Keynote Address to the
2nd National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment

By Donald Kennedy
Editor-in-Chief, Science
Former President, Stanford University 

December 6, 2001
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

The environmental movement has been characterized, since its very beginnings, by attention-getting slogans.  One of them attempts to focus on two scales at once, by advising that we “act locally, think globally.â€�  I shall have more to say about this particular bumper sticker later on, because it focuses us on scale – a matter that profoundly affects how we treat the environmental problem writ large.

But the concept of sustainability has become a slogan too.  It is now such a watchword in the litany of environmental policy-making that it has assumed an enlarged entity, one that captures – or attempts to capture – an essential part of what environmentalism and conservation are all about.  That may be too much freight.   The trouble is that the term isn’t very precise, so I will take an historical approach to explore three different levels of meaning and argue for the most inclusive one.  Next I shall try to identify some of the challenges that face us in using science to help establish sustainability on two scales:  large, that is global; and local, that is, at the level of communities.   Finally, returning to the bumper sticker to reverse its message, I will argue that we are readier then people think to act globally, and less ready to figure out the right local arrangements.

We all understand what sustainability is in a general way.  Aldo Leopold famously advised us to “save all the parts.â€�  More formally, it means adopting policies to ensure that the nth generation has access to the same resources, and is therefore as well off, as the current generation.

But that begs the question: what, exactly do we mean when we talk of human welfare and the kinds of resources we need to provide it?  It also neglects some important issues of equity.  Finally, it says nothing about whether we should use as our starting point the convenient  present -- ‘time zero’ -- or instead include some consideration of past rates of change.  I will consider these three in turn.

First, what counts as human welfare?  Much of the conservation dialog is about nature and the satisfactions human beings obtain from nature.  Some of these satisfactions are consumptive:  we mine, or graze cattle, or catch fish.  Others are non-consumptive, but nevertheless involve uses of nature:  camping in a national park, or bird-watching along a beach.  Still others, though, don’t involve use at all.  We may appreciate the existence of a national park even if we never take the opportunity to visit it.

Since the very beginnings of the environmental movement, people have worried about what is happening to these various versions of human welfare in a world with finite resources and a rapidly growing population.   They have not agreed, however, on which ones within the range of human satisfactions should concern us most.  In Man and Nature, perhaps the first truly environmental book, George Perkins Marsh produced a meticulous, even exhausting nineteenth-century critique of what humans have done to their environment.  For many contemporary conservationists, Marsh is a peculiar and even disturbing book to read today:  there is little in it of the love of nature that animates many modern readers who, like my Stanford freshmen, come to it late.  The book begins with an account of the glories of early Rome – a moral, Republican landscape later desecrated by the Empire, in an exploitation that Marsh clearly links to political repression.  There follow nearly 500 hundred pages and hundreds of long footnotes, describing what has happened to the Earth’s water, its woods, and its soils.  Nowhere in it will you find a sense of one-ness with Nature, nor a shred of spirituality.  Marsh is a practical Vermonter:  Nature is important because it provides human services.  We are, he says, irreversibly damaging our capacity to continue enjoying those services.  He makes a plea for sustainability without ever using the word, but it is plain that his concern is for use values, especially the consumptive kind.  

Many modern environmentalists attach a very different set of values to Nature.  They find in it some things that lie far beyond practical utility.  Their account would emphasize the capacity of wild lands to lift the human spirit, or perhaps to provide people with a sense of oneness with the rest of the living world.  The late Wallace Stegner, much admired by contemporary conservationists, made a claim equivalent to Marsh’s but with a very different tone:  â€œWe have been too efficient at destruction; we have left our souls too little space to breathe in.  Every green natural space we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.â€�  His account of the fall matches Marsh’s, but his sense of what has been lost relates to quite another kind of welfare, a kind better captured within the domain of non-use values.  In a lecture at Stanford recently, former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt went farther – employing the Noachian covenant (“not two of some, but two of every one..â€�) as a plea for biodiversity that certainly reflected an obligation well beyond ‘use.’

