Sustainability, the solutions...

So in my last entry I gave a nice general, rather vague aim, to connect up people’s thinking so that they can see the resources that they use and in turn use them in a sustainable way, the question is now, how on earth do you go about it?

Well, that’s a tricky one but I think that there are a lot of tips out there already and without scaremongering I really doubt we have time to be complacent. I’m generally not one to be a pessimist and we have come well rather close to Armageddon more often than we like to imagine.

Each generation has its challenges and we stand on the shoulders of giants. We have the inherited wisdom of thousands of years of what really often looks like trial and error. It is thought that 70,000 years ago we came close to extinction due to a supervolcano when our numbers came down to a few thousand. We’ve survived the Cuban Missile Crisis that was nearly world war three and I don’t think that we’re unable to deal with the next set of challenges. Though, the only reason we’re still here is due to the bravery, foresight, blood, sweat and tears of people in every generation. The threats we face now are not insurmountable but it looks like we’re in for a rough ride. You may well be wandering what on earth I’m getting at. There are of course rogue states, terrorists of various descriptions and natural disasters though there have always been dissidents and continental plates have always moved.

However, there is a new level of threat we now need to deal with. The world is now more connected than ever before and for the first time we have the case where highly complex societies, with tens of millions of people within them and the prospect of significant and permanent environmental change and degradation. We are currently in the middle of a mass extinction event and it appears very likely that the climate is going to change more drastically than it has for the past 2 million years never mind the past 10,000 years of stability we have enjoyed whilst our civilisations have flourished. We know face the prospect of the achievements of human civilisation being undone across the globe and we may only have 20 or so years of climatic stability left before this starts to occur. We can adapt to it but we need to start acting now and make very significant changes to the way we live and the very constructs of our societies to make them more adaptable and in turn more sustainable. I've had some ideas along these lines on what can be done which I'l detail in anotehr post. If you have any please do comment on my blog. For a detailed, more scientific description of what I'm getting at please take a look at the Reeth Lectures by Geoffrey Sachs.