Goodland, Robert. 1995. "The Concept of Environmental Sustainability." Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 26: 1-24.

Thesis:

"This paper reviews the current status of the debate about the concept of environmental sustainability and discusses related aspects of growth, limits, scale, and substitutability" (Abstract, p. 1). "Sustainable development (SD) should integrate social, environmental, and economic sustainability and use these three to start to make development sustainable" (p. 4).

Summary:

1) Social sustainability involves systematic community participation and strong civil society.

2) Economic sustainability requires economic capital to be stable, that is to remain intact. This is similar to Herman Daly's steady-state economy.

3) Environmental sustainability (ES) "seeks to improve human welfare by protecting the sources of raw materials used for human needs and ensuring that the sinks for human wastes are not exceeded, in order to prevent harm to humans" (p. 3, Figure 1). Goodland's conceptualization of environmental sustainability fits into the resource limits - limits to growth ecological economics framework. He also identifies ES as "a set of constraints on the four major activities regulating the scale of the human economic subsystem: the use of renewable and nonrenewable resources on the source side, and pollution and waste assimilation on the sink side" (p. 10 - see Figure 2).

The number of people in poverty is increasing (intragenerational component) while fewer resources are available to future generations (intergenerational component). Goodland discusses the importance of both intergenerational and intragenerational sustainability in creating sustainable development.

Goodland provides a brief history of sustainability including reference to J. S. Mill and T. R. Malthus as well as Boulding, Daly and Meadows.

Growth compared with development: "Growth implies quantitative physical or material increase; development implies qualitative improvement or at least change. Quantitative growth and qualitative improvement follow different laws. Our planet develops over time without growing" (p. 9).

Goodland discusses two related causes of unsustainability: source and sink capacities have become limited, but governments tend to be ignoring this fact. Because of these limits, the time for ES is immediate.

There are four types of capital: natural, human, human-made, and social. Goodland defines natural capital as "the stock of environmentally provided assets (such as soil, atmosphere, forests, water, wetlands), which provide a flow of useful goods or services; these can be renewable or nonrenewable, and marketed or nonmarketed" (p. 14). A major barrier to economic growth, then, is limits to natural capital.

Three degrees of ES:

1) Weak ES assumes that the four types of capital can be substituted for each other; that is, human made artifacts can replace natural capital with no negative impact on society.

2) Strong ES recognizes that the four types of capital are not perfect substitutes, but that a sawmill (human-made capital) is of little value if there is no forest (natural capital). Goodland, with most other ecological economists, supports this view of ES.

3) Absurdly strong ES expects humans to never deplete anything; that is, no resources could ever be exploited.

Traditional economics and technological optimists, those who believe that there is always a "technological fix" for any resource limitation, tend to believe in weak ES. They "...depend heavily on substitutability as the rule rather than the exception" (p. 16).

Goodland concludes with a discussion of common misconceptions about ES. The issues are as follows: Is ES the same as sustained yield? Is ES certain or uncertain? Is ES more of a concern for developing countries? Does ES imply reversion to autarky or the Stone Age? And finally, ES involves public choice.

Keywords: economic sustainability, development, economic development, natural capital, growth, limits of growth