Rachel Carson, surely the launcher of the modern environmental movement, starts Silent Spring not with an appeal to wild Nature but with a description of a pastoral landscape; and she ends the book with a critique of our attempts to over-manage Nature through the use of insecticides and other poisons.   There are occasional passages that reach for the kind of spirituality that Stegner invokes, but her argument is fundamentally practical.  In making the case for nature, Carson is really asking us to pick the low-hanging fruit:  she is urging us to be conservationists for the most practical of reasons.  My colleague Gretchen Daily, in a useful book called Nature’s Services, emphasizes that conservation efforts can get practical help from monetizing some ecosystem services so that they can be included in cost-benefit calculations about development.

This has turned into a debate within the environmental movement, a soil on which debate flourishes readily.  Some environmentalists believe that to monetize nature’s values degrades the entire effort; they want none of it.  Others argue that it is a practical and moral way to achieve objectives we can all agree on.  It is an argument that wastes time:  what we should be concerned about is the full range of human satisfactions.  If we arrange sustainability for the use values but neglect the non-use ones, I don’t think we will have met the test.

The second issue involves an equity problem.  We need to agree on what we really mean by sustainability, beyond the easy definition is that it consists of that set of practices that leave the n’th generation no worse off than the present generation.  I just argued that this means equally well off in terms of access to all of the resources needed to sustain life and the full range of human satisfactions.

But do we mean something beyond the average welfare of the nth generation (greatest good for the greatest number), or do we want to insist that no member of the nth generation should be worse off than the poorest member of the current one?   Surely a society that sustained itself by ensuring that AVERAGE welfare held constant while its poorest members lost ground would not be one in which most of us would like to live.  Instead, an intragenerational test for equity ought to be part of our evaluation of intergenerational sustainability.

A third aspect of the sustainability problem has to do with where one starts to measure welfare, and what else has been going on.  Nations and societies do not stand still; most of them grow -- in population, in average income, and in technological sophistication.  In that sense, sustainability sits on a moving target.  Should the recent trajectory of growth be incorporated into a consideration of sustainability?  If generation 1 has moved ahead of generation 0 by 10% in some indicator of average welfare, should generation 2 expect another 10%, or should it be satisfied with staying level?  The straightforward take on sustainability would adopt the second, but our welfare detectors are sensitive to history as well as to disparity.

That obliges us to consider some of what has been learned about the history of income and environmental resources as nations develop, beginning with the effect of income improvement on equity.  Simon Kuznets received the Nobel Prize in Economics for a 1955 paper in which he demonstrated that as average income improves during development, income disparity first increases and then falls.  More recently, U-shaped “Kuznets curvesâ€� have been discovered for several variables related to environmental quality:  as nations become richer, air and water quality first get worse and then get better.  

Explanations for the economic Kuznets effect rest on the need for initial capital investments to support later infrastructural improvements that spread benefits more broadly.  The wealthier members of society enjoy early income improvement from the investments only they can make; later, the poor get a delayed boost from trickle-down effects.

A similar trajectory, it has been argued, applies to the environment: the first improvements are often dirty, as with the soot left in the British midlands during the Victorian industrial revolution.  Later, technological improvements, more widely distributed wealth and changing social priorities make remediation possible.   

It thus seems clear that both kinds of Kuznets curves apply to those Western nations that went through their development in the Victorian era.  But do we really have to through all that again?  Many economists now doubt the relevance of the Kuznets effects to today’s newly-developing countries.  Several of the newest successful Asian economies appear not to have suffered the initial dip in income disparity, and it is by no means clear that environmental improvement is destined always to come late.

What does that history have to say about sustainability?  If we ask the question in a poor country where economic development is in its early stages, we are likely to get an answer quite different from the one we would get in Washington.  I think the expectation there will be for an economy and an environment that marks to experience, not to steady-state:  in short, developing countries will want nothing to do with a concept of sustainability that offers no continuing mandate for development.

