Sustainable WNC

Many folks talk about sustainable development as a three legged stool, with the social, environmental, and economic legs being equally important to hold up the structure of the stool. I think this concept was first articulated by the developers of The Natural Step (http://www.naturalstep.org/com/nyStart/).

To me this is metaphor that seems conceptually clean, but doesn’t match reality. The fundamental fact of life here on this beautiful, mysterious planet is that all life, including human communities, must function within the constraints of the whole earth system that supports life. The economic leg and the social leg of the stool sit on the environmenatl leg, and oops, a two legged stool falls over very quickly. We must change the metaphor to match reality.

Ecosytem health is fundamental to the health and dynamic, creative evolutionary function of the whole. Human culture as civilization is a brand new feature, a whopping 10,000 year blip in the 3.5 billion year history of life on earth. If human culture doesn’t get it right, we are gone. And it is in the very real realm of possibility that we could tip the planet into a mass extinction that rivals the Permian Extinction of 250 million years ago when 90% of all life died. Most scientists who study extinctions believe we are already in the sixth great mass extinction (http://www.well.com/user/davidu/extinction.html). And the climate scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say that there is a 90% probability that unless we change course now we will go past critical tipping points.

This experiment of living in city-states is an experiment in communal living that is heading for failure, a collapse of magnitude for which our imaginations are unprepared. The Black Death and Great Depression pale in comparison with what is in store for us unless we get our act together.

So thinking of three legs is missing the basic point. We must learn to live with what Earth has to offer. We are killing her now because we are living off capital (to use economic language) - now at over 124% of earth’s capacity to renew itself. Allowing business as usual, or to even allow business to define the context of the dialogue will not be sufficient to get us successfully through the next 10-20 years. These are the years that we need to make the most drastic changes in consumption in the developed world, to halt and cap carbon emissions and drastically reduce them so we can avoid multiple and major tipping points towards runaway global warming. We must start in our own community and country so we have the moral trust to help and lead the developing world into a realistic future.

The economic leg (business) always says more is better, economic growth is the engine to prosperity. The fact is that economic growth at this stage in human history is the doorway to ecological collapse. The money economy is a false economy if it is not built on the foundation of earth’s economy.

Humans, especially in the so called developed world need to learn how to live with less, so all can just live. Call it sacrifice, call it austerity, this is the truth and the great challenge and opportunity of our age. We live at a turning point, that is the meaning of the climate crisis and the meaning of peak oil.

How are human communities going to learn to live in harmony with earth’s generosity and beauty? As a culture of consumers addicted to more, we are clueless right now. Making consumers out of the developing world is downright stupid - we’d need 4-5 planet earths to satisfy that economic engine. 

In the end, we need to create a more realistic vision of what a sustainable earth community would look like. To do that we need the participation of more folks who are willing to enter the political arena and dialogue with business leaders and politicians to help move public discourse and policy towards a more realistic agenda. We also need to continue to create local economies and social structures that are in harmony with earth’s creative dynamics.

Hoping that our effort here stimulates some of you to get more involved. There’s alot of work to do, and some great people to meet in the process!

Here’s a line of a Rumi poem I heard last week - …passion burns down every branch of exhaustion…

So let’s ignite each other’s passion for sustainable community, and in its diversity and creativity it will have millions and millions of legs walking on and caring for earth’s gifts.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 10:02 pm and is filed under General Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.