I didn't make my point very well about the Vikings in Greenland, so I'd like to try again. Today we define a sustainable process as one that can be continued at a certain level indefinitely. This definition contains a tacit assumption that the future will be more or less like the past, because without that assumption there is no "indefinitely". This assumption is what is wrong with the idea of sustainability.
Turn back the clock to 1200 AD. The Vikings grew hay in the summer, fed it to their animals in the winter, and ate the animals. In the spring they mucked out the stalls and spread the manure on the fields. After a couple hundred years of doing this, they and their grandfathers and their grandfathers' grandfathers had pretty much figured out how much hay they could grow and how many people they could feed without depleting the soil.
By any reasonable definition, they had a sustainable lifestyle. But the tacit assumption was wrong. Their future was not like their past. They could not possibly have anticipated the Little Ice Age. As the climate changed, the growing seasons got shorter and the winters got longer. They produced less hay at precisely the time they needed more hay. Their lifestyle didn't work any more. Instead of adapting and doing what they could plainly see did work, namely igloos and kayaks, they kept feeding hay to cows in barns.
If we see that the tacit assumption is wrong, that the future is not necessarily like the past, then it follows that sustainability is the wrong mindset. We need a Plan B for every contingency we can foresee, and we need the flexibility to improvise when there is no Plan B.
2 comments:
This does clear up the discussion. In this context (that of Jared Diamond's book, which I haven't read, but will comment on anyway, following the lead of Steven Colbert), "sustainability" has a restricted meaning, referring to the continuance of a lifestyle, not of the existence of the community. In short, the reliance on tradition in the face of possible extinction. The Vikings faced a long term problem, the citizens of Istanbul a short term one, when the Turks were taking their city in 1452: they went into the churchs and prayed. Prayer hadn't worked before, and they could have done something more productive to continuing their lives, like get the hell out of there. The reliance on tradition when danger threatens (long or short term) is probably part of human nature, but usually counterproductive. Yet how often have we heard someone argue, "Let's do it this way, it's traditional." The answer should be, "If we always did what's traditional, we would be living in caves and starting fires by rubbing sticks togther." Traditions are fine, as long as they are kept to harmless matters like wearing kimonos at festivals, or yamulkes in temple, or eating turkey on Thanksgiving (well, not harmless to the turkey, but that's another discussion).
I agree with jde. I am, personally, an anti-culturalist, since most cultures relay on the forced labor (in the original meaning of the word) of women to create larger populations for encroachment into neighboring lands.
The California Indians (now called Native Americans in order to be PC - how boring) lived in HARMONY with the land and at PEACE with each other for over 3,000 years according to those who study the development and divergencies of languages. They maintained a stable population by methods lost to history.
The biggest problem to sustainability, harmony and peace is maintaining a stable population. Disease and contraception both work well to this end. Is it immoral for the UN and the US to fight childhood diseases with modern medicine without also providing funds to educate families on how to determine the number of children they have?
As far as biological beings go, there is a theory that the recessive genes are "Plan B." That in as short a time as one or two generations many individuals in a threatened population (Maybe even human populations) can pull to the fore traits that will ensure the survival of that populaiton. Here is a question about that: Is Autism a recessive gene that is rapidly spreading in the US because it is necessary? Autistic children shut out the noise in their enviornment, don't some of us want to do that ourselves, only we have to move to rural and isolated places. How much more convienent to be able to just filter out the static automatically.
CET 11-3-2007
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