Sustainability

Sustainability, whether economic or environmental, has been one of the dominant issues of our time. As The New York Times explained it, sustainability - aka sustainable development, is about “strategies for meshing human activity with the limits of the planet and the needs of future generations”.

Back in 1996 the environmental writer Bill McKibben wrote an OP-ED piece in the NYT calling sustainability a "buzzless buzzword", mere jargon. He found the idea repulsive and a waste of time; a hollow sentiment. He thought the philosophy behind it wouldn't necessary discourage anyone from consuming more or from further exploiting the Earth's limited resources. He disdained the terminology because it was usually coupled with the imperatives of 'growth' and 'development', such as 'sustainable growth' or 'sustainable development'. For McKibben growth and development were incompatible with sustainability, a contradiction in terms. He wrote, "Sustainability is doomed, because it does not refer to anything familiar." To his way of thinking adopting the idea would lead to the opposite - unsustainability.

Well, the idea of sustainability is not dead but alive and well, judging by its constant mention and usage. I am often coming across articles on the subject, one of the latest being in National Geographic. The idea of sustainability (adopted as policy by the UN in the mid 1980s) didn't implode as McKibben imagined. That's because there is something about it that captures the human imagination. There is something inherent and practical about the idea. It captures and articulates the complex, dual situation we find ourselves in today, in a world that is pulling in two different direction, of expansion so as to maintain a life style while trying to protect the environment for the future. And it does sound familiar, contrary to what Mckibben said, because humans have been involved in it for a long time, just not that aware of it.

McKibben believes the term sustainability was meant to obfuscate the issue of human activity's impact on the environment, to postpone the day of reckoning, as he put it. He favors another term - "mature", thinking that we are all or should be mature enough to see the writing on the wall, so to restrain ourselves from developing and growing anymore. His idea is that in our maturity we should learn to live within our needs and stop growing physically. Instead, he says, we should focus on our moral, spiritual and cultural development. He thinks "maturity", not sustainability, is the buzzword that will truly motivate us to be environmentally prudent, as though we are all mature enough to comprehend the issue. However, the reason his choice of mature hasn't taken off is because the concept is dull. 'Mature' sounds stodgy. It lacks dynamism, while "sustainability" has a ring of optimism and opportunity.

The buzzword 'mature' is meant to appeal to our sense of Reason. The reasoning behind it is that we ought to be mature enough, especially in the developed world, to realize that for the sake of the environment and the planet's wellbeing we can't continue to grow and develop our economies as we have or else there will be nothing left. However, we don't live in the rational, mature world McKibben envisions. For one thing, the growing and developing economies of the world haven't reached that point yet. They are not yet ready or willing to be mature in the manner we in the developed world can afford to be. The developing world wants to catch up with the rest. For them maturity be dammed. They feel it's their right to grow and develop like we have. Imposing maturity on the developing world, like father knows best, would imply that they scale back on their economic ambitions, most likely making them resentful and hostile towards the rest of us. At least with the idea of sustainability there is the likelihood of a cooperation and working together, to find solutions so as to maintain a livable and workable environment.

Perhaps, them, it was McKibben who was delusional in thinking that "mature" would win the day and become the buzzword in persuading us to become better stewards of our environment. Perhaps someday we may all be so mature and enlightened. But in the interim the idea of sustainability make more sense. It is pragmatic term emblematic of both our consumer and conservation instincts that will encourage the development of systems that both protect and replace the resources we are certainly not going stop needing so that we survive and continue.

I wonder what kind of strategies 'mature' would devise for meshing human activity with the limits of the planet? It doesn't sound very engaging to me. Of the two buzzwords "sustainability" sounds more sophisticated and energetic. It pushes the boundaries and explores new frontiers. It forces use to be inventive and remain active. "Mature" conjures the idea of downsizing, that one is ready to quite or retire.

I often think about what the optimistic economist Julian Simon believed. To quote one of his colleague: “He believed that the world needs problems because they make us better. Problems make us better off than if they had never occurred”. And our meshing with environment has give us a heap of problems.

And that is what I think about the act of sustainability. It works with problems. It makes us look further than we generally would, to seek solutions and alternatives, to reinvent ourselves, activities that keep us from atrophying and withering away.

Crooked Timber

Kant wrote, Out of the crooked timber of mankind, nothing straight was ever made.

He may not have gotten that idea all by himself. He may have been inspired by a passage in the Bible, from the book of Ecclesiastes where it is written "That which is crooked cannot be made straight" [1:15]. On discovering that Kant probably applied it to his philosophy, to reconcile the perversion and absurdity he saw around him.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin interpreted the Crooked Timber of Humankind metaphor as an admonishment against dogma and perfection. He believed that if a system of human governance set itself up deliberately to straighten out human flaws it would inevitably amount to totalitarianism. This is what he saw the utopian vision of communism trying to do, as endeavoring to straighten out that crooked timber of humankind, which as we know ended in absolute failure.

Another interesting passage from Ecclesiastes is hedonistic, which its preacher, narrator shares with us, invoked, no doubt, by the meaningless and drudgery he saw in life: "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun" [8:15]. That passage could have inspired the passage in the American Declaration of Independence that encourages the 'pursuit of happiness', as an elixir to the drudgery of life.

Nietzsche and other existentialist may have also been influence by Ecclesiastes and the absurdity and meaningless it attaches to live. Nietzsche, it was written, "is one of the first to recognize the absurdity of human existence as the necessary basis for creative life and to stress the importance of irrational and illusional factors in shaping human behavior". Perhaps he was thinking about religion when he observed that.

I was reading the autobiography by psychotherapist Viktor Frankl in which he mentioned another existentialist, Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard once said, to quote Frankl, " anyone who offered a corrective had to be biased, thoroughly biased". Frankl was thinking of his own bias, of the corrective in psychotherapy he offered his patients.

Frankl was a surviver of the Holocaust. It was probably his existentialism that afforded his survival. Had he not been one he may not have survived. His existentialism gave him a certain strength and outlook on live, which balanced life's absurdities against its more admirable ones, and reconciled humanity's crooked timbers with its straighter ones.