SIEMENS

What’s your definition of sustainable development?

Meadows: In my opinion this is an oxymoron, a term with nonsense meaning. To many people, "development" seems to imply that we can simply keep going as we have for the last 100 years, depleting resources on a large scale and polluting heavily. And adding some kind of "sustainability" makes the detrimental effects of our model of development go away. I am more interested in the term "resilience." This concept is about how to structure a company or a city or a country so that it can continue to function quite well even in the face of major shocks. Implementing policies that give you resilience tends to make the system more sustainable.

Can you provide an example?

Meadows: The financial system is a good example. It is not very resilient. It was structured in a way that small changes in the prices of assets in the United States could spill over and infect banks and economies all over the world. That is a what I would call a fragile system that must be changed.

Is the financial crisis somehow analogous to the environmental crisis we are heading for?

Meadows: Yes, in terms of the environment we will see similar results, systemically speaking, as we have seen in finance. Like the financial crisis, climate change or energy scarcity are not going to proceed in a nice orderly, uniform way. Sometime in the foreseeable future there will be discontinuities, which will put us in a mode of crisis. I hope we will be better in dealing with them than we have been in dealing with the financial crisis. To prepare ourselves, the most important thing is to increase our time horizon. And certainly we must also develop new technologies. But we should not believe that technologies as such are the solutions for our problems. Hunger, climate change, inequality, conflict, energy depletion, falling water tables, derive from a set of values, ethics, and behavioral practices we have. If we don’t change them we will continue to have these problems. Technology is important but it is only a tool for achieving our goals. The key is to rethink the goals.

How can individuals help to improve the resilience of man-made systems?

Meadows: When I try to help people think about changing, the first thing I do is give them tools to measure the consequences of what they are currently doing. I refer them to a website where they can calculate their ecological footprint or I may give them some readings, helping them to become more aware of the energy needed to produce their food. Only when people understand the consequences of their own behavior can they develop a real interest in changing it.

In what ways have you changed your life to make it more sustainable or resilient?

Meadows: The most valuable thing I could do for the environment would be to stop traveling by plane. Nevertheless, I still do it. It is the largest fraction of my ecological footprint. Beyond that I have done a few things. For example I converted my house to being more energy- efficient. I heat it with solar and wood. When I buy a car I keep it for 10–15 years, rather than replacing it every few years. And I have adopted a policy in my house that when I buy something new, I have to throw out something that is already there. This makes it much more difficult to grab something in a store. All these things are trivial, but this is the level on which - on aggregate - significant changes can happen.

In short, when it comes to energy, we will all have to tighten our belts?

Meadows: It is unsustainable that a few percent of the global population accounts for the lion’s share of energy and resource consumption while two billion people make ends meet on less than $2 a day. In traditional societies most energy that was consumed was in the form of foods. Eighty percent of the population was busy producing energy, be it through hunting or agriculture. Today, with cheap oil, people who harvest energy, for example on oil rigs, represent a tiny proportion of the population. The rest can be professors, journalists, sportsmen or hairdressers. But we will run out of energy, and will have to change to a different system at some point. It will not be like the Dark Ages. But it will be a society in which a lot more than one percent of society will have to work to harvest energy. And this is a shift we had better start preparing for now to make it less disruptive.

Do you expect this shift to be a smooth process?

Meadows: To be honest, no. I expect severe disruptions from this, much bigger for example than the financial crisis that began in 2008. I strongly believe that we will see more disruptive changes over the next 20 years than in the past 100.