“Sustainability” is a term we hear constantly in modern parlance, including in recent reporting of the sustainable seafood trend highlighted at this year’s International Boston Seafood Show (WWF April 2005). “Sustainability” enjoys such broad application that defining it is a challenge. It is most commonly used in reference to natural resources from farming to forestry and fisheries. But we are just as likely to read of sustainable highway projects, even sustainable buildings. However threadbare the term has become, the underlying principles of sustainability are only now beginning to hit the mainstream.
The goal of preserving natural capital – that is, earth’s resources or its biodiversity – is probably the most widespread association of sustainability. But it also involves a social component wherein decisions about natural resources and community life are intertwined. One overarching theme that runs throughout all definitions of sustainability is the notion of longevity or resilience through time: there is an explicit awareness of generations to come, human or otherwise.
The broadest and probably most widely recognized definition of sustainability comes from the World Commission on Environment and Development, commonly referred to as the Bruntland Commission. Its 1987 report, “Our Common Future” defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future to meet its own needs.”
“Everyone feels good about that definition,” says John Hagan, director of forest conservation at the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences. “The problem is in the details. You have to decide what you want to sustain before you can sustain it, and that’s where it gets messy. Because you’re often sustaining certain values at the expense of others.” Hagan cites firsthand research on biodiversity in the northern forest, where Maine’s own governor, John Baldacci, has set the target of 10 million acres certified as sustainably managed by 2007. “Maine is growing as many trees today as it ever has,” says Hagan. “That’s the wood fiber part. But the forest is younger; we’re not sustaining late-successional stages. Society hasn’t defined what we want to sustain.”
Today Maine has about seven million forest acres certified, under any of three different certification protocols, according to Henry Whittemore, who directs the governor’s Forest Certification Initiative with the Maine Forest Service. “We’re at 78 percent of the 10 million-acre certified goal,” says Whittemore. That’s 38 percent of Maine’s productive timberland. Reaching the state’s target and getting the remaining three million acres certified will be challenging. “Landowners need to see that it is worth their money getting certified,” says Whittemore.
Otherwise, the trend toward certification of Maine timberland may not be sustainable.
Agricultural sustainability may be more readily accessible since it has to do with the food we eat. Organic farm production grew up in the 1970s as an alternative to more mechanized, industrial farming systems. Sustainable agriculture focuses on maintaining soil quality, good stewardship and avoidance of fossil fuels. “It’s a farming system that lasts a long time,” explains Stewart Smith, University of Maine professor of sustainable agriculture policy. Sustainable farms are smaller, they have many crops and enterprises and different types of livestock. They’re also more complex.
“Much of the complexity of a sustainable farm is related to the particular environment it’s in, because ecosystems vary,” Smith explains. “In sustainable farming you’re more attuned to the natural cycles. Industrial agriculture imposes its standards on the natural system,” says Smith. “You’re basically sterilizing the environment of any external or local effects and putting in your own inputs: Maine uses the same chemicals as Michigan, so they become the same system. There isn’t much difference between a potato farm in Aroostook and one in Michigan. If instead of sterilizing the environment you utilize it to assist you in production, then the differences between natural ecosystems becomes important.”
Chaos At Sea
Stakeholder involvement in the management of their resource is the critical component in a sustainable system Smith says, whether it’s farming, forestry or fisheries. “It should not have external values or technologies imposed on it without the consent and involvement of the locals,” says Smith. “Most industrial economics point you in a mechanistic, linear input-output model. Agriculture and fisheries use complex adaptive systems, which evolved from chaos theory. If you think of unpredictable, complex systems like the sea or farming, they’re adapting all the time.” Government favors industrial systems, Smith says, “because it’s easier to manage. You only have to figure out the inputs (such as what you need to purchase) and the outputs you need to maximize profits.” He speaks from experience serving as associate administrator for the U.S. Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service in the Carter administration.
Smith is critical of fisheries management using quotas (such as individual transferable quotas) because they allow consolidation and ownership of the resource. “The resource has to be managed equitably” for it to be managed sustainably, says Smith. That resonates with Craig Pendleton, director of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA), a regional organization focusing on “economic stability, personal responsibility and accountability, resource protection and distributed power and authority” in managing the ocean.
“If we keep going down on the road we’re on with [quotas], the inshore fleet won’t get enough allocation of the resource to survive,” says Pendleton. NAMA proposes innovations that take advantage of the traits inherent to smaller boats working out of smaller coastal communities, historically characterized as being a diverse, adaptable switch-fishery. “At this point the definition of sustainability for us is following the rules, being innovative, and with a sense of local-ness to the fishing,” says Pendleton.
Pendleton describes the typical route a codfish takes once it is landed ashore. “The way it works now, a boat will come to Bar Harbor and unload its catch. It’s trucked to the Portland Fish Exchange. From there it’ll get shipped to Massachusetts, where it gets processed and shipped back to Maine for more money. No matter how you define sustainability, that doesn’t sound sustainable,” says Pendleton. “So we’ve been trying to get more money by not trucking fish everywhere.”
Pendleton wants to experiment with more innovative and sustainable distribution of the catch in which relationships are forged between fishermen and shoreside processors and markets within a 50-mile radius. “That’s just not there now,” says Pendleton. “In smaller markets where we’re bringing in 200 pounds of fish, we can try innovative ideas that would be too much for a Portland Fish Exchange handling 20 million pounds. A small fish market that has a cutting facility could move the smaller amount of fish throughout that 50-mile radius and make good money. Consumers will be into it because they’ll know where their food comes from.”
It may be difficult to get a roomful of people to unite around a single definition of sustainability. But if the term is used to signify a healthy natural resource base and an equitable standard of living for local communities, it is especially relevant in a state like Maine. And there are common themes people can agree on. It means proactive stakeholder involvement in managing the resource, be it forest, farm or fishery. It means appreciating regional characteristics, be they cycles of climate, vegetation, or spawning – and working to enhance their values, not suppress them. Shortening distribution of products so that more money stays in the local economy comes high on the list as well.
These are all themes consistent with sustainability, yet they pose significant challenges in a world where competition is global and products are increasingly developed in multiple sites thousands of miles apart. Two things seem clear from this analysis. People may not agree on what sustainability is, and it is a lot simpler pointing out examples of what is not sustainable.