The League of Women Voters
of New Mexico
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Follow usAt its May 2005 convention, League of Women Voters of New Mexico accepted a proposal for a two-year state study leading to a state position on sustainability. During the first year local Leagues considered whether such a position might have value. It was concluded that it was at least worth while to proceed with the second year of the study.
(To read the PDF files, you can download a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader:)
For the second year of the study, we have drafted some consensus questions (PDF file of material that follows) with brief pros and cons for consideration by the local Leagues in New Mexico that might be considered as part of a sustainability position. The basic study guide remains the series of articles (PDF file) published in La Palabra during 2005. Links to the on-line references contained in these articles are found near the bottom of this page.
Sustainability is defined as "meeting the needs of the current generation while not impairing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Should League support for any position or action be conditioned on its impact on sustainability?
Requiring that League support for positions and actions be conditioned on its impact on sustainability will ensure that the League does not inadvertently work against the long-term interests of society. It may also prompt a review of some existing positions. This should not be an onerous requirement.
Implementation of this requirement will require a detailed consensus on what a sustainable society would look like. As many have pointed out, the usual definition, reproduced above, leaves so much to the discretion of the framer of any position or the proposer of any action that it is unlikely that any position or action of the League would fail this test.
Here are a couple of questions whose answers might help you decide whether such a statement would be appropriate.
Do LWVNM members believe that sustainability may be imperiled by human activities that are stressing Earth's biological and physical support systems?
The precautionary principle states that when there is reasonable suspicion of harm, lack of scientific certainty or consensus must not be used to postpone preventive action. Do LWVNM members believe the precautionary principle should be more widely used in public decision-making, for example in dealing with greenhouse gas emissions or genetically modified organisms?
Do LWVNM members believe that active, educated citizen participation in a democratically organized system of governance is essential for sustainability?
Of course. The League believes that citizen participation is essential for just about any progress, including moving towards sustainability. But its relevance to sustainability is particularly important. What we see happening currently is a drastic fall-off in citizen participation. Virtually all important decisions are left to elites and �experts� who often serve unsustainable economic and political ends, resulting in the diversion of resources to military uses, perpetual growth in economic production and consumption, privatization of social services such as education and health care, and the fragmentation of civil society.
Of course. The League believes that citizen participation is essential for just about any progress, including moving toards sustainability. The League supports our existing, constitutionally mandated form of representative government. In this system, citizens delegate political authority to elected representatives. It is the job of these representatives to seek out and be guided by expert as well as popular opinion in developing solutions to complicated issues such as sustainability. As proposed, this statement adds nothing to the League's positions.
Here are some questions to help you decide how such a statement might be formulated.
Sustainability will require some global standards, such as standards for atmospheric emissions and population. How can the development and implementation of international standards be shared with regional and local governments?
Would reversing the tendency towards the concentration of power at higher levels of government improve or reduce the chances of developing a more sustainable society?
Should the League take a position on issues related to corporate responsibility? For example, should corporations have legally enforceable responsibilities towards the communities in which they operate as well as to their shareholders and investors?
Do LWVNM members believe that state economic policies and public finance should be more closely tied to the natural resource base of the economy?
This is perhaps the part of a sustainability position that would have the most immediate impact on League actions and positions. State government tends to accept advice from well-meaning but conventional financial and economic advisors, not all of whom recognize the limitations imposed by the semi-arid environment of New Mexico, for example. It is under continual pressure from developers, and its subsidies are not always reviewed critically from a long-term perspective. League positions are not unambiguous in many of these areas. A statement such as this would help clarify them.
The League takes a national and international perspective. While local economic ventures that take advantage of the opportunities provided by our natural resources and stunning landscapes are of course desirable, it is much too restrictive to insist that our entire economy be based on these things. Currently, for example, military investment accounts for a very significant proportion of our economy; is the League proposing to discourage that? Isn�t it better to regulate the new dairy industry than simply tell them to go away? And while a carbon tax might eventually be desirable, right now there is no alternative to lengthy drives for people in this large state; reforms of this type would penalize our poorest citizens.
