Week 3: Is Sustainability Possible?

Class began with a video: Story of Stuff – How Things Work, About Stuff. The video raised many issues. However, they largely revolved around excessive consumption. It began with USA’s overconsumption of natural resources. It was shown that although US is low on natural resources, they managed to consume about 30% of the world’s resources. Needless to say, US was and still is the biggest consumer in the planet. However, what shocked me was that if the whole world were to have the same consumption habits as the US, we would need 3 to 5 planets to survive. What is worse is that to satisfy consumption habits of first-world countries, these countries take from third-world countries which are rich in resources. As a result, third-world countries are unable to reach its potential growth expected of them considering the amount of resources they have. Thus, this explains the widening income gap among countries.

The second form of excessive consumption is in the form of consumerism. In the video, consumerism is represented by the “Golden Arrow”. This arrow is essential to the US economy. It keeps the linear production chain active. People depend on this link to be fed, to survive. How this happens is that, if Americans do not engage in consumerism, factory workers (who were forced to work there because of the US’ failure to protect the environment) do not get paid.

Something else that was discussed in the lecture was that although we are moving gradually moving towards a sustainable society, at present, societies are at a dilemma whether to conserve the environment and sacrifice economic development, or to sacrifice the environment for economic development. However, I believe that in either option, we’ll have to sacrifice both environment and economic development; the difference is to what extent we have to sacrifice each. If we choose Option 1, which is to conserve the environment and sacrifice economic development, we’ll not be able to protect the environment because of the lack of capital in the long run. Protecting the environment requires new technology to be introduced, however if there is a lack of capital, new technology cannot be implemented, hence leading to environmental degradation. The same can be said of Option 2 (sacrifice environment for economic development).

In Karishma’s presentation, she raised an issue for discussion: Should companies act environmentally sustainably even though that would negatively impact their profits?

Here’s my take on this. Society is slowly moving to a sustainable one. People are increasingly becoming more aware of how the environment is being affected by industrialisation. Although helping the environment may lead to lower profitability of the company, in the long run, it may actually be a benefit. What happens is that in the future, other companies will see that it is indeed wiser to be environmentally-friendly instead of searching for resources as these resources start to dwindle and become scarce and prices of these resources increase. In the long run, the more sustainability-driven company will win because they have had a longer time to experiment and find more ways of how to be sustainable. And considering the shift towards a more sustainable one, the benefit may be twice as much.

In the report Sustainability for Tomorrow’s Consumer: The Business Case for Sustainability, the same reasoning can be used in Pg 6. It says “Companies that take the lead on sustainability will be market makers rather than market takers.” If companies start embarking on sustainable methods of production before others, they may make losses initially, but in the end when consumers are aware of the benefits of sustainable methods of production, these companies will be able to benefit from having found successful ways of achieving them.

Followers are only able to be as good as those they follow, never better; but leaders are the ones that break new grounds.

Personal Rating: 8/10