The following has been extracted from the opening pages of "The Information Society and Sustainable Development" (of the March 1996 Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice. Commentary is invited with a view to developing a statement which is considered to be more provocative and useful for the purposes of this forum.
The emergence of the "Information Society" provides some grounds for (cautious) optimism concerning our collective ability to negotiate the heretofore quite unlikely move to a more sustainable society in our time. In the broad area of technology and society that it encompasses, enormous order-of-magnitude improvements are already being achieved in the performance of materials and services. This wave of innovation and accomplishment is still in its early stages. Beyond these, there is a to-now largely unrealized potential for bringing together and ‘cascading’ these new technologies in new synergistic ways which will permit productivity improvements in many sectors on a scale and at a speed never possible in the past.
The potential for approaching the sustainability objectives through positive actions such as those which these new technologies and approaches permit is something which needs to be kept to the fore, because it holds the key to the potential success of this approach. Most past arguments for sustainability have stumbled because they keyed on proposals which targeted reductions in current levels of use of inefficient technology, without any increase in the productivity of materials and energy (ex., a car ban in a city without accompanying measures to absorb and satisfy mobility and access demands).
But this need not be: technologies and organizational approaches now exist which offer potential solutions that go far beyond the reduced use of inefficient technologies (in this case, such things as telework, intelligent routing systems, access-oriented answers vs. mobility-oriented, etc.). This positive potential exists in virtually every aspect of our productive and people-serving systems.
Without wishing to trot out all the usual house arguments that lay claims for its exceptional growth, etc. potential, nonetheless it will be useful to recall briefly some of the broad lines of the reasoning behind the choice of what some call the "Information Society", and others the Electronic, Third Industrial Revolution, etc., etc., as the main lever in this particular push toward sustainable development.
At the heart of the Information Society lie most of the fastest developing areas of science, technology, business and human practice in these closing years of the century. In addition to telecommunications and information processing, its scope covers such things as microelectronics, integrated circuits, new materials developments, control systems, robotics, software engineering, and even biotech -- all of which are growing at rates never achieved at any previous time in history.
The most oft-cited indicator that reflects the speed of this progression is of course "Moore's Law", which states that the cost of computing and storage is reduced by 50% every eighteen months. There are many other such indicators, all based on actual achievements and a number of which even substantially exceed the observable performances that accord to Moore’s Law. These are not isolated or lab-only developments. One striking example is the fact of Internet’s traffic which is currently doubling roughly every nine months. These are phenomena that are occurring in a manner which is universal and bringing with them a whole universe of new ways of doing things and organizing ourselves.
These technologies are revolutionary above all -- and in sharp distinction with most technological progress in the past -- in which they (a) involve relatively small amounts of materials resources, and (b) permit substantial dematerialization in many domains. They are not (for better or worse) waiting for government policy decisions to shape either the pace or direction of their development. Aspects of these technologies do of course depend on government in some ways, but overall they are progressing at the speed they are without much reference to government positions on most of the issues involved.
But if this is all well and good for the rich "North", what about the four billion or so others who happen to share this planet and are not quite so well off? What might IS/SD mean for them, if anything?
To a considerably greater extent than any previous generation of technology, they have the potential of being directly transferable to the countries of the Third World, and quite possibly may do more than anything that we have passed on to them in the past to ensure their well-being in real terms. The potential for the Information Society to permit the developing world to achieve something much closer to sustainable development than anything that has been observed or planned for till now is something that is very real. That said, without the thoughtful participation of today’s advanced economic nations – who, above all, must be able to "lead by example" as enthusiastic and successful practitioners of this new model of economy and society -- the full potential of this transition will not be achieved.
It is often claimed that the main reason for our inability to live sustainable lives lies in some combination of the selfishness of individuals, the breakdown of the family and the resultant dearth of responsibility in terms of providing for future generations, the lack of any broader sense of ethics on the part of the business community, or the short-sighted nature of government and politicians in these closing days of the 20th century. All of this is undeniably part of the problem, but only part.
Perhaps a better explanation for this breach has been that the fact that the various calls for sustainable development over the last years have either been too vague, insufficiently cognizant of the realities of the human condition, or so ambitious, far-reaching and complicated that most reasonable and otherwise responsible people and institutions are put off rather than mobilized for action. Put in other words, it would seem fair to say that the ambitions of the main proponents of sustainability have considerably outstripped their knowledge of what makes people tick.
Our challenge now is: how are we going to get from here (i.e., a notoriously unsustainable combination of practices and process) to there (at least a step in the direction of what might eventually prove to be a sustainable world). What we need, in effect, is to identify some sort of bridging strategy -- some sort of practical mechanism or series of steps that can move us toward a transition. In order to accomplish this, we have to leave end-state thinking behind us, and try to see if we can come up with something that properly reflects the foibles and the realities of the world we live in.
One point that has become clear to all by now is that, in the final analysis, sustainability is unlikely to be achieved through unilaterally mandated government regulations or laws alone. National and international government agencies have a role to play, but in the final analysis whatever is done must flow from and build on the awarenesses and freely made choices of individuals and groups throughout society. We interpret this to mean that in the push to sustainability the task at hand now is to develop and demonstrate acceptable alternatives in many aspects of daily life -- because sticks and threats alone will not suffice. These alternatives and incentives must be addressed to the individual citizens and groups that constitute our societies, including both public and private sectors as well as all those many combinations and groupings that lie between the two.
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updated by WebMeister
on 17 August 1996
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