What is sustainability?
That’s what my professor scrawled across the whiteboard on the very first day of ES
112 -- the intro to environmental science class.
And of course, being the excitable young freshman that we were - almost everyone raised
their hand. But each answer was met with the same “yeah, kinda, but thats not quite it"
We ended up spending the entire semester trying to answer that question: “What is Sustainability”
And now i’m going to try to compress an entire semester, probably to my professors
chagrin, into this video. But fortunately, I don’t have to do it alone -- I got a little
help from Hank Green.
Hank: I think that sustainability is the idea that we could get the earth to a place where
it could stay roughly the way that it is, without, oh I don’t even know, it’s so
hard. Can we get to a place where we could have the number of people we have and we’re
sort of not creating more than cause ughh. Even then. You’re right, this is a hard question.
The question doesn’t seem that hard on the surface -- sustainablity is a buzzword that we
throw around all the time.
But understanding what exactly is sustainability -- what environmentalists are working toward
all the time --is kind of important.
Now if I pull out my old college notebook this is the definition I ended up writing down
at the end of the semester: Sustainability is living within the regenerative
capacity of the earth so that the essential needs of present generations can be met without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their essential needs.
And that sounds great. Kinda.
In order for that to work we have to define a lot of other things, and suddenly the definition
becomes a lot more subjective. What is earth’s regenerative capacity? How
do we even measure that? What does future generations mean? Does that
include just people - or are we looking to preserve and protect the future generations
of all species? Trees, bees, capybaras, red pandas, even sharks ?
What are our essential needs? And what are the essential needs of future generations?
Is that the lifestyle I live
in this new york city apartment? And shouldn’t essential needs be the same for everyone or
at least close to the same? Because they certainly aren't now.
Hank: Can we have people on the earth in a way that there will never be a time that we are dying
of lack of resources or destroying because of lack of resources. And in a way
where that is a perpetual thing, and perpetual is such a stupid word and a dumb idea and
there is no perpetual anything. But is that possible, is that a do-able thing?
So maybe the better question is. Is sustainability even possible? And to tease that apart I like
to look at in two chunks. Macro like I want to save the whole world and Micro. like I
want to focus on my local, or niche community.
Hank: well we don’t want to save our neighborhood, we want to save our world. And thinking about
in a macro way. I mean it is also, it is sort of a nice thing to think that we can solve big problems like
it lets you realize that there are lot of, you know, unintended consequences that are on a global
scale. And one way of thinking about, of like dealing with that is saying well lets completely go isolationist
and local and say everything is going to be produced in my backyard and i’m not going
to consume anything, and I'm gonna over 3 years going to fill one mason jar with trash. And thats,
I saw that story on Huffpo this morning and i was like. Ugh, ughh.
But I think that we have to be a global society. I have my phone, I love my phone and I would
not want to give up my phone and all the places on earth that were involved in the creation
of this phone many different countries. The story of human progress has been the story
of trade and I’m not wary of globalization and capitalism on their own I’m worried
about whether those things incorporate morality into them and incorporate sustainability into
them. I think there can be a lot of ecological gain that can be accomplished through the
burning of fossil fuels. I just think that we should be doing it wisely.
And hank is super right, global problems need global solutions. We can’t leave groups
of people behind, just like we can’t expect certain countries to carry the burden of combating
climate change. A complete ban on fossil fuels tomorrow isn’t going to solve the climate
crisis -- and its going to leave a huge swath of future generations in economic ruin and
who knows what else because we didnt take the time to thoughtfully come up with a real solution.
But the flip side of this idea of micro sustainability -- doesn’t just mean, your community,
or your neighborhood, or a self-sacrifice, zero-waste vegan lifestyle - in my definition
of micro sustainability that focus is zero'd in on present and future generations.
That means your micro-focus could be on yourself, or your neighborhood or community, but it
could also be and I’m stretching the textbook definition of this here, in your niche. Where
your global reach extends. For me that ‘niche’ - how I find and define my own sustainability
is a mix jumbled up of this, the self-sacrifice that I impose on myself, what I do in my irl
job sometimes and political activism.
Miriam: so the other flip side of the micro instead of it just being your traditional neighborhood
thing, because we live in a global society is a micro focus on how the tech industry
can move away from the buying a new phone every six months to to the like google replaceable
parts where as it gets better you only have to replace one tiny part which has a much less impact.
Hank: Or you can say, Apple's gonna buy this phone back because it is going to have a life
somewhere else. Like many of the products that I use will not have a life after me.
My shoes will not have a life after me. I'm gonna tear these things apart and they're
going to be useless after I'm done and there is no way to take this shoe and make it into
a useable product. Whereas my phone, they could refurbish this and have it be a useable
product that somebody is gonna want. And my car is the same way. My car is going to have a life after me.
Thats problematic in some ways where like newer cars are much more efficient, but it is not
problematic in like it cost a lot to make a car, not just in dollars but in resources.
Miriam: Yeah, I meant that's a big question of sustainability. Is that is it more sustainable to continue
driving your grandparents old jalopy? or get the new weird looking Prius with the funny
little taillight that they just released.
Hank: I mean at the same time, I want something with airbags. Which would you rather? To destroy
the world or die? I dont know a lot of people are going to go with I dont want to die.
Miriam: Thats super valid.
Jokes aside, that’s the kind of ‘sustainability’ question thats frequently encountered. The
building I live in is old, and not well insulated but tearing it down and building up a new
one isn’t the right solution for sustainability or economic purposes - so do I not use my
heat in the winter? And, one of the easiest ways to curb pollution is to reduce population
size, but its not reasonable or necessarily effective to suggest that people have
less children if they don't want them. Likewise, climate activists get a ton of flack for jetsetting
across the country -- but that the impact that have on reducing emissions is so much more
than the (yes carbon-intensive) plane trips. We can’t expect a rural farmer in china
or a businesswoman in India or a shopkeeper in Iowa to reduce their impact
in the same way or the same amount.
The global climate crisis can seem insurmountable if you look at it in a Macro sustainability
way. Because it is so much easier to see what an individual impact has. I know what I'm
doing, and I can see what you’re doing, but it is so hard to imagine how that affects
the world.
Hank: it’s easy to get really hopeless because this is a huge problem and I have a hard time
imagining the steps that we need to take, but I've also sort of witnessed - not witnessed,
maybe a little bit in my lifetime - but mostly just seeing there have been a lot of seemingly
insurmountable challenges overcome and particularly climate change is terrifying to me but, I
dont think that we're going to solve that problem. I dont think, like, I think that
it is going to be an incremental thing. I dont think that we're not going to see sea
level rise, I think that we're going to have to find the balance between how do we prevent
this sea level from rising while also dealing with this sea level rise that we already have.
Thats going to be a tremendous, world-wide, human problem its going to be the biggest
technological and infrastructure challenge we have ever ever like taken on as a species.
And I kind of, I do have hope that we will be able to take that on and be hopefully a
thing that we do together rather than a thing that drives us apart.
So what is your definition of sustainability? How do you find it? Does this micro/macro
framework help or do you use something entirely different. Let me know in the comments down below
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I hope you’re having a fantastic day. by3333!