Sustainability in a Post-modern Era

Sustainable Development is one of the socio-environmental concepts born from post-modernity.  This new notion was defined in 1987 as the  “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations”.  The simplicity of this definition was intended to highlight an important connection existing between developments and sustainability of human livelihood on the planet.  Definitions, however, need to evolve in order to ensure relevance and applicability to real situations, especially within the context of the rapidly changing technological and social trends of our time.  More sophisticated definitions are now needed to cope with the high degree of complexity unfolding on the sustainability sphere.  New thoughts and tools are also required to apply new fields of knowledge to the increasing varieties of issues linked to sustainability.

Post-modern Ideas in Sustainability

What is common among these events and trends is a reaction to the blindness, rigidity and disharmony we experienced at the high-point of the modern era, when a development was valued only on the basis of its economical merits, ignoring important socio-environmental processes.  The concept of sustainable development was thus born to bring vision, flexibility and harmony to human endeavors.

The vision expanded our scopes both in time and space.  In time, we saw how livelihood of future generations is tied to our present activities.  In space, we understood that local effects have global consequences; this guided us to globalization, in its benign sense of the world.  The flexibility brought an understanding of the importance of tolerance in environmental, social, political and technological realms.  Finally, an urge for harmony lead to developing concepts, such as “mosaic”, to celebrate social diversities.

In contrast with a few decades ago, we now realize that socio-environmental problems (with their exponentially increasing complexity) can no more be solved in closed political or corporate boxes.  It takes global efforts to solve global problems.  Fortunately, we live in an era where global collaboration at grassroots level is possible.  Post-modern communication (resulting from revolution in nano-technology and cyber intelligence) has given us the proper tools to create a real cross-cultural and cross-political forum to find solution to our global problems.

Sustainability in the Cyber World

Cyber Space can provide the best international round-table to bring humans together and unite them within their unique natural environment

One of the hottest web cams on the internet, which was enthusiastically viewed last year by millions around the world, was an eagle’s nest in its real environment.  This demonstrated the urge of humanity, especially the younger generating, to re-unite with nature.  In the same way, trends such as Facebook and blogging, are a response to the growing urge of humans to know each other and collaborate in solving problems facing them.  Internet can therefore play a central role in enhancing the sustainability through bringing people and nature together in real time and attain great objectives through facilitating parallel processing of human minds.

Cyber Space is, however, severely under-utilized in its capability to solve environmental and sustainability problems of our time.  We need to devise modalities to enhance the role of the cyber space in interfacing sustainability and environmental issues.

One idea is an Internet charrette (or collaborative design sessions), which can be effectively organized to bring local and global stakeholders together, enhance communication and create the synergy required to develop best concepts and fine-tune plans in sustainable development projects.

To make Cyber Space more effective, we need, to translate the sustainability notions and definition into cyber-friendly parameters, through which humans and computer programs can efficiently communicate.  Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (such as fuzzy logic, genetic algorithm, and neural networking), have proven successful in creating synergy between machine and human problem-solving capabilities.

It should be reminded that the notion of sustainability is not yet fully understood.  We know its importance in our livelihood.  We may identify the ingredients of sustainability, but we do not yet have good recipes in hand.  An Internet charrette can play an instrumental rule in formulating the best recipes, through interactive and iterative processes developing organically in the virtual world.

New Definition of Sustainability

A central issue in human-machine communication (especially in soft sciences such as sustainability and environment) is to reach the right balance between the simplicity of human ideas and the complexity of machine processes.  Simple definitions of sustainability (presented two decades ago), should, therefore, be expanded to ensure an effective interface with the complexity of Cyber Space.

The main concepts of sustainable development are known to be Environment, Society and Economy.  Including these dimensions in the classical definition of sustainability and expanding the notions over both time and space, sustainable development can be more effectively defined as the development which provides living environment, economy, and social comfort for the present generation, without compromising:  the environment, economy, and social comfort of future generations; and the living environment, economy and social comfort of the global population.  

Quantifying tools

In order to create an AI (or cyber-friendly) language for sustainability, both at policy and practice levels, it is imperative to create modalities to convert qualities (in the human perception domain) to quantities (in the machine perception fields) and visa versa.  The three-dimensional space (Society, Environment and Economy) of sustainability can be interfaced with the project reality fields in a simple matrix shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Assessing Sustainability Practices

At a higher level, sustainability can interface with policy components (of vision, flexibility and harmony) In a matrix shown in Table 2 the values to be put in the tables can be linguistic (excellent, good, average, poor, bad, disastrous) on the human side, and numerical on the machine side. Fuzzy logic is an excellent tool for interfacing human and machine value and perception systems.

Table 2: Assessing Sustainability Policies

On the human side, the values can be color coded to provide a visual perception of the overall sustainability of a project or a policy (e.g. warm colors for high values and cold colors for low values).

Reward and Penalty

Fuzzy values can be given numerical equivalents and weights to provide a basis for calculation of incentives and disincentives (such as penalties and taxes) for specific elements of sustainability (e.g. carbon emission).

Note that there may always a tendency to give money values to socio-environmental effects of sustainability.  That will reduce the three-dimensional space of sustainability to a simple economical vector.  While this level of simplification may be required at some administrate levels.  Yet, it should be cautioned that total pecuniarization of social and environmental components of sustainability can be counterproductive in the long-term.

Policy makers should devise reward and penalty modalities, applicable not only in the economical and legal fields, but also in the moral and ethical domains.  Education, culture, and spirituality (in its general sense) are tools which can be used to increase sensitivities towards social and environmental components of sustainability, independent of economical incentives.

With a little creativity, Cyber Space can provide great tools to device both economical and non-economical reward and reward-trading systems.  

Most of the socio-environmental disasters we are facing today, issue from unsustainable developments during the last episode of modernity.  In this chapter of or our history, a widespread individualistic attitude separated us from each other and from our environment.  We forgot that we are musicians but in a universal symphony.  We played our instruments inharmoniously, not listening to birds, trees, rivers, and oceans.  Sustainability is playing harmoniously in a universal symphony.  Sustainability is the art of singing in a choir.  Sustainability, as Shakespeare put it, is to “Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything”

*Footnotes