What does a sustainable world look like? I’ve tried to consider somethings’ sustainability before embracing it, and haven’t thought fully about what this means. For instance, my last vehicle purchase was of a diesel van, so that I could use the sustainable fuel biodiesel and avoid being dependent on petroleum. This is not truly a sustainable vehicle (no vehicle is), as non-renewable resources are still being used for the engine maintenance, replacement tires, and any repairs that will need to be done over time.
Perhaps somethings’ sustainability is a measurement of whether or not your children and childrens’ children and their children alike can engage in the same activity that you are (drive a biodiesel van, for example). But how far into the future do we take this? 50,000 years? 100 thousand? Why stop there? For something to be sustainable, I assume it must be something that can be repeated indefinitely. Not by everyone, but perhaps only by the same number of people who are currently doing the activity.
One problem with this perspective is that nothing can be repeated indefinitely. The earth will not exist forever. There will come a point, either due to entropy or our sun going supernova (the latter the more likely of possibilities), that the earth will cease to be. With this assumed, nothing need be sustained indefinitely; only as long as the earth is a home to life.
In fact, it’s the life I think that’s the crux of the matter. Our life, yes, but the life of other creatures as well. Discussions of sustainability with friends usually leads to the assumed eventuality of extra-terrestrial resource extraction, that the human race at one point will be able to economically travel to other parts of the solar system and beyond in search of metals, minerals, and other useful things to bring back for human use. This is assumed to be an amoral action, as metals floating in space (on mooons of other planets, on asteroids, on other planets) have no intrinsic value. Perhaps this is because no life is sustained yet by the metals, or would be harmed by our extraction.
People talk about the intrinsic value of inanimate objects. I argue we shouldn’t use up the petroleum, shouldn’t mine the metals under forests. But they don’t have value in and of themselves. Things don’t have value unless life relies upon or is affected by them. Life is the thing we should care about.
With this, the question becomes not whether something is sustainable but instead whether it can be done without requiring that life is taken or that suffering occurs as a result of the activity, now and into the future indefinitely. It doesn’t matter if we use oil, natural gas, coal, or any other classically unsustainable energy source, so long as it doesn’t take life or cause suffering. The purchase of a hybrid car, of passive solar heating, of a photo voltaic (PV) array, is not a sustainable action. But it is one that hopes to and attempts to avoid the loss of life and the causation of suffering to life in the future. While more coal and more precious metals may have been used to produce the PV cells than would have been used over 10 years of coal-provided energy at the same Wattage, it is the technology, the attempt to create a better world, that is important, that makes the decision laudable.
I believe that if we continue to head in the same direction, there will be a catastrophe of human suffering that we’ve not seen before. Already such a catastrophe is happening to other life forms, who are going extinct at a rate 1,000 times faster than would occur naturally. It is only through the hope of the human mind, of reason and compassion, that we can survive this, and possibly prevent the catastrophe that so many of us forecast on our horizon. What we should strive towards is not sustainability, but a way of life that will avoid catastrophe, that will prevent massive die off or suffering of life that has the ability to suffer, for now and the future. If we feel we can do this through careful mining of the planet, by wantonly extracting resources from space, than so be it.
Very thoughtful post. Most people now use “sustainability” as a catch-phrase, giving scarcely any thought to what it means. I think you came to the crux of the matter when you stated that life (in all its forms) is what matters, and our goal should be to preserve life and avoid causing suffering. The beauty of Southern Utah redrock seems to have intrinsic value to me, but that value arguably exists only in my aesthetic enjoyment of it. Of course, if it were destroyed, neither I nor any other humans, now or in generations to come, could experience that joy, and all the vibrant forms of life that thrive in that environment would be destroyed as well.