Books
Sustainability: Steeped in Values, Animated by Process,
and Structured (but Not Dictated) by Experts
Sustainable Values, Sustainable
Change: A Guide to Environmental
Decision Making. Bryan G. Norton.
University of Chicago Press, 2015. 344
pp., illus. $37.50 (ISBN: 9780226197456
paper).
have developed over time, they remain
firmly linked to the ideals of philosophical pragmatism and political
pluralism, themes that are crystallized
clearly in the present volume.
H
ow should we as a society understand and pursue environmental sustainability? This question has
long occupied environmental scholars, activists, and practitioners, and
despite multiple decades of intellectual debate, the idea of sustainability
remains fraught. What is it that should
be sustained: Economic welfare?
Ecological resilience? Or something
else? In Sustainable Values, Sustainable
Change, philosopher Bryan Norton
provides a thoughtful account of the
issues currently vexing sustainability,
refracting them through the lens of
environmental values and then drawing together these insights into a
practical program of action. His book
argues that no single theory of environmental value can tell us what to
sustain and that instead, values need to
be described and transformed through
the processes of actual place-based
decisionmaking. The book provides a
philosophical primer for environmental scholars and practitioners, establishing the philosophical and ethical
foundations that can both frame and
guide the pursuit of adaptive ecosystem management.
This book serves as a culmination of
Bryan Norton’s 30-plus-year career in
environmental ethics and policy. Now
a distinguished professor emeritus of
philosophy and public policy at Georgia
Institute of Technology, Norton has
built up a coherent and powerful body
of work through his career, making
valuable contributions to pragmatic
philosophy, environmental ethics,
and ecological economics. Although
Bryan’s core arguments and concerns
Norton’s book attempts to shift
debates about sustainability away from
the terrain of theory and toward a
concern with the practical processes
of decisionmaking. He contends that
sustainability conversations are grid­
locked in theoretical debate, because
ecologists and economists (among
others) promote narrow disciplinary
concepts of environmental value that are
incomplete in their representations of
what matters for human c­ ommunities.
Rather than trying to win contests of
theory, Norton ­contends that environmental scholars should contribute to
processes of ­
deliberation with local
communities about “what should be
sustained” in particular places. What is
“right” and “what should be s­ustained”
cannot be determined by a single
discipline or theory; they need to be
worked through with communities via
a fair and effective process of deliberation. Therefore, the pertinent question
becomes how a fair and effective process
might be conceived and constructed.
The book’s argument proceeds
through two parts. In the first, Norton
critiques the idea that disciplinary
790 BioScience • September 2016 / Vol. 66 No. 9
theories can (and should) tell us what
to sustain and why. He takes aim at
economic-welfare theory and intrinsic-value theory, arguing that both
approaches are too narrow and static
in their purviews to provide a meaningful framework for sustainability.
What is needed, Norton contends,
is an approach that (a) works with
actual communities to articulate their
values; (b) focusses on how specific
environments can support desired
human experiences over multiple time
and space scales; and (c) incorporates
uncertainty and change by being part
of an iterative, inclusive, and adaptive process. In the second part of the
book, Norton proposes and develops a
“procedural approach” to sustainability that is concerned with facilitating
an effective and fair process through
which communities and experts can
generate, analyze, and evaluate possible environmental and development
futures. Such an approach would
organize deliberation toward constructing a place-specific concept of
the public interest. A good process
would also place expert analysis alongside other forms of moral reasoning
and employ a range of deliberative
tools and mechanisms to get participants to construct new “mental
models” of their relationships to their
place and to nature. Environmental
values, then, rather than being static
or knowable in advance (as economists
and ecologists have often assumed),
need to be worked out with the actual
communities facing specific decisions.
Norton’s solution to the challenge of
sustainability is valuable and distinct:
Instead of deriving “what should be
sustained” through theory and then
measuring sustainability as a relative
alignment with this ideal, Norton’s
vision of sustainability is about creating deliberative forums in which
a multiscalar concept of the public
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Books
interest can be generated, discussed,
and embedded.
