Real sustainability

In an earlier post, I criticized the environmental movement and particularly the promoters of “sustainability” for their hypocrisy. I am not opposed to sustainability at all. In fact, I believe that our long-term survival as a species mandates that our economies, large and small, become sustainable. By sustainable, however, I mean something completely different than the simplistic measures promoted by the “green movement,” such as recycling, conservation, and renewable energy. To be truly sustainable, we must accept the inviolable fact of finiteness, that the earth and its resources are finite, that the concept of unlimited growth is fanciful and a danger to the survival of our descendants. Rather than something to be exploited for short-term gain, the earth and its resources are the savings account for humanity. Thus far in our history, we have been wasteful with those savings, spending them heedlessly, ignoring the fact that in reality we are stealing them from our heirs.

All sorts of organizations promote sustainability, including non-profits, local governments, and businesses. Yet all they advocate are simple-minded measures that avoid confronting the fundamental issue of consumption and the necessity for frugality. Such sustainability programs remind me of an essay by Edward Abbey in which he writes about tossing empty beer cans out of his car window while driving down a highway, noting that it is not the beer cans that are ugly but rather the highway itself. Sustainability programs are like an anti-litter campaign to remove beer cans along a highway through a pristine wilderness: the issue is not the cans but rather the highway itself.

Further, much of the effort toward “sustainability” is mere greenwashing. I saw a particularly egregious example of that a few years ago when I attended a conference on sustainability that included presentations by sustainability coordinators of Chevron and Rio Tinto. Chevron is the second largest oil company in the US, and Rio Tinto is the third largest mining company in the world and the operator of the largest excavation on earth, an open pit mine in Utah. The idea of those companies advocating sustainability points out the ignorance and self-delusion of the sustainability movement.

When it comes to the situation facing the world, our species, and particularly this society, the words of the comic strip character Pogo are more relevant than ever: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That quote was about environmental pollution and was used in 1970 on a poster in celebration of the first Earth Day. Nearly a half century has passed since the cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote those words. While that quote is more relevant than ever as our species faces the imminent existential threat of human-caused climate change, we still do not understand its fundamental meaning. What we face is more complex than simple environmental pollution or dangerous levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The challenges are more complex than crime, poverty, minimum wage, welfare, guns, or abortion. Further, the malefactors are not just big corporations, banks, bosses, scabs, special interests, Republicans, Congress, or lobbyists—the groups that demonstrators typically rally against and are the subject of protest songs. Certainly organizations and individuals with more power and money take advantage of others in society. That is only a part of the issue, however, and a small part at that. Pogo was right in that it is we (to be grammatical) who are the enemy.

We have become our own enemy through a gradual process over the past century as our species has transformed itself from Homo sapiens—the “wise human” in Latin—to Homo economicus, the economic human who measures virtue and good almost exclusively in economic terms. It is our individual and social mindset that has created this society preoccupied with consumption and continuing economic growth. With the exception of a damned few individuals (and essentially no organizations, public, private, or non-profit), we fail to understand the fundamental fact that the planet on which we live is a closed system, a virtual rock, where everything we use comes from this rock, and everything we produce and throw away stays on this rock. There is neither an infinite source of “raw” materials, nor an infinite “away” to which we can discard our waste. The reality is simple and incontrovertible.

What that means is every aspect of how we live affects this rock we call the Earth. For example, every car we buy requires metal, other materials, and energy to make, and each of those components results in pollution of some sort or other. Further at the end of its life, every car ends up as a combination of junk to be discarded (but remember, there is no “away”) and materials that can be partially recycled but only with an input of energy and output of more pollution. Of course, driving those cars requires energy, whether in the form of petroleum or as electricity, and all energy production results in pollution.

Cars are only an obvious example. Everything we buy—in shopping malls, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, or on Amazon—bears costs in terms of damage to the natural world. The same thing goes for everything we eat, including much of what we grow at home given the chemicals we apply to our gardens. Further, social dysfunctions such as poverty, racism, and crime are also a form of pollution, by-products of a society driven by consumption, manic pursuit of growth, and measurement of good only in economic terms.

All of this is easy to write about, but what, if anything, can we do as individuals and as a society to address this situation? I believe that most of us sense that the way we are living is not right. To do better requires that we live in a way that reflects a sense of responsibility toward the natural world, each other, and future generations.

What that means is that we must become more frugal—we must ignore the enticements of advertising-driven consumerism that is the dominant theme of this society and begin to listen to our conscience. Yet the practice of frugality is considered eccentric at best and often un-American or even crazy. Moreover, it would be nearly impossible for anyone to be elected to public office on a platform of advocating individual and societal frugality. Perhaps a new version of the Civil Rights and Anti-war movement of the 60s will emerge with new protests and new songs to inspire. Perhaps more people will don the mantle of Dorothea Lange and other FSA photographers to document what we are doing to ourselves in the name of “progress” and “growth.”

I am not optimistic, however. I see those who advocate for “sustainability” as gullible innocents who think that some sort of technological deus ex machina and feel-good slogans about saving the earth will allow us to continue to live as extravagantly and foolishly as we are now. That is impossible, for the Second Law of Thermodynamics trumps the First Law of Walt Disney (Wishing will make it so) every time.

The late Charles Bowden understood the situation when he wrote these words in his book “Blood Orchid.”

We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.

Elsewhere in that fine book he writes this:

Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse effect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned. Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can affect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness … then what are we to do?

Indeed, then what are we to do?