of human agency and agenda are left out. In the most common Anthropocene narrative , technical change, and economic growth come together and take the form of objective, impersonal, neutral forces. Actors, specific interests, politics and institutions are downplayed. This is a ―geologist‘s view‖ characterized by neutral forces interacting with each other over very long periods of time. This way of thinking has clear merits and it was the background for putting the Anthropocene on the agenda in the first place. However, since the development of the Anthropocene is driven by interactions, including feedback loops, between biogeophysical and social processes it is crucial to understand not only the character of the former but also the latter processes. It is the structure and character of ―human forcing‖ that is at the bottom of the transition between the Holocene and the Anthropocene and it will determine if ―desirable Holcene-like conditions‖ (Donges et al 2017) can be sustained

2. From Growth to sustainable development

2.1 The rise of hegemonic growth

The most important factor beside population growth behind the ―human forcing‖ of the Anthropocene discussed above is economic growth. To understand the Anthropocene we need to

3 understand economic growth. It is, like the Anthropocene itself, a relatively new phenomenon in human history. Thinking about growth can roughly be divided into three historic periods. First, the period from mid-18th century to mid-19th century (often labelled the First by historians). The central growth-related question for the ―worldly philosophers‖ of the time was if there were any limits to continued economic expansion (in Adam Smith words: ―continual increase of national wealth‖ or ― of opulence‖). Could societies continue to improve general living standards or would limiting factors (mainly shortness of agricultural land) at some point halt the process? The general agreement was that an end of economic expansion was unavoidable and for most of the thinkers (Smith, Ricardo, Malthus) this was quite deplorable. Policy could extend the process (for example by removing tariffs) but not forever.

During the second period, from mid-19th century to the mid-20th century (roughly the period labelled the Second Industrial revolution with mass production by mean of electricity), mainstream economists gradually came to take economic expansion for granted and growth lost its status as an issue of high importance. Marx analyzes of accumulation and extended contained a theory of economic growth but for obvious reasons Marx‘s labor-based theory of value with its emphasis on exploitation was more popular in the emerging labor movements than among capitalists. In the class struggle capitalists found support in the new neoclassical theory of value based on marginal utility, which expelled the idea of exploitation to the history of economic . The theoretical focus and main political objectives now became stability and efficiency. Economic growth/progress was difficult to handle in a general equilibrium system and was mostly regarded as exogenously determined by technical change. The expelling of growth from the economic discourse was so clear-cut that Arthur Lewis (an economist known for his contributions to ) wrote: ‖No comprehensive treatise on the subject of economic growth has been published for about a century‖ (Lewis 1955). Furthermore, growth was also absent from the policy discourse in this period: ―Hardly a line is to be found in the writings of any professional economists between 1870 and 1940 in support of economic growth as a policy measure.‖(Arndt 1978).

The third period of growth thinking (often labelled ―modern economic growth‖), where growth is becoming more and more important as a policy goal that can be influenced via and economic policy, coincides first with the cold war and later with the third industrial revolution, where electronics and information technology became generic and broadly introduced in the economy. Usually we think about the cold war as a period with mutual military armament. However, the rivalry was also about achieving the fastest growth and progress. Growth accounting became a tool both used to compare between nations and to set goals for the development in the years to come. Instruments of macroeconomic planning and technology policy were introduced and gradually in this process GDP and its growth became ends in themselves.

It is interesting to note that the most important theoretical ―weapons‖ in the competition between capitalism and socialism (macroeconomic planning and growth accounting) was originally developed by ―the enemy‖. Ideas of economic progress based on planning and national accounting were developed in Russia and in the Soviet Union in the first decades of the 20th century. These were partly incorporated in economic policy in the 20s and some of the insights (but not many of the intellectuals behind them) survived Stalin´s purges. In terms of industrial production the Soviet Union was quite successful and in 1938 its share of world industrial production was estimated to near 20%, which has to be compared to a share of 4% a decade earlier (Rosenberg 1982). Many of the founding economists behind modern economic growth were of Russian origin. Some of them

4 got their basic training in economic theory and mathematics in Russia and the Soviet Union before emigrating to Germany or the United States. Most famous are probably Simon Kuznets (national accounting) and Wasilly Leontief (input-output analysis) but there were many others. ―Thus to some extent the concerns of Russian economics before 1929 survived by proxy, ironically in the homeland of its future Cold War adversary itself‖ (Barnett 2008)

The economic war against ‖the real existing socialism‖ was in the 1960s institutionalized through the formation of OECD (Schmelzer 2016, p46). OECD became the new economic NATO setting growth targets for its member states. A result of the growth targets often mentioned by historians was the emergence of an imagined community of countries and notably the imagined community of ―the West‖(Anderson 1983). Another result was that growth targets ―could inspire, galvanize and unite the nation‖ (Tobin 1964). (On a more speculative level this might be seen as one of the mechanism leading to the development of fierce competition between nation-states and the growing nationalism in the following decades. But this will not be discussed in this paper). During the cold war GDP growth was exalted to become a responsibility states had to take on, an imperative that could not be evaded and the one preeminent requisite and priority. (Schmelzer 2016 p. 185). An early awareness of the emerging paradigm is demonstrated in Tobin‘s keynote speech to The American Economic Association: ―Growth has become a good word. And the better a word becomes, the more it is invoked to bless a variety of causes and the more it loses specific meaning. It has become a new synonym for a good thing in general and a fashionable way to describe other economic objectives.‖ (Tobin 1964).

2.2 , limits to growth, sustainable development

The possibility of serious negative effects of economic growth, not least the effects on the environment, was not neglected in the economic war between East and West. In fact, almost all the great minds of modern economic growth (for example Abramovitz, Kuznets and Solow) had concerns about negative . But it was not until the growth paradigm was challenged in the 70s and 80s that environmental problems became a central issue on the agenda. The challenge came from two directions: (a) the economic slump with low growth rates and (b) a growing concern about negative environmental consequences and exhaustion not only for local and regional economies but also for the whole global economy. These concerns were first formulated by the , and later in the Bruntland report (―‖). The concerns were backed by new key statistics showing the picture of ―a hockey-stick‖ for all critical variables: population, , water use, etc. (Angus, 2016). There was, in other words, a new and growing concern about planetary-scale limits and possible ecological feedbacks.

