This article was written by Professor Mark Everard, IES Vice President, following from his initial 'War of the Worlds' article written in March and three subsequent opinion pieces: 'Sustainability is not a political debate', 'A War of Evidence', and 'The false dichotomy of environmentalism vs wealth'. It provides Mark’s perspective and represents personal views of the author to stimulate thought and discussion. It is not an opinion of the Institution of Environmental Sciences as an organisation.
As a membership organisation, we provide a convening space where members can share their views and engage in healthy debate, so if you have a perspective on these (or any other) issues, please get in touch. We intend to publish a short series of papers from different IES members and stakeholders, leading to a discussion event later in the year where members can share their views.
Opportunities as constraints
My March 2025 opinion piece, 'War of the worlds',1 drew attention to geopolitical trends rejecting or deferring a range of commitments relating to sustainable development in favour of ‘old school’ unreconstructed monetarism, opting for an anachronistic model of blinkered, financially framed growth overlooking the inevitable generation of adverse social and environmental consequences.
The ideological drivers of this war of world views were expanded in my follow-up May 2025 opinion piece 'A war of evidence',2 highlighting the importance of existing and new scientific knowledge as an antidote to wilful or unintended blind dogma descending into fundamentalism. Since that time, we have seen more protectionism driven by a narrowly competitive economic rationale that is totally divorced from inevitable environmental and social consequences that will, in the longer term, not only constrain continued profitable enterprise but also blight future generations at this pivotal time in human history.
A dogmatic monetarist paradigm rejects state or other interventions intended to internalise the diverse ramifications of profit-generative ventures upon the socio-ecological system from which it is indivisible. This comes with an implicit, though often more recently explicit, assumption that such environmental and social consequences are inconsequential ‘red tape’ constraining societal progress measured in narrowly financial terms.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as an example of a widely used metric around the world, purely quantifies economic throughput without accounting for distributional benefits and disbenefits or longer-term ramifications. The beneficiaries of profit generated in the short term are insulated by current market systems from the blood and lasting devastation entailed in their production.
Whilst such myopia may serve the interests of western oligarchs, this form of short-term monetarist profit-taking is subsidised by the myriad non-beneficiaries of the widely discredited ‘trickle-down effect’ particularly including the least powerful in society and especially future generations reliant on dwindling supportive environmental capacities.
Informed by awareness of the widely evidenced declining trends in natural resources of all kinds – mined, biological, fresh water, productive soils, the dispersive capacities of all media – there is a pressing need to modify assumptions and practices not merely to recognise and then lighten burdens on supportive ecosystems but, urgently, to progress further to regenerate their capacities enabling them to continue to sustain societal needs into the future.
There is a flawed view that environmental and social responsibility is all about what we do not do, portrayed as modern-day ‘sackcloth and ashes’. Nothing could be further from the truth as human needs will always require fulfilment. The trace of human history reveals how encountering and addressing limitations to meeting a range of needs has generated cascades of revolutions in the use and innovation of materials, novel agricultural and industrial processes, medical advances and international trading, information storage and communication, and diverse other means.
Recognition of inevitable constraints consequent from the declining supportive boundaries of the natural world are therefore powerful stimulants of new thinking as well as innovation of novel products, technologies and use practices to meet humanity’s continuing needs in the shifting future operating environment. Far from ‘sackcloth and ashes’, welcoming what science clearly indicates about inevitable changes in that operating environment shapes new opportunities for meeting needs, both commercial and societal, and hence profitable means to address them in a future in which the ‘rules of the game’ may be as dissimilar as today’s norms are from those of medieval times.
Natural constraints
The narrow monetary-bound model would work just fine if we didn’t live on a planet. However, the unavoidable biophysical reality is that all of us live within the beneficence of finite planetary cycles that generate the multiple services supporting our biophysical needs: clean air and water, safe and adequate food, ambient climate and many more dimensions besides.
There are finite boundaries to the capacities of ecosystems to supply resources, particularly those such as oil, phosphorus, soil fertility and more that are deposited or generated by slow processes over geological timescales. These finite limits also apply to the capacity of natural systems to yield harvests such as from intensive capture fisheries or farming practices. There are also finite boundaries to nature’s capacities to assimilate and reintegrate waste products without detriment to climate, aquatic ecosystems, landscapes and biodiversity.
