The Mother of All Sciences

Now more than ever, it's time to study the art of association

Today, Harvard University, where I’ve taught journalism since 2021, joined an expanding list of U.S. universities announcing temporary hiring freezes in response to “substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies,” as Harvard’s president put it.

You might cheer this news—and even welcome permanent freezes—if you are a proponent of the Sustainable Society and Sustainable Economy view of sustainability, one of six definitions of sustainability by Brown et al. (1987).

Also termed the No Growth / Slow Growth root of sustainability (one of six such roots) by Charles V. Kidd (1992), the idea of humanity adopting policies to ensure a steady state of population, even a “no growth” economy, came from an understanding that the Earth’s resources are finite, and only some of those resources are renewable.

"Fishery resources are finite but renewable. If placed under sound management before overfishing has caused irreversible effects, the fisheries can be conserved and maintained so as to provide optimum yields on a continuing basis." 
-- The Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, p. 1 (1976, reauthorized in 2007)

As both Brown et al. and Kidd note, “sustainability” was first used to describe the capacity of an ecosystem to support animals. We’re animals. The Earth is our ecosystem. But scaling up from fisheries management to planetary stewardship takes coordinated political will over time. And what is optimum when it comes to humanity, anyway?

The term "optimum", with respect to the yield from a fishery, means the amount of fish which—
(A) will provide the greatest overall benefit to the Nation, particularly with respect to food production and recreational opportunities, and taking into account the protection of marine ecosystems;
(B) is prescribed as such on the basis of the maximum sustainable yield from the fishery, as reduced by any relevant economic, social, or ecological factor; and
(C) in the case of an overfished fishery, provides for rebuilding to a level consistent with producing the maximum sustainable yield in such fishery.   
-- The Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, p. 10

For some cultures, optimum means being fruitful and multiplying.

For other cultures — including indigenous peoples but also those populations on island nations because they see their fences — “optimum” means no growth / slow growth.

For those professionally studying global environmental problems back in the 1970s on one of those island nations — Great Britain — “a succession of thoughtful, humane and measured changes” is necessary for humanity’s survival.

"The principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is that it is not sustainable. Its termination within the lifetime of someone born today is inevitable -- unless it continues to be sustained for a while longer by an entrenched minority at the cost of imposing great suffering on the rest of mankind. We can be certain, however, that sooner or later it will end (only the precise time and circumstances are in doubt), and that it will do so in one of two ways; either against our will, in a succession of famines, epidemics, social crises and wars; or because we want it to -- because we wish to create a society which will not impose hardship and cruelty upon our children -- in a succession of thoughtful, humane and measured changes. We believe that a growing number of people are aware of this choice...." 
-- A Blueprint for Survival, The Ecologist (1972)

Such either/or choices often are signals of logical fallacies: there are typically more than two options to solving any problem. Indeed, for Brown et al., (ibid., 1987) and Kidd (ibid. 1992), one way out of the aforementioned binary is through sustainable development or ecodevelopment, which involves adapting businesses and economic development to the realities of natural resource limits and in ways that do not deteriorate the environment. So, still expanding, but not terminal to humanity.

Of course, the political will behind the “rapidly shifting federal policies,” as Harvard’s president diplomatically put it, does not suggest much room for “a succession of thoughtful, humane and measured changes” such as are considered necessary to avoid catastrophe or to split the binary and create ecodevelopment. But it is at various universities where such thoughtful people tend to gather. And within the past couple of years, two more prominent universities have started major sustainability programs: Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability (2022) and The University of Chicago Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth (2024). Of course, they join a large number of other institutions already engaged in sustainability science, including the majority of European universities, which are represented broadly by the European School of Sustainability Science and Research, an intra-university association whose membership numbers now 86 universities.

So although it takes extra effort to associate with others, for we in these United States of America, including especially our universities, “the art of associating together must grow,” including outside of the U.S..

Nothing, in my opinion, is more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associations of America. The political and industrial associations of that country strike us forcibly; but the others elude our observation, or if we discover them, we understand them imperfectly, because we have hardly ever seen anything of the kind. It must, however, be acknowledged that they are as necessary to the American people as the former, and perhaps more so. 

In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made. 

Amongst the laws which rule human societies there is one which seems to be more precise and clear than all others. If men are to remain civilized, or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American (1835, emphasis added)

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What associations are you in — or do you wish to join — to improve sustainability in your habitat?