Here are some more questions that might help you dcide:
What are the economic limitations imposed by the resource base in New Mexico? What opportunities are provided by resources in which we are rich?
How can tax and subsidy policies be revised to encourage more careful stewardship of the environmental basis for the New Mexico economy?
Should public and private development be regulated to ensure that the biophysical limits of the local resource base are not exceeded, in order to preserve the ability of future generations of New Mexicans to meet their own needs? In particular, should a stronger linkage between land use and water availability be enforced?
Do LWVNM members believe that social policies should equip all members of society to participate in and contribute to a sustainable society?
This is another "of course". The problems that we face are so enormous that they cannot be left to the "experts" to solve; their solution will require the participation of every citizen. We will need a new social contract that encourages, rather than discourages, citizens to contribute to all aspects of social and economic life. Education needs to explicitly foster the ecological systems thinking that will be needed to solve the problems that confront us.
This is another "of course". Omit the words "a sustainable" and you have the League's current positions. Implementation of these existing positions would increase awareness of the changes needed to arrive at sustainability and enable people to work towards that goal.
Here are some things to think about:
What are the goals of education in a sustainable society? What do these imply for the design of our educational system?
How does health care contribute to a sustainable society? What does this imply for the design of a health care system?
The "core economy" is economically productive activity that takes place outside the market and is not measured by traditional indicators such as GDP. It includes all kinds of unpaid household labor and community work, much of it done by women. Economists have estimated its value at 20 to 40% of the total economy. Should the social policies of the League acknowledge and support the core economy as an essential component of a sustainable economic system?
For the first year of this study,
the proposed study question is:
Should LWVNM adopt a state sustainability position and/or principle?
Subsidiary questions that will be discussed during the first year include:
What should such a position/principle do for the League, in terms of supporting its
educational and advocacy activities? In particular, are there statewide advocacy issues
that could be supported using a new position or principle?
What would be the implications of such a position/principle for League positions and programs?
For example, are there positions, such as our position on state finance, that could be updated
based on such a position or principle?
The second year of the study will take place only if the consensus on this first question is
affirmative, to be determined by the state board in the spring of 2006.
In that case the second year of the study will be devoted to arriving at consensus
on the wording of a sustainability position and/or principle.
A series of articles on the possibility of adopting sustainability as a position or as a guiding principle is appearing in the 2005 issues of the LWVNM newsletter La Palabra. You can download the package of all four articles here (PDF 176 KB) or individually below. The questions from these articles have been extracted on a one page handout (PDF 72 KB). A second handout consists of a list of pros and cons (PDF 72 KB) for the first-year question above.
Hard copies of the four articles and the questions are being made available to each League in advance of its unit meetings for those without access to the internet. However, this page provides easy access to the cited links as well as to other internet resources.
We have also prepared a questionnaire for the first year of the study. Copies should appear in your local newsletter, or you may download it here and return it to
League of Women Voters of Los Alamos
att: Sustainability Study
P.O. Box 158
Los Alamos, NM 87544
Spring 2005: "Does LWVNM Need a New State Position
on Sustainability?" (PDF 60 KB)
Questions raised:
Summer 2005: "Living Within Our (Renewable) Means"
(PDF 100 KB)
Questions raised:
Fall 2005: "Sustainability Requires an Economic
Paradigm Shift" (PDF 92 KB)
Questions raised:
Winter 2005: "Sustainable democracies" (PDF 88 KB)
Questions raised:
Articles from La Palabra:
(all New Yorker links are dead) Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Climate of Man" in The New Yorker, April 25, May 2 and May 9, 2005. Part I: "Disappearing islands, thawing permafrost, melting polar ice. How the earth is changing." Part II: "The curse of Akkad." (Akkad was the world's first empire, around 2300 B.C. It collapsed in a period of prolonged drought.) Part III: "What can be done?"
