Crucible for a common ethic
FEDERICO MAYOR
explains the role of culture in sustainable development
'Traveller, there is no road; you make the road by walking'. The words of
Antonio Machado in his Nuevas Canciones may be applied to the quest
for development. Development is not a fixed destination, but a path along
which the traveller is also a pathfinder.
We have been a long time in discarding mental maps that identified
development goals in terms of linear economic growth, in discovering the
complex nature of the development process. In recent decades, our
understanding of this complexity has passed through a number of stages,
marked by the deployment of such terms as 'endogenous', 'integrated' and
'sustainable' to signpost the path to development. The report of the
Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future, represented an important
conceptual advance by placing development in its broader environmental and
intergenerational setting. Nine years later, we are still pondering and
debating the requirements for a development that 'meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs'. However, there is an increasing consensus - in the
United Nations system as elsewhere - that development must be concerned
with 'the flourishing of human existence in all its forms and as a whole',
as the World Commission on Culture and Development put it, and that
culture is an essential dimension of such development.
Culture is elusive to definition. However, it may be taken to refer to all
those mentally generated forms of organization created, preserved and
transmitted within a social group or, in a wider context, the human
species. Such a definition encompasses culture both in its special sense
of the arts and in the broader anthropological sense of a whole way of
life, material, intellectual and spiritual. Culture comprises all the
expressions of our creativity, including language, science and technology,
architecture, music and art. It includes our whole system of beliefs,
values, attitudes, customs, institutions and social relations. It shapes
the way we perceive the world (including ourselves) and how we interact
with it.
Culture is thus inextricably bound up with the great developmental
challenges of our time - eliminating poverty, curbing population growth,
combating disease, protecting the environment and the resource base,
promoting a culture of democracy and peace. The global crisis facing
humanity at the dawn of the 21st century is above all a reflection of our
collective values, behaviour and lifestyles. In a word, it is a
cultural crisis.
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development and the
implementation of Agenda 21 have served to highlight the complexity of the
concept of sustainability which, reduced to its simplest expression,
leaves open the question of what exactly is to be transmitted to future
generations. They have also underscored the imperative of ensuring that
the moral obligation of intergenerational solidarity is not met at the
expense of our contemporaries. In many parts of the world, people have
little natural capital to pass on to posterity apart from their cultural
identity. It has become clear that the concept of sustainable development
is meaningful only when construed in multidimensional and global terms,
that is to say, when envisaged in its interrelated economic, social,
environmental and cultural aspects and in the perspective of an
increasingly interdependent world.
Culture as arbiter
The relationship between these different aspects of sustainable
development naturally poses highly complex questions of ends and means.
Culture, for example, will have an instrumental role in relation to
economic, social or environmental objectives deemed necessary or desirable
within a particular society. Within a sustainable society, however, it is
culture itself that will be the arbiter in the difficult trade-offs
between conflicting ends, the 'final court of appeal' with regard to
developmental goals. Culture becomes an end in itself when it plays its
creative, pathfinding role of determining our ultimate destination. As
pointed out in the recent report of the World Commission on Culture and
Development set up jointly by UNESCO and the United Nations, culture is
not only the 'servant of ends but (...) the social basis of the ends
themselves', a factor of development but also the 'fountain of our
progress and creativity'.
Culture will clearly have a key instrumental role to play in efforts to
achieve an environmentally sustainable economy. Technology alone will not
suffice to compensate for the effects of waste and wastage on our
environment. Reducing energy consumption to combat environmental pollution
and the risk of global warming will call for far-reaching cultural changes
in domestic living, transportation, work location and urban-rural
dynamics. Responsible stewardship of the planet's material resources will
involve a revolution in the habits of the throwaway society. Conservation
of the biological resource base will require new patterns of consumption
consistent with sustainable farming, forestry and fishery practices.
Education - itself an aspect of culture - will have a major part to play
in facilitating this cultural shift as well as in promoting
capacity-building and technological innovation for sustainable development.
These changes will concern disproportionately the affluent 20 per cent of
the world's population that currently monopolizes some 80 per cent of its
resources of all kinds. Indeed, unless changes of lifestyle are
accompanied by a new ethical awareness, the prospects for global
sustainable development cannot be said to be bright. By breeding poverty,
our asymmetrical world aggravates its other ills, notably damage to the
environment. The inhabitants of the rich countries will have to discover
within their cultures the source of a new and active solidarity if such
development challenges are to be met through greater international sharing
of knowledge and resources.
