sustainability/sustainability-myanswer.html

My answer to the question of "sustainability?"

A. My answer to the question of how we can become sustainable is to describe characteristics of sustainability as seen from different views.

the views are non-converging

we have to deal with the immediate problem of attempting to value a concept that has inherent inconsistencies

for our own society - post-industrial society might progress toward a sustainable economy but only after periods of excess consumption

it seems we had to pass through that phase to gain a larger/longer scale view

the same inherent inconsistency has been described by Allen and Starr 1982 as "complementarily"

unified models will be contradictory

trade off between rate dependent and rate independent descriptions

B. Multiple views - and what we need to learn or understand

1.system view

in the demographic transition model population growth rate is slowed down by increased wealth

the death rate may already be low, thus the main effect is to slow birth rate

the big question is whether "wealth" is measured by the use of resources or whether it could be related to the conservation of natural resources

2. network view

a sustainable society would be a network with intermediate level of connectivity

mosaic of different processes

leads to health and resilience of the society - see Panarchy

3. scale

citizens will be able to see the long term processes (even if they are slow)

civilization time scales of 1000 years

citizens will be able to act at small and short scales that contribute to the overall sustainable society

4. preferences/choices

peoples preferences will shift to make decisions based on longer time scales

people will redefine their values

wealth will be related to what they can do (potential), not what they have done (used up)

wealth will be seen as what the ecosystem can do for them

there will be some understanding of what can be measured and what is valuable even though it can't be measured

may have vale exactly because it can't be measured

health/beauty/life

enough people will change their preferences that the society will cross a threshold - jump to a new stable regime

Crossing the threshold, and jumping to a new regime for sustainability provides some resilience for the society. Future excursions in values are less likely to jump back to the previous modes of production and consumption.

5. institutions

people need to get together to create instructions that foster trust in future resource use patterns

C. "Sustainability?" is not the question in many areas of the world

need to recover, reconstruct and reconstitute their societies

construction of an infrastructure that depends on renewable resources

rather than depend on foreign aid and foreign technologies

natural disaster relief and post civil war reconstruction should not be seen as opportunities for the industrialized nations to develop markets

D. Implemention has to be done within the limit of each system's sustainable energy and resource flow

for areas that are on a path to sustainability

energy reallocation for change has to be absorbed in the current system

i.e. can't overwhelm a potentially sustainable system, that will fundamentally change the nature of that system