Sustainability and the System Problem
by Gar Alperovitz
Based on an address to the Executive Staff of the
President's Council on Sustainable Development
The Good Society, Vol. 5, No.3, Fall 1995

Page 8 of 8
The Inevitability of Change

Again, a "system" which might one day be less driven to materialist consumption would likely provide structural support for an alternative culture--greater personal security, the nurturance of community, and the cultivation of meaningful work. It might even affirm human spiritual concerns.

Put another way: our culture of grow and consume is also reinforced by what is not present in the current system--an experience of community life and support for personal fulfillment sufficiently meaningful to sustain an attractive way of living different from consumerism.

Some of us still have glimpses of what an alternative feels like--for instance, the broader values associated with the best of some religious traditions. But when individuals and families must constantly move in search of the next decent job, and when the local factory must pollute the community because it has fundamentally different goals, when communities are regularly undermined by economic pressures, then the culture of grow and consume is constantly reinforced simply by virtue of being the only game in town. Nothing in everyday life teaches that there is a common, community interest.

Once we begin to move beyond sketching possible "elements" of a sustainable system to the question of how diverse elements might one day be integrated into a larger whole, numerous other issues (and possibilities) arise. For instance, if there were more security--which clearly requires some form of planning--we might face the challenge of defining democracy in ways more compatible with true sustainability. If we so choose, increases in productivity and a more equitable income distribution could result in a shorter work week--in an increase not of more goods and more pressure on ecological systems but of more free time.

One use of that free time, in turn, could be to expand the capacity of a broader range of citizens to participate politically--which in turn is a precondition for holding planners and governments to higher standards of accountability for sustainability.

Even to begin to open the door to such questions is to suggest the need for a far ranging inquiry which might begin with "elements" but which would ultimately have to lead towards the integration we call a "system." This in turn poses the age-old problem of "transitions":

System change is obviously an extraordinary occurrence. Yet, it also is obvious that, in fact, systems change all the time. Historically speaking, they come and go like the cycles of the moon. What may seem impossible today becomes tomorrow's reality. In one decade alone the Berlin Wall fell, communism collapsed, and apartheid ended. Indeed, the political and economic forms we take for granted today will almost certainly not be the dominant forms of the next century.

The real question is not whether there will be change, but--given the growing pain, social strife and violence in our country and, indeed, around the world--whether the inevitable change will be democratic and sustainable.

A useful paradigm to consider in this regard is the idea of "reconstruction"--the invention within an existing system of new forms and institutions which point in a different direction and which lay foundations for a different system architecture. "Reconstruction" as a paradigm for change involves a nuanced combination of maintaining certain ongoing aspects of our present way of doing business--while at the same time moving to a different way of thinking through incremental institution-building steps. It is a good place to begin, too, to reconstruct our ideas of the institutional requirements of sustainability itself.

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