The title says it all, but for clarity, I’ll generalize: if you choose to do something that requires polluting, depleting, or plundering, you don’t get to claim your life requires living unsustainably. You don’t get to then make claims on others’ resources.
A life requiring hurting others is not liberty. Its’ the opposite: it’s destroying other people’s liberty. Why don’t I spend all my money and then claim you have to support me?
If you do something today that you know tomorrow will force you to hurt others, that consequence isn’t a part of life. It’s the result of your choice.
On a global scale, our sleepwalking into living unsustainably doesn’t mean we have to keep living unsustainably or that life requires polluting, depleting, or plundering, which destroy life, liberty, and property. The best we can do about past choices that forced us into depriving others of life, liberty, and property is to own up to those choices and do our best to reverse them.
In a world in which what people create you can destroy with impunity, people lose hope for a better future. We become isolated as we reduce our communities to whom we can protect ourselves. There are reasons even the most ardent supporters of limited government, that I know of at least, don’t promote no government.
If you dig yourself into a hole, don’t keep digging.
Some years ago, I visited Hoover Dam in Arizona. There was a plaque to honor the 20 men who died during its construction “to make the desert bloom”. My reaction was, well why didn’t you just stay in one of the many places that already have plenty of water? Then those men wouldn’t have died.
I plan to leave the USA and go where it is easier to live sustainably. Someplace with nice weather and good public transportation. If I stay here, I’d live in a van in the desert and head for the mountains in the summer.
Speaking of attempts to “tame” or “green” the desert, Reading Cadillac Desert made a big impression on me, how much we made ourselves dependent on unsustainable living, requiring yet more unsustainability to maintain. In the words of the book: socialism for the rich, among other problems. I recommend the book.
I understand wanting to leave where the problems are. I prefer to stay where the people causing the problems are: corporate boardrooms, the home market driving imperialist plunder, and our elected officials. I want to restore stewardship and the Golden Rule to our culture.
Likewise, the US has long subsidized mail service and electricity to rural residents, as those services would be uneconomical on a market basis. We need farms and mining and wind power and other things from rural areas, but I’m not sure just anyone should be entitled to an environmentally taxing rural way of life at taxpayer expense.
The book Cadillac Desert showed me a lot of how programs with the best intentions can spiral ever greater in size even when they cease helping where they were supposed to and even achieve opposite goals. In your case, if people can’t farm sustainably in a place, it seems to make sense not to farm there. To subsidize it may exacerbate the unsustainability by making it more profitable, leading it to grow more.