Sustainability Doesn’t Have Three Pillars

I was recently drawn into a debate on whether the UK should start drilling the North Sea again. The argument was that drilling answers our economic sustainability, and that from that strength we could invest in sustainable solutions.

My counter, with my closet environmentalism dangerously close to being outed, was to point at a common misconception: that the “Three Pillars of Sustainability” (social, environmental and economic) are substitutable.

Three Pillars: A flawed model

John Elkington authored the triple bottom line in 1994 - people, planet, profit - which later became known as the three pillars.

The issue with this model is that the image of three pillars gives the illusion of equality - all pillars equally necessary to be sustainable.

The most basic glimpse of astronomy will immediately contradict this and imply that the environment is the first layer of sustainability.

Life developed on Earth while all the other planets in the solar system appear barren, simply because Earth has been hospitable for the development of life longer than any other planet.

It’s suggested that Mars may have borne oceans and very much resembled Earth before its core cooled and its atmosphere was swept away by solar winds. Last I checked, Mars wasn’t teeming with socially and economically rich communities thriving in spite of the absence of a sustainable environment. No atmosphere, no sustainable hospitality for life.

After that comes social, coexisting for long enough for intelligence and sophisticated structures, such as economies, to emerge.

The Drake equation estimates how many communicating civilisations there might be, and one of its terms is L: the length of time a civilisation survives once it becomes technologically capable. Strip the equation back and it’s really just a chain of preconditions multiplied together: a habitable planet, then life, then intelligence, then a society stable enough to sustain the sophisticated structures sitting on top of it, each link wholly dependent on the one beneath.

L asks how long a civilisation can keep from destroying itself once it has the means to, and that doesn’t have to mean nuclear apocalypse. A species can clear every earlier hurdle and still undo itself the moment it starts consuming the very environment that made it possible. A civilisation that inverts the order, that spends its foundation to feed its top layer, is cannibalising its own L.

With the evidence against three equal pillars piling up, Elkington conceded the flaws himself. He issued a public product recall on his own concept in the Harvard Business Review, 24 years after authoring it.

Elkington argued that his concept had been hollowed out into an accounting exercise for balancing trade-offs rather than the tool for transforming capitalism he’d intended. Whether it was a design flaw or user error is a moot point: the substitutability within the model was a false representation of sustainability.

Evolving the model: the Wedding Cake

Rather than looking at sustainability through the lens of pillars, they should be thought of as layers.

This thinking has grown from a fringe alternative into the established view, what’s usually called ‘strong sustainability,’ or the nested model.

The ecological economist Herman Daly spent a career arguing that the economy is not a free-standing thing but a subsystem of the biosphere, calling it a “wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.”

The Stockholm Resilience Centre turned the same idea into a picture: the “wedding cake” model of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, with the biosphere as the base tier, society resting on it, and the economy as the small tier at the top.

The issue is that humanity’s proclivity for short-term bias and risk aversion leaves the majority trying their best to bake the impossible wedding cake.

This might seem like a statement of blame, but it’s an agency problem.

Each generation’s term as planetary caretakers is far too short to witness the bigger picture and the agent’s priority is to improve their own position first - the greater good, particularly an unwitnessed one, comes second.

It’s the story of every fishery ever emptied. Each boat takes the full value of one more catch, while the cost of the vanishing stock is shared across the whole fleet. Everyone is trying to catch more, right up until there are no fish left for anyone.

An inch without miles: where green’s gone wrong

It’s not a one-sided story though.

Environmentalists have made the opposite mistake, treating those agents as an abstraction.

The eco-conscious have too often been guilty of offering idealistic solutions with no practical route to delivery and villainising the corporate world. They have played their part in polarising the debate, hardening the green side into treating the corporate side as the enemy rather than a collaborator.

Take fusion as the answer to the energy crisis. Unequivocal benefits, yes, but we’re a long way from people flicking their lights on and charging their phones from a fusion powered grid. There are a lot of challenges to overcome to get there and without plotting a route through a solution to each, saying fusion is the answer is nothing more than blue sky thinking.

The reality is that the western world, the world that built the carbon budget problem, is a mixed market economy. It is still dependent on extractive industries. It will always be full of agents that get 80 years if they are lucky, most of whom want to enjoy their time.

Given that modern context, it’s the traditional bottom line of business that dictates terms - giving people jobs and putting food on the table. Whilst the true layers of sustainability are factually and irreducibly environmental first, social second, economic last, the current rules of engagement demand economic and social satisfaction. Without considering that, the best laid plans of the environmentalists are nothing more than pipe dreams.

Back to the North Sea: a framework for decision making

It may sound like I conceded ground to the argument with the latter, but the argument for drilling in the North Sea again falls down on two points.

First, had this been 1926, it may have had a point. We’re no longer agents whose great-great-grandchildren may deal with the consequences of self-interested and negligent decision making.

Second, even if time was on our side, we’re no longer blissfully ignorant and we can’t now mistake the route for the destination.

We now lack both the time and the moral claim to ignorance to put out a fire today only for the embers to start a bigger one tomorrow. This apathetic style of decision making being the political status quo for the last 50 years is the exact mechanism that has quietly created the climate crisis.

Kate Raworth’s “doughnut” framework practically describes this - meeting people’s economic and social needs while staying inside environmental limits. It sets a social foundation (nobody falling short on life’s essentials) inside an ecological ceiling (the planetary boundaries we mustn’t overshoot), and calls the ring between them the safe and just space for humanity. The target is not economy-first or environment-first-and-damn-the-cost, but the narrow band where both hold at once.

It takes drilling the North Sea off the table as a solution to anything - that’s the economy-first extreme. Equally, load-shedding until renewable infrastructure can meet demand isn’t viable - that’s damning the cost.

The work is to find what’s in between.