Message-ID: <199610081529.LAA14672@purple> Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 11:29:14 -0400 From: Elin Whitney-Smith <mailto:elin@TMN.COM> Subject: Re: Sustainability To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Hunter/ Gatherer life style sustained H.sapiens for over a million years. Horticulture started ca 9,000 years ago. Agriculture 7,000 years ago. We have been growing and polluting steadilly since. It may well be that H. sapiens is not ecologically sustainable. We need to think through what we mean by sustainable and we need to take responsibility for the consequences of our way of life.This means that there is no "right answer" provided by traditional or other peoples. This is good in that we need not do without solar cookers - certainly high tech. - but that we may have to do without internal combustion engines unless we can be very smart about them.
This is bad in that we as a species like the "engineering solution" and resist the thoughtful solution.
This arguement is a case in point. We want to:
1) find a good model - traditional societies, other models, examples. 2) we want to either see technology as innocent or as guilty 3) we want to push it off on culture without saying what forms cultural choices.
In short we want to find a simple answer rather than looking at individual projects and/or technologies in relation to the society they are impacting. Sustainability is, in one sense, an evolutionary bet. I'll bet my solar cooker/ windmill / hydro / nuclear power plant will bring enough good to allow the continuance of life without negatively impacting the planet enough to make life unsustainable for my species.
Many of our bets have been wrong or half wrong - DDT helped with malaria but has hurt the environment and people.
Traditional societies were kept small through high infant mortality. There are few of us willing to say children should die in the name of sustainability. This throws us back into a Malthusian world where the only answer we have known is technology. We can't go back to hunting and gathering unless we are willing to drastically reduce the worlds population and accept that we will not have medicine and die young.
Thus, sustainability is a technolgical issue that has to be thought about, not avoided and not brushed off with romantic notions of return to some more perfect past, thoughtless luditeism or technological salvationism.
elin Elin Whitney-Smith mailto:elin@tmn.com http://www.well.com/user/elin
>So if we accept this arguement that "traditional" societies were not as
>sustainable as popularly reported in the press, what is the foundation we
>are using to build the future of sustainable development on? Is there an
>actual example of a longterm sustainable economy and society?
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