The book is well written, although
there are bouts of jargon, and the text
is dense. At 291 pages, what should be
a short read was not, owing both to the
density of ideas and terms as well as
several conceptual detours. The claims
and logic of each chapter are not clearly
stated up front or in summary, so each
chapter is somewhat of a circuitous
journey. The book is at its strongest
when discussing environmental values
and communicating the implications
of different concepts. It is at its weakest when it evaluates social science
relating to sustainability and adaptive
management or when it offers tangible
advice beyond the ivory tower. The
book employs a helpful but comical
narrative device for readers to keep
track of the argument as it progresses:
Optim, a wonkish cartoon hedgehog,
and Adapt, a stylish fox, are used to
represent distinct approaches toward
sustainability. Optim—the straw man
of the book—seeks to derive a goal
theoretically and optimize his pursuit
of it, whereas Adapt seeks to learn her
way toward sustainability in an incremental and iterative fashion. The characters appear throughout the book to
clarify how the two approaches differ,
and the book introduces and defines 10
heuristics that guide Adapt’s behavior.
The book has one major contribution
for each of its two intended audiences.
For critical and reflective practitioners of environmental management, the
book provides a grounding in ethics and
a conceptual framework for the pursuit of sustainability through adaptive
management. Put simply, it helps practitioners understand and articulate why
adaptive, process-focused approaches
are needed in terms of environmental
values. For scholars of environmental
values and adaptive management, the
book provides a unique theoretical
contribution linking environmental
values to the practice of collaborative
and adaptive management. By characterizing and evaluating the utility
of adaptive management through the
lens of environmental values, Norton
shifts the axes of environmental values
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debates to a concern with process in
place. The book also provides a nuanced
justification for the roles of experts on
environmental values with respect to
community decisionmaking processes.
By positioning experts as equal contributors of reasoning into community
deliberation, Norton democratizes the
decisionmaking process in which citizens can shape (and not merely receive)
environmental metaphors and developmental pathways. These are important
points for scholars of environmental
values and adaptive management.
Despite Norton’s intent to reach a practitioner audience, however, the jargon,
structure, and density of concepts and
terms will mean that the book is of most
use to an academic audience.
The book suffers from its refusal to
engage with power. Of course no book
can do everything. Yet, for some readers,
Norton’s proposal to unite communities
to work collaboratively toward sustainability will ring of naïveté and idealism. Norton addresses this omission
by stating explicitly that his analysis
assumes that political institutions will
work for the public i­nterest. Following
philosophical norms, he leaves for
other scholars the task of figuring out
whether this assumption is true (or
how to make it so). Thus, the book’s
thesis is predicated on the assumption
that all members of a community are
willing to come together in good faith
to work through their differences and
change their mental models to arrive at
a normative and multiscale concept of
the public interest. Debatably, Norton
assumes that a “free trade in ideas” will
yield the best ideas, that broad acceptance is the “best test of truth.” One
need look only at the success of Donald
Trump in US politics to see that truth
is not the arbiter of popular acceptance. Although we wholly agree with
Norton’s project to champion adaptive
management, we remain unconvinced
that one can legitimately outline such
an approach without delving deeply
on the question adapting for whom?—
especially given the messy real world of
special-interest politics.
Sustainable Values, Sustainable
Change would also be more compelling
if it more explicitly addressed the
messy mechanics of societal change
and individual thought. Much of the
book treats as the primary choice
that between hedgehog Optim and
fox Adapt, as if sustainability were
truly the product of pointy-headed
policy, which currently operates by
identifying (sans politics) what to optimize, and then structuring society so
as to achieve that. However, our world
does not change only as a result of
such intentional policy choices but
also through messy social processes in
which the influences of corporations
and nongovernmental organizations
are key. Norton says little about such
organic changes, instead writing as if
humans were rational agents (“think
first”). Because abundant evidence
demonstrates that people are largely
intuitive and emotional agents, perhaps what is needed next is a treatise
on feel-first sustainability designed specifically for affective thinkers, which
might help level the playing field of
entrenched power and unleash the
agency of the disempowered and the
latent sustainability values in all of us.
In summary, as scholars of environmental values, we enjoyed reading
Norton’s book, and we would recommend it to others with strong intellectual interests in the topic. The book is
a novel bridge linking environmental
values to adaptive management, and
practitioners in both fields will benefit
from a close reading and reflection.
MARC TADAKI
KAI M. A. CHAN
Marc Tadaki (marc.tadaki@geog.
ubc.ca) is a PhD candidate at the
Department of Geography at the
University of British Columbia, and
Kai M. A. Chan ([email protected])
is a professor and Canada Research
Chair at the Institute of Resources,
Environment, and Sustainability at the
at the University of British Columbia, in
Vancouver, Canada.
doi:10.1093/biosci/biw098
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