How were these environmental issues threated in OECD? According to Schmelzer (2016), before the economic slump there was an open-minded approach. ―Environmental problems cannot be dissociated from the economic context because these problems are largely byproducts of economic activities, general operations of production and consumption and therefor have to form part of economic policy‖ (from Meeting of Council at Ministerial level, May 1970). The awareness of negative effects of economics growth was also reflected in many seminars organized by OECD where leading scholars in the field of were invited to develop methods of analysis and evaluation, and to formulate policies to handle economics externalities.

However, the combination of declining GDP (growth) and increasing unemployment changed focus and priority and the perspective became decidedly marked-oriented: ―Thus environmental factors –

5 clean air and water, for example – can be brought into the economic calculus along with the more traditional factors of production: they can be given a price. This approach has been considered the most efficient way to reduce pollution and the one less likely to distort international economic exchanges, if no subsidies are given.‖ (OECD at Work for the Environment, 1973); here cited from Schmelzer (2016). The faith in liberalized market, the faith of prices as the main regulating mechanism, and the shift from demand to supply-side economics as the dominant paradigm was part of the restoration of growthmanship in governments and OECD in the and 80s. Concerns about ―limit to growth‖ was not any longer a main issue in those circles. They were mostly present in popular discourses.

In the period after the second World War theory emerged as a broader and more multifaceted view on progress than growth of GDP. It was emphasized that growth and development are not the same thing. Often, however, this problem is sidestepped by using the term ―economic growth and development‖. Even if development has become theoretically rather well- defined it continues to be interpreted in many different ways by different persons and in different contexts: ―Anyone who asked articulate citizens in developed or developing countries what they meant by this desirable objective of ―development‖ would get a great variety of answers. Higher living standards. A rising per capita income. Increase in productive capacity. Mastery over nature. Freedom though control of man‘s environment. Economic growth. But not mere growth, growth with equity. Elimination of . Basic need satisfaction. Catching up with the developed countries in technology, wealth, power, status. Economic independence, self-reliance. Scope for self-fulfillment for all. Liberation, the means to human ascent. Development, in the vast literature on the subject, appears to encompass almost all facets of the good society, everyman‘s road to utopia.‖(Arndt 1987)

The situation today remains unresolved. Everyone agrees that development is something more than growth and that GDP growth is a poor measure of welfare and living standard. In order, not to have to choose between the two measures the term ―economic growth and development‖ have become a standard notion. Furthermore, terms like , clean growth and sustainable growth have become common. This, of course, doesn‘t solve the problem of priority and in times of economic stagnation or crisis economic growth (i.e. good old GDP growth) still takes precedence over clean, green or sustainable growth. Also, the notion of development has got its own adjectives. In fact, ―sustainable development‖ and also ―inclusive development‖, have become standard notions of substantial political importance (compare the UN Sustainable Development Goals).

We have come a long way from economic growth to sustainable development. The importance of this should not be underestimated. It signifies an increasing awareness of the complexity and conflicts that characterize development and implies that the struggle for development around the world has to be fought on many fronts and in many ways. At the same time, when a word contains so many connotations, it is clear that when adding ―sustainable‖, which in itself has several meanings, there will be many and contradicting views on what to sustain.

3. Sustainable development – an inherently vague notion.

3.1 The mainstream notion.

6 It has become a common view, almost a mantra, that growth and development needs to be ―sustainable‖ and the idea that a combination of technical change and government regulation can implement this is almost hegemonic. However, the realization that we live in the Anthropocene (or perhaps more correctly in the transition between the Holocene and the Anthropocene) puts the notion of sustainable development in a new light, or rather lack of light. Since the Holocene stability is coming to an end, many conditions for human and social life change and it becomes increasingly difficult to pinpoint what it is that needs to be sustained. If the notion of sustainable development is to retain any meaning at all, it can‘t be about how to preserve the Holocene climate and landscape, which is its core meaning today. The meaning of the concept has to shift into something, which is about how to cope with fast changing Earth System characteristics. It has to be adapted to the Anthropocene reality and become more about how to ―navigate the Anthropocene‖ than on how to preserve well-known landscape characteristics of the Holocene.

Immediately, the notion of sustainable development seems simple and clear. ―‖ refers to the ability to last, to go on over time and sustainable development is development that can go on without running out of steam and without encountering any serious limits. The most well-known formulation is probably the one from the so called Brundtland Report: ―Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future to meet their own needs‖ (Brundtland 1987). Following the Brundtland report it has become standard procedure in the literature to note that sustainable development has several interrelated dimensions. It is, for example, often pictured as three partly intersecting circles or ellipses illustrating social, economic and environmental development, where the intersection of circles defines sustainable development. Or it may be pictured as a building where three pillars (a social, an environmental, and an economic) together support a roof denoted sustainable development.

It is of course true that sustainable development doesn‘t refer only to society‘s natural environment. Even if the natural environment remains healthy, development may bump into different kinds of limits if the social or economic systems for some reason become undermined in the process. But it is misleading to put the natural environment at the same level as the social and economic systems. Nature (thought of for example as the biosphere) can survive without being environment to economic and social systems, in fact it did so for about 3 billion years, but neither human individuals nor human society can survive without the biosphere. It is clear that sustainable development has to be a concept with several levels and that the health of the biosphere takes precedence over social and economic ambitions also if we take an anthropocentric view and regard human wellbeing as the ultimate goal in development.

