The Case for Strong Sustainability

Abstract

This book is written after three decades of global policy and discourse on sustainable development (SD). Regrettably, these decades did not meet the iconic Brundtland report's call to display 'environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by the year 2000 and beyond' (WCED, 1987: Chairman's foreword). Instead, humanity's combined efforts have made an already strained Earth even hotter and fuller.Not only has the atmospheric level of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, risen sharply due to human activities, but even its growth rate has been increasing (NOAA, 2018). The level is now the highest in at least 800,000 years (Scripps, 2018;Tripati, Roberts, and Eagle, 2009), and it is approximately 50% above the pre-industrial average of the Holocene (Steffen et al., 2011). As a response to these anthropogenic emissions, the Paris agreement recognized 'that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet' (UNFCCC 2015, p. 1), using 'urgent' or 'urgency' five times in its first section.Even this relatively successful attempt to approach climate change is, however, very inadequate. It was built on voluntary commitments, so called nationally determined contributions. These not yet proven promises were admitted to stay far below the real reductions needed in order to keep estimated increases of global average temperature at a level where planetary changes and risks, by much less certain estimates, were expected to be manageable (less than 2 • C above pre-industrial levels). Leading climate researchers therefore point at 'political short-termism'; they declare that 'alarming inconsistencies remain between science-based targets and national commitments', and they propose rapid scaling up of CO2 removal by technical means, so called carbon capture and storage (CCS) (Rockström, Gaffney, Rogelj, Meinshausen, Nakicenovic, and Schellnhuber, 2017, p. 1269).Concerning the second term in the book sub-title's description of the state the Earth is in, we follow Daly's (2005) use of 'full' to signify the global expansion and dominance of humans and human activities, which on a steady rise clearly crowd out other species and make spaces unaffected by human activities rare (Gallagher and Carpenter, 1997). From an anthropocentric perspective, this is often addressed as a problem of biodiversity loss, which has undesired consequences on human societies, e.g. in terms of lost pollination, decreased possibilities to produce medicine, and loss of recreational values (Cardinale et al., 2012). Caused by humans via habitat loss and climate change, another description is one of the emerging sixth mass extinction of

Degrowth Perspective for Sustainability in Built Environments

“…While it calls for a deviation from materially excessive, hedonistic lifestyles, it invites humans to focus on justice, an increase in local self-sufficiency, independence from global economic forces and from commercialisation [34][35][36]. It encourages humans to make a step from overproduction and overconsumption to sufficient production and consumption, from material wealth to wellbeing [2]. In this invitation lie hints and more precise suggestions of where to live, how to approach our built environments, how to make them more sustainable.…”

“…It is at once a social movement, a political project, and an academic paradigm [1]. What unites these pursuits is a desire for sustainable, harmonious co-existence between humanity and nature, between humans and non-humans, and within humanity, including oneself [2,3]. The name of the concept, degrowth, reflects the roots of the concept, i.e., a critique of prevailing economic growth orientation which disregards the negative effects of pursuing economic growth, such as ecological and social degradation [2,4].…”

“…What unites these pursuits is a desire for sustainable, harmonious co-existence between humanity and nature, between humans and non-humans, and within humanity, including oneself [2,3]. The name of the concept, degrowth, reflects the roots of the concept, i.e., a critique of prevailing economic growth orientation which disregards the negative effects of pursuing economic growth, such as ecological and social degradation [2,4]. Despite its name, degrowth is not opposed to growth, but the growth that it advocates, supports and encourages is mainly non-material, such as growth in care, solidarity, empathy, creativity, generosity, and connectedness.…”

Being in the World Locally: Degrowth Business, Critical Realism, and Humanistic Geography

“…Our current mode of being in the world is unsustainable (Spash, 2015(Spash, , 2017Bonnedahl and Heikkurinen, 2019;Spash and Smith, 2019;Elhacham et al, 2020). It causes degradation on many levels.…”

“…Amongst the researchers who work to respond to the unfolding crises are degrowth scholars, including economists (e.g., Bonnedahl and Heikkurinen, 2019), political economists (e.g., Buch-Hansen and Carstensen, 2021), sociologists (e.g., Koch, 2022) and geographers (e.g., Schmid, 2018). Their arguments are based on the necessity to honor the limits of the planet via de-growing our economies to a size that can be sustained in the long term (Daly, 1993).…”