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Environment
Actually, We’re Pretty Darn Good at Sustainability
It’s the “what,” not the “how,” of sustainability that needs attention.
Posted July 3, 2023 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Life is a process of sustaining.
- We sustain that which is important to us.
- We need to focus more on what we choose to sustain.
Sustainability gets lots of attention these days. Even the United Nations has specified a list of Sustainable Development Goals, which describe a variety of areas that have a bunch of different targets for nations and other collectives to strive to reach. Apparently, sustainability is essential if our grandchildren’s grandchildren are going to have a planet to call home.
Reflecting on our current global state of affairs, though, provides evidence to suggest that, actually, we’re pretty skilled at sustaining that which is important to us. In fact, the crucial point may well be not how to go about improving sustainability but, rather, what it is that we currently choose to sustain.
Take hunger for example. It happens to be the case that, across the globe, we produce enough food every year so that no one ever needs to go hungry. And, yet, as you read these words, hundreds of millions of people don’t know where or when they will have their next meal. How can that be? How can a state of affairs persist in which massive amounts of food are wasted in some places while, at the same time, people just around the corner are hungry?
Hunger is a global phenomenon that has no right to persist. Yet, persist it does. The fact that it persists can be no accident.
Neither can inequity. There have been times across the millennia of our existence when inequity was an unknown concept. How has it come to pass that, by and large, we now organise our social arrangements according to relationships of dominance and subservience? And how can it be that we have created a situation where a teensy proportion of people are able to accumulate more wealth than they would ever need in several lifetimes? It is utterly preposterous that 1 percent of the world’s population would have half of all its wealth.
Examples such as this provide compelling evidence that people can sustain all manner of situations and circumstances. While it might be tempting to blame “organizations,” “institutions,” “economies,” and even “policies” for much of the world’s current skewed social arrangements, “organizations” don’t make decisions. People do. And policies don’t just arrive.
Individual people are always the architects of every set of arrangements that create extraordinary advantages for some people at the expense of opportunities and living quality for others. Sometimes individuals work together, but, even when one group or another makes a decision, it is still the case that it was the agreement between separate and distinct individuals that created the decision.
We are designed to organize our affairs and activities according to our own unique set of internal standards, ambitions, desires, dreams, and wants. We all do it all the time even though, for some of us, it’s exceedingly difficult to do it given our circumstances and resources. For others, it’s trivially easy.
Everyone without exception strives to sustain that which is important to them. Perhaps it’s no more complex than those with more can sustain more. The people with the most power, authority, and resources have more degrees of freedom to decide what they are going to sustain even when what they decide to sustain prevents other people from sustaining what is important to them.
For hunger in the world to be eliminated, the people who, by their practices and policies are sustaining global hunger, need to change their priorities. Currently, they have things they consider more important than the nutritional needs of others and, for as long as that remains the case, widespread hunger will persist.
It’s the what, not the how, of sustainability that needs to be our focus. As good as we are at sustaining our own importances, we are not invincible. Neither is our environment and atmosphere.
Sustainability can only occur indefinitely by paying attention to the limits within which life persists. Ignoring these limits will be to the detriment of life itself.
Sustaining sustainability demands understanding the interconnectedness and the circularity within which causes and effects become blurred as systems exert whatever energy they can to maintain balance. Helping, rather than thwarting, the balancing efforts of others will allow us all to maintain the order and harmony that is required for life to endure.
