User login
Contact
- anz at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Archives
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
"I am all for working for a sustainable society". But you won't.......until everyone else does...... and everyone else thinks the same as you.
When will we start sustaining? When should we have started? Will we ever?
Look at the world around you. Over consumption is normal now, it is what got us to where we are and it will inevitably lead to collapse. We absolutely need overconsumption to sustain economic growth.
We used to have one TV per household, now there is three or four, several DVD recorders, cell phones etc. We must have the latest technological gadget or appliance.
YOU will start a sustainable lifestyle when it does not affect your means or when you are forced by circumstances. You (and I) are like the vast majority, the human race as a whole is easy to understand and predict.
Look at the past to see the future. The depletion of a resource including foodstuff will encourage a frenzy, an orgy of destruction and scramble, to get it before it is all gone or before someone else does. That is human behaviour. We will watch as the last tree is cut down, carrier pigeon slaughtered or coal seam plundered.
Sustainability will be a reality forced upon us. It won't even be recognized as what it is.
Until then we will sacrifice anything and everything to maintain a perception of business as usual.
Won't I? Perhaps on a global level my contribution means virtually nothing until most other people work towards sustainability and we reduce our population, but on a personal level there are plenty of people who are voluntarily reducing their consumption, or trying to produce for themselves. And I am one. I fully understand how futile that is when 99.9% of other people are not, but you have to start somewhere. Things won't change overnight. And I, like many people who are voluntarily changing, have a long way to go.
You may well be right - sustainability may end up being force upon us. That doesn't preclude trying to work towards a voluntary change.
I'm sorry if I insulted I'm sure you mean well..
The level of sustainability which was/is/will be required, means sacrifice. Buying a smaller car and putting a solar panel on the roof won't cut it. That's not sustainability, that's self preservation.
Eating less, growing and slaughtering your own. Sustainable manufacturing and construction.
Your perception of "entertainment" must alter completely and forever.
Our obsessive quest to obtain or participate with what makes us feel good is the ultimate journey to destruction for human kind.
Every species likes to be pleased. Animals would eat themselves to death if they could. The problem with us, is we have the ability to seek and bask is pleasures which become addictive and then appear normal. Like any addict we must continually increase our pleasure levels to obtain the "high" we sought.
Human pleasure centres can be stimulated by drugs, violence, sex, power, status, gambling and eating.
In the developed world and now in the developing world, since the turn of the last century and especially since the 1950's each succeeding generation expects more pleasures from life, they also expect more for their offspring.
We absolutely, positively cannot change. Our very existence now is interwoven with the type of world we have created. Everything is interdependent on over consumption which we have grown used to. It's acceptable behaviour.
All the popular solutions to peak oil involve more consumption. It's an attempt to maintain the current way of life. Synthetic oil, wind mills, solar cells and so are illusory solutions, exploited by governments and business. They too need straws to clutch, they have a way of life to maintain.
No insult taken. Although I may quibble over some of the specifics of your argument, I agree with you in general.
First of all, you're talking primarily about the western world, not the whole world. Over consumption is a larger problem, particularly in the U.S., than in other parts of the world such as Japan, which has anemic economic growth for many years now, greatly because of lack of "western style" consumption.
Furthermore, you're going way too far if you think people need to grow their own food and slaughter their own animals. Many members of society have not been growing their own food for thousands of years now. Things may have to change, but we're not going back to the point where people all grow their own food.
As far as us being unable to change, you're underestimating people's adaptability when forced to change. People wouldn't buy 3 TVs if each TV cost $10,000. Maybe people wouldn't be happy about it, but they'd survive.
You name every single technological innovation as illusory. I say your ideal of living on the farm where we all slaughter our own animals is even more so. Even faced with problems, we're still going to endeavor to move forward, not backwards. I doubt an agrarian society could support anywhere near the population we currently have, so that scenario already assumes catastrophic failure and thus is hardly something to aim for.
As a colleague of mine is fond of saying (somewhat ominously), "by 2100, we'll all be living sustainably".