Ruining the world
A cautionary tale about trying to save a planet.
👈 || UNSAYING | CONTEMPLATION | TRADITION | MEDITATION | DISCUSSIONS | BACK MATTER || 👉
In the face of irrefutable evidence that human activity is destabilizing the Earth’s ability to support life, at least as you and I have been blessed with, there is an ever-increasing call for “sustainability.” What is sustainability? One definition put forth by the Board of Trustees of Arizona State University in the United States, home to a “School of Sustainability,” is:
Promoting human prosperity and well-being for all, while protecting and enhancing the earth’s life support systems.
What does this actually mean in practice? All you need to do is examine that School of Sustainability’s curriculum and you will see exactly what it is about — finding creative scientific and technical solutions, and the public policies to implement them, to problems caused by our current way of life so that we can continue with as little impediment as possible in that way of life.
Yet the evidence is telling us that it is our way of life that is the cause of the problems we are facing. Our economic system, based as it is on the need for continued growth of material prosperity, has become the means for our mutually assured destruction, much as the amassing of nuclear weapons were consciously deployed to that end during the last century. Its effects are everywhere, and everywhere the same, and those results are now properly labeled as Ecocide, with strong movements in a number of countries to have it recognized as one of a short list of Crimes Against Humanity, as Genocide is today.