Columnist Austin Miles introduces his new column which will focus on local topics through a sustainability lens.
For more than 10,000 years, stable environmental conditions allowed for the development and proliferation of human civilizations. Before this period, known as the Holocene, conditions on Earth were probably too unpredictable, too irregular for humans to settle in a single place. The Holocene’s stability allowed humanity to take advantage of ecosystem services, such as the pollination of crops by bees or the filtration of water by native vegetation, to use them to develop their settlements.
Those settlements, however, have now proliferated so much that they threaten the stability that initially allowed them to come into being, and the body of evidence suggesting that we have now entered a new era called the Anthropocene grows. Last week an article in Science further supported this claim.
From a review of data gathered from observations of geologic strata in lake beds, glaciers and other records, they found that our use of resources such as plastics, metals, pesticides and fossil fuels have left a stratum that is discernibly different from that of the Holocene. This new stratum emphasizes the extent to which we influence the Earth and the overwhelming importance of our decisions regarding our home.
Targeting sustainability may be the ideal way to approach environmental issues that will affect our common future. In order to reach a sustainable state as a whole, we must focus not just on the environment, but also society and the economy. The doughnut model of sustainability clearly illustrates this concept. The doughnut is made up of an environmental ceiling and a social foundation, between which lies a safe and just space for society supported by sustainable economic development.
The environmental ceiling consists of nine planetary boundaries, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and ozone depletion, which cannot be exceeded. Similarly, the social foundation consists of social boundaries such as access to food and water, income, social equity and gender equality, none of which can be crossed.
If any environmental endeavors are to succeed from a sustainability perspective, they must take into account social and economic values in addition to ecological principles. Efforts to protect the environment that do not do so risk deepening social and economic inequalities, or worse, they may be manipulated by actors such as the state for the sake of coercion and marginalization.
Take, for example, the relationship between the Maasai people and the Kenyan government. Beginning in the 1960s, with the rise of wildlife tourism and the growing popularity of conservation principles, Kenya began to invest in the creation of wildlife parks and preserves, many of which overlapped with Maasai reservations.
These national parks eventually forbid any human inhabitation, effectively expelling the Maasai from their homes and separating them from their traditional livelihoods. They coerced the Maasai under the guise of principles from conservation biology, such as the need to preserve biodiversity, which are purportedly done for the sake of saving the environment.
Major environmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund supported the government. They seemed to portray the Maasai as a growing threat to the success of conservation efforts, rather than a people who had coexisted with local wildlife for thousands of years. That disregard for the importance of the consideration of social issues in relation to environmental issues in turn resulted in an environmental injustice.
The Maasai were extirpated from their land in the name of conservation, and environmental organizations, in their crusade for protection of the natural world, had enabled this coercion. Perhaps they had successfully protected some wildlife, but they certainly did not help to create a safe and just space for humanity.
In this column we’ll explore local issues in a similar vein. We’ll examine topics ranging from acid mine drainage to local food systems and GMOs using a sustainability lens to try to find what a safe and just space may look like for a small town like Athens.
Austin Miles is a senior studying biology. Are you interested in sustainability in and around Athens? Email him at am343011@ohio.edu.