But it is not only the relation between the different layered subsystems (the economic, the social and the environmental) that has to be taken on board when thinking about sustainable development. There are also differences in expected lifetime of the subsystems. The sustainability of a system necessarily has a time dimension. It can‘t be sustained indefinitely. We can for example relate a life span to each type of subsystem within the natural environment ranging from relative short lives for individual cells over the lifetime of individual animals to longer periods for species and ecosystems and finally to the planet as a biological system (the biosphere) with a much longer life span (Costanza and Folke 1996). Different social and economic systems (and their subsystems) also have very different expected lifetimes, which are shorter than the systems of the natural environment they are interacting with. Nothing lasts for ever and it is unsatisfactory to define and discuss sustainable development without taking the expected life-spans of the different subsystems into

7 account, which is often the case today. In a way sustainability is a notion in conflict with our knowledge about fundamental laws of biological processes; in nature, there is basically no sustainability, only change governed by the process of evolution.

The Brundtland report tries to avoid the problem of different lifetimes for different subsystems by focusing on capabilities rather than concrete aspects of the Earth System. It is the capability to meet the needs of the population that is supposed to be sustained over present as well as . This aligns the Brundtland formulation with most modern notions of economic development. These are also formulated in terms of capabilities or ―freedoms‖, as in the well- known texts of Amartya Sen (1999). It is, of course, a strength of the Brundtland definition of sustainability that it fits so well into present mainstream development theory. It is not always recognized, however, that this also makes it utterly anthropocentric. The only thing that matters is human needs. The natural environment of the socio-economic system is supposed to have (instrumental) value only if it contributes directly or indirectly to the fulfilment of human needs. It is primarily regarded as natural resources, i.e. as input in the production process. In addition to this it may provide ecosystems services, i.e. the benefits people obtain from ecosystems such as soil formation, carbon sequestration, watershed protection, purification of water, wild food for example game and spices, recreational and aesthetic services, etc.

The natural environment is obviously crucially important for the fulfilment of human needs. However, it doesn‘t seem to have a value of its own in excess of this. There are no substantial or intrinsic values connected to nature in the standard definition of sustainable development, only instrumental values. In environmental ethic this is, as we will see below, a somewhat problematic position. Furthermore, it risks making myopic and short-sighted, since only issues that in the views of present policymakers seem important for human well-being are put on the agenda. Experience shows that these views change over time and that people seem to find it difficult to think and identify with others over more than three generations.

3.2 The great divide between culture and nature.

As argued above, the mainstream notion of sustainable development implies that different subsystems (social, economic and environmental) can be at least approximately defined and separated from each other. It is often recognized that very precise empirically meaningful definitions and borderlines are almost impossible to formulate, but the notion of sustainable development still presupposes that it makes sense to distinguish the different subsystems from each other. It is especially important to be able to distinguish between nature and society. Nature is thought of as an environment to society and since no system that destroys its environment can survive, sustainable development means that different processes in society, like production, consumption and trade, should not allowed to wear down or outright destroy the natural environment.

This separation between nature and society plays a role in the present sustainability discourse. It is often connected to ‗modernity‘ and it has, allegedly, prevented us from understanding ecological issues and the interactions between nature and society. It is commonly thought that the sustainability issue was discovered only recently (say from the beginning of the 20th century) by first science and then environmental and ecological political movements. After this it became increasingly important in the political and economic discourse. However, this picture is in many

8 ways incorrect. First, modernity is not responsible for constructing the ―great divide‖ between nature and society. This idea and the corollary that nature has to be conquered and transformed into an instrument for fulfilment of human needs and wants (regnum Hominis) is older than modernity. Tamed nature as an ideal, prominently illustrated by the notion of a ‗garden‘, can for example be found in the Bible‘s story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden (i.e. not in the wilderness) and gardening is as old as civilization itself. Thinkers of the antiquity had already established and discussed the value of a conceptual division between nature and culture and modernity has from its beginning included knowledge that emphasise that humans belongs to and are part of an order of nature. Environmental reflexivity is much older than modern (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016).

The great divide between nature and society is, thus, both old and much discussed and it, still, plays a role in the sustainability discourse. It is however becoming less and less helpful for our thinking about sustainable development. It obscures rather than clarifies the issues. Partly this is because nature is a very complex word, which can mean very different things. Sometimes it refers to the essential quality and character of something (the human nature, the nature of the bees, the nature of football, etc.). Other times it refers to the material world itself, with or without human beings (as it is studied by the natural sciences). In patent law, for example, there is a distinction between nature and human invention. Phenomena of nature can‘t be patented but a firm can take a product of nature, for example a seed, change its properties and then patent it. This distinction is supposed to be clear-cut, but court praxis shows that it can be quite difficult to handle. Finally, very often the word nature simply refers to a tract of land relatively untouched by human activity. This is basically how nature is understood in the context of the great divide between nature and culture.

One reason for the decreasing conceptual usefulness of the nature/society divide is that phenomena that used to be regarded as ―natural‖, acts of nature or resulting from processes in nature now have turned out to be partly cultural and social phenomena. For example, famines have often been seen as caused by crop failures resulting from droughts and described as natural disasters. However, it is now clear that social institutions and economic policy to a very large extent determines if a period of drought leads to a famine or not (Sen 1999, Davis 2001). The distinction between nature and society has turned out to be blurred. Another reason is that an increasing proportion of the human population lives in surroundings, which are clearly very much affected by human activity, for example in towns and , or in intensely cultivated . Contacts with landscapes that are only marginally untouched by human activity have become rare and as a consequence people are redefining their notions of nature. It has become common to refer to any place where you can find living plants or animals as nature. Parks, gardens and jogging lanes in the cities, Christmas tree plantations and planted windbreaks in the countryside and other places far removed from anything resembling wilderness now count as nature. This ―conceptual drift‖ is also present in . For example, a recent publication from PNAS (2017) investigating potentials for reduction of emissions refer to conservation, restoration and/or improved land management actions in agriculture and grasslands as natural climate solutions. The main reason, however for the increasing elusiveness of the divide is the Anthropocene itself. Wilderness has become very rare and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find land where human activities haven‘t significantly interfered with ecosystems or vital biogeochemical cycles like the carbon-, nitrogen- and phosphorus cycles. The divide between the man-made world and the natural world dissolves. Nature is now anthropogenic.