The old analogy of ‘travelling first class on the Titanic’ is appropriate to our situation. Whilst elites may be cossetted from the consequences of breaching nature’s limits through their greater economic and political power, breakdown in the socio-ecological system will ultimately affect everyone through collapses of resource flows, shifting societal expectations and tolerance, associated economic performance, public health dependent on a healthy environment, and the potential for insurrections or other civil rebellions in the face of punitive inequities.
Some societal practices already acknowledge and respond to natural constraints. Catchment management practices, for example, are founded on acknowledgement of water as a geographically bound, limited resource. Best-practice forestry and fishery management accept and adopt the concept of ‘maximum sustainable yield’, reflecting natural limitations to productivity beyond which degradation or collapse of these otherwise renewable resources can be anticipated.
Controls on the pollution of urban air and water bodies reflect feedback loops to public health and utility. At biospheric scale, awareness of the potentially existential threat of runaway climate change has also slowly been focusing global attention on the importance of decarbonisation though, in this case, proportionate reform of policy and practice are yet to follow and denial by selfish interests is blighting the future for all.
Rejection of consensual scientific realities, either by dismissing them as ‘fake news’ as they do not fit a closed ideology or through the less honest setting back of prior commitments to control climate-active emissions as constraints upon ‘growth’, risks instabilities in the ‘common to humanity’ atmosphere with inevitable ramifications that vary geographically and with differential effects across societal sectors.
This careless and uneven approach to controls on gaseous discharges destabilising the global common of the climate over longer time horizons – including its implications for flood and drought, food security, the spread of diseases, biodiversity collapse and other consequences – would not be so readily tolerated were feedback to be more directly felt locally and in the immediate term through nationally or regionally bounded systems.
Despite variable awareness of natural limits, historic and unreconstructed legacy natural resource use practices founded on prior ignorance of the finite bounds of supportive planetary systems continue today to degrade or deplete productive soils and capture fisheries, to mine and generate emissions from limited phosphorus, oil and other resources, and to perturb the climate system with feedback into greater incidence of storm, flood, drought and other severe weather damage. These factors all highlight that the time is long overdue to respond strategically to lessons about natural limits to consumption and disposal as, for example, exposed to the wider world well over five decades ago by the Club of Rome’s seminal The Limits to Growth report of 1972.3
Rejection of the very concept of finite limits to growth though continues to operate today in pariah political regimes, as also by legacy industries established in a less aware era during which a historically uneven model of development was the norm and when consequences for wider constituencies including future generations were largely overlooked. The act of denying these finite bounds though also has a finite trajectory, ultimately culminating in a metaphorical tax on over-exploitative activities through, for example, their contributions to increasingly frequent and intense instances flood, storm and fire damage.
Regrettably though, it is all of us, now and tomorrow, who pay the tax levied from the actions of today’s myopic profit-generators.
Historic advantages reaped by early adopters of industrialisation still enable some countries to evade the worst excesses of breaching finite biospheric limits, at least for a time. Measures enabling these early industrialising nations to become richer by taking a greater share of global resources were initially entrenched by empire-building or other forms of resource appropriation at favourable rates.
In the modern globalised economy, imperialism is alive and well enacted through economic means, for example by exertion of political and economic might to procure resources on favourable terms and the outsourcing of production to less advantaged global regions where lower labour costs and, not infrequently, laxer environmental and social protection policies are in place.
Some political regimes still choose wilfully to dismiss or ignore these finite boundaries, trading on their uneven economic might and castigating the notion of natural limits and protective regulations and conventions as mere inventions to derail competitive financial progress.
The wealth of contemporary science though makes it very clear that planetary, catchment and other scales of ecosystems are undeniably finite. Today, the linked crises of climate change, biodiversity and pollution are gaining awareness and featuring at least sporadically in political rhetoric. The evidence is abundantly clear that unavoidable feedback from breaching the natural limits of supporting ecosystems, including primary resources and waste assimilation amongst other factors, requires humanity to radically revise established norms.
Growth
Inherently, growth is no bad thing. It is in fact vital to address the needs of a growing global population with rising mean per capita consumption met from a natural resource base that, the evidence clearly demonstrates, is already substantially degraded and in continuing decline.
