some final notes about sustainability at the end of the semester

Historians figure that about 80 billion humans have inhabited the planet over the course of human history. This totals out to about 2.16 trillion years. Due to rapidly increasing population humans over the last 100 years, one fifth of all those years has taken place in the twentieth century. One fifth of all the experiences humans have ever gone through occurred between 1900 and 2000. At the same time our economy and ability to consume has increased dramatically. The world economy is 120 times larger than it was in 1500. Our per capita income has increased 9 fold. Technology has allowed us unprecedented freedom to travel and experience people and places. As the world has increased in size our individualism and freedom have surprisingly increased as well. However the question is at what long-term cost?

The most interesting thing I have ever read about sustainability was in a book called Something New Under the Sun, in it author John McNeill said, “It is impossible to know whether humankind has entered a genuine ecological crisis. It is clear enough that our current ways are ecologically unsustainable, but we cannot know for how long we may yet sustain them, or what might happen if we do. In any case, human history since the dawn of agriculture is replete with unsustainable societies, some of which vanished but many of which changed their ways and survived. They changed not to sustainability but to some new and different kind of unsustainable. Perhaps we can, as it were, pile one unsustainable regime upon another indefinitely, making adjustments large and small but avoiding collapse.” These adjustments have become what sustainability means, simply avoiding collapse. However I am not satisfied with this answer.

Looking toward the future it would seem like at some point in our lives we will get the chance to own an electric car. The incentive for the development of electric cars is based on the assumption that gas prices will at some point go up again. However if enough people start buying electric cars the price of gas will go down causing people to return to buying gasoline powered cars. Perhaps through tax incentives we could prevent this trend but passing gas taxes is a difficult thing to do.

Sustainability has to be about a historical reexamination of what we view as “rational decisions” and place those decisions in a long-term perspective. It cannot be a simple rationality, market driven replacement scheme, but a conscious effort to improve society that is based on knowledge. If we remove our agency and leave ourselves prey to our rational decisions I don’t think we stand much chance of becoming either sustainable or sexy. As our school and society continues to seek ways to “green” itself I hope we begin to see the ways in which our current system is preventing us from saving ourselves. Sustainability needs to be about seeing past our ideological assumptions to develop new ways of how our society could be structured that is both sustainable and increases the individualism and freedom we have enjoyed over the past century.