-----Original Message-----
From: Eva Durant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: list futurework <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Monday, August 03, 1998 10:02 AM
Subject: Re: BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
In response to my posting on the probability that we are transcending the
limits of sustainability, Eva Durant asks:
>who wouldn't agree with you?
I can think of ever so many people. I know that a few people on this list
would agree with me, and some people that I know personally and
professionally, but most people would either disagree or not bother to think
about it. Many of those who disagree would work for bureaucracies or large
corporations which have made efforts to become more environmentally and
conservationally responsible. They have bought into ISO 9000 and 14000 and
have made commitments to put sustainable development into practice. The
point that I would make, and I believe that Jay Hanson and others would
agree, is that this is not nearly enough. It does not represent any kind of
serious departure from the high energy using technology that is central to
our culture.
I would also suggest that much of it is phony. I have worked for a
government department which said it believed in sustainable development.
In public pronouncements, anything the department did was given a
sustainability spin. The promotion of mining was sustainable development,
as was the encouragement of oil and gas development. The creation of large
bureaucracies in northern Canada, sustainable only because of large
transfers from the federal government, was said to be about sustainable
development.
I was originally impressed with the Brundtland Report (Our Common Future)
when it was published in the late 1980s. I have since come to believe that
it was one of the greatest hoaxes we have ever pulled on ourselves. It has
given rise to a mantra, "sustainable development", which is repeated
everywhere and often in the hope that it will not only save us, but save us
the bother of changing our behaviour in the direction of real environmental
responsibility.
>The system doesn't work, the system has to go, to be
>replaced by local and global democracies, initially
>collating local resources and then having a global
>stock-taking of what we can do to survive and sustain
>what we can...
Eva, you're dreaming. The system will go, not because it is either
capitalist or communist or anything else, but simply because the resources
it requires are finite. It may or may not last another 100 years, but its
time is limited. While it would be nice if it died with a whimper that
allowed humankind to get on with the business of building a new and better
system, it probably won't happen that way. I would expect to see growing
international violence as issues around who gets to use the last of the
water table are settled.
Ed Weick