Answers to all of these questions:  how we define welfare, how sustainability incorporates equity, and how it incorporates history – are likely to be important as we deal with sustainability, whether on a global or on a local basis.  Improved equity and the capacity for continuing economic development will be essential parts of the picture for the poor countries.  Here, solving the sustainability problem is going to require more than political will, which is hard enough to get.  It will need science and technology – capacities concentrated in the rich nations, but most needed in the poor ones.  The world’s scientific community is becoming increasingly aware of this maldistribution, and is starting to do something about it.   For example, Science and Nature, the world’s two leading scientific journals, have now joined with the Third World Academy of Science to sponsor a website – SciDevNet – that will make science news and information more readily available to scientists and policy-makers in the developing world.

We know that the environmental problems the world faces occupy the entire scale from very local to global.  One the one hand, climate change and similar challenges require not only international scientific cooperation but complex, multi-party negotiation toward solutions by treaty.  On the other hand, in the villages of the Third World water resources must be divided by local agreements among users, and forest conservation, if any, will rest on some form of local decision-making.

That takes me back to the bumper-sticker I mentioned at the beginning – the version of the Good Environmentalist as one who Thinks Globally, Acts Locally.  Is there a kind of science that can help with both tasks – that is, can inform and guide good work at the meters-to-kilometers scale, and at the same time can help nations develop and implement policies that ensure sustainability?

That is a difficult task.  An international group of 23 environmental scientists, economists, and others published in Science a thoughtful review of the problem earlier this year.  The collaboration said much about the effort to bring science to the problem of sustainability.  There is a nascent alliance of the world’s scientific academies, international programs, and informal networks, like that represented by these authors; it represents a real hope that serious attention from the scientific community can be integrated with the various political agendas of economic development.  It’s the right time, since the Rio plus 10 conference – the World Summit on Sustainable Development – will be held in South Africa next year.

At the global level, the present and prospective roles for science are clear and evident in some cases, subtle and diffuse in others.  The prospect of global warming and its relationship to the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has by now fueled a large effort at computer modeling, carried out in several superb national centers and coordinated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  That work is vital to the resolution of what surely is the most prominent and threatening of the large-scale problems.  But there is another task, less dramatic and – so far at least – attracting less attention and fewer resources.  That is the job of monitoring and surveillance, not only of climate data but other measures of environmental welfare – measures that may be required to inform more local action.  For example, satellite measures of forest cover, especially in places that are hard to reach and explore to establish “ground truthâ€� are important – and the technology needs improvement.  Rapid assessments of biological diversity and the management of the resulting databases are much needed.  So is focusing scientists on problems of tropical biology and ecology – an important commitment of the Smithsonian Institution where this meeting is being held.

The aspects of sustainability I have just been discussing in the global context – especially the matter of what kinds of welfare we want to sustain, and with what considerations of equity – will be just as important on a more local scale.  And they are likely to vary even among communities here in the United States, where the most important land-use and resource decisions are made through planning and zoning.  Environmental policy-making, like politics, is mostly local.  Compare Gardiner, Montana and Woodstock, Vermont.  Both are rural towns, of about the same size; both have some industry and some tourist business.   Woodstock, the birthplace of George Perkins Marsh, is a settled, stable town; Gardiner is a growing community at the border of Yellowstone National Park.  Both communities have active environmental groups, but if you asked each of them about sustainability my guess is that they would come up with quite different definitions because their histories, resources, and economic dependencies are so different.

