[Major read] I wrote a book on sustainable development at the turn of the last century. . .

. . .and had to conclude, with some others, that it was about increasing human opportunities to respond to unpredictable change without killing ourselves in the process. No mention of the priority of unpredictable change in the then-reigning Brundtland Report definition of “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Plus, one very major way to increase human opportunities to respond to unpredictability remains increasing economic growth in ways that, again, don’t destroy us now, let alone later.

How to undertake the latter remains an open question precisely because of the unpredictable change taking place in the Anthropocene.

What to do?

I

In answer, I want to start with a thought experiment. Assume current levels of above-average consumption, production and pollution are halved and then halved again. High rates of population growth are halved and then halved again. The mass extinction of biodiversity stops, fossil fuel extraction stops; industrial fishing, farming and forestry stop; and all manner of government stupidity in the form of subsidies, incentives and distortions cease.

Now ask yourself: What if these interventions also prove unsustainable? What we thought was true sustainability proves to be unsustainable as things change (remember: irrigated agriculture was once promoted because it sustained year-round production). Conditions remain complex, even if different from before.

In this thought experiment, it turns out that degrowth reduces the resources to prevent stronger nations from invading and taking over. Changes in diets as now recommended lead to unexpected maladies or recurrence of older diseases. Getting rid of fossil fuels doesn’t eradicate the need for plastics and other petroleum based products. The growing middle classes, once considered essential to the advancement of democracy and states, continue to undermine the global biosphere.

And yet, while all this is going on, the demand remains that whatever critical infrastructures are in place–even (especially?) ecologically sensitive ones–must be highly reliable and safe. (Hunting and gathering societies may be the most sustainable, but I do not remember any hunter-gatherer in Botswana in the early 1970s who didn’t want to quit that that way of life for something safer and more reliable. Their lives were exciting enough, thank you very much.) It turns out that realizing sustainability, in this thought experiment, didn’t make any of this less complex for management purposes when it comes to the Anthropocene.

At best, socio-technical systems–even the more sustainable and environmentally-friendly ones we need–are reliable only until the next failure ahead. That indeed is the lesson of unpredictablity. This means that preventing that next failure in today’s energy-intensive infrastructures is the track record we want in place when the more sustainable infrastructures are to be managed just as, or even more reliably. The upshot of so many infrastructure studies is that, when operating in situations of high unpredictability, systems must be managed reliably and safely beyond the in-built limits of design, technology and regulation. A track record in managing the unexpected now and just ahead, especially in conditions of Anthropocene, is an affordance–opportunity and constraint–not be thrown aside.

In short, Infrastructure mandates for managing and innovating reliably and safely are not going away. Nor can they, even when systems are necessarily smaller, more decentralized, less interconnected, and more sustainable. Those systems too will be managed as if peoples’ lives and livelihoods depend on it—because they do.

III

Still the question remains: “What are more sustainable ways to anticipate future environmental crises while coping with the ongoing ones, now and just ahead?”

As I see it, the benefit of this question is thinking in terms of path dependencies (plural)–not only that their durations differ, but the with-respect-to’s are also highly variable. Path dependencies in the Anthropocene already are commercial or institutional or legal or technological or behavioral or climatic–and hybrid and more.

This means management attention is directed to the specific failure scenarios of interest and the levels of granularity at which the scenarios are said to be actionable. Specifying action-levels of granularity is important because the answer to the “What happens next?” question so central to on-the-ground crisis management MUST be more than “What happens is, well, more path dependence. . .”

So what?

If the question is–“What are reasonable and feasible ways to anticipate future sustainability crises while coping with the ongoing ones, now and ahead?”, then my answer in light of the preceding is another question:

If we can’t differentiate path dependencies by better focusing on case-level, variably granular failure scenarios actionable in and for environmental crisis management, how are we ever to better anticipate future sustainability crises while coping with the ongoing ones?

Or another way to put it: The most important part of the expression, “sustainable livelihoods,” is that final “s.”