Searching for sustainability: The poverty of spontaneous order

Traditional approaches to sustainability rely on models that depend upon judgments of welfare across future generations, 'right prices' and some sense as to what future persons will find giving of utility. These models both accept the spontaneous order of market processes and rely on that order to derive optimal consumption paths into the future. Sustainability is, however, not a problem of divining optimal paths predicated upon right prices. Rather, sustainability, to be operational, requires a prior constructed order predicated upon rights for future persons and duties for those now living who sit in a position as dictator over the settings and circumstances that will be passed on to future persons. Rights-based approaches to sustainability do not rely upon unknowable 'preferences' of future persons, but rather upon an 'environmental regency' in which those now living agree to preserve 'settings and circumstances' for the future. This reminds us that the issue of sustainability concerns not 'how much to preserve) but 'what to preserve.' (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.