• December 2002: “Waging Peace with Intelligent Design” • November 2002: “The Extravagant Gesture” • Sept/Oct 2002: “Intelligent Materials Pooling” • August 2002: “Beyond the Triple Bottom Line” See all monthly features

So, what is sustainability?

This is a question I answered for myself long ago…or at least I thought I had. As a professional toxicologist, I've been working for over 20 years to make products and systems healthy and environmentally safe. I work with the fine points of the design, conduct, and interpretation of toxicology studies to assess the risk of chemicals to human health and the environment. I have been comfortable that my efforts contribute in a meaningful way to a sustainable future. But on a recent trip to East Africa, I was reminded that outside the frequently esoteric confines of academia and upscale coffee shops in the West, sustainability is a very real, stark, everyday human issue.

Real Sustainability Challenges

Large, fast growing cities in East Africa, as in much of the 'developing' world, continue to challenge the sustainability of their infrastructures and institutions. Traveling through Nairobi I saw many areas with no drinking water, open sewage streams in the streets, and people burning garbage to produce smoke to repel the flies and mosquitoes. Many other cities have similar widespread problems.

As more and more Africans leave their traditional, rural societies for the often illusory opportunities of modern, urban centers, they are giving up the wisdom of generations of forebears in forging sustainable ways of life. They are learning to rely on new types of resources and skills for subsistence, and in many cases the results are unfortunate.

How can we address these people's very real, basic need to achieve a just, healthy, sustainable way of life? Clearly, the types of toxicological analysis, eco-design, and theory we spend so much time on in the West address this only tangentially and in the long term. And African responses have not been able to overcome the many political, economic and social obstacles to sustainability.

Despite the obstacles, I found myself on my African journey asking a seemingly endless series of questions beginning with "what if?" What if…we used technology to turn the region's natural conditions into usable assets in a sustainable way? What if we looked for concrete, immediate solutions that the West could help implement?

Opportunities and Resources

I believe Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart's cradle-to-cradle design paradigm could make real contributions to sustainability in areas of the world like East Africa. The concept that we should design systems which use current solar income and which circulate healthy biological or technical nutrients has yet to be applied in a large scale in the developing world as it industrializes.

Consider the use of "current solar income." Coming from a central European family, and living until recently in Wisconsin, after 30 minutes in the mid-day East African sunlight my skin was beginning to burn—a very palpable reminder of the tremendous solar energy contained in the bright equatorial sunshine. Yet most of this powerful energy source is untapped. Trees, harvested from East Africa's dwindling forests, are cut down at a most unsustainable rate in the relentless daily search for firewood for heat and cooking. I asked myself, what if we set the goal of establishing the widespread use of solar ovens? I can only imagine the effect that this could have on the sustainability of the surrounding ecosystems and the productive use of families' time and energy.

Some in the West look skeptically on MBDC's discussion of technical nutrients being recovered and used again and again in closed-loop industrial systems. But in East Africa, as in many economically struggling regions, the value of technical nutrients is very real and very visible. Driving through the countryside in Kenya, I saw many small machinery repair shops bursting with what in the United States would be considered junk—old, recovered parts from bicycles, trucks, motorcycles and farm implements. These objects have real value. When ingeniously reused, they keep the machinery of everyday life running, meeting basic needs and generating productivity while easing environmental stress. Developing more coherent systems of recovery and reuse could go a long way toward building economic stability and laying a foundation for the use of new, environmentally friendly technologies.

And consider the potential importance of biological nutrients. What if the packaging that enters Africa with imported consumer goods were easily composted and served to enrich the soil, rather than mar the landscape and end up in smoky, carbon dioxide-releasing trash fires? On a large scale, products and associated packaging which serve as biological nutrients could serve the very real, present need for soil recovery throughout the continent.

Recalibrating

As I return to my toxicological work in the U.S. I returned to my world… a world of mathematical exposure models, toxicology studies, and the fine points of risk assessments.

I'll never forget standing next to a fire on a cold night on the rim of Ngorogoro Crater in Tanzania. Just 15 miles from the roaring fire was the Oldavi Gorge, the place where, in the 1950's, British-born archeologists Mary and Louis Leaky found a skull fragment belonging to an early hominid, which lived in the area almost 2 million years ago.

That night kindled in me a sense of obligation to return to the place where our species may have originated and to do something to contribute to the sustainability of a region that has sustained our species so well for the past two million years. Ever since that night I ask myself…what if?

What if we made an earnest, well focused effort to return to the origins of the human race, East Africa and to work to ensure for a sustainable future.

What if we identify only three things that we could do that are visible and real and contribute to the sustainability of life in this region? What if we had a serious discussion about the obstacles to accomplishing these changes? What if we put together something like a Marshall Plan for African development incorporating the cradle-to-cradle design paradigm?

After my experience in East Africa, I know ask myself, not what if? but when?

Dr. Thomas G. Osimitz is Principal – Health & Environmental Sciences, at infoscientific.com. A board-certified in Toxicology by the American Board of Toxicology, he earned a PhD in toxicology from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Infoscientific, Dr. Osimitz was Vice President, Global Safety Assessment and Regulatory Affairs at S.C. Johnson, the worldwide consumer product and institutional chemical company. In this position, he had the ultimate authority for the safety approval of all products prior to marketing.