A sustainable society?

A sustainable society,
That is what we strive for, whether it is sustainable transport of a sustainable city. But what does sustainable actually stand for? Is “sustainable” the polish that makes our leafs shine, to be applied to every activity in order to make the products more attractive? Is the concept of sustainability as worn as the concept of “environment” became in the nineteen-eighties? When the first criminal dirt- and waste management companies came up and painted “environment” on their trucks, I understood that “environment”was no longer a recommendation. So how is that with sustainability? Do we still understand what it represents and what it was intended for?



I would not be surprised (I did not google or wikipedia the word) if sustainability finds its origins in the alarming reports of the Club or Rome in the nineteen-seventies. In those reports it was emphasized that we were exhausting the natural resources of the earth, and – even worse – at an ever higher speed. We treated the planet earth, as a then popular environmentalist group stated it , as if we had a second earth in store. For the moment when the first earth would be totally exhausted. These old-fashioned considerations come close to what sustainability originally was supposed to represent: a way of life that leads to a situation, where the generations that come after us have equal chances as the current generation. Mind you: not exactly the same planet, because then sustainability would lead to a laming sort of inertia and conservatism. Sustainability points at a different planet, carrying the traces of our current generation and all the generations before us, but offering equal opportunities to create prosperity, well-being, health and happiness as the ones given to us by the planet earth.

I think that is one of the finest definitions of sustainability, but at the same time it has very limited validity. It seems to be fit particularly for our “western” society. How will the average resident of the Sahel zone think about “equal opportunities for future generations”, if he realizes the unequal distribution of opportunities on our current planet? At the same time it is the way of life of nature people that can offer us a mirror picture, because those people often practice a sustainable way of life. The North-American Indians lived in a symbiosis with the bison for ages. The Western immigrants with their firearms and economic drive managed to decimate the carefully kept hurds in a few decades. However, it were the people of the Easter Islands themselves that, as far as we know, cut their islands free of trees at a fast pace, only to find out that the islands were inhabitable without trees.



Sustainability seems easy at small scale, where it may even have its roots. When man became cattle-keeper instead of hunter, which was probably due to his laziness, he developed a way of living together with nature that did not exhaust natural resources; the cow ate the grass and produced the manure, that kept the grass growing for ages. Man looked after the cow and the land, took care that the cow would have a calf, and once the calf had grown up, man would eat the cow. A cycle that could have lasted for ages, and where the sort of sustainability as defined in the first section was obvious.

But we are no longer keeping the cattle or even working the land, we are now caretakers for the elderly, accountants, doorkeepers or process managers. We live in comfortably heated and lighted dwellings, drive to work using fossile fuels, and eat the meat of the low cost butcher. And to add to that we fly to Costa Rica for a last minute weekend.

We exhaust the fossile fuel stock at a tremendous speed and leave to our next-of-kins a heated world. So, in this respect, what would be a sustainable caretaker for the elderly, a sustainable consultant, a sustainable doorkeeper or a sustainable process manager? Is that someone who transfers 20 Euro to buy off his guilt by planting a CO2 compensation tree? How, in this respect, should we look at the extinction, in The Netherlands, of the lark, once a common bird, now seldom heard? Is it not so, that our children’s children have a lesser chance to happiness now that they will probably never hear or see this remarkable singer over the over-fertilized meadows?



Apparently it is very hard to fully understand this complicated concept of sustainabiliity, let alone to allo wit to take possession of our daily life. So we choose the scaled-down version of sustainability. The version where the bus is more sustainable than the private car, as if the bus did not use gasoil to run on. The version where we put the heating one degree lower, as if we then do not use up natural gas. The version where we only eat eal from the ealfarm, as if we were not emptying the seas of all their glass-eals.

Sustainability is a state of maind of people who live consciously but can not help it. Sustainability of the leaf polish of the polished advertisement boys. Sustainability is fashionable and the ticket into the world of the ‘purpously better-situated”. Sustainability does not exist.