Creating a Sustainable Society: Four Questions We Should Ask

Enlarge Image Image Gallery In the past, conservation has been our primary approach — an ethic that is admirable, but uninspiring. ISTOCKPHOTO/FOTOVOYAGER

I used to go backpacking with a friend who drilled holes in his toothbrush handle to decrease its weight. With his goose-down sleeping bag, dehydrated food and plastic utensils, he could tell you within an ounce exactly what his pack weighed. His obsession was amusing, but not attractive.

Another friend favored fire-grilled steaks and would hit the trail with 10 pounds of beef in his backpack. Sometimes he also brought fresh potatoes and some whiskey. He relished the smell of meat cooking in the mountain air as the twilight glowed pink beneath a ring of peaks. Sometimes he strapped a guitar to his pack.

For a camping companion, I preferred the steak-and-whiskey friend.

We environmentalists have drilled a lot of metaphorical holes in toothbrushes. But we haven’t found ways to bring enough people along on our journey. If environmentalism had Ten Commandments, they would all begin, “Thou shalt not ...”

In 1970, MOTHER EARTH NEWS warned that our fossil fuel habit was destructive, industrial agricultural was damaging our land and water, population growth was unsustainable, and contemporary lifestyles were separating people from nature in ways that undermined our health and our emotional well-being. We’ve stuck to that message for 40 years, and we’ve pretty much been proven correct. But being right hasn’t done any of us much good.

For a long time, politicians discounted environmentalists. Nowadays, the green vernacular is more widely spoken, but we still are not making much progress toward true sustainability. While we trade our incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescents, we simultaneously allow our population in the United States to grow at a rate that builds a new Chicago every year. In unprecedented numbers we choose organic food, while destroying the rain forests to increase the supply of cheap soybeans and beef. About a billion people suffer from hunger, while a similar number are overweight because they eat too much. One step forward, two steps back.

Most of the time we’ve gone about this task backward, advocating personal change without offering incentives. Conservation has been our primary approach — an ethic that is admirable, but uninspiring. Austerity is a drag. Most people know that — and resist it.

Abundance, on the other hand, is attractive. If we are to lead creative, innovative and beautiful lives, we need some surplus time and energy. Most of the significant achievements in our history have been accomplished in the presence of abundance. Science, technology, literature and art spring only from societies in which the surplus resources created by some people enable others to live reflective, inventive lives. We will not engage the great engines of human creativity with a vision of pure frugality. If we are to create a sustainable future, we need more positive criteria.