It is, however, the model of growth that determines whether it can endure or if it will ultimately butt up against and be arrested by finite limits of resource availability and societal acceptability. This applies as a global reality, but also a commercial one as over-dependence on dwindling resources and overlooking downstream consequences can only drive costs upwards and generate unintended externalities with associated liabilities.
Viewing the dwindling base of natural resources and other aspects of supporting ecosystems purely as annoying constraints brings with it significant risks. Unreconstructed resource use patterns and operational norms will lead to companies scrabbling around competitively for scarce and increasingly expensive primary resources to perpetuate ‘business as usual’. It will also blind them to shifts in the acceptability of inevitable negative impacts on ecosystems and people by downstream value chains, consumers, markets and regulation.
Take, for example, the literal and metaphorical sea change in attitude to single use plastic items contributing to the accumulation of offensive marine litter that, regardless of crass rejection of phasing out the use of disposable straws in the US in 2025, has and will in the longer term continue to fundamentally shift consumer behaviours. Pursuit of blinkered growth can, regardless of how it may put money into the pockets of a privileged stratum of society in the short term, only resolve in longer-term decline in the face of shifting market norms.
Wiser, then, to embrace the functions and finite limits of planetary systems as opportunities. How can they help us reframe thinking about wise use and stewardship of declining resources, guiding the innovation of benign, regenerative circular practises and durable, efficient products delivering upon human needs over long service lives and without encountering obstacles at the end-of-life phase? How will operating in growing symbiosis with supporting ecosystems and those inhabiting them help us innovate the different but profitable products and services required to meet continuing human needs in an inevitably different future?
This is a different conception of growth and commercial development: the basis of sustainable development and a more foresighted approach recognising natural constraints as commercial opportunities to service human needs in novel ways that evade the hazards of a world that, the evidence of environmental limitations tells us unambiguously, cannot be the same as yesterday or today.
A fork in the road
A war of world views is being played out in real time across the current geopolitical landscape, each faction heading in a radically different direction.
One path assumes that natural limits do not exist, and that distributional equity is unimportant, seeking to maximise short-term wealth generation at least for those nations, individuals and societal sectors with the assets so to do. We are seeing both overt but also more stealthy abandonment of such perceived constraints as social and environmental protections wrought through many decades.
The evidence is clear though that this is not so much a path as a cul-de-sac, founded as it is on an inevitably self-extinguishing model. Scientific evidence documenting and modelling limits to resource availability, accumulation of waste and other pollutants, accelerating degradation of ecosystems and natural productive and supportive processes highlight that this myopic pursuit can only result in a blight on the security and opportunities handed on to succeeding generations.
Some, the privileged subset of people, may ride first class, but the ship is sinking. I have seen corruption in much of my work across the developing world, most overtly how the great promise of post-apartheid South Africa, where I worked as a government advisor on visionary water reforms, was buried, perhaps irretrievably, by an incoming political regime intent only on self-benefit.
The anger I feel about that destruction of a rainbow promise to all the people of that rainbow nation is not so different from what I feel now about the disenfranchisement of the powerless, including in particular future generations, in the contemporary world. We owe them better, and judgement from future generations of the imposition of wilfully selfish short-termism today will not undo the damage being done already. We custodians of the present must not allow it to further poison humanity’s future prospects.
The alternative path heeds the evidence that perpetuation of inherited norms and assumptions, if unreconstructed in the light of knowledge of nature’s supportive capacities, are generating, and will increasingly generate, major and potentially permanent degradation of productive systems and consequent opportunities for the security and health for future generations.
On this open-minded pathway, knowledge of these limits shines a guiding light for innovations – dematerialised approaches, renewable and circular resource uses, ecologically sympathetic soil and water management practices, awareness and valuation of the myriad supportive functions of nature – as human needs will surely still require servicing in a future that is inevitably different from what we have known to date.
To wiser, foresighted innovators will come the rewards of preparing proactively to serve those novel markets safely and efficiently, averting the costs of having to react to changes as they impose themselves.
