Sustainability Ad Absurdum: What’s This All About?

By Christine Tian | Thursday, March 1, 2007

An unofficial survey last week of campus opinions regarding the Dartmouth Sustainability Initiative yielded a handful of complaints about lack of to-go boxes at Home Plate, a few gung-ho lectures about environmentalism, and, mostly, a vast sea of mildly encouraging shrugs. (The more unorthodox responses included a 5-minute diatribe on the evils of Jim Merkel’s bike and one ‘10’s quip: “I like sustainability. I like to sustain myself with food, with water...”) Casual support for the nebulous goal of sustainability is quite en vogue among large swathes of the campus population, from crunchy Collis rats to sorority girls searching for a feel-good cause to champion.

The aim of heroically ‘saving the environment’ seems harmless, noble, and extremely useful for generating warm fuzzy self-satisfaction—unfortunately, such fuzziness also characterizes the rigor (or lack thereof) with which passive supporters consider the value of the Sustainability project. On the other hand, opponents of the Initiative tend to lack substantive criticism. Most complaints leveled against it this year have consisted of ad homonym attacks targeted at the Sustainability Director’s fashion or choice of vehicle (though, he admittedly embraces the unwashed hippy aesthetic while shunning such new-fangled technology as the horseless carriage).

Both of the positions on sustainability we have heard so far are somewhat misguided; both fall prey to blind acceptance or blind rejection of a fairly complex issue. The truth is that even ‘heartless’ conservatives do not aim for the destruction of the biosphere, and recognize that environmental costs play a significant role in deciding issues of public policy. Conversely, most ‘hippy liberals’ do not advocate the complete sacrifice of quality of life and economic prosperity of mankind for the sake of the natural world (well, PETA excluded)—the criteria for evaluating the relative effectiveness of the Dartmouth Sustainability Initiative must lie somewhere between the two extremes of ignoring the environment and elevating the environment above all other issues.

— Garbage Guru Jim Merkel —

Shoot any question at Jim Merkel, the College’s recently hired Sustainability Director, wait five minutes, and inevitably he will come around to the topic of an “ecological footprint,” an estimate of the “amount of biologically productive land and sea required to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste,” according the 2006 Living Planet Report. The Report (and its ‘unpaid’ advertiser on campus, Mr. Merkel) calculates the “sustainable” footprint per person—the amount of bioproductive space on earth divided by the population—at around 4.6 acres. Unfortunately, an average Dartmouth student’s garbage alone, to say nothing of his consumed resources, translates into a 5.3 acre footprint. Oh no, what misery, &c. and whatnot.

Instead of generating unnecessary waste and over-consuming resources, Merkel urges us to admire and emulate the practices of the 95 countries whose per capita footprint is less than a Dartmouth student’s trash footprint. The idea seems sensible until you actually look at what sorts of nations fall into this category: Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere; all of the states in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia), who are currently suffering from a massive famine; and Afghanistan, where two-thirds of the population lives on less than two US dollars a day. The list of “sustainable countries” features not a single representative from Western Europe or North America; perhaps this is because the inhabitants of Western Europe and North America are decadent consumerists who selfishly squander the wealth of nature. But honestly, who would rather be decadent than starving? It’s quite clear that the nations that Merkel lauds for their sustainable economies are not more efficient than us, more focused on environmental stewardship, or more aware of the consequences of unsustainable consumption; rather, these countries are simply too poor to have any resources to waste.

Merkel fails to point out that the current system’s obvious trade-off between quality of life and reduced ecological footprint makes reducing our use of natural resources to the level of, say, Sri Lanka or Rwanda, an extremely unappealing option. This is not to say that shrinking our ecological footprint is not a noble goal, but rather that demanding citizens to severely cut resource use to equal that of a struggling Third World country is infeasible and detrimental to our national welfare. For example, since the biological footprint of a car is 4.1 acres of the per capita 4.6 acres available, it ‘stands to reason’ that individually owned cars should be eliminated. Nonsense, clearly.

Of course, obvious and painless conservation habits such as turning off lights and reducing excess trash should not be ignored, but the truly effective way to promote sustainability is not by forcing a drastic reduction in resource utilization, but by improving the efficiency of current resources and thus indirectly (and painlessly) reducing our demand for natural resources. It is the difference between reducing what we have and making more out of what we have; it is only the latter option that is truly socially or economically sustainable.

