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November 20, 2005

"Is Modern Economic Development Sustainable?" - Fletcher Professors Face Off in the Second Annual Everett-Moomaw Debate

Can we sustain modern economic development without incurring irreparable adverse ecological consequences? Professor Bruce Everett said yes, while Professor Bill Moomaw argued no, in The Fletcher School’s second annual Everett-Moomaw Debate, held on November 15 and organized by the Ph.D. Forum and the Environment and Sustainability Initiative.

Everett, who teaches a course on “Petroleum in the Global Economy,” defined sustainable development using the Brundtland Commission’s terminology. “It is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” he said.

According to Everett, five perceived constraints to sustainable development are overpopulation, social dislocation and inequality, resource depletion, pollution, and climate change. However, he emphasized that “industrialized society can be flexible, innovative and responsive, but only if it has democratic political and economic institutions to address its environmental problems.”

Moomaw, however, strongly contested this assertion.

“Sustainable development is an oxymoron,” Moomaw, who teaches “International Environmental Policy,” said. “It is not even clear that the modern economy can be maintained, much less be made to grow, by continuously undermining the environmental capacity that supports it.”

He suggested instead that the value of environmental goods and services is decreasing by many measures because of factors such as species decline and soil erosion. He also asserted that the current system is unsustainable.

“We have an economy that cannot even do its math right, that defines its status by how much it wastes, and that destroys its environmental capital stock,” Moomaw said.

Everett, however, said that advanced societies have shown the ability to clean up their environmental systems. In response, Moomaw agreed with the assertion that developed states are able to address the problem using their resources and capabilities, but also asserted that developing states do not have the same means, which leads to imbalanced development.

Following up on this issue, Nadaa Taiyab, a second-year MALD student, asked Everett how industrialized economies will be able to sustain environmental clean-up considering that they also have limited resources. Everett replied that the world’s population has yet to use up the bulk of said resources.

“And, once these are used up, human ingenuity will come in. Humans will look for more resources,” he said.

Moomaw, though, asserted that despite numerous innovations in technology, exploration for resources such as oil and gas already peaked in the late 1960s.

“There is a limit to how many resources you can find available,” he said, warning that “we will eventually have to move out of the United States to find resources.”

It was the issue of climate change, though, which elicited the most intense exchange between the two professors. Everett debunked the supposed link between development activities and climate change, saying that while there has been evidence of global warming trends in recent years, “we don’t know how much of that is human-induced and how much is natural. This condition of uncertainty makes it difficult for us to do environmental accounting.”

Moomaw replied that this “condition of uncertainty” is being created by some private companies which fund research casting doubt on the causes of climate change — a claim which Everett refuted.

During the open forum portion of the debate, Rahul Chandran, a second-year MALD student, asked the two professors which policies they would immediately undertake to address the issue of environmental decline if they had the authority to do so.

Moomaw replied that he would “stop rewarding destructive policies and start rewarding constructive and productive ones,” while Everett said that he would “let loose” the capabilities of people in developing states. “Industrial states must be ashamed for closing sectors like agriculture to developing states,” he said.

Ultimately, both professors agreed that democratic institutions should play a role in articulating the needs of the global population. “True development can only be attained if the needs of the wider segment of the people are addressed by the institutions that are supposed to serve them,” Everett said.

Article by Sharon Rivera, MALD '07

Posted by jessica at November 20, 2005 08:57 AM