Sustainability 2

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.

Does sustainability lead to collapse?

I've been reading Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". Diamond studies a number of societies from the past for lessons we can use today. He discusses the usual suspects (Easter Island, the Maya, the Anasazi, etc.) within a five-point framework:

1. Cumulative environmental damage
2. Gradual climate change
3. Conflict with neighbors
4. Support from neighbors
5. Adaptability

The most interesting story is that of Viking Greenland. The Vikings settled Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period (984 AD) and vanished sometime in the 15th century at the beginning of the Little Ice Age. Climate change is the obvious explanation, with the colder weather reducing crop yields and the increase in sea ice making it more difficult for ships from Iceland to get there.

And yet, the Inuit had the technology to survive in harsher climates than the Vikings' protected fjords. All the Vikings needed to do was copy the Inuit. Here is where the last factor, adaptability or the lack thereof, comes into play. The Vikings thought of themselves as Europeans, and apparently preferred to die as Vikings than live as skraelings.

The modern notion of sustainability seems to be about reaching equilibrium with a more or less constant environment. Equilibrium leads to conservatism which leads to a lack of adaptability. But nature is not constant. Sooner or later, Mother Nature will try to kill us with earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, floods, droughts, forest fires, ice storms... even if we get our carbon dioxide under control. When that happens, we need adaptability, not sustainability.