Today’s post is by regular contributor, Richard Jurin. Before his retirement, Richard led the Environmental Studies programme at the University of Northern Colorado, where he launched a degree in Sustainability Studies. His academic interests are environmental worldviews and understanding barriers to sustainability. As ever, with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by NAEE.
Richard writes:
When people talk of the future, it always seems well beyond tomorrow, but the reality is that we are creating the future right now. “The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.”
Leonard I. Sweet.
Predicting the future is always a difficult task, and trying to predict what a sustainable future looks like is not any different. Yet, trying to move forward into such a future without a sense of direction is at best, ‘walking north on a southbound train’ as David Orr has said. Education is key, and awareness of possibilities is the precursor to real change. There is no ‘one right way’ for a sustainable future, but I believe there are several ‘principles,’ which is why I titled my textbook about sustainable living as such. Once we all start moving towards a true sustainable future, it will happen organically, and each community will fit with whatever unique features exist in any given area, using sustainable principles as they fit. “The only way you can predict the future is to build it.” Alan Kay.
For starters, I do not believe that a true sustainable future will simply be a green technological version of the failed socio-cultural Materialistic-Consumer worldview we currently live within. This worldview is the very reason for our myriad environmental and ecological problems and no amount of lifestyle tweaking will ever make it work. Around the globe are numerous ecovillages, transitional communities, new urbanism, relocalized communities, etc., where people are trying to live something approaching sustainability by creating parallel societies alongside the current dominant societal one. Success in this transition will most likely come from the grassroots as failed hope for hierarchical solutions fail miserably. As environmental writer Jack Loeffler lamented, ‘We cannot keep living from an economic paradigm that turns habitat into money.’
So, ‘Looking Through a Glass Darkly’ one can envisage a future that seems bright, not hopeless. The biggest change will be in how people live within the world. We will start living in a world ‘Beyond Civilization’ as philosopher, writer, Daniel Quinn espouses. We will return to an older way of thinking in which we remember the lessons still learnable from indigenous cultures as author Jared Diamond explored (The world until Yesterday). We will merge the best of the old indigenous philosophies with the best of the modern world for a new consciousness – a Nova Renascentia. Without this awakening and application of a compassionate consciousness towards each other and the natural world, we are merely trying to hold back the tide of change that are already upon us. But we have to be the change we wish to see, not corporate hierarchies entrenched within a failed economic system.
Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Movement, places food and energy as the primary components of a new ‘relocalized society.’ The idea of global industrialized food production and manufacture (for that is what food has become) is failing on many levels, and our first task for a sustainable future will be to return to organic local poly-crop farming and to localize all energy generation to gain community self-sufficiency and resilience. The economic impetus that created megacities is failing, but instead of fearing decay of urban systems, we need to envision them more as a collection of neighboring urban villages. Each one acting independently, and yet collectively for the benefit of the whole. Once we move past old beliefs of scarcity, competition, fear of failure, and adherence to hierarchical dictates, we will learn to use our individual sovereignty to create new systems where collaboration, integrity, and respect become the norm. This would be true for each of us as well as for the natural world upon which we rely.
“A Land-Ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land [and the planet]. Health is the capacity of land for self-renewal… Quit thinking about land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Aldo Leopold.
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Richard can be contacted at richardjurin@gmail.com