The freedom to achieve social recognition at the expense of child labour in the supply chain, or to find meaningful work at the expense of a collapse in biodiversity, or to participate in the life of the community at the expense of future generations, may well be others. The freedom endlessly to accumulate material goods may simply be inaccessible to a world approaching 10 billion people.
This is the most important lesson that sustainability brings to any attempt to conceptualise prosperity. Capabilities for flourishing are a good starting point from which to define what it means to prosper. But this vision needs to be interpreted carefully: not as a set of disembodied freedoms, but as a range of ‘bounded capabilities’ to live well – within certain inevitable limits.
These limits are established in relation to two critical factors. The first is the finite nature of the ecological resources within which life on earth is possible: the regenerative capacity of our ecosystems, the available resources, the integrity of the atmosphere, the soils and the oceans. None of these is infinite. Each stands in a complex relationship to the web of life on earth. We may not yet know exactly where all the limits lie. But we know enough to be absolutely sure that, in most cases, even the current level of economic activity is destroying ecological integrity and threatening ecosystem functioning – perhaps irreversibly. To ignore these natural bounds is to condemn our descendants – and our fellow creatures – to an impoverished planet.
The second limiting factor on our capability to live well is the scale of the global population. This is simple arithmetic. With a finite pie and any given level of technology, there is only so much in the way of resources and environmental space to go around. The bigger the global population, the faster we hit the ecological buffers. The smaller the population, the lower the pressure on ecological resources. This basic tenet of systems ecology is the reality of life for every other species on the planet. And for those in the poorest nations. The point is that a fair and lasting prosperity cannot be isolated from these material conditions. Capabilities are bounded on the one hand by the scale of the global population and on the other by the finite ecology of the planet.
In the presence of these ecological limits, flourishing itself becomes contingent on the entitlements of those who share the planet with us, and on the freedoms of future generations and other species. Prosperity in this sense has both intra-generational and inter-generational dimensions. As the wisdom traditions suggest, there is an irredeemably moral dimension to the good life. A prosperous society can only be conceived as one in which people everywhere have the capability to flourish in certain basic ways.” 94 I Humanity’s unsustainable environmental footprint Equitable shares. Footprints per capita: consumption pattern and intensity of natural resource use or waste generation per unit. International externalization of footprints. 1116 Footprints caps on different scales within planetary boundaries, “To reduce humanity’s environmental footprint toward a sustainable level, it is necessary to reach consensus on footprint caps at different scales, from global to national or river-basin scale. Footprint caps need to be related to both production and consumption (32, 55). The various components of the environmental footprint of humanity must be reduced to remain within planetary boundaries. Improved technologies (eco-efficiency) alone will not be sufficient to reach this goal; consumption patterns will need to alter as well (39). How such cultural shift and transformative change in the global economy could take place remains an open question.” 1117 I I THE CIRCULAR BIOECONOMY AND DECOUPLING: IMPLICATIONS FOR SUSTAINABLE GROWTH “Indeed, there are limits to recycling and technological fixes in the technosphere for two basic reasons:
1. According to the first principle of thermodynamics energy cannot be produced. We cannot increase the size of primary energy sources, but only learn how to use them better.
2. According to the second principle of thermodynamics irreversible processes alter the qualitative characteristics of material flows. Recycling can be done, but only to a certain extent and at a certain cost, and only if the corresponding primary resources are available. Hence, the amount of primary waste outflows of an economy can be reduced by recycling (provided the inputs required by the recycling process itself do not exceed the waste outflow recycled), but a continuous production of wastes is unavoidable.” 152, 153 “Internal recycling is important, but when analyzing the pressure on the environment exerted by the metabolic pattern of a social-ecological system, what really matters is the relation between the size of the primary flows required by the technosphere and the size of the primary sources and primary sinks made available by the biosphere.” 153 I OPEN DATA PLATFORM – FOOTPRINT NETWORK