Sustainability, Christopher Peterson says, is “like playing chess while riding a bicycle.”
Peterson is a professor in the department of agriculture, food and resource economics and an expert in the bioeconomy.
He gave a talk last week, as part of the Office of Campus Sustainability’s UN Decade of Sustainability Speaker Series, on “The Wicked Problem of Sustainability.” The lecture was also supported by the University Committee for a Sustainable Campus and the Sustainable Michigan Endowed Project.
You can watch a video of the lecture and others in the series here.
Wicked problems, Peterson explained, are ever-changing, and the people concerned have very different views of them. In fact, wicked problems are defined by the absence of a clear formulation of what the problem actually is. There can be no solution to such a issue - it can only be managed to make the situation better. Terrorism is an example, Peterson said, and so is sustainability.
It’s nice to say that sustainability means that our use of a resource today doesn’t constrain our use of it in the future, he said. “But how do you do the thing? How do you operationalize it?”
The key challenge to sustainability, according to Peterson, is the need to satisfy the three P’s: people, prosperity and planet. That is, a policy that walks all over the poor, sacrifices the wealth of states or communities for environmental protection or degrades the environment in the pursuit of other values is unsustainable.
Creating sustainable economies will require a “transformational process” in which we change our thinking about nearly everything, according to Peterson. Among those changes, people need to stop thinking of the environment and the economy as opposing values. Instead, we need to look for win-wins (or win-win-wins) in which we can promote one P by working on another.
“To understand that the three P’s are tradeoffs is to say we’re stuck,” Peterson said.
-Andy McGlashen
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