Continuing profitability will stem from recognising that humanity’s needs have to be serviced differently as environmental and societal megatrends reshape the operating environment. As certainly, ‘dinosaurs’ in denial of a changing operating environment – both companies ‘too big to fail’ but inflexible to new realities as well as nations abandoning global social and environmental protocols that may see them excluded as acceptable trading partners under ISO certifications – will go the way of the non-avian dinosaurs when asteroid impact profoundly changed the planetary environment approximately 66 million years ago.
Standing up for sustainable development
The corporate sector is often targeted by NGOs and the media as principally to blame for pressures on the environment. Ironically, people tweet and otherwise communicate their ire on smartphones, computers and associated networks, print media and other products provided by business. In reality, business is merely the device that capitalist society has accepted as its model for the alchemy of turning base resources into useful products to service societal needs.
All of us, across all sectors of society, are complicit in the flows of materials and energy across entire product life cycles. All of us benefit from being part of life cycles flowing from raw material extraction through manufacture, distribution, use and maintenance, to end-of-life use recovery or disposal. All sectors of society – public, private, voluntary and knowledge-providing – therefore have roles to play and agency to influence across product life cycles. The potential to engender change is most powerful when energies can be joined up across sectors to reject ultimately destructive norms and the will of those who benefit from promulgating them, and instead to inform and drive innovative shifts towards foresighted and optimally consensual goals required in an inevitably changing world.4
For the ignorant and/or the wilfully blind, knowledge about the nature of likely change informed by tested evidence is a threat to a fixed ideology and is therefore something to be denounced or ignored. For the wise, it is a guide on how to service humanity’s continuing needs in a more efficient, safe and profitable way as pressures from an overexploited world come to bear from scientifically informed sources.
This is a time for all who stand for sustainable development – all who recognise the importance of meeting the needs of the present whilst supporting others to meet their needs in future – to stand up and speak out strongly with all the influence they can muster as this is not only an equitable strategy, but one that is vital for continuing wellbeing. Within the tangled nexus of societal sectors, the wisdom and foresight enabled by the judicious use of science offers strategic guidance to corporates to continue to better and profitably serve our various needs into a challenging future.
Championing a sustainable pathway of development is far from a role just for sustainability campaigners and environmental scientists alone; any business with an eye to the future should be concerned about inadvertently placing its investments into a blind alley, or of committing themselves unintentionally to a legacy of potential toxicity, liability and customer disaffection.
It is clearly economic folly to invest in tomorrow’s potential problems through lack of awareness, or naked arrogance, as it is clearly foreseeable that sustainability pressures will impinge on future freedoms and societal acceptance. And surely, governments and their regulators should be minded to make and influence wiser and better-informed choices for the wellbeing of the citizens they are elected and paid to represent.
This is time for us all to stand boldly for the sustainable pathway, rejecting hollow rhetoric and disinvesting in trading partnerships with corporates and governments that set out their stalls to focus solely on selfish, short-term and unsustainable profiteering. If we do not, we share in their guilts and liabilities as part of their value chains.
The shape of the future is a choice. It is a choice about which all of us have agency, and about which all of us are also informed and empowered through the use of science. To do and say nothing at this conflicted point in history is to passively accede to the imposition of the rise of narrowly monetarist agendas and the degenerative cycles into which they will accelerate the supportive capacities of the world we inhabit and, along with them, decent prospects for humanity. To choose instead to champion an as-yet unrealised future in which limitations in the natural resources and processes that support us are recognised, and applied to better inform our journey forwards, requires active voices and practical actions.
Recognition of the constraints of nature’s finite and diminishing boundaries is, in fact, a guide to emerging opportunities, for business as for all of us, as human needs will continue to need to be fulfilled in novel ways in an inevitably different future. This view is a remedy for the flawed ‘sackcloth and ashes’ portrayal of environmental and social responsibilities as negative pressures, and a resolution of the ‘growth agenda’ with informed engagement with sustainable development.
Human needs will need to be fulfilled for as long as there are humans, and our history tells us that recognition of limitations in the past has been a spur for innovation. The declining supportive boundaries of the natural world, of which we are aware and scientifically informed today, offers clear guidance regarding inevitable changes in the operating environment, pointing the pathway towards commercial and other forms of opportunity for how needs are most safely and efficiently met as a basis for a sustainable form of growth of benefit to all.