1000 Friends of New Mexico, Taking Charge of Our Water Destiny (PDF 856 KB) (dead link)
The Energy Bulletin is a good source of current news about oil and alternative energy sources, with well-indexed archives.
The Living Planet Report 2004 (PDF 272 KB) provides an explanation of "ecological footprint" and "biocapacity" calculations.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (dead link) is generating a series of large summary reports; for example, the fourth, "Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Opportunities and Challenges for Business and Industry" was published in July 2005. See first GreenFacts.org, which provides a much more navigable on-line summary of these studies.
The 1987 Brundtland Report (dead link) (very large file, PDF 16.4 MB, linked at the bottom of this page) is credited with the first and most cited definition of sustainability: "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." But it failed to face the problem of growth, as pointed out by Herman Daly and Kenneth Townsend in Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem. This four-page excerpt from their book Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology and Ethics (1993) is one of the most succinct discussions of sustainability and economics on the web. Daly has written a succinct summary of his work for the September 2005 issue of Scientific American, "Economics in a Full World", pp. 100-107.
Daly has also written extensively on allocation, distribution and scale. See, for example, Chapter 8 of Fritjof Capra and Gunter Pauli (editors; 1995) Steering Business Toward Sustainability. (This chapter by Herman Daly is primarily about ecological tax reform.) Chapter 7 of the same on-line book discusses "The role of government", and Chapter 10 is about "Industrial clusters of the twenty-first century", such as Kalundborg (see below).
Comparison (PDF 80 KB) of the current economy, an "eco-efficient" economy, and the economy of "the next industrial revolution", from The NEXT Industrial Revolution by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, in The Atlantic Monthly, October 1998, pp. 82-92.
Industrial ecology in practice is illustrated by Kalundborg, Denmark, where some 20 industries exchange residual products from steam to sludge to ash, producing enzymes, fertilizers, animal feed and district heating while reducing or eliminating the discharge of waste water, refinery gas, sulphur dioxide and other harmful wastes and reserving lake water for municipal uses.
The Apollo Alliance and the World Energy Modernization Plan (dead link) point out the economic opportunities as well as the direct benefits of a rapid transition to sustainable energy sources and highly efficient use.
Economist Richard Douthwaite discusses the relationship between the globalization of the economy and sustainability in Why localisation is essential for sustainability (PDF 304 KB. There are several other chapters of interest in the same on-line book, Growth: The Celtic Cancer.)
Greenpeace has released a report Decentralising Power: An Energy Revolution For The 21st Century (dead link) (link to 4.5 MB report at bottom of page.)
An example of an alternative transportation system, City CarShare is one of a number of urban systems providing a network of vehicles available to members on a per-use basis.
Sustainable Development Update discusses the interactions between ecological issues and social and economic development, that is, the relationship between sustainability and issues with which the League has more traditionally been concerned.
The entire book Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth by Lester R. Brown can be downloaded in PDF chapter by chapter from the Earth Policy Institute. This is an excellent source of information about positive economic directions that could be pursued, including chapters on the material and energy economies, agriculture and redesigning cities. Of greatest relevance to the League may be Chapters 11 and 12, which discuss the role of government in accelerating the transition. Chapter 4 provides an overview, "The Shape of the Eco-Economy".
Daly’s writing can be a little dense for non-economists. If you need help with the economic terms, we recommend the Wikipedia economics page: everything you need to know about Pareto efficiency (how economists determine whether a given allocation of resources is "optimal") and welfare economics (how economists tackle the distribution problem) in plain English, with all the caveats ¯ the reasons why all this elegant economic theory may fail to apply to the real world ¯ right up front.
The International Solar Energy Society has published a white paper Transitioning to a Renewable Energy Future (PDF 1.1 MB) proposing that a worldwide effort to generate the renewable energy transition take its place at the top of national and international political agendas.
Several pages of annotated references were developed for the sustainability course taught by members of the Los Alamos League in the spring of 2005. See especially the page on "building community", still under development.