The sophistry of sustainability
And the mendacity of nature worship
Sustainability as a goal is deluded, unnatural, and harmful. I won’t waste time discussing disputed definitions. The idea of sustainability is simple: continuity. The aim is to create a system of metabolism which minimizes harm to its continuity. Somehow, sustainability got fused with reverence for the natural world. Yet, metabolism is about destruction and change, and nature doesn’t do sustainability. It never has.
For all the caterwauling about the climate, current conditions on earth have been cool and ‘stable’ for a very short amount of time. The conditions that led to explosive human population growth are an anomaly, not the norm. For the majority of earth’s existence, there have been no polar ice caps. Cyclical cataclysm and perpetual perturbation are the prevalent patterns of existence, both on earth and cosmically. The big error humanity has made is to slide into the assumption that its short-lived, temporality could, or should, become permanent. A form of narcissistic hubris, born from genetic drives, and framed by a shallow culture of mirrors.
Regardless of what we do, we won’t outrun ‘nature’. It doesn’t want to work with us. It doesn’t care whether we become extinct, or wipe out all life in pursuit of the ghost of happiness. It is utterly unmoved by our existence. I know this intellectually, based on evidence. However, I’ve also experienced nature’s indifference in a profound, personal way.
I remember the exact moment, standing alone on a steep mountainside, in a storm. The wind was gusting upwards of 80mph, the mist and rain so dense I could barely see ten metres. Unable to make out enough terrain to plot my route on a map, and with a compass that seemed to have spontaneously demagnetized, I had no reliable means of navigating. There was no mobile signal, and I was miles from the nearest dwelling.
Fortunately, I’d gone equipped for extreme conditions. The most important kit being foil blankets and a rubberized military poncho. I’d almost left the poncho at home due to its weight. But it was invaluable, as was the thin rope I used to secure it around my body and stop it flapping in the wind. The foil blankets, I stuffed inside my jacket to insulate my core.
My senses became incredibly acute. I could hear the slightest change in the wind, anticipating gusts that might have otherwise thrown me off balance. My mind began to store any detail it could: intricate patterns of lichen and moss on the surface of bare rocks; slight changes in the variation and density of grasses and tiny plants. After three hours of trekking, I recognized a small patch of ground as a place I’d been three hours earlier.
Luckily, through my wandering, I’d developed an internal image of the terrain I was in, and managed to figure out where I was by studying the contour lines on my OS map. So, I set off in a direction I hoped would lead to the shelter of a nearby forest.
As the light began to fade, I stumbled on a rock. My peroneal tendon popped over my lateral malleolus, and I fell on my arse. The rock rolled into a deep pit in front of me. After pushing my tendon back into place, I struggled to my feet and peered into the dark hole. At the bottom, some five feet down, was the carcass of a sheep, a clean break in one of its legs. I imagined it falling. Laying in agony, unable to escape. Dying slowly. Alone. This was nature. Indifferent. Amoral. Unattached.
When I arrived home after that trip, I enjoyed the best hot bath of my life, followed by an incredible night’s sleep in a warm, comfortable bed. My life had been put in perspective. Utterly unimportant. My species, infinitely insignificant. The reason I survived was due to my actions combined with chance. There was no green god. No magic in the mountains. No future path to a better world. Just a wandering in the mist, trying to avoid the inevitable pitfall for as long as possible.
On my next outing into nature, I saw it in all its squirming horror. A perpetual war where organisms murdered and tortured each other, fought and squabbled over the tiniest seed, over every square inch of territory, in constant pursuit of more. Nature was a place where cats ripped the heads off baby birds for fun; where flies laid eggs in the wounds of a live fox, so their young could dine on its flesh; and where magpies pecked each other’s eyes out for dominance over scavenging rights. Humans are no different.
The average time mammal species persist before extinction is around half a million years. That’s about 0.0001% of the life of the earth, and twenty times less than a tree or invertebrate. Extinction is part of nature. Mass extinction too—when more than 75% of species die out in a short amount of time. We may be entering our sixth, which means it’s happened at least five times previously without our involvement.
Sustaining things as delicately balanced as contemporary human society isn’t going to happen. Not just because nature will end it at some point, but also because we are part of nature. As a result, we don’t do sustainability very well. The core drive of life is expansion. It requires consumption and competition. We’re built to destroy, dismantle, metabolize, and expand. Not sustain. And we’ve built these unconscious, self-defeating laws of nature into our economic system and our modern mythology.
Growth economics is an obvious example of our unintelligent subservience to natural law. You cannot grow indefinitely, nor consume increasing amounts of resources without limit. Yet, the modern sustainability movement exists within the growth paradigm, like it or not. While there are plenty of people who understand the problem, there are many more who don’t. Sadly, too much emphasis on STEM, and too little on philosophy and reflexivity, means that even clever people lack the intelligence to recognize what they are doing.
Technological innovation doesn’t alter human proclivity for growth. This is demonstrated by the Jevons paradox and the rebound effect. The Jevons paradox is a pattern of behaviour: when we increase efficiency in the use of a resource, we increase consumption of that resource by more than the efficiency saving. A pattern observed by Mr Jevons during the industrial revolution. The rebound effect is different (although sometimes confused as the same thing). With the rebound effect, efficiency gains in one area lead to consumption being directed somewhere else.
The evidence for both of these patterns is abundantly clear. The more energy efficient we have become, the more energy we consume. Get off the oil addiction? You’ll be onto something else. Perhaps some combination of rare earth metals, plastics, metal, etc. Made a saving on your annual electric bill by installing solar? You’ll probably spend it on something else. Maybe a city break somewhere nice. Or you’ll put it in the bank—a demand for future resource consumption.
Overall, energy use has increased massively since the industrial revolution. The only minor pauses or blips, coinciding with global economic crises. It’s no use looking at per capita stats either. They’re misleading. You must look at gross statistics because our growth addiction means we’ll fill any surplus we cannot consume directly by increasing the population, so there are simply more people. Even if they consume less each, there will still be more overall consumption.
The madness of this system was laid bare in my first business studies lesson as a youth. I was taught that people have unlimited wants and needs, yet limited resources with which to satisfy them; the dogma of scarcity. This was something taken as fact, and which I was supposed to learn to harness if I wanted to be a successful businessman. It was a critical moment that unveiled another aspect of the madness of the world I had been thrown into. I wondered why generations past hadn’t developed a system of education that is reflexive and examines this predisposition for greed and expansion, instead of nurturing an economy and culture designed to glorify and exploit it. The answer is simple; it’s in our nature.
Despite the many millions of people who have insight into the human condition, as a species, evolution hasn’t endowed us with the capacity to deprogram ourselves. Need and greed remain the very basis of life, of business, of economic activity, and of nationalism. Contemporary virtue is firmly attached to material acquisition, even for those whose culture and religion espouses contrary values. It’s why any government who tries to reign in our animalistic ambition will soon find it’s the beast that holds ultimate sovereignty. Our natural, biological programming is why we’ll be extinct sooner rather than later. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.