If vigorous advance of science and technology is a necessary condition for sustainability, then getting the social contract between science and society right is vital to humanity’s prospects.

What features of that social contract matter? Today’s post considers one that’s particularly sobering.

First, let’s go over a bit of groundwork:

Think of sustainability as the ability to provide food, water, and energy for the world’s seven billion people (going on nine billion); simultaneously building resilience to hazards, and maintaining ecosystem services and air- and water quality; all the while preserving (or even adding to) the same opportunities and options for future generations. A clearly meritorious, perhaps even defining, societal goal.

Significantly, this goal can never be actually achieved – not in any steady state. It can only be sought, or perhaps neared, through continuous innovation, that is: through steadily maintained scientific and technological advance, accompanied by constant societal uptake.