Sustainability Nasty

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

How about if we take this well worn design axiom and apply it in a new sense: to sustainability. What unnecessary consumptions can be weeded out to leave us with a streamlined, workable, successful society? If all of us, willingly, got rid of our cars, jets, oil, gas, electricity, central heating, TV’s, computers and other luxuries that make up our unsustainable lifestyles. That would be a sort of beauty. A simple, stark kind of beauty. Perhaps more than a little dry for contemporary western tastes, a bit Quaker perhaps, a little too Ray Mears for comfort. Certainly it would be more ethically sound, but very few would find it more desirable, especially such a comprehensive removal of comforts.

So then is it about finding a balance? A yin and yang. Between wants and needs, smug rights and hedonistic wrongs. Pragmatically, is having as much luxury as we can get away with and still be sustainable the closest we can get to ‘perfection’?

“Are ethics and sustainability just about being good?” Just about being good? Isn’t that quite important? Certainly sustainability is important, for our survival and long-term success as a species, but the recent IPCC [1] research has reiterated that climate change is happening now, and it is a problem for everyone. Even the selfish and most unethical can no longer deny the existence of climate change for their own benefit [2], all they can say now is that it won’t matter (to them) [3], which is another opinion that is slowly being eroded away (or if you like, flooded).

With respect to the (acknowledged) accusations of smugness, ego, or “people only do good things to feel good about themselves” being counter-arguments to acting upon ethical conscience, there isn’t a lot of ground to stand on. Of course ivory-tower/ high-horse self-righteousness is annoying, but that doesn’t mean to say the actions are mistaken, or guilty wrong-doing is better. Obviously, its better to be right, and know it, than to be wrong, and know it.

[1].http://www.ipcc.ch/
[2].http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg18524861.400
[3].http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/francis_sedgemore/2006/06/jeremy_clarkson_must_be_destro.html