Sustainability is Forever
So Todd came back last night. I was online, checking out some star charts, trying to figure out whether that weird bright light in the western sky was Venus or the mothership come to take me home, when a yellow sticky popped up right in the middle of the screen.
so lets get cracking we dont have any time to waste lets get that doc out and wake people up and get them moving lets solve these problems
“Where’ve you been, Todd?” I typed.
Turns out Todd went to YouTube to see the What a Way to Go trailers and ended up watching every last piece of video there. That explains his long absence. “Did you read my blogs where I told your story?” I asked.
yes yes I did but thats old news thats the past and this is now and right now we need to roll up our sleeves and get to work
I sighed. As predictable as was his shame was this new energy to “get cracking”. I’ve seen it over and over. I went through it myself.
“What is it you think we should be doing?”
Todd had apparently been doing his homework. He papered my desktop with stickies:
we need new legislation new rules that kyoto thing and carbon caps and biofuels and hybrid cars and cfls and carbon offsets and theres people figuring out how to store carbon underground how to make hydrogen cars and cold fusion and clean coal and theres a new generation of nuclear theres catalogs full of green products now and people are building green homes and green schools and green businesses and wind and solar and geothermal and algae and and and theres people figuring out how to block the sun and new genetically modified crops and tar sands and oil from garbage and theres new technologies like nano particles we dont even know whats possible yet were smart and can innovate like nobodys business but we have to stop pretending everything is fine and knuckle down
“Well, you’re an American, that’s for sure,” I joked.
what does that mean
“You have a tendency to jump to solutions before you really understand the problem.”
what the heck are you talking about climate change is the problem peak oil is the problem mass extinction is the problem you said so yourself I watched your damned documentary six times you said it yourself
“Those are the symptoms, Todd. Symptoms of an underlying cultural and spiritual disconnection from reality so profound it makes my head spin and my heart melt.”
so why cant we get cracking and make some changes anyways why not build wind power and green houses and all of that now while we figure out this disconnection stuff
“Because it won’t work. And because most of it will just make things worse. Most of these solutions arise from only looking at a part of the whole. Technofixes will be difficult to implement when energy prices skyrocket, when water fails, when ecosystems collapse. Energy alternatives all seem to fall way short, and most come with fairly high environmental costs attached.”
“Ultimately, nothing is sustainable inside of a growing system. Nothing. We can be as green as Kermit, but if we’re still growing - growing the population, growing the economy, growing the American lifestyle - it will not be sustainable.”
“It’s not enough to just do less damage. Sustainability has to mean forever if it’s to mean anything at all. Sustainable for a while will simply not cut it. That’s what we’ve been doing. Civilization could be sustained for a while. But it’s a culture that fouls its own nest. It has always been unsustainable. Our present situation was built into the equation from the get-go. It just took a while to get here, because the Earth is so large.”
Todd tossed a sticky onto the sc