Joseph Tainter, Sustainability What Does Moving Toward

Joseph Tainter, Sustainability

What does moving toward sustainability really entail? Joseph Tainter's article on "Social Complexity and Sustainability" makes a crucial distinction at the outset, differentiating sustainability from resiliency. Sustainability entails a society's ability to continue along in current patterns or modes of existence, whereas resiliency is a society's ability to adjust and reorient itself during conditions of change. It is possible that unsustainable policies or activities may have put is in a position where drastic changes are to be expected, and where resiliency may be something we all require -- but as Tainter notes, "the goal of human groups is more often sustainability or continuity than resilience" (Tainter 92). Yet the concept of resiliency is important to understand Tainter's insight that "Given the role of complexity in both sustainability and collapse, 'success' consists substantially of staying in the game." I would like to consider Tainter's insight while ultimately pondering the question of what a move toward sustainability might indeed entail.

Tainter's idea of "complexity" is an important one, although he chooses to define it largely in economic terms. But the basic sense is that complexity is the most profound and adaptable human tool for dealing with environmental challenges -- in Tainter's economic definition, societies invest in complex strategies (such as complex technologies) as a technique of problem solving, and the shared economic benefit ultimately outweighs the initial investment. In Tainter's definition, however, the idea of complexity is by no means limited to environmental challenges -- he shows how the idea of complexity can be applied to systems of information, such as the educational establishment or the current U.S. health care system. But his reliance on an economic definition of complexity is important to establish that, at a certain point, complexity may reach a point of diminishing economic returns, and might even begin to cause problems rather than solve them. This is important because in our current social model, complexity has become the primary problem-solving tool -- and in a situation where the problem is one of unsustainability, complexity itself may add to the problem substantially. As Tainter notes, "a society or other institution can be destroyed by the cost of sustaining itself" (Tainter 99).

Tainter's most persuasive point is his insistence that sustainability itself must proceed from a sense of history: after all, many societies have collapsed before now, and we have at least the advantage of their examples to understand how societies can fail to meet problems. Indeed, the commitment to sustainability over resiliency may be one reason for such prior societal collapses, although Tainter is keen also to emphasize that complexity as the basic technique of problem-solving may, in many cases, have added to the collapse. This is where a sense of historical awareness becomes all-important: the same strategy that can sustain a society can also play a role in bringing it down, so therefore the question of "success" (as Tainter calls it) in sustainability must consist in constantly employing different strategies. Although Tainter uses an athletic metaphor, we might also consider this in terms of evolution -- there is no point at which this natural process ever stops or ends, and however much human beings might consider themselves to be the jewel in the crown of natural selection, human existence has not ended the process of natural selection altogether. In some sense, then, sustainability consists in being able to adapt to new changes, and being aware of the role that complexity has played in previous scenarios of societal collapse. When the only tool that you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Tainter's point is that the primary human tool is complexity, but that we should at least have a sense of historical awareness of the double-edged nature of this tool.