9 To refer to nature when discussing environmental sustainability is becoming more and more empty. Nonetheless, this is the way we tend to think about the natural environment to the socio-economic system: The Holocene landscape is still identified with nature and essential aspects of this landscape like forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, swamps, stable weather patterns and so on must be sustained if development of the human society is to be sustainable. But this is not very helpful. One reason for this is that the Holocene landscape is to some extent an ―imagined landscape‖. It has varied substantially over time and space and each new has a new image of it in their minds. Another and more basic reason is that we already are in transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. The whole landscape is anthropogenic and the Holocene can‘t be used as a baseline landscape for sustainable development. It is necessary to be more precise. What exactly is it that should be sustained in sustainable development?

3.3 Visions of sustainable development: What should be sustained and how could it be done?

Increasingly realizing that we no longer live in the Holocene seems to give rise to new images of sustainable development, of what it is and what it could and should be. In the discourse, it is possible to identify a number of partly overlapping ―visions‖ of sustainability in the Anthropocene. Each of the visions is connected to more or less precise ideas about what it is that should be sustained and about possible instruments for this.

Sustain economic growth: In the first and most conservative or mainstream vision it is economic growth, often with an adjective like ―green‖ or ―clean‖, that should be sustained. Growth continues to be the most important goal, trumping everything else. It is supposed to be compatible with and partly also a precondition for high environmental standards if accompanied by well-designed regulations and policies supporting development and utilization of green technologies. The relative focus on how green growth should be may change with the rate of growth, being strong when the economy grows fast and weaker when the economy slows down and unemployment rises. Such a relaxed approach to environmental sustainability is regarded as acceptable since it seen as a quite long-term issue. This vision may be regarded as a crude version of another slightly bolder vision.

Sustain the Holocene. Here sustainable development is strongly linked to commonly hold images of the ―Holocene landscape‖ referred to above. Human activities have resulted in economic growth, population growth, , globalization, and increased use of natural resources and energy. Degradation of air, soils, forests, fresh water resources, habitats, biodiversity, the nitrogen and carbon cycles, etc. have followed. There are different ways of listing and describing the effects of the human activities but the core idea is that the basic aspects of the Holocene landscape is changing and the health of the biosphere is threatened. Sustainable development then implies that crucial Holocene landscape characteristics must be preserved through a number of defensive measures: Limit climate change, stop the loss of biodiversity, protect specific landscapes like tropical , coral reefs, mangroves, etc. This vision differs from the first one primarily by a much more active and many-faceted environmental policy and much a stronger climate policy. Economic growth is not necessarily a problem but the structure of the economy has to reflect the ―needs‖ of the environment and the biosphere much more than it does today.

A stronger and more ambitious version of this vision may be formulated as sustain desirable Holocene-like conditions (Donges et al 2017). The idea is that taking departure from an Earth System science approach it is possible to formulate rather precisely a number of ―planetary

10 boundaries‖. These boundaries delimit a ―safe operating space‖ for human activities which defines the Holocene-like landscape conditions that should be sustained. The Stockholm Resilience Center has pioneered the research along these lines and identified and quantified 9 planetary boundaries: climate change, novel entities, stratospheric , atmospheric aerosol loading, ocean acidification, biogeochemical flows, freshwater use, land system change, and biosphere integrity. Two of these boundaries – climate change and biosphere integrity - have been identified as crucial since each of them on its own has the potential to drive the Earth System into a new state. To keep humanity within the safe operating space a broad spectrum of policies are necessary, including deep institutional changes addressing both social inclusion and global governing of crucial environmental issues. The vision of ―sustaining desirable Holocene like conditions‖ is, like the ―sustain the Holocene‖ vision, anchored in the Holocene landscape and uses the Holocene stability as a lead star for policy making, but it is more activist and forward looking. Anticipating negative environmental consequences of human activities is a crucial part of the Earth System based analysis, while designing and implementing policy responses also calls for insights in social sciences.

While the third vision described above relies on the ability to identify and mitigate environmental threats rather precisely, the fourth vision – sustain the health of the biosphere – focuses broadly on preconditions for biodiversity and evolution. There should remain enough nature to sustain biotic integrity. That means less concern for a managed planet and more for the inherited biosphere. This has been formulated in the following way: ―The ―sustainable biosphere‖ model gives priority to a baseline quality of natural environment. In any ethical environmental , the economy must be worked out ―within‖ such a policy for environmental quality objectives (clean air, water, stable agricultural soils, attractive residential landscapes, forests, mountains, rivers, rural lands, parks, wildlands, wildlife, renewable resources). Winds blow, rains fall, rivers flow, the sun shines, photosynthesis takes place, carbon recycles all over the landscape. These processes have to be sustained. The economy must be kept within an environmental orbit.‖ (Holmes Rolston III 2015). This means a partial shift from anthropocentric to eco-centric focus in environmental policy: Preserve a variety of basic landscape types and specific biotopes. Protect soils, forests, freshwaters, etc. Keep the biosphere in a state so that it can support a rich variety of life forms and continued evolution.

There is also a geo-engineering vision: sustain the Anthropocene. In this vision humankind embraces a new role of Earth System managers. The idea that we have an obligation to sustain biodiversity for its own sake is scrapped in favor of only taking care of eco-systems that have a value to people. The ambition is to take on ―the design and management of novel ecosystems that provide valued eco-services (e.g. carbon sequestration) yet bear little resemblance to historical landscapes‖ (Minteer 2012). The argument is that since ecosystems in the Anthropocene are already anthropogenic i.e. hybrids of culture and nature, they should (and could) be planned and managed by society. Take climate change as an example. Scientists are already developing different types of ―geoengineering‖ technologies, which, supposedly, can be used to reverse global warming (The Royal Society 2009). Carbon dioxide may be removed from the atmosphere in different ways. For example, carbon absorbing materials could be mined and spread out or tipped into the oceans and plants could be grown to absorb carbon from the air, which then could be captured and stored. Another approach is to intercept or reflect some of the heat radiation from the sun. This might be done by spraying seawater into the air and by spraying sulphur into the stratosphere. The ―sustain the Anthropocene‖ vision may perhaps be described as including a maximum risk and radical uncertainty strategy to sustainability. It relies heavily on technology push policies without much consideration for the connected distributive and institutional issues.

