Sustainability is fundamentally about justice. It seeks a just intergenerational distribution by constraining current activities so that future generations can flourish, or minimally meet their own needs. Ensuring that environmental impacts and natural capital (environmentally derived goods and services) are distributed justly within the current generation — i.e., intragenerational equity — is also critical.
The finiteness of Earth’s resources and regenerative capacity, and the reality that the social, economic and ecological outputs that contribute to human well-being are derived from and constrained by nature, implies a trade-off between inter- and intragenerational equity. We can use up natural capital and other forms of capital to address current injustices today or preserve them for tomorrow.
However, there are also strong complementarities. The current distribution of capital assets determines the inclusive wealth that society generates and whether and to what extent our communities, regions, nations and world are able to sustain that wealth over time. Current inequalities erode our ability to be sustainable over time. There is evidence that economic inequality, nationally and globally, plays an important role in driving global biodiversity loss.
This complementary relationship is reinforced by the very nature of wealth. Wealth accumulates and so disparities in wealth widen over time. Large, persistent racial inequities in the U.S. with origins in slavery and systematic exclusion of Black people from owning wealth drive home this point. It is more difficult to adjust as wealth gaps widen over time and deviations from a sustainable path increase.
Recent stock market record highs, coming amid soaring unemployment and rising COVID-19 infection rates, reflect a strong disconnect between the financial interests of investors and the social well-being of people and communities. I can’t help but wonder: What if we had an inclusive wealth stock market that would drive investments in sustainability rather than the narrow financial interests of current stock markets?
The distribution of natural and other capital assets over time, people and places is the defining aspect of sustainability. Social justice cannot be separated from sustainability over time. As sustainability scholars and practitioners, we must understand the social justice issues of the systems we study. Each of us should ask: “How does natural capital and wealth distribution play a role in the systems I study? How does distribution affect system outcomes, including the types of outputs and environmental impacts that are generated and distributed? How would a more equitable wealth distribution alter these outcomes and how could this solve specific sustainability challenges?”
SI is committed to discussions and investigations of the relationship between social justice and sustainability over time. If you have suggestions about what SI can do to support interdisciplinary research on these topics, I want to hear from you. I also encourage you to consider the university’s Seed Fund for Racial Justice opportunity. These funds will seed interdisciplinary, innovative, untested and/or exploratory research approaches and creative ideas that will contribute to the elimination of racism and solve its underlying causes and consequences on our campuses, in our community and across the nation.
For more on this topic, check out my TED-style talk at the 2019 “Ohio State Intersections” event and recent paper on the deepening patterns of neighborhood housing wealth inequalities, co-authored with Jinhyung Lee, geography; Nicholas Irwin, agricultural, environmental and development economics; and Harvey Miller, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis.
