11 HUMAN BEINGS FOR ALL TIMES: THE IMPERATIVE OF SUSTAINABILITY TO A POSSIBLE FUTURE
AS A PATH TO A POSSIBLE FUTURE

• Sérgio Besserman is an economist and environmentalist, the president of the Pereira Passos Municipal Urbanism Institute of Rio de Janeiro, an economics professor at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), a member of the managing council of WWF-Brazil, and the president of the Rio de Janeiro Technical Chamber for Sustainable Development and Metropolitan Governance. A commentator on sustainability for GloboNews and on city affairs for Rádio CBN, he served as the president of Brazil’s national statistics agency, IBGE, in 1999, during which time he was also a member of the Inter-Ministerial Commission on Climate Change. He previously held several positions at Brazil’s national development bank, BNDES, starting in 1987, including head of the CEO’s office, planning superintendent and planning area director.

Sigmund Freud once said that humanity grows when it falls from its pedestal; when its pride is wounded. [1] According to him, this occurred with Galileo Galilei (Earth is a small dot among billions and billions of galaxies), Darwin (we are a part of the history of evolution through natural selection) and himself, Freud (our unconscious drives us more than our conscious mental processes).

Stephen Jay Gould, a great paleontologist and popularizer of science in the 20th century, added: “Now it is time for us to fall from another pedestal, with the discovery of long time.”[2] Indeed, humanity is very powerful in its short time, but does not have any power in the long time scale of nature or the extremely long time of the Cosmos. In the planet’s timescale, hundreds of millions of years, humanity is completely powerless to generate significant harm to nature. To illustrate this, just remember that 65 million years ago, when the asteroid fell on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, striking the final blow in the process of species extinction that began some millions of years earlier, it generated an impact many times greater than the entire nuclear arsenal existing today.

However, that was not the only loss of biodiversity on a large scale in history: of the many ones to have taken place, five are known as the mass extinctions. The one we just referred to was the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, [3] famous for having had its main cause discovered – the asteroid – and also for the known end of the dinosaurs (except their flying descendants, the birds). Now, if we compare the destructive powers of humanity to the great extinction at the end of the Permian period, for example, which around 235 million years ago caused the disappearance of 10% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates, we can note how human power is even weaker in relative terms. [4]

Furthermore, if we add in the fact that we are at the top of the food chain, we can easily deduce what humanity’s fate would be in the hypothetical case that it were to witness such an event. Despite all the strengths and powers we have at our disposal today, we would certainly not survive. Accordingly, even though humanity has developed a naive sense of omnipotence, thanks to the increase in its power over nature, on a long time scale Homo sapiens does not have the power or capacity to generate notable harm for the planet. At most, we would provoke another mass extinction, at the end of which a new era, with a new biodiversity, would arise. (Nature’s recovery time after each of the five great extinctions is calculated to be between 5 and 10 million years.5)

Environmental awareness and concern should not therefore be seen as merely the consequence of a paternalistic stance in relation to the natural world, but on the contrary the result of recognition of our helplessness and dependence on the home where we live, Earth.6

The risk of extinction that hangs over the future relates less to the planet’s nature than to humanity.

If we ask ourselves what the extent and depth of the risk faced by civilization is, the answer is limited: as far as we can know, we are not likely to suffer an apocalypse or insurmountable catastrophe. However, it is precisely because we are not certain of this that we cannot afford to be complacent.

Uncertainty ought to be a sufficient indication that we are on an unsustainable path for the development of the human species. An evaluation that would allow us to know whether or not humanity’s current course is sustainable should be made in the context of a risk analysis essentially the same as the one all people make in their everyday lives, or the one that business people use to take decisions related to their businesses.

The prospect of unsustainability would be confirmed not only by what we know, but above all by what we do not know. Within their known dimension, statistics make the environmental crisis of the 21st century evident. Indicators suggest scenarios with a strong tendency for degradation of the capacity for natural renewal of services fundamental to human quality of life (climate, fresh water, fertile soils and biodiversity) at a speed consistent with the envisaged rates of their usage.

However, we know little about the release of methane that global warming could cause in the frozen soil (permafrost) of Siberia, which contains immense stocks of this powerful greenhouse gas. Nor do we have a deep understanding of the dynamics of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, which are crucial to scenarios of rising sea levels. Likewise, we are ignorant about the resilience of the current ecological balance and the brutal rate of species extinction. As we can see, we may be generating irreversible processes that will have potentially disastrous consequences for civilization and human species. To any rational mind, the precautionary principle is the applicable imperative.

On the other hand, it may be said that the current development model is unsustainable, because not only do we not know the true meaning of the concept of “sustainable development”, but we are also unaware of how to measure the notion of sustainability with precision. Many important efforts are under way to find better ways to measure the idea of sustainability. Measurement of countries’ gross domestic product (GDP) has been relentlessly criticized for its major weaknesses. The insufficient and misguided way in which natural resources are considered in national accounts is one of the main grounds for this criticism. The United Nations Statistical Commission has also been working with national institutions to develop a family of sustainable development indicators. Many composite indicators and other ways of evaluating the sustainability of current development are being enhanced.

For these reasons, deep reflection about the term “humanity’s sustainable development” is the most precious thing that human beings could now have in their hearts and minds. It is up to us to contextualize all parts of this term – humanity, sustainable and development – given that the concept still sounds like a rich unknown thing to be explored.