11

Even if geoengineering is the main idea in the ―sustain the Anthropocene‖ vision engineering that changes the meaning of human life itself (human-engineering), and thus its relations to the natural environment is, increasingly, accompanying it. This may have drastic consequences. Biodiversity is crucially important in the ―sustain the biosphere‖ vision described above. This is because it is fundamental for biological variety, which keeps the ability to adapt to environmental change open. But Harari (2015) mentions three ways in which technological change may replace natural selection with something quite different: Biological engineering, cyborg engineering (i.e. combinations of organic life and inorganic, mechanical parts) and engineering of inorganic life (i.e. computer programs that can evolve by themselves). Adding these kinds of engineering to geoengineering makes the Anthropocene even more unpredictable and the meaning of the notion sustainable development completely loses its substance.

3.4 Governing the Earth System?

The view of planet Earth as a total system of interacting subsystems was pioneered by Kenneth Boulding (1985). His analysis included systems of very different kinds and time scales and was groundbreaking in its new understanding of the interactions between social, biological, chemical and physical systems. Today his contribution is not so often recognized as it should be in the new surge of system thinking in the sustainability discourse related to the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene notion was introduced by geologists but it was soon picked up by environmental science and . Even if the chronostratigraphic discussion about if and when the Anthropocene started may seem a bit irrelevant for social sciences, it is, we think, crucial to take the interactions between biogeophysical and socioeconomic forces on board when discussing sustainable development. The notion of the world as a total system and the insights of Earth Systems science are fundamental in this context. Traditionally, the Earth System is described as a total system in which the biosphere, the cryosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere and the lithosphere constitute interacting subsystems. This may be an adequate model for the geological epochs before the Anthropocene. Now, however, human activity has become the major driver of Earth System change and the global socioeconomic system and its interaction with the biological and physical Earth System have to be included in the Earth System.

The task has been described as understanding these interactions and develop strategies and methods for governing the system within the normative context of sustainable development (Bierman et al 2010). Terms like ―governing (or managing) the Earth System‖ and ―governing the Anthropocene‖ have become common. But governing the Earth System in the Anthropocene sounds like anthropocentric hubris (Regnum Hominis). In any case it won‘t be easy. The biogeophysical and the socio-economic systems have mainly been studied in very different scientific domains that don‘t communicate very much with each other. This means that the interactions between these systems are poorly understood. The Earth System is characterized by social-ecological feedbacks, which may lead to non-intuitive tipping points in vital subsystems and seems very difficult to model. Furthermore, the increasing rate of change of the Earth System, which is a hallmark of the Anthropocene, implies that the normative framework for governing the system, i.e. ―sustainable development‖, also change. As showed above it is not totally clear what it is that should be sustained. Add to this a lack of institutions for , problems of agency and accountability, conflicts of interest and conflicts of distribution of wealth and power, etc. and any

12 ambition of managing or governing the Earth System from a sustainable development point of view (or for that matter any point of view) seems out of reach in a foreseeable future. However, if Earth System science is right about the complexity, instability, unpredictability (because of numerous feedback loops and tipping points) and fast rate of change of the Earth System and if the experiencers from social sciences of a high degree of unpredictability and non-governability of the continues to hold, then some kind of basic policy approach for ―navigating the Anthropocene‖ is required.

If the term ‗navigating the Anthropocene‘ is to be meaningful it should not be about navigating in the sense of applying reliable methods for sailing across a sea from a known point of departure to a known point of destination. It would rather be about developing skills and techniques (like Odysseus?) to sail on a sea the size of which you don‘t know, with a very vague idea of the destination, with unfamiliar weather conditions and where different kinds of nameless monsters may lurk. To navigate the Anthropocene includes to negotiate a way through the transition between the Holocene and the Anthropocene and to go on adapting to continuing and unavoidable change and high levels of uncertainty – expecting the unexpected. Navigating the Anthropocene requires a . Capability to identify planetary boundaries and to adapt behavior in order to stay within them. Capability to adapt to faster rates of change of the environment than usual. Capability to adapt to unexpected outcomes of Earth System dynamics. Our capacity to navigate the Anthropocene comes from the diversity (in cultures, ideologies, values, information, knowledge, , etc.) and not from a bio-geo-engineering Anthropos. Earth System science has to be developed and better communication between social and natural sciences is needed.

The lead star is not to escape from the Holocene crisis into a forever sustainable world liberated from geo-history. It is something more demanding - to live within a continuing crisis and struggle to influence its course. In fact, we have to move away from the idea of sustainability towards ecological pluralism and reconnection with the biosphere, i.e. working for the survival of complex, plural ecosystems. Embracing compassion and empathy for the grizzly bears in the age of uncertainty and unpredictability. Biodiversity is a basic quality since it is the precondition for the dynamics and change, which constitutes the capacity to evolve and survive. This means that a variety of ecosystems and societies and basic resources like habitats, soil, forests and fresh water reserves need to be uphold.

The Anthropocene is here and it can‘t be undone. There is no way back to the Holocene stability. The change in our way of thinking about sustainability and the new development approach that is needed has is still very far away. Maybe the first that needs to be done is writing the history about how the Anthropocene happened including the conflicts, institutions, actors, wars, consumerism, globalization, etc. in order to get a better understanding of the character and seriousness of the problem ahead.