Interesting, innovative movements are now underway to make sustainability efforts work at this more local level.   It is a challenging task, because the problems at restricted scales have to be resolved against deep political differences – and politics is, as Tip O’Neill liked to remind us, local.  The Yellowstone neighbors who ranch and have to contend with wolves who have difficulty recognizing the Park boundary, and the loggers in the Northwest who find that their livelihoods are under threat from the Endangered Species Act and the Spotted Owl, are angry people.   They are mad at “environmentalistsâ€� who, in their view, have only a distant and esthetic – if not effete – interest in a land with which the ranchers and loggers not only have an economic interest but also a deep and often sympathetic familiarity.

Indeed, the bumper-sticker mantra of the environmental movement – “Think globally, act locallyâ€� – may not be the best possible instruction.  It implies that we’re really all set to move ahead in our own communities – what we need to do is wake up and act.  In fact the task is a whole lot harder than that:  the sphere of possible actions is clouded by long histories of political difference, ownership patterns, and traditions.   In my part of the country, the West – where much of the land is federal, water is scarce, and natural areas precious -- organizations have sprung up that bring special economic and political skills to communities in which there is a need to resolve these differences.  It is heavy lifting.   The Sonoran Institute, for example, has been able to help Arizona communities facing uncontrolled peri-urban sprawl and industrial development work out a consensus vision for their own future and then take the political steps to realize it.  In some cases – as with communities like Gardiner that are public lands gateways – the Institute faces the task of educating federal agencies as well as community leaders about the value of compromise.  

The degree of difficulty is well illustrated by the history of the Endangered Species Act as it has been applied to local situations.  It was plainly intended by the Congress as a kind of sustainability initiative:  to conserve for our children and grandchildren the value of our living natural endowment.  In the legislative dialog, however, it became plain that the Members were really talking about Bald Eagles and Wolves – the Charismatic Megafauna – just as they had a century earlier when they established National Parks because they contained “natural wondersâ€� like Old Faithful.   Environmentalists found the Endangered Species Act useful in blocking some unwise large federal projects, like Tellico Dam, and in preventing some local economic developments that some people wanted a lot.  In doing so they appealed not members of the Charismatic Megafauna but to creatures like the Snail Darter and the Furbish Lousewort, creating a pantheon of Boring Microfauna and flora that became a political lightning rod for objections to the Act.  Fortunately there was room for some good local thinking, followed by government cooperation; the result was a series of Habitat Conservation Plans in which conflicting interests could find resolution.

Most of you know how difficult this has been.  It is a difficulty created in large part because land planning in the United States is a mess, having ignored ecology and landscape in permitting growth to follow need with minimal control.    It shows how unclear and bumpy the path toward local resolution may be.   It might make more sense to turn the bumper sticker around, so that it reads “Think Locally, Act Globally.â€�

Returning to the larger scale:  surely you will argue that global resolutions are even harder than local or regional ones.  For the big-ticket issues like climate change, where national interests and histories collide, that may be true.  But there are a number of important environmental domains in which we already know what to do, so that the admonition to act globally is realistic.   THE primary enemy of sustainability in the developing world is poverty:  poverty that places so much focus on the here and now that there is no room for thoughts about the welfare of the next generation.  The next generation is already fetching wood and water instead of going to school.

First-world science can really help, if we can do the right kind and get it to the right places.   Technologies for improving the ability of developing-world smallholders to produce food and manage water are available now.  We need to make the resource investments to export them.  We will do well to get over some of our rich-country scruples about the use, for example, of genetic modification technology.  If you don’t give people the means to grow more food on the flats, they deforest the hills.

I think we are readier than we know to Act Globally.  In a splendid editorial in last week’s Science, Jonathan Lash laid it on the line in pointing out that we have to deal with the tinder of terrorism – poverty – as well as the flint.  If we really mobilized our scientific potential, he says, “We could create the knowledge create the knowledge base that would allow people everywhere to manage ecosystems more productively and more sustainably, preserving the forests and fisheries for present and future generations.â€�  It is a reachable goal, and it is time to get started. So it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to Think Locally, Act Globally.  I might even put it on my bumper as soon as I get my ZEV electric hybrid.

Questions? conference@NCSEonline.org