Sustainability? Nah, we need resilience

I’m fed up with the contemporary obsession with ‘sustainability’. Wherever you look — government, NGOs, the private sector, evn — everyone feels obliged to do stuff that’s ‘sustainable’ and report on how ‘sustainable’ that stuff is.

But seeking ‘sustainability’ is a mistake. There is no way of measuring it, nor knowing whether we are achieving it (or its opposite). But it’s even more wrong because its focus is how we currently do things. It traps us in the status quo, merely trying to do more ‘sustainable’ status quo stuff and cutting out ‘unsustainable’ status quo stuff. Not that we have the faintest idea which is which.

Certainly, a lot of people like the status quo, particularly the experts who pontificate upon it. But sticking with the status quo is no way to create what we really need — not a world that is ‘sustainable’ but one that is resilient. We need the capacity to withstand shocks, adapt to change and grow stronger. Not to stick in some approved version of the present, but to evolve through it.

Resilience thrives only in open, competitive systems — where institutions, methods and technologies are constantly tested by reality, not mothballed by subsidies or regulations.

Life has survived through the millennia because there are innumerable different species. So, whatever happens (dinosaurs) there is always somebody around who is well placed to survive it (small mammals) and take new forms of life forward. Evolution’s parameters are loose enough to enable this: there’s no single ‘sustainable’ shape or behaviour, you just have to live long enough to produce offspring who then do the same.

Markets too. There isn’t some single ‘sustainable’ basket of goods to be traded. Market players, guided by prices that reveal scarcity, innovate and adapt to changing circumstances and customer demand. Firms that don’t adapt — that aren’t resilient — fail, leaving the market to those who can produce higher value. It’s evolution again.

Take the example of energy. ‘Sustainability’ focuses on top-down targets, locking in particular technologies through mandates, subsidies, and banning alternatives. But that mono-technologism merely creates fragility, as when Europe became over-reliant on cheap Russian gas. A resilient approach would liberalise markets and use prices to allow a diverse array of technologies (including ones we haven’t even thought of yet) to compete on cost and reliability — with the winners being those that are most resilient to changing climate, technology, geopolitics or whatever.

Agriculture is another. ‘Sustainable’ farming focuses on enforcing strict rules on traditional methods, limiting yields, or subsidising particular farms or methods. But resilient food systems have come from constant ‘Green Revolution’ innovation that produces a variety of new crops that can see us through changes in population, soil and climate. And all driven by competition and the profit motive.

‘Sustainable’ regulation reinforces the status quo — taxis against Uber, big banks against innovators, nimbyism against development. Resilient approaches instead cut barriers to entry and allow new methods to evolve.

The push for ‘sustainability’ seriously underestimates human ingenuity and overestimates ‘expert’ wisdom. Complex, adaptive systems outlive our conscious efforts, using dispersed knowledge and allowing rapid pivots when circumstances change, under whatever pressure comes along.

Policy should therefore prioritise not ‘sustainability’ but resilience. Such as cutting red tape to unleash experimentation, embracing free trade to diversify supply chains and no longer propping up today’s (or yesterday’s) solutions. Open markets, open institutions, diversity, trial and error (or trial and success), and the evolutionary power of human creativity. That’s how to make ourselves resilient — for whatever the future holds.

Eamonn Butler