4. The need for an environmental for the Anthropocene.

That society is still largely unprepared for many of the technical, institutional and political challenges of the Anthropocene is reflected by ethical unpreparedness. When society and its natural environment become more and more intertwined, new ethical issues are raised – but with a significant time lag. The American environmentalist Leopold (1949) observed that ―there is as yet

13 no ethics dealing with man‘s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it … The land ethics simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to in addition to people also include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land‖. He sums up the land ethics in the following often quoted way: ―A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise‖ The relevance of Leopold‘s land ethic is increasing in the Anthropocene. It may be seen as an early reaction to this in the sense that its sees people and societies as interwoven with and not separate from nature. But preservation of local biotic communities, which has been interpreted as the main heritage from Leopold, is not any longer a sufficient reaction. Global environmental problems (like climate change and ) are connected to overexploitation of the ―‖, (like the biosphere, the atmosphere, and the oceans), which can‘t any longer be seen primarily as sources and sinks to the economic system but have to be recognized as preconditions for human civilisation as such. This means that there are problems of collective action within and between nation-states emanating from, for example, prisoner‘s dilemma situations and free riding behaviour (Williston 2015). To cope with this there is a need for ethical considerations. The present ethical deficit is aggravated by a lack of awareness and identification of environmental problems. Vetlesen (2015) calls this a ―denial of nature‖. Nature has become artificial and lost its meaning to many people. Humans do not any longer think of themselves as part of something bigger than us. According to Vetlesen anthropocentrism is a hallmark of the Anthropocene. Everything is seen from the perspective of humans and aspects of nature like plants, animals and ecosystems have no intrinsic value. They have instrumental value for human needs and wants, which through their limitless character take precedence over everything else. Animals, plants, and ecosystems may in addition to their instrumental value also have some substantive value, for example recreational value for people through zoos, parks, nature reserves, accessible open landscapes and so on. But the dominant perspective is anthropocentric and nature is void of intrinsic value. Vetlesen (2015) sees the denial of nature as a process. It is sustained by a lack of personal, direct experience with nature since we don‘t usually defend something we don‘t know from personal experience. It is also driven by technical change. Modern technology, especially ICT, seems to make everything immediately accessible everywhere. We lose some of our sense of time and space. This changes the society–nature relationship. Our willingness to react against destruction of nature decreases as our experiences with it decreases and it becomes more veiled and indirect. Furthermore, the baseline for evaluating the state of environment drifts over time through a kind of generational environmental amnesia. We tend to use the environment we grow up with as the norm against which we evaluate the environmental degradation we encounter later in life. We accept what seem to be reasonable small losses with the consequence that next generation starts from a lower baseline. There are, however, some countertendencies to the denial of nature. First, the widespread inclination to regard animals as ―non-sentient‖ creatures, unable to suffer and in general quite incomparable with humans, which goes back at least to the 17th century and Descartes, is now increasingly challenged. It is more and more recognised that animals are sentient in many ways and have more advanced cognitive capacities than thought earlier. There is not much doubt any longer that they can suffer and have other feelings as well. In many species animals relate to each other and learn from each other. When animals become more like humans it becomes more difficult to look upon nature as being purely instrumental for economic growth without any substantial value at all.

14 Second, within different forms of ―ecocentrism‖ have gained influence. The focus is more on wildlife than farm-life and it is more on species, habitats and ecosystems than on individual animals. Environmental ethics has become quite complex and there is a scale of positions from pure ‗anthropocentrism‘ to extreme ‗ecocentrism‘ (Garner 2015). Anthropocentrism in this context means that environmental sustainability should be pursued only when it benefits humans. Ecocentrism on the other hand means that intrinsic values can be found in nature regardless of human benefits or even human presence. Such values are not primarily connected to individual animals but rather to species and ecosystems. This position is usually tracked back to ‘s ―Land Ethic‖, later developed further by for example Baird Callicott (1989). Moderate ecocentrism, which lately seem to have gained some influence, can be regarded as a counterforce to the denial of nature. The question of intrinsic versus instrumental value of aspects of the natural environment is quite complex. It is true that the value of the environment can‘t be considered without considering its impact on human lives. Take the example of small pox eradication. Biodiversity has been reduced but we don‘t think that the environment has become poorer because the smallpox virus has been wiped out. The value of the environment can‘t be divorced from the lives and needs of people. But to see people only in terms of their needs is not enough. People certainly has needs, but they also have values. Especially they cherish their ability to reason, appraise, choose, participate and act. In doing so, however, we have moral responsibilities. For example, since we are enormously more powerful than other species we have obligations to them. When thinking about the relations about people and the natural environment it is important not to have a narrow view of peoples‘ identities and for example regard them as primarily consumers of goods and services. There is no contradiction in valuing the preservation of a specific species, for example a certain frog living in some parts of Fælleden in Copenhagen, even if it has no significant effect on our living standard. We may strongly value specific ecosystems even if they have (seemingly) nothing much to do with human living standards (Sen 2009). Third, ―animal welfare‖ in agriculture has become a political issue in some countries. Farm animals pose specific ethical problems. The ways cows, pigs and chicken are treated in their roles as inputs in a process of production become morally disturbing when you start to look upon them as sentient and in many ways intelligent. Even if domesticated animals have their roots in nature the value issues connected to them have gradually been separated from how we think about wild animals. Farm animals are let down by almost everyone. The discussion of animal welfare in agriculture is so far mostly about the physical health and condition of the individual pig or cow without much regard for their species-specific behaviour in terms of genetically based needs for space, activity, bonding with other animals, herding and so on. Even so the fact that animal welfare is becoming a moral and political issue is connected to the increasing importance of environmental ethics. To handle the ―expected unexpected‖ and proliferating environmental problems in the Anthropocene we need ethical consideration to prepare us for at least five types of problems. First, we need environmental ethics to balance between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism in environmental policy. Related to this, we also need help in finding pragmatic and undogmatic solutions to the many problems of animal welfare in modern food production. Second, since the costs and benefits of environmental change are unevenly distributed and much has to be internationally coordinated, we need an ethic to address relations between the global prosperous and the global poor. Third, present generations of people need to engage more actively in a communication with imagined future generations. Taking up the perspective of future generations looking back at what we did to the biosphere may act as a moral constraint on present actions (Williston 2015). Fourth, the Anthropocene has developed into a situation where we have

