Why Sustainability?

[Oscar]

QUOTE: “What happens then? How will policy makers distract the public from the evident fact that they have no long-range plan to deal with either energy supply or climate change? No doubt they’ll think of something.”

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MuseLetter #285 / February 2016 by Richard Heinberg
[ http://richardheinberg.com/wp-content/u ... er-285.pdf ]

Nature and Sustainability in Istanbul, asks the big question 'what is sustainability' and how might we get there?

Why Sustainability?
[ http://richardheinberg.com/ ]

The following essay was written at the invitation of the curators, Çelenk Bafra and Paolo Colombo, for the catalog of the current special exhibit at the Istanbul Modern art gallery, [i]Till It's Gone: An Exhibition on Nature and Sustainability. [ http://www.istanbulmodern.org/en/exhibi ... _1743.html ] The exhibition features a "selection of artists who undertake conceptual research on nature and focus on ecological issues in their artistic practices," including pieces by (among many others) Joni Mitchell and Yoko Ono.[/i]

The essence of the term sustainable is simple enough: "that which can be maintained over time." We want our culture, our institutions, and our society to be durable rather than fragile. A society that is sustainable is built to last, while one that is unsustainable will fail sooner or later.

Of course, no society can be maintained forever: astronomers assure us that in several billion years the Sun will have heated to the point that Earth's oceans will have boiled away and life on our planet will have come to an end. Thus sustainability is a relative term. It seems reasonable to use previous civilizations as a yardstick; their lifetimes ranged from several hundred to several thousand years. A sustainable society, then, would be one capable of maintaining itself for many millennia.

The word sustainable is often used, in a general and vague way, merely to refer to consumer products reputed to be more environmentally benign than others. But sustainability has a life-or-death importance for us in an era of rapid population growth, resource depletion, widespread species extinctions, and catastrophic climate change. The term is key to understanding humanity's current ecological dilemma, and to finding a way toward a future in which we live happily within nature's limits.

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What Would a Sustainable Society Look Like?

Is it possible to describe a sustainable society in more specific terms?

First, our hypothetical sustainable society would have a steady-state economy rather than one based on continual growth. It would be a conserver society rather than a consumer society. There would be far less advertising than we are accustomed to today, and products would be made to high standards, so they could be reused and repurposed indefinitely rather than being thrown away and replaced. All materials would be recycled or reused.

No fossil fuels would be used for energy; instead, all energy would come from renewable sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass. Average global per capita energy consumption would be much lower than is currently the case in North America and Europe. Because no fossil fuels would be burned or turned into petrochemicals, air and water would be less polluted.

Environmental toxins of any kind would be rare.

Biodiversity would be stable or slowly growing rather than diminishing. Forests would be increasing rather than shrinking. Bird populations would be healthy. The oceans would be clean and sea life would be flourishing.

People would have an intimate and interdependent relationship with the natural world, often spending time in nature. They would understand where their food comes from because more households would be participating in community gardens. People would know that while nature supplies resources for human benefit, humanity has the responsibility to keep its appetites within nature's long-term ability to provide.

Our sustainable society would also be one of relative equality, in which the highest and lowest members of society could still rub elbows. And it would be a society that relies minimally on debt.

How Do We Get There From Here?

Clearly, our imaginary sustainable society would work very differently from the nations of today's world. Fortunately, however, there are efforts under way to move us in the direction of sustainability.

The renewable energy industry has been growing dramatically in the past few years, with solar and wind power together increasing faster than any other energy source. Meanwhile climate activists are persuading large institutions such as universities to stop investing in fossil fuel companies. These two efforts-to force extractive industries to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and to replace fossil fuels with renewable alternative energy sources-represent today's most visible and important sustainability efforts. However, it is clear to most analysts that it will be difficult to fully replace the energy of fossil fuels with solar and wind power due to the intermittent nature of sunlight and wind resources. Thus, as we transition to an inevitable renewable energy future, it will also be important to reduce overall energy demand. Doing so will serve the interests of sustainability in other ways: all energy use entails environmental impacts, so the pursuit of sustainability will require highly industrialized nations to scale back energy usage in any case. The actual process of reducing energy usage while maintaining a high quality of life will require innovation and behavior adaptation throughout society-in agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, and the economy in general. Here are just a few examples, again highlighting efforts already underway.

If we are to have a conserver economy rather than a consumer economy, then extraction-dependent manufacturing sectors must shrink, while other sectors will have to be transformed so that they use renewable energy and recycled materials. The implications for jobs and investment are significant. The field of ecological economics has for years been exploring how this transition can be accomplished in a way that actually improves lives.

The "passive house" movement in Germany has pioneered techniques of building construction that yield structures using up to 90 percent less energy for heating, cooling, and lighting.

Green transport advocates around the world have been working to reduce consumption of oil through the replacement of internal-combustion vehicles with electric vehicles; through the promotion of walking and bicycling; and through investment in rail and public transit.

The local organic food movement aims to reduce the amount of transport energy in food systems. The market share of organic food-which requires no fossil fuel-based nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides-is growing by leaps and bounds. And advocates of regenerative agriculture hope to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in healthy topsoil.

Forest advocates note that climate remediation can also be accomplished through planting more trees, which would help protect the world's remaining biodiversity. Conservationists are also seeking to preserve and restore native forest, prairie, desert, and ocean ecosystems.

With regard to the financial and social dimensions of sustainability, debt and equity problems have become subjects of more widespread discussion throughout the world in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and the Greek debt crisis. While solutions to these problems still seem to elude national governments, communities have quietly begun experimenting with the sharing economy, time banking, and alternative currencies.

It has been shown that high population growth rates can be brought down by raising the education levels of women, and by empowering women to take charge of their own reproductive lives.

These are all welcome and praiseworthy efforts. But they need to be appreciated in context: society has spent many decades on an unsustainable path; time, courage, and collective effort will be needed to transform unsustainable practices still embedded in nearly every aspect of our economy. We cannot know how long we have before the accumulating impacts of climate change, species extinctions, resource depletion, environmental pollution, debt, and inequality force changes upon us that none of us would want. The voices of sustainability-inspired artists, as well as those of conservationists, renewable energy advocates, and the rest, call not just for the moral improvement of society, but for a widespread awakening that might rescue us and countless other species from the consequences of more than a century of reckless, fossil fuel-based expansion.

We should listen as if our life depends on it.