The weather’s recent pleasantness has turned my mind towards environmental matters. All over, Emory included, I am bombarded by one word in particular: sustainability. As it is understood, “sustainability” is a move towards creating ways in which society may persist and develop in a way that is sustainable for both society and the environment.
These are fine enough goals, but we should delve further into the logic of sustainability before we accept it wildly.
Sustainability, first and foremost, is a questioning of the means by which our society “goes about the business” of being a human community. It recognizes the limitations of those natural resources available to us, either in the quantitative sense of what is available to us or the qualitative sense of how those resources are extracted. The accompaniment to this, of course, is that the sustainability movement recognizes that the current means by which society goes about its business are not functional when taking into account the long-term survival of society.
This is a wonderful thing! It shows the sort of forethought that does not come naturally in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. But for all its efforts to reduce waste and create more environmentally-friendly structures, the sustainability movement fails to challenge fundamental structures and assumptions about society itself.
Our society functions on an attitude of exploitation. From labor to resources, the question is, “how can I get mine?” Sustainability initiatives work to make the processes of our society operate in an environmentally smooth way. However, sustainability does not question capitalism or its associate consumerism. So long as the workplace is lit with low-energy bulbs and low-flow toilets, who cares that the worker is still tied to a hellish wage system? So long as our products are ‘carbon-neutral,’ who cares that we are ceaselessly tossed into an ocean of manufactured desire? No! What is necessary is a rethinking of how society is to operate.
My issue is that sustainability is superficial. It suggests that our environmental issues are to be solved with recycled bath water and safer plastics. And to be certain, our attitudes towards seemingly small acts must change. But the problems confronting us require we undo those systems which focus on maddening pursuit of profit.
Our environmental ideology must be one that advocates a so-called “harmonious” approach. I do not mean this in some dreamy, pastoral way. Rather, we must consider our societies as systems operating within greater systems. What’s more, we mustn’t even consider society and nature as separate entities. Each is shaped by the other and must be considered holistically. Greater even than that, we must reject all exploitative perspectives. We must reorient towards a system that looks towards the concrete needs of the human community.
It is a curious pleasure of the American liberal to condemn newly developed countries (is the term “developing” even any longer appropriate?) for their poor environmental standards. Never mind the fact that it was the pressure exerted by Western states, either through direct force or as suffocating acts of coercion, that affected the change to radically alter their economic composition. No, it’s obviously the fault of the countries and their people, poor fools, who have no regard for the environment. Let us learn from this ignorant attitude and ask what created the opportunity for the many problems facing us. We will find that we, with our exploitative attitudes and attachment to harmful systems, are the authors of these disasters.
Rhett Henry is College junior from Lawrenceville, Ga.
Photo courtesy of JRW984, Flickr
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On “wage” sustainability/economic stability
We don’t need to fix the wages, what we need to fix is the money. This same “hellish wage system” we’ve been running on for many years now was just fine back in 1964 when $1.25 in silver quarters was, in melt value, worth $26.21 in modern day dollars.
Q: How much money would you need in the year 2000, to have the same “purchasing power” as $500 in year 1960? If you entered these values in the correct places, you will find that the answer is $2,910.00.
http://visual.ly/purchasing-power-us-dollar-1913-2013
Judging by the value of the dollar, and the buying power of the dollar, that’s certainly better than our current system for the average worker, and for the minimum wage worker, too. Un-backed fiat currency is an unsustainable aspect of our society, as it, by government order, is the currency of our society, and it loses value every day because of the actions of puppet-master banks, banks that have been openly caught funneling money to drug cartels in Mexico (but let’s not talk about that.. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-29/banks-financing-mexico-s-drug-cartels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal.html)
On environmental stability…
I believe strongly in an individual’s duty to conserve. We used to be pretty good at conserving. We ‘used the whole deer’ as this was the custom, because we did not have this cheap, commercial excess, and it was frowned up to waste. We need to work at once again becoming a society that appreciates the value of reducing, reusing and recycling for its own good, or we’ll never break out of the cycle. Government action can’t affect change at the cultural level, short of brainwashing. It’s our job as members of society who care to start that process, and we’ve been doing it so far, things are looking less bleak on the environmental side of things. Perhaps we should start working on economic sustainability and cutting out the leaches in our economic system: the federal reserve baking system, and the runaway-train overspending federal government that desperately needs to have its spending priorities straightened out and its credit card limit lowered by We The People, as it has proven to be the frivolously spending mall rat teenager of the American family.
Good luck in your youthful crusade to rid the world of greed. When you realize that there is not a single person on this planet that does not want to operate in self-interest (and that the true act of greed is demanding someone give up the fruit of their labor in enforced, militarized communism, the historical result of anti-capitalist movements), capitalism will be here waiting for you when communism inevitably leaves us in a state of even worse financial ruin. You do not fix a problem caused by crony bureaucratic corporatism by instituting communism, the most bureaucratic, inefficient, and crony system ever attempted by mankind (I don’t care if Marxism sounds good in theory, in practice communism always creates unstable militant totalitarian regimes. Every single time.)
FYI: the federal government of the united states is the single biggest polluter on the planet. It’s sobering how wasteful the very bureaucracy you want to administer enforced ‘sustainability’ is.
Milton Friedman – ‘Greed’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A
I SAY NUKE THEM !!!