Page 38 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

2 Strong Sustainability as a Frame for Sustainability Communication 21

These reasons can be considered sufficient to justify the concept of strong
sustainability in an envisaged counter-factual discourse with representatives of
future generations. Of course, neither Western ethicists nor economists are allowed
to dictate a concept of sustainability to others; they may only raise it as a topic for
discussion. However, it can be expected that the concept of weak sustainability, if its
core premises are expatiated coram publico, might meet with surprise and refusal in
many cultures.

Natural Capital

Some scholars oppose the term ‘natural capital’, arguing that nature should not be
designated as a form of capital (Biesecker and Hofmeister 2009), arguing that the
term capital tacitly implies transferring an understanding of utility resulting from
the means of production, which is typical for man-made capital, to complex natural
systems providing a variety of ecological services, whose components are living
and subject to evolutionary alterations. In the theory of strong sustainability, ‘capital’
is used as a concept at the intersection of economics and philosophy, being neutrally
defined as stocks yielding a somewhat beneficial or useful flow (Ott and Döring
2008). This concept of capital must be specified according to the specific features
and benefits of different types of capital. Therefore, the theory of strong sustain-
ability starts with the term natural capital in order to show in a subsequent step the
‘differentiae specificae’ of natural capital as such, especially the autopoietic
productivity of the living.
Natural capital is a totality concept that encompasses heterogeneous entities.
These entities can be described in terms of renewable and non-renewable stocks as
well as living and non-living funds (Faber and Manstetten 1998). A homogenised
understanding of natural capital contradicts the very meaning of the term. Single
natural capital stocks are complex in themselves and, in addition, the actual compo-
nents (soil, species, abiotic elements) are interlinked and interdependent (connectivity).
Natural capitals are multiple, heterogeneous, and internally connected. The CNCR
refers to this network of critical stocks. The definition of the term natural capital in
the theory of strong sustainability is as follows: natural capital consists of all com-
ponents of animate and non-animate nature, especially living and non-living funds,
that can benefit human beings and other highly developed animals in the exercise of
their capabilities or that can constitute indirect functional or structural conditions
for such beneficence in the broader sense (Fig. 2.1).
Natural capital can be preserved by following ‘management rules’ as formulated
by the German Advisory Council for the Environment (WBGU):
• Renewable resources may only be used at the rate at which they normally
regenerate.
• Exhaustible raw materials and energy sources may only be consumed at the rate at
which physically and functionally equivalent renewable substitutes are created.