Sustainability

I was listening to NPR the other day, and heard the Sustainability Desk editor bemoaning the fact that there is little an individual can do to reduce our dependence on the petrochemicals that permeate our lives.  First, I was surprised to hear that there was a Sustainability Desk at NPR.  Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised.  Second, isn't our petro habit a direct outgrowth of  our dependence upon food, water, shelter (climate control, really), sanitation, community and commerce?  Shouldn't most Sustainability effort be directed at mitigation, rather than in futile searches for a miraclulous replacement?  We are mighty good at engineering our way out of sticky situations, e.g., the Green Revolution.  We are less successful at wholesale replacement.  Remember the Wankel engine, the Chrysler turbine that would run on "anything, even perfume.", the Stirling Cycle engine, and Atomic Power so cheap they'd be "giving electricity away?"

How does Earth, our blue green and white home floating in space, maintain sustainability?  Brutally.  The food chain is brutal; death equals food.  The water cycle is brutal; all manner of bad weather and sea, raging rivers, prolonged droughts.  All sustainable, all adjustments in equilibrium.  The population cycle is brutal; epidemic, famine, fire, earthquake, flood and war contribute their brutal controls. 

Our strength as a species is the way we have mitigated the brutality of our Earth.  Life in modern technological societies is very comfortable, even when compared to life less than 150 years ago.   Our concept of poverty in this tech society would be considered practically luxurious to the poor of 150 years ago.  This is not to say that there is not wretched poverty anywhere in tech society, for the poor will always be with us, in part due to the brutality of nature, and in part due to the genetic lottery of the location of your birth. 

The comedian Sam Kinison screamed, "You live in a desert!  Move to where the food is!", but the reality is that the poor in less developed countries live at the mercy of governments, domestic and foreign, and international corporations.  Sustainability is not at the top of the list for most of those agencies; they live in the moments of political windage or quarterly results.  Some, for example the Chinese, are exchanging infrastructure improvements for mineral and trading rights, building on our talent for public works that mitigate the effects of larger and denser populations, and probably ingratiating the citizenry in the process.  Careful cultivation of the relationship can result in long-term consulting opportunities for China's plethora of well-trained young men in need of jobs, many now working on public works projects in China .  We, in contrast, send Peace Corps workers and tell them to create small-scale sustainable projects. Which effort do you think will change more lives for the better?

The true problem, the elephant in the Sustainability room is Population Control. Nobody in that room wants to talk about the elephant for fear of being trampled by the mob it represents. I have great hope that genetic engineering, tissue culturing and other biotech can keep the spectre of Famine at bay, much as big Pharma and Medicine have kept Disease under control, and big Ag has fed the world.  We can reliably predict the odds of starvation and deprivation based on location and other demographics, unexpected disasters excepting. I wonder if the correllation between fertility rate and education is the natural control for our mitigating talents.  For example,  fertility in America dropped below the replacement rate in the 1970's, around the time we really woke up to enviromental impacts.  But immigration has vastly outpaced fertility as a source of population growth in America today.  Our talent for mitigating natural controls like fertility rates extends to public policy decisions, too.  Should not our first concern in sustainability be at the source, namely, population growth?  We cannot control the population growth in the world, but we can here at home.  While I do not urge us to close our doors, I do urge that scientific considerations about the capacity of our infrastructure be made part of immigration policy.

The NPR Sustainability editor was unable to offer any hope, and did not address the elephant.  Many believe that Sustainability can be achieved with organic farming, much the way alternative medicine advocates feel that health can be best maintained with natural remedies.  This is magical thinking with little basis in reality. Science is the only reliable source of engineering advancement, and Sustainability today should be about engineering mitigating support systems and not speculating upon the sustainability of cow manure.

"O tempora! O mores!"