By Heather Gates
Beloved Wisconsin conservationist Aldo Leopold once said, “Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.” An avid forester, philosopher, educator, writer, and outdoor enthusiast, Leopold’s dedication to living sustainably granted him well-deserved recognition.
Yet, what is living sustainably? What creates the harmony Leopold longed for?
Many people think sustainability is just another word for environmental balance. Although sustainability is deeply rooted in the environment, it is also inseparable from our economy and our society. The economy, society, and sustainability are not merely overlapping parts, but nest, one inside another, as in the accompanying diagram. 
The economy would not exist if we did not have a society to make, supply, and distribute goods and services, and society would not exist without the environment to provide our life-support systems, like air, water, land, climate, biodiversity, and more.
“The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around,” said economist Herman Daly.
The Natural Step (TNS) framework for sustainability is a science-based, robust approach to reducing and sometimes reversing human impacts on our planet. Having a common understanding of sustainability helps guide our activities and decisions towards a future in which people thrive.
TNS uses universal principles that apply to everything in our earth’s complex system. These four sustainability objectives can be summarized this way:
1. Reduce our dependence upon fossil fuels, extracted underground metals, and minerals (things from the earth’s crust).
2. Reduce our dependence on chemicals and other human-made substances.
3. Reduce our dependence on activities that degrade life-sustaining ecosystems.
4. Meet the hierarchy of present and future human needs fairly and efficiently.
The fourth objective, meeting human needs, is the focus of this column.
TNS uses Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef’s definition of human needs. Max-Neef’s work focuses on alternatives to the conventional models of development that have contributed to poverty, debt, and ecological disasters in Third World communities.
Max-Neef holds that we have nine basic human needs: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, leisure, creation, identity, freedom, and participation. Rather than arranged hierarchically, as presented by Abraham Maslow, needs are interrelated and interactive, and are constant throughout time and culture. What changes over time and between cultures is how these needs are satisfied. In other words, today’s satisfiers are not your Irish grandmother’s satisfiers.
According to Max-Neef, “Satisfiers may include, among other things, forms of organization, political structures, social practices, subjective conditions, values and norms, spaces, contexts, modes, types of behavior and attitudes, all of which are in a permanent state of tension between consolidation and change.”
Some needs and their satisfiers are very simple, such as protection (family structure, health systems) and understanding (curiosity, education). But in some cases, we easily confuse needs and satisfiers. For example, food and shelter are not needs, but rather, satisfiers of the need for subsistence.
To understand all the ways we can fulfill needs, it helps to think about the ways in which we experienced needs in life. We experience them by being, having, doing, and interacting. These four add another component to the understanding of needs. We can picture this new dimension by creating a table, with the nine needs and the four ways we experience them charted to show the 36 different groups of satisfiers. (A sample is here)
Satisfiers have different forms. “Synergic-satisfiers” satisfy a need, but also fuel or add to the gratification of other needs at the same time. For example, education satisfies needs for understanding, but also protection, creation, identity, and participation.
People do not always make the best choices of satisfiers. Some things appear to satisfy, but do not. “Pseudo-satisfiers” give a false sense of gratification, as in the example of a car superficially fulfilling the need for identify, or stereotyping seeming to fulfill understanding.
“Inhibitors” satisfy a need but at the cost of reducing the fulfillment of other needs, as in non-educational video games satisfying the need for leisure, while degrading understanding, creation, and identity, or an overprotective family satisfying the need for protection, but inhibiting affection, understanding, participation, identity, and freedom.
“Violators” are applied under the pretext of satisfying a need, but destroy the possibility of other needs being satisfied. A good example is censorship, which is meant to give protection, but actually prevents understanding, participation, creation, identity, and freedom. Violators are mostly related to the need for protection.
The only need that requires material goods to be satisfied is subsistence. Therefore, if individuals and societies make wise choices, quality of life can be enhanced while consumption of our world’s (diminishing) resources is reduced. In other words, people can have more happiness with less stuff.
The ways in which we meet or fail to meet human needs fairly and efficiently greatly affects the first three objectives for sustainability. Max-Neef further says that any fundamental human need that is not met reveals a human poverty, and that “each poverty generates pathologies” that lead to other problems in society.
In 2012, I wrote two columns about human needs that focused on how changes to our political system have created barriers to people meeting their needs for participation and freedom. Sustainability demands that such barriers come down.
Last month, Torbjörn Lahti, co-author of the book The Natural Step for Communities (the book that gave birth to The Natural Step Monona) and teacher of Human Needs workshops, spoke with staff member Jenny Peek about the intersection of sustainability, politics, and human needs. He said, “Everything that’s against participation and fairness is important to tell that we don’t accept this as a part of sustainability.”
Lahti stressed that “participation is a fundamental need.” He continued, “Politics for me on the one hand is to see what we can learn from nature within the framework of natural force and on the other hand, meeting needs.”
“Politics is about finding the best satisfier for society,” said Lahti. As an organization promoting sustainability, Lahti said of The Natural Step Monona, “It is your duty to always suggest solutions, to help to find solutions, of the best satisfiers you can have in society. In a democratic society, of course, you have to work together within the democratic system. You’re doing your duty as an organization to have an opinion from a sustainability perspective.”
