Sustainability: A Wicked Problem

Abstract

xMany years ago, one of the founders of sociology, Max Weber [1958, 147], argued that “the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other”. Perhaps he overstated his argument with the word “irreconcilable”, but he nevertheless drew attention to the difficulty of reconciling various value spheres. This is certainly the case with the complex concept “sustainability”, where there is tension between sustainability and development, between environmental requirements and sociocultural needs and desires, between needs of the present generation and those of future generations. The sustainability issue consists of how humans will use the resources constructed by nature and use its dynamics, whether our unique species will be good stewards of the environment that it depends on or destroy its capacity to render us services and unleash dangerous dynamics of nature. The threats of modern human activities to sustainability are numerous and interconnected: habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, deforestation, degradation of the oceans, scarcity of fresh water for a growing population, depletion of resources, toxic synthetic chemicals accumulating in the environment, anthropogenic climate change, etc. 1 Books have been written warning x 1 Nuclear warfare and resulting nuclear winter was another threat to sustainability much discussed during the cold war, and could re-emerge, but it will not be examined here.