Sustainable Defined: Part III The Triple Bottom Line
August 16, 2013Background: The Brundtland report, Our Common Future, marked an agreement that development needs to be approached holistically, including environmental considerations—not simply as a political process that mediates between capitalism (investment for financial gain) and public welfare (that protects or incentivizes social good). It recognized that economic, social, and environmental spheres are interconnected, requiring a systems approach to identify optimal solutions. This basic framework alliteratively named People-Planet-Profit by John Elkington (and Economy-Ecology-Equity by William McDonough) has been developed into the tool of Corporate Social Responsibility (a.k.a. Corporate Sustainability et al).
People-Planet-Profit, or the Triple Bottom Line, grew out of a global call for change–to address planetary limits and essential needs of the world’s poor. It evolved to focus on measurement and improvement over past performance with regard to environmental and social “impacts.” An entire culture of corporate and institutional sustainability metrics and reporting is now in place. This is certainly an improvement over the more common practices of denial that were the standard a generation ago. From the perspective of architecture and sustainable design however, a number of things are lost in this definition (or were never in the original script). Most glaring is the assumption that if our existing social structures and practices were simply more efficient somehow, then we would eventually solve the sustainability problem.
TBL is a technocratic approach, suggesting that engineering and policy changes within existing social and political channels can yield fundamental change. It attempts to measure social and environmental efficiency of practices rather than questioning many of the practices themselves. It allows, for example, for increasingly energy-efficient and “eco-friendly” production of trivial, unloved (but recyclable) consumer goods. My skepticism as a designer is best summarized in the iconic Einstein quote: “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them.” Architects and designers are trained to question the initial statement of a design problem—it’s what makes us designers. Somewhere out there is a definition of sustainability for design that accounts for this ability to envision alternative futures. It is important for current practices to be measured and improved in order to have less negative impact, but even more important is the kind of innovation that will yield different practices altogether.
NEXT: There are different ways of looking at sustainability other than the triple bottom line—perspectives that co-exist with one another or contradict one another. These social constructs do not use the same measuring stick as the People-Planet-Profit approach. They may not even start with a bottom line that is recalculated to be a different line. Such constructs may not be of use to organizations seeking to make steady measurable positive change. It is clear, however, that other “logics” exist. And that is the subject of the next, and possibly final post on the topic.
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