However, to the Sustainability Initiative’s credit, some of their projects do actually embrace this goal of improved efficiency. For instance, new building projects minimize the costs of heating (and the depletion of the non-renewable heating oil) by utilizing improved insulation and orienting buildings so that “passive solar energy” (read: sunshine) can provide warmth.

But what about a little improvement in efficiency with a large price tag? It is not enough to blindly applaud every single enhancement in resource productivity without considering the cost. Some examples that Waste Czar Merkel provided of efficient ways by which to reduce one’s ecological footprint included sharing a car with carpoolers and not bearing more than one or two children. However, real-world social and economic costs stand in the way of such ‘more efficient’ lifestyle choices: as more Americans live in suburbs further away from their workplaces, carpooling becomes a less feasible option and may require more time than a busy worker can give up, while family planning decisions are unpredictable and rooted in personal values. To assume that cutting ambiguous environmental costs should invariably supersede the personal costs is to assume that environmental welfare ought to be a person’s primary criterion for decision-making, a view which is simply unrealistic.

Even when looking at Sustainability Initiative-sponsored projects that earn a net positive return, it’s important to evaluate the size of the benefits reaped. Baby steps towards complete sustainability—consuming less than we produce—may be noble in intention, but we cannot afford to throw support behind every development that promises a small increase in efficiency without considering the opportunity cost of such actions.

For example, just last Wednesday the College signed a letter of agreement to begin engineering and design work on a project to install a 6,000 square foot solar panel array on top of the college-owned McKenzie power plant. The college will be leased the equipment in exchange for a $25,000/year fee, in addition to the initial fixed cost of $14,000 for the engineering work; the energy generated from the solar panels, which will replace some purchased oil, is expected to save Dartmouth approximately $35,000 a year. The net savings of $10,000 a year will be complimented by the projected reduction of 13,000 gallons of oil per year from last year’s use of 5,372,000 gallons. All of these numbers regarding the resources and money saved might sound impressive until viewed in a larger context: the solar panel project would reduce oil consumption and oil costs by a mere .24%. This, of course, is not an immediate reason to condemn the project—it has some potential to cut costs and environmental impact—but in order to realistically assess the value of such an endeavor, one needs to look at the costs of solar-panel building and maintenance, versus the opportunity cost of $14,000 spent in different ways.

— More sustainability garbage. —

Unfortunately, the lack of transparency in the Sustainability Initiative makes it difficult, if not impossible, for astute students and observers to accurately assess the value of its different projects. The annual Dartmouth Sustainability Report includes key financial and environmental information about campus consumption of different resources, the efficiency of different buildings, and the amount of waste generated in living, eating, and work spaces—but the Sustainability Office does not distribute the report or make it available to the public even upon request. Similarly, in an interview, Jim Merkel declined to share information concerning the budget and funding of the Sustainability Initiative. Such secrecy can only hurt the Initiative’s credibility in the long run, in addition to precluding students from taking an active role in critically evaluating the office’s performance. The Sustainability Initiative cannot afford to alienate those students who have an interest in its aims, but are independent-minded enough to assess its merits on their own terms; it can only benefit from informed and constructive criticism from the student body it serves, which more transparency and accountability will make possible.

More accessible information regarding the achievements of the Sustainability Initiative may enable detractors and skeptics, but a clearer idea of the actual end-goals of sustainability would also vastly benefit the coalition of student groups that have gathered in support of the cause. Student groups and, to some extent, the Director of Sustainability himself, tend to conflate the issues of sustainable food with advocacy for organic, local, and fair-trade food; however, it seems incredibly short-sighted to not realize that the aims of these disparate advocacies are actually often at odds with each other.

Supporters of fair trade, for example, often tout the practice as one allowing poor farmers in developing nations to sell their produce at a ‘fair price,’ thus improving their quality of life, preventing exploitation by evil corporations with their dangerously efficient mass-production techniques. In the eyes of most students, fair trade and sustainability go hand in hand—fair trade bananas from the Oke company debuted recently at Home Plate, the “testing ground” for sustainable dining on campus, and a recent story in the Daily D referenced the sale of fair-trade goods as an example of increased sustainable dining opportunities. Ironically, though, fair trade practices are both economically and environmentally unsustainable. A critical view of fair trade supported by such respected institutions and publications as The Economist and The Cato Institute—as well as the fundamentals of economics—states that, by paying fair trade-certified producers an amount substantially above the market price for their wares, the unnaturally inflated price creates an incentive for farmers to over-produce, exceeding the market demand, in order to cash in on the guaranteed high price for their goods. Overproduction of natural resources to be consumed is hardly environmentally sustainable, and a growing disparity between the guaranteed fixed price and the decreasing market price caused by excess supply cannot be sustained economically without heavy losses. And it goes without saying that oftentimes, advocates of fair trade food come into conflict with advocates of local food, each of whom align themselves with the sustainability movement. Clashing goals under the same banner of socially conscious environmentalism make for an interesting, if illogical, coalition.