In the realm of ideas, sustainability implies a break with mechanistic and
one-sided approaches to development issues. Modern science, for example,
is increasingly recognizing the value of indigenous ecological knowledge
and traditional resource management practices based on generations of
observation and experiment and deeply embedded in local cultures. The
industrialized world is discovering that traditional pharmacopoeia,
fertilizers and insecticides can often be turned to account. Traditional
knowledge and values are combining fruitfully with modern science to
foster sustainable environmental management - as in the over 300 biosphere
reserves in 85 countries making up the World Network of UNESCO's Man and
the Biosphere programme. Culture can here be seen to be playing a very
practical role in sustainable development.
Dialogue
and democracy
The politics of participation - and the cultural ethos that makes it
possible - is arguably another of the requirements for sustainability. A
sustainable society is conceivable only in terms of the involvement and
empowerment of people - men and women equally. Individuals and grassroots
organizations have been prominent in the environmental movement that has
transformed the political landscape in most countries over the last
decade. Sustainable development needs to be rooted in the lives and
concerns of people at large, including traditional cultures and minority
groups. It implies a knowledge of, and respect for, cultures in their
diversity. It is predicated on a spirit of dialogue and democracy and,
beyond that, a climate of civil and international concord. A culture of
peace, in the broadest sense of the expression, is one of the constituents
of sustainability.
Culture becomes an end when we think of the ultimate purposes of
development. 'Sustainable development' is, after all, but a stage on a
chartless road. Who can say what are the conditions of 'cultural
sustainability'? It is in this sense that culture in the diversity of its
forms is an end that encompasses the objective of sustainable development.
There is an important parallel to be made here between biological and
cultural diversity, which may be seen as aspects of the same phenomenon.
Just as the multitude of diverse species and life-forms that constitute
the Earth's biodiversity have evolved in adaptation to different
geographical and climatic conditions, so the adaptability of Homo
sapiens - being the only species that has the potential to exploit
every feasible ecological niche on the planet's surface - is expressed in
humanity's cultural diversity. In this way, not only the plants and
animals but also the human cultural patterns that we find in the humid
tropics differ from those in the tundra or in the arid temperate zones.
Just as nature produces a variety of species adapted to their environment,
so humankind develops varied cultures in response to local conditions.
Cultural diversity may thus be seen as a form of adaptive diversity and,
as such, a prior condition of sustainability.
Need for a common ethic
Globalization is posing a serious threat to both kinds of diversity.
Peoples and cultures that have existed for thousands of years in
equilibrium with the natural environment are disappearing along with the
ecosystems that sustained them. The loss of diversity is debilitating the
biosphere of which humanity is a part. At the same time, the rapid
destruction of age-old cultures and traditions is diminishing our
collective repertoire of cultural response. Unlike modern industrial
society, many traditional cultures promote not only the need but the
sacred duty for people to live in symbiosis with their natural
environment. If the unique and particular understandings of humanity's
different cultures are lost or simply reduced to a lowest common
denominator, something precious and perhaps even essential for our
collective survival will have been squandered. Their world view, their
values and their innate respect for nature and life represent potential
contributions to the profound change in attitude and behaviour that can
alone engender a global culture capable of acting responsively and
responsibly in the face of global change. The world's cultures must be
preserved in their diversity - 'for their sake and ours'.
Yet while posing a threat to diversity, globalization is also giving us an
expanded vision of the human situation and of the repercussions of our
individual and collective actions on ourselves and on the biosphere as a
whole. The concept of sustainable development may itself be seen as an
expression of this new awareness. Our greatest need at the present time is
perhaps for a global ethic - transcending all other systems of allegiance
and belief - rooted in a consciousness of the interrelatedness and
sanctity of all life. Such an ethic would temper humanity's acquired
knowledge and power with wisdom of the kind found at the heart of the most
ancient human traditions and cultures - in Taoism and Zen, in the
understandings of the Hopi and the Maya Indians, in the Vedas and the
Psalms, in the very origins of human culture itself. Is this not perhaps
the essential role of culture in and beyond sustainable development - to
be the crucible for a common ethic, corresponding to the intuition of a
shared yet diverse destiny?
Federico Mayor is Director-General of UNESCO.