15 knowledge and capacity to interfere deeply with the natural environment but without knowledge about the full consequences. We can‘t separate the workings of the socioeconomic and biogeophysical systems and we need an ethic to define acceptable and non-acceptable interventions in the systems (Williston 2015). Finally, we need to handle these ethical questions without preventing the innovativeness that is a precondition for keeping the systems within the planetary boundaries. The ethic for the Anthropocene needs to support creativeness and innovation as part of the solution and not as part of the problem. The present lack of ethical preparedness for the Anthropocene is based in a complacent narrative of an imagined world of non-sentient animals, well-behaved climate change, super-resilient ecosystems, and very innovative humans, always able to solve all unexpected problems. When this narrative becomes challenged by a more realistic one based on awareness of entering the Anthropocene, Earth System thinking and new visions of sustainability, a new ethic for the Anthropocene may also be developed. We can‘t, however expect this to come by itself. In a recent book Michael Ignatieff (2017) takes up the question if globalization driven by increasing trade, capital movements, travelling and migration is followed by a new global moral order, moral globalization. Especially he discusses if stronger national and international support for human rights is developing to cushion and counteract negative redistributive consequences of the globalization process. The answer seems to be in the negative. For example, new information about the amount and consequence of tax evasion following globalization indicate a certain lack of moral order. Globalization has sharpened the conflict between universal moral principles and national and local democratic self-determination. The Anthropocene narrative strongly invokes a picture of a single, common world – the planet Earth described as a total system. Global environmental problems are strongly connected to the economic and political globalization process. The need for moral globalization in this area is obvious. The vision of sustaining a healthy biosphere introduced above clearly has to include ideas of a global moral order. Environmentalism could be an example of moral globalization, but in practice the process is paralyzed by conflicts between countries about the distribution of responsibilities, instruments, costs and benefits.

5. Denial To realize that we live in the Anthropocene doesn‘t necessarily mean that we accept it or want to react to it. Denial seems to accompany the Anthropocene at least in some countries and population segments. Not even supposedly objective and unbiased organizations like universities are free from a kind of Anthropocene denial. In the field of economics for example, topics like sustainability, climate chance, inequality, migration and, especially, the relation between these are either absent in basic textbooks or at best granted minor appendices. Studying the relation between the economic system and the Earth System is not part of the discipline. This ―Grand Challenge deficit‖ is mirrored in the relatively small volume of research at economic departments dealing with sustainability issues. This is not because of an information deficit, regarding how important planetary boundaries and the risk of transgressing them are for humanity. It is rather a reflection of what economics traditionally sees as its main topic, i.e. what economics ―is about‖. In ‗economics‘ the main challenge remains how to achieve static and dynamic efficiency, i.e. how to allocate given resources efficiently and how to keep production and productivity growing. One reason often mentioned for the neglect of grand challenges is the huge increase in enrollment of university students in OECD countries in recent decades. This has led to an increase in private funding of universities. in business and economics in most universities therefore tend to aim at jobs supporting and promoting growth and competitiveness of society and firms. In countries

16 where universities are to a high degree publicly funded, politicians mirror this request. Education should be ―useful‖; it should contribute to economic efficiency, growth and productivity. Increasingly, higher education is considered as a factor enhancing competitiveness at all levels from firms to nation-states. A similar mechanism also holds, more broadly, for university research. Not only relative higher private funding but also demand from governments request research to support growth and productivity. As long as economic growth is the main political imperative, education and research will reflect this. The changing funding structure and the movement away from Humboldtarian universities is not, however, the only reason for the relative neglect of ―Grand Challenges‖ in education and research. Increasing specialization in science may also play a role. When disciplines grow they tend to split up into sub-disciplines. Academic careers then depend on formulating and answering specific questions within narrow fields naturally neglecting the broader issues. We think that also ‗Innovation Studies‘ exemplifies this development. Although innovation research is multidisciplinary in essence, it is now gradually aligning with logics and scientific quality criteria from mainstream economics and management studies. As innovation scholars very well know, a complex system cannot be adequately described by dividing it into subsystems. Murray Gell-Mann (2005), a Nobel Laureate in physics, provocatively put it this way: ‖People must get away from the idea that serious work is restricted to beating-to-death a well-defined problem in a narrow discipline, while broadly integrative thinking is relegated to cocktail parties. In academic life, in bureaucracies and elsewhere, the task of integration is insufficiently respected‖. Psychological and socio-psychological factors blocking for integrating grand challenges may also be important, especially those related to climate change. While most research on ‗denial‘ has been in psychology, e.g. how people develop different kinds of defense mechanism, Kari Marie Norgaard (2011) shows that from a sociological point of view denial is produced by social interactions affected by social norms. In many societies, social norms tell you to be optimistic, successful and maintain control. This, sometimes, leads to feelings of fear and helplessness. The conflict between emotions and norms leads to emotion management strategies such as ―don‘t think too far ahead‖ or ―focus on something you can do‖. Another group of emotions is guilt and identity threats (fear of being insufficient as a person). People in the North may for example feel that they are responsible for global warming. Here (again related to climate issues) the corresponding emotional norm is to be proud (of what your country does). This contradiction leads to a strategy of perspectival selectivity: ―we (my country) are not as bad as (all) the others‖; ―we are a minor player in the game so it doesn‘t matter what we do‖. Although widespread in the population, Norgaard finds these emotion management strategies used more frequently by educators, men and public figures. This may also be a factor behind the denial of the big challenges of our time. The Anthropocene denial we can observe in research and education is, of course, not limited to these realms, but, rather, a reflection of broader phenomena in society. A number of things may explain why society at large seems to lack the ability to react adequately to the contemporary grand challenges. There are many examples of societies that have mobilized their resources to resist extreme danger for example in situations of war. But the dangers accompanying our trespassing of planetary boundaries are anonymous in character and materialize rather slowly. This gives room for ―landscape amnesia‖ as discussed in section 4 above (Diamond 2005, Vetlesen 2015) Another possible mechanism for Anthropocene denial is to fall back on false analogies to what may have worked before. One such false analogy is that since societies always have been able to solve their environmental problems before there is no reason to doubt that this will be done also in the future. Technological advancements and resource substitution will be enough, and besides, there is