Regarding the term “humanity”, we should remember that it only exists in the abstract. What exists in concrete reality and is part of Homo sapiens’ constitution, including genetic, is clans, tribes and nations. A person who thinks, takes decisions and acts on the basis of humanity’s long-term rather than immediate future will be a different human, reconstructed by culture in relation to the humans of today.

When it comes to “development”, we note that the identification between this term and quantitatively measured economic growth was merely the product of a historic age that is now being superseded. The inclusion of broader objectives in human perspective, as expressed in the Human Development Index system (created by Amartya Sen, the winner of a Nobel Prize in Economics), is a great step forward, but it still does not incorporate the greater challenges of the issue of sustainable development.

Finally, the meaning of “sustainable” goes beyond something that merely lasts, as common sense tends to indicate, and means much more than a commitment to future generations. Like human consciousness, the term “sustainable” relates to time; not short time (that of the human species), but all times, including long time (that of the Cosmos). And what makes humans stand out from nature if not consciousness?

The omnipotence of a humanity that is still in its infancy and that does not, as a society, know the existence of limits needs to be overcome. Human civilization needs to be more “conscious.”

Until recently, the life expectancy of human beings was low and our ecological impact was restricted in both space and time. In the period before the Industrial Revolution, when the first significant impacts of human action on the planet were seen, the consequences were local: unhealthy spaces, polluted rivers, contaminated air in cities. With economic growth, the consequences became regional: an entire water basin was harmed or a whole biome (such as the Atlantic Forest) was devastated. Around five decades ago, this scale changed and environmental aggressions became planetary. Now our impact is global and its consequences extend for centuries. Today, given the size of alterations to the planet’s landscape arising from human actions, the term Anthropocene has been coined to designate the current geological era.

Although the last 300 years have experienced remarkable development, which has increased life expectancy, cut infant mortality, educated populations, reduced violence and greatly improved the wellbeing of human beings, we should be attentive to our numerous unsolved problems: the poverty of billions of people, enormous inequality, the persistence of frequent assaults on fundamental human rights, the existence of countries where there is no democratic freedom, and also the persistence of discrimination based on ethnicity, sexual orientation or ideas, including religious beliefs or their absence.

Many important efforts are under way to find better ways to measure the idea of sustainability. Measurement of countries’ gross domestic product (GDP) has been relentlessly criticized for its major weaknesses.

In short, in this appraisal, in which we weigh up extraordinary advances and unresolved key issues, we add another theme that will be at the center of 21st-century history: the global ecological crisis and the challenge of building a civilization founded on sustainable development.

Because of the impact of the global ecological crisis on the world economy and above all on the wellbeing and freedom of people, especially the hundreds of millions who are the poorest, the most vulnerable and lacking the means to defend themselves, the human species will face challenges in the next two decades that may be considered unprecedented, if we bear in mind the timeframes in which our choices will be made. How much will we raise the planet’s average temperature in future (between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius)? Will we provoke immense climate change? What proportion (between 10% and 30%) of the species living on the planet will be made extinct forever?

The choice is ours and it must be made now: either we will be a humanity that will remain in the excess and selfishness of its “childhood”, or we will expand our consciousness in time, generating a revolution of thought like the one that the Renaissance represented to history.

The concept of sustainability therefore takes us to the necessary expansion of the boundaries of time, the broadening of the temporal categories with which we tend to consider future generations, even the most distant ones. As the writer Jean-Claude Carrière famously observed, the term “development” is etymologically unambiguous in several languages.7 To develop does not only mean to “expand, grow”, but rather to “undo what is involved”, or to “unroll what is rolled”, or in French and English (“développer/develop”) to “un-envelop.” It therefore involves a process in which a potential that is contained, stuck in certain circumstances of history, is freed. In other words, it means a process defined by time.

The choice is ours and it must be made now: either we will be a humanity that will remain in the excess and selfishness of its “childhood”, or we will expand our consciousness in time, generating a revolution of thought like the one that the Renaissance represented to history.

According to Saint Augustine, there are three times: the present time of present things, the present time of past things, and the present time of future things.8 Our species is now faced with the greatest challenge of the 21st century: to construct human beings capable of being, seeing and acting in all these times.

The issue The issue of sustainable development is consequently intertwined with the issue of human consciousness. The question “What is sustainable development?” could also be read as “Who are human beings?” And the answer to the question about what sustainable development could be may also answer the question of who will be the humans of tomorrow who human beings themselves will construct.

• 
  [1] Sigmund Freud, “A pszihoanalyzis egy nehézségéröl” [“A difficulty in the path of psychoanalysis”], Nyugat, Budapest, January 1917. 
  [2] Stephen Jay Gould, “Conseguiremos concluir a revolução darwiniana?”, in Dinossauro no palheiro, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995. 
  [3] The Cretaceous period was the last period of the Mesozoic era. It began 145 million years ago and ended 65.5 million years ago.
  [4] Peter Ward, O fim da evolução: extinções em massa e a preservação da biodiversidade, Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 1997. 
  [5] Ibid., p. 321. 
  [6] Sérgio Besserman, “Darwin e a consciência no século XXI”, in Charles Darwin: em um futuro não tão distante, São Paulo: Instituto Sangari, 2009.
  [7] Jean-Claude Carrière, "Entrevistas sobre o fim dos tempos", Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1999. 
  [8] Santo Agostinho, “Confissões”, translated by J. Oliveira Santos and Ambrósio de Pina, “Os Pensadores” collection, São Paulo: Nova Cultural, 1996.