Sustainability Belongs to Imagination
On a normal day companies and governments around the world are working to make sustainable change to our world. New energy sources, ocean cleanups, retrofits, compostable packaging, plastic eating bacteria and more are on the list of implemented and research solutions.
Sustainability is used so often we forget what it means and the high bar it should bring to what we are describing. Something that is sustainable is something that can be sustained. In other words, it is something we can expect to do indefinitely, taking into account its entire life cycle, cradle to cradle or cradle to grave.
Sustainability is easier to imagine in a small population that is part of a larger ecosystem for which there is no widespread human impact. One may imagine drinking water in a plentiful environment, processing the water in the body, and it returning to the environment for it to be absorbed evaporated and enter into the atmosphere just to be rained down and enter the cycle again. This does not exist in the present day universally but does in many places. Somewhere along the Sapien rise from part of the ecosystem to its dominating lifeform we have become unsustainable requiring new innovations to outsmart our next issue. We continue to scale up, make luxuries into staples and strap ourselves to a system who is built upon an inherently unsustainable method. We require more elaborate tricks to maintain this way of life thinking we can indefinitely evade a fall. This a pattern of escalation I call the Icarus trick as it is much like Icarus flying at the sun but with a belief in technological tricks to maintain higher and higher flights.
We have been so far removed from a sustainable way of life that the most basic activities, such as consuming water, are now projected to require new technological tricks or innovations to continue their consumption. For many of our most fundamental resources such as water, the question is how can we sustainably consume them at our present scale. But for many if not most resources we ought to question if we should continue to consume them at all.
The two most basic components of our built environment which are steel or concrete, use unsustainable production means. We will never run out of iron or concrete rock but our means to produce them will have to change. Those two materials are the figurative water of our cities and the urban world in which most of humanity lives.
Energy is of course a huge component, and if stable sustainable power is ever produced at a level to power the entire steel industry start to finish, we have done an immense amount of work. Here most of the technology is available despite it being uneconomical. But this future is not a real one and belongs to imagination.
For many things in this world energy will not remediate its inherent unsustainability and supplantation will have to be the focus. Fossil based oil products are an obvious staring point. These products are so widespread in its use it requires imagination to see how all of these existing products would change. There are some alternatives to petrol products such bio composites have ready to go solutions and much promise though often they come with similar end of life problems and rarely meet the same high material properties.
A sustainable future we can all look forward to will not be reached through austerity. We are not a species of austerity and will never be. We need to focus our efforts on researching and implementing the materials that we can use at scale and making the full conversion to sustainable energy. Humans change when consequences are obvious and immediate. We act not like a frog in a slow boiling pot but when there is a gun to the forehead. People change at the precipice. I suspect we are somewhere between those two extremes a concerned frog in a sweet warm pot who thinks the boil may never come and if it does it will be for someone else.
