Going Green: Recycling Sustainability at Fort Benning Georgia

Conclusion

Results and Findings

The earliest clear example of the concept of sustainability in economic thought is in John Stuart Mill's (1806- 1873) treatment of the “stationary state” in Book IV of his Principles of Political Economy (1848). In this work Mill argues that an end to economic growth is ultimately unavoidable but that this limitation need not imply a rejection progress; rather, he anticipated significant moral and emotional human improvement through a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and reduced economic competition. Although this prescription was original to Mill, in making it he acknowledged debts to Thomas Malthus's (1766-1834) earlier writings on natural limits, especially “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” which had gone through six editions between 1798 and 1826 and significantly influenced opinion among Mill's utilitarian philosophical bedfellows in England. Malthus's argument, however, did not share Mill's optimism about prospects for social improvement, and was originally motivated precisely by Malthus's opposition to doctrines of human progress advanced in the wake of the French Revolution.

Malthus argued that unchecked population increases geometrically (e.g., 1,2,4,8) whereas food supply increases only arithmetically (e.g., 1,2,3,4); hence there is a constant tendency for demand on necessities to outstrip supply when population rises, along with a permanent likelihood of poverty and starvation for some section of the population, a circumstance that undercuts arguments for social improvement. This focus on population rather than differences in wealth and consumption was underscored by Malthus's opposition to contraception and was further emphasized by his supporters' tendency to concentrate on (possibly compulsory) birth control, but only for the poorer classes, priorities that were sharply condemned by the nineteenth-century radical left and that still fuel suspicions of Malthusian influence on thinking about sustainability today. (Meadows, 2002)

Forestry has also informed modern ideas about sustainability. The work of the American forester-conservationist Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) has been a major influence. Echoing Mill, Pinchot combined theories of resource scarcity with an anthropocentric utilitarian moral concern for human welfare. For Pinchot the forester's mission was “based on the elimination of waste, and directed toward the best use of all we have for the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time”. In his autobiography Breaking New Ground (1947) Pinchot recounts that, upon his return to the United States in 1890 after a period of forestry training in Europe, he was horrified at American lumbermen's wastefulness. He and his allies, pointing to the dangers of timber famine, established a national U.S. Forest Service based on principles of efficient harvesting of resources through scientific forest management and replanting, and the prevention of fire, theft, improper use, and destruction. These practices aimed at preserving the resources in perpetuity. This mandate came to include economic and long-term social-justice concerns, as manifested in Pinchot's concerns about the theft of timberland land from Native Americans and his campaign in 1908 and 1909 to introduce systematic forestry on American Indian reservations. He claimed that this last measure, within eighteen months, “saved large sums of ...