17 no reason to rush into premature solutions since the environment always must be balanced against the economy. Jared Diamond (2005) shoves that this widespread belief is indeed false and gives many examples of environmentally induced collapses of societies. Adequate responses to grand challenges may also be blocked by clashes of interest between different stakeholders and by the fact that the people who are in the strongest positions to react often are the ones who are least affected by the problem, at least in a short- and medium-term perspective. Furthermore, standard reasons for suboptimal behavior identified in economic theory (such as free riding, prisoners‘ dilemma, and ) may also block effective counteraction. Finally, an important reason for inadequate response to the challenges which accompany the Anthropocene is that large groups of people tend to stick to old values, which may have been socially beneficial before but now turn into the opposite. Individual choice and maximization of consumer satisfaction at the micro level and highest possible economic growth on the macro level may have worked well as basic values supporting increasing levels of living as long as human activities didn‘t trespass the planetary boundaries. Now the same values tend to undermine adequate response to the grand challenges of our time. As discussed in section 4 above the value system in contemporary high-income countries is still underdeveloped in relation to the changes brought about by the Anthropocene. One thing is why and how individuals as well as firms are pressed by both social norms and contexts of competition to disregard or even deny the great challenges of our time. Quite another thing is how and why the political system of a whole country fails to rise above the level of competing individuals and firms and meet the challenges. The responsibility to meet the great challenges is, necessarily, a political responsibility. It seems that this responsibility is avoided by national governments, that see themselves as pressed and bound by international competition and tend to pass on the problems to an, as yet non-existing, global level of decision-making.

6. An Unpretentious Conclusion

The arguments in this final section are somewhat speculative and loose. They may be regarded as input to a discussion rather than conclusions in the normal sense. That‘s why we call the conclusion unpretentious.

We have shown that the notion of sustainable development tends to lose its meaning when the Earth System moves from the Holocene into the Anthropocene. It is futile to cling to a vision of sustaining what is irrevocably changing. It might be better to develop a new vision of how to cope with radical changes without endangering vital properties of the Earth System. Such a vision should include both a selection and description of vital Earth System characteristics and basic values to be defended in a long-term perspective. It should also include medium-term goals concerning development of freedoms and capabilities in the sense these terms are used in economic development theory i.e. including both substantive and instrumental values. The vision should apply for the world as a whole as well as for its interacting individual countries.

Within such an overall vision (maybe something like the vision of ―sustaining a viable biosphere‖ presented in section 3.3 above) a more concrete and detailed political-economic strategy should be formulated and constantly reformulated. If we use the term ‗navigate‘ in the flexible and open sense

18 described above we may formulate a strategy for navigating the Anthropocene. Such a strategy would walk on two legs:

1. Prolong the Holocene stability as far as seems feasible: Develop a broad spectrum of technical and institutional innovation in a prolongation of a learning and innovation approach to development. 2. Increase the capabilities to adapt to the Anthropocene by developing institutions and policies to care for, or nurture, a diversity of habitats, ecosystems and basic resources of nature, i.e. care for the health of the biosphere. This also means to reveal the mechanism of Anthropocene denial and support development of an environmental ethic for the Anthropocene

The strategy would have at least three parts: It would describe the main problems to attend to, the basic approach for attacking the problems, and the type of solutions strived for.

The Problems. The first part is a description and public reasoning of the main problems or ―grand challenges‖ to address:

1. Inequality in terms of income, wealth, power, access to information, learning and knowledge. 2. financial instability, 3. population growth and migration 4. climate change, 5. loss of biodiversity 6. soil degradation 7. and in general terms the transition from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene.

The Approach. The second part is a discussion (including public reasoning) of the basic approach (main policy methods, policy perspectives) in meeting the challenges:

1. Capability building 2. Experimentation 3. Adaptation, acclimatization 4. Public reasoning about ethics for the Anthropocene 5. Support for ―ordinary virtues‖ (Ignatieff 2017)

The Solutions. The third part consists of a description and discussion (including public reasoning) of the major types of ―instruments‖ that may be used to address the challenges:

1. Reformed and new institutions 2. New (or improved) technologies. Breaking out of old trajectories and giving new directions to the processes of learning and innovation. (Lundvall 2016). 3. Policies for income generation and distribution

19 In an implementation of the third part of the strategy innovation and innovation policies will get a major responsibility. The ability to adapt and react to the grand challenges will have to draw heavily on capabilities for knowledge creation and utilization. Many kinds of innovation will be needed, but it seems likely that institutional innovation will be even more important than technical innovation. Technical create new possibilities, but if these improve the lives of people or not depends on institutions. New technologies may present themselves as solutions to problems caused by nature (natural disasters), but if they will in fact be used to reduce human suffering will depend on institutions and policies. For example, the telegraph and the railroad, new to the Indian continent in the late 19th century, were believed to prevent starvation to follow from crop failures caused by drought. Information about crop failure in one region could quickly be sent to surplus regions and food could be shipped by railroad to the starving people. But this was not what happened during the repeated famines in 1876-1878, 1888-1891 and 1896 1902. Quite the contrary, the telegraph informed about rising food prices in and food was shipped out of India while people starved to death beside the railroad tracks (Davis 2001). The problem was colonial policy and institutions and not lack of technology and capital. Democracy, media, public reasoning, inclusion, equity, all depending on institutions of different kinds, may together with policies for income generation and redistribution help societies to overcome the niggardliness of nature and use new technologies to safeguard or improve peoples‘ living standards. This general lesson may prove valuable also for navigating the Anthropocene.

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