Where do you see Sustainability as a concept in 10 years?

[daybrown]

The history and prehistory of stable sustainable communities is obscure, but of those we have, none of them followed a Levantine religion with the mandate to "be fruitful and multiply". None of them had a tyrannic father god idea of the divine. All of them had powerful female leadership, that to some considerable extent, depended on health services, family planning, and perceived magical skill rather than the power of the sword in the hands of the warrior class.

[isenhand]

Originally Posted by Bowman

I'm starting to think that isolating some of the problems we face as a global civilization is misleading and actually unhelpful, issues such as global warming, peak oil, destruction of the rain forests, HIV/aids, the war on terror, globalization, etc.

I would see all these not as the problem but as symptoms of a problem. The all emerge out of the way we do things, out of our interactions and those of companies and governments. In other words they emerge as by-products of our current socioeconomic system.

Originally Posted by Bowman

While each should have a place in our every day consciousness, sustainability needs to be as instinctive as breathing and needs to be the single most important consideration in everything we do, as individuals, as families, as local communities, at regional, national, and continental, and global level.

Or in other words, we need a new culture and a new socioeconomic system, which could mean giving up some cherished beliefs.

Originally Posted by Bowman

There is much more talk of sustainability in the press, especially over the last year, yet the word is always linked to some other issue be it environmental, business, energy etc. I don't recall an article or analysis in the press or media, much less from any politician that addresses sustainability as a value that should be central to every aspect of human activity.

That, I think, results form the way the mainstream perceives sustainability. They see it as meaning “keeping what we do now going”. Personally, I don’t see that as something we can do, thus we need to see sustainability as a change in the way we do things. They we can start look at everything we do.

[isenhand]

Originally Posted by Johnny Electriglide

Remember what I wrote years ago about the Earthship Villages, high tech with small manufacturing ability. Biofuel and electric vehicles, and possible radio/satellite/physical contact with other similar villages. That was all from the median data, and the mathematical certainty of population crash and oil depletion.

Nope, could you enlighten me? In sounds very similar to what I have proposed.

Originally Posted by Johnny Electriglide

we are really looking at extreme species loss and a surface that is uninhabitable even for these villages. Totally underground massive fortresses with nuclear reactors, good water and treatment facilities, hundreds of years supply of food, and grow light capacity with generational population staticism, would still have difficulty making it for the many many thousands of years it will take the biosphere to return to close to what it was. If these "molemen" could last, what would they be like in 200k years? No eyes? Inability to handle solar radiation? Still have an inate inability to understand and live sustainably on the surface?

We have a strong possibility of a population collapse, especially if we continue that way we have. However, at this point in time we still have other options. That would involve a change in culture and the way we do things. Difficult but not impossible.

Originally Posted by Johnny Electriglide

I agree with Bowman that, like with my first post, everyone should be thinking about sustainability as an ecological definition, not business, or the oxymoron sustainable development. The old Ute Indian Rule of Life, to think 7 generations ahead of the consequences of our actions and decisions, should have been adopted throughout humanity, as common sense and a religious principal.

Yeap

[daybrown]

Part of the reason real solutions have been unthinkable, is that we are near the end of 5000 years of rule by the warrior class, and they cannot think of any other way to do things. But the brave heart, strong right arm, sword in hand, no longer cuts it. Smith & Wesson guarantee equal rights for smart women.

There iis the Mosou in the remote mountains of Western China now, and you can trace the evolution of rule by women from Kucha, a couple hundred miles West of the Jade Gate, and all the way back to SE Europe 6000 years ago, that show rule by women produced sustainable systems. But the transtion will be messy. The warrior class will not go into that goodnite peaceably. They didnt wake up that way either.

[Squiffy the Shoe]

Yes, men are to blame.

[daybrown]

If we look at the effect of hormones on behavior, and the field studies of primates, we can see its the alpha males who try to use force to control everyone so as to mate with more females. Hominid evolution shows how the efforts of the alphas to acquire more status symbols has also been used.

The alpha instinct however, combined with superior intelligence results in leadership that produces benefit for the whole community. Unfortunately, that intelligence is handed down more on the mtDNA, and so the sons of airheads inherit the same desire to want to dominate, but without the talent, resulting in the rancor of the impotent, terrorism, and demagogery.

The resulting demagogic leadership does not bode well....