Groping toward SustainabilityThe Logic of Sufficiency. By Thomas Princen. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.

Abstract

Oriented toward a nonspecialist educated reader, The Logic of Sufficiency is a philosophical, ethical, and practical exploration of one of the biggest and hardest questions facing social science: the power and inertia that drive the engine of the economy in an unsustainable and ultimately self-destructive spiral of increasing growth, depletion of resources, and despoliation of the planet. To make this problem conceivable and conjurable, Princen takes “efficiency” as the master trope for binding together the logic of the factory, the laboratory, and the market. In the first half of the book he presents an abbreviated but intriguing culture history of North American devotion to efficiency, which depicts a country relentlessly pursuing the logic of growth, speed, and increase as national policy, corporate strategy, and personal life plan. He also develops the argument that materialist consumerism is driven by the increasingly dehumanizing and “unnatural” rhythm of industrial work discipline. The second half of the book draws on three extended case studies in an effort to distill some broad principles of management that create systems of “sufficiency,” building institutions and accepting ecological constraints. In his chapters on the long-term management practices of the Pacific Lumber Company, Monhegan Island (Maine) lobster fisherfolk, and an urban Toronto Island that resisted bridge and road improvement, Princen argues that sufficiency is a different kind of logic and ethic from efficiency. Sustainable practices, he says, are based on ecological rationality, acceptance of complexity, humility, long-term thinking, and respect for traditional knowledge and reasonable limits. He also abstracts from ecological economics and the common-property-management literature some of the formal properties of human ecosystems, which tend to be self-regulating and stable: they have fixed boundaries and large buffers of unused resources, resource levels are relatively easily monitored, and exploitation can be policed. There is a lot to argue with here, as is to be expected in a work of such ambitious scope and broadly defined goals. The progressive-technological theme of American culture that