Mr. Merkel, when questioned about the future of organic food, boldly proclaimed that “the only sustainable way to grow food is organic.” Evidence of the perceived correlation between organics and sustainability is straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, which is troubling when considering that in reality, organic farming can have detrimental effects on sustainable resource use. Because organic farming rejects the use of certain artificial pesticides and fertilizers, it is far less efficient in land use. Simply put, it requires more land (and thus, more resources) to grow the same amount of crops as in non-organic farming, thereby causing deforestation. Additionally, organic certification requires produce to be non-genetically engineered: in a world where all food is grown organically, you can say goodbye to genetically modified high-yield wheat and maize breeds that have saved a billion people from starvation since the Green Revolution of the 1970s, and bid farewell to vitamin-enriched ‘golden rice’ which helps prevent blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency. Of course, in the relatively affluent countries of Western Europe and America, demand for organic food exists from wealthy consumers who wish to pay a premium for the disputed health benefits, but organic farming is simply not viable on a large scale. Its practices are not productive enough to adequately supply more than a niche market with enough food to survive. Obviously, organic farming is not all bad; some scientists believe that the use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers release harmful pollutants into the environment, and that most organic farms use less energy in their production, thus consuming fewer resources and generating less waste. The point is that one should look at all the costs and benefits of organic farming just as critically as one would evaluate other Sustainability goals.

Even if one suspends his disbelief and assumes that movements for fair trade, and local organic food, are uniformly complementary in their goals, great for the environment, and completely consistent with the aims of the Sustainability Initiative, he must still consider the costs of serving such foods in Dartmouth Dining Services. R. Tucker Rossiter, the director of DDS, makes it quite clear that the prices of “socially conscious” food are substantially higher than regular food. For example, DDS’s currently utilized cage-free eggs cost 40% more than the eggs used last year, local meat costs 50% to 100% more than meat bought from major suppliers, and organic products are “definitely more expensive” than non-organic foods. However, as Rossiter notes, the DDS multi-cafeteria system provides students with a choice of products; students can choose to buy a cheaper non-fair trade banana from the Hop if they value cost over ‘social justice,’ just as in previous years students could choose to eat at the Pavilion if they valued their need to eat kosher over the slightly lower costs in Food Court.

In this way, it seems that students who choose not to follow the organic/local/fair-trade craze for ethical or financial reasons can avoid bearing the higher costs of such special foods. However, this argument rings false because students actually do not have a choice in how much money they spend in DDS, due to the mandatory purchase of a declining balance account at the beginning of each term. Dining Services determines the minimum required DBA accounts for each year based on the projected costs of purchasing food and covering other expenses, so increased spending on, say, organic produce translates into a higher-priced meal plan for all students, even students who choose not to eat organic. As Mr. Rossiter quite plainly put it, “If you only eat at the Food Court [a dining facility which does not sell organic or fair trade produce], part of what you’re doing (eating), goes towards supporting the other facilities,” and the more expensive goods sold at those other cafeterias. And because everyone bears the cost of such supposedly more ‘sustainable’ purchasing choices, due to the structure of the DBA dining plan, it becomes more important than ever to closely examine whether the benefits are worth it.

The emphasis on economic means of considering the effectiveness of the Dartmouth Sustainability Initiative does not imply that money and financial concerns ought to overrule care for the environment any time the two come into conflict; instead, it is an effective lens through which to view the correct balance of conflicting monetary and environmental costs that the College should adopt. Sustainability is a noble idea in theory, but the student body should be critical in evaluating its actual accomplishments and costs. Thereby it may determine which projects are worthwhile and which are merely feel-good wastes, instead of blithely accepting the mantra of ‘environment good, Jim Merkel better!’ So, Sustainability Initiative: keep up the compost and well-insulated buildings, ditch the organic- and fair-trade- activists and let them fend for themselves, stop assuming everyone values the environment so unselfishly and so much that we’d be willing to live like starving children in Eritrea, think economically, and above all, give us information—making your budget or conservation project ideas public wouldn’t kill you.

Sustainability Ad Absurdum: What’s This All About?

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