Everyone looks for holes in sustainability, expecting it to unravel, but it’s self-consistent. Unsustainability has holes and doesn’t work.
One of the more common responses to my suggesting eight billion people live sustainably, along with governments and corporations, is to suggest thing after thing the other person thinks wouldn’t work.
“What about cars? How will people get around?”
“What about family?”
“But they won’t be able to create energy.”
“What about police and ambulances?”
The list of attempts to challenge sustainably goes on. They aren’t being rational. They’re just reacting to emotions of wanting to avoid changing, to avoid trying, to do anything besides keeping doing what they’ve been doing and expected to keep doing.
Among other things, they hope to find holes in sustainability. If only they find an inconsistency in living sustainably they can not try. I did it.
“A meteor the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs may hit; if we haven’t reached Mars, we’ll go extinct, so we have to get to Mars, even if it means polluting now.”
Living sustainably is coherent. Living unsustainably isn’t.
If only they applied that skepticism to living unsustainably they’d see its holes. It doesn’t work. They just want it to. They want it to keep producing the results in the future it did in the past if they ignore the pollution filling Earth’s reservoirs. Until those reservoirs were filled, new pollution wouldn’t hurt many. Ignoring it wouldn’t lead to immediate harm.
Now most reservoirs are full. More greenhouse gases cause more warming. Pollution released today kills people today. More people living lifestyles than Earth could sustain didn’t exist. They do today.
But people lived sustainably for hundreds of thousands of years. Living sustainably can work. Living unsustainably fails.
If you find yourself trying to poke holes in living sustainably, meditate on what inside you causes that skepticism.
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