With the dawning realization that global climate change is real and happening, and is attributable largely to the human activity of burning fossil fuels for energy, the immediate reaction of many folks is to ask "How can we reduce the amount of CO2 produced to meet our energy needs?" The goal, in shorthand, is "sustainable energy production and use.". The vision is a world not much different from the one we know, managed sustainably.
But this awakening to the need for energy sustainability coincides with several other, intimately connected changes of equal or greater consequence.
One of these, the end of cheap oil, is helping to persuade many to invest in sustainable energy technologies just for the financial benefits. But as the supply of cheap oil declines, the once abundant and convenient fuel that drove the massive suburbanization of America and life styles filled with stuff, will become too expensive to support this level of consumption. We will personally experience dramatic economic dislocation due the expiration of cheap oil.
Not surprisingly, cheap oil has abetted a massive increase in human populations, along side of rising expectations, commensurate with that they see in our television shows. Remove cheap oil and …?
Meanwhile, the heat retaining effect of CO2 is not felt instantaneously. Even if all emissions were to end today, the Earth would continue to warm under the CO2 blanket we now have. With or without additional CO2, the oceans will rise just from their warming and expanding, dislocating the masses of humanity that live in or close to that first foot above sea level. But also, weather will be less predictable and climates will change, causing more dislocation of peoples due to hostile weather, and unreliable water supplies and food production. And a warmer Earth means that ice is melting, removing reservoirs of water that have sustained humans for tens of thousands of years, and further filling oceans. And most of that ice, far from human populations, is above sea level. Already scientists are reporting that water percolating down to the bottom of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is lubricating their motions, and portions of these sheets could slide into the ocean, further raising sea levels by meters, up to eight. New reports predict that new climates will be created in this new world, while old climates will simply vanish. Were these things to happen, a truly global flood would hit the reset button on human evolution.
In this context, what does "sustainable" mean? Fill in the blank in "Sustainable _____ use": Water, soils, fuel, forest, metals, food, air, space. Fill in the blank in "Sustainable ______" with any human activity or value: communities, economic development, families, political systems, social systems. Once we have admitted that our world is changing, that we face not gradually increasing pressures of population, food supply, fresh water, disease, competition for natural resources, with each other, and competition for habitat, with the natural world, but actually sudden and dramatic crises and conflicts, the question "What is sustainable?" has a new meaning. Energy production and use that does not produce CO2 emissions is only the first hurdle, and just preparation for the struggles to come. Still, we must adapt to conditions of a changing food supply, changing sea levels, insecure energy supplies, polluted water, epidemic disease in a time of massive population upheavals, governments willing to secure their borders and resource conduits with guns and blood, and the existential burden that each of us will need to bear, of a humanity bent on self-annihilation. To render the environment of the Earth hospitable to human life, or just to life, the task facing humanity is far larger than just limiting CO2 production. We must make humanity sustainable.
Many people will have no difficulty grasping this argument. The further argument may be less obvious.
"Sustainability" is a moving target. Sustainability, in so far as it can be achieved, won't manifest as a static structure. Given the hyper-kinetic energies of humanity, the ever pressing, pushing, inventing, building, destroying, rearranging, ambitions of human beings, even that system that might prove sustainable, if perpetuated, will be cast aside before being proved, before it has had a chance to work out its flaws, before it has repeated its productive cycles enough times to demonstrate that it might actually be sustainable. No, our search for sustainability will not be productive if we search for a particular formulation of, a closed ecology of, technology, political structures, or social arrangements. Our search for sustainability cannot succeed, if in our restlessness we search for control over that system that might have been sustainable.
Our search for sustainability will be productive when what we seek is meaning. Sustainability dwells in the inventors themselves, in the commitment to taking less and giving more, to making life and relationships the source of meaning, not the possession of things. Sustainability dwells in the spirit of the design, in the integration of systems of supply, consumption and recycling. Sustainability dwells in the designers, the inventors, the livers, who ask, will this system self-strengthen, or self-destroy? Sustainability resides enduringly in the people, in their freedom and chaos, seeking for that something that feels right and durable and meaningful. Embedded in the human soul is the knowledge that what is sustainable, what self-reinforces, has meaning. Profound meaning.
That is how we know what is sustainable: It has meaning.
