Sustainability 2
I didn’t make my point very well about the Vikings in Greenland, so I’d like to try again. Today we define a sustainable process as one that can be continued at a certain level indefinitely. This definition contains a tacit assumption that the future will be more or less like the past, because without that assumption there is no “indefinitely”. This assumption is what is wrong with the idea of sustainability.
Turn back the clock to 1200 AD. The Vikings grew hay in the summer, fed it to their animals in the winter, and ate the animals. In the spring they mucked out the stalls and spread the manure on the fields. After a couple hundred years of doing this, they and their grandfathers and their grandfathers’ grandfathers had pretty much figured out how much hay they could grow and how many people they could feed without depleting the soil.
By any reasonable definition, they had a sustainable lifestyle. But the tacit assumption was wrong. Their future was not like their past. They could not possibly have anticipated the Little Ice Age. As the climate changed, the growing seasons got shorter and the winters got longer. They produced less hay at precisely the time they needed more hay. Their lifestyle didn’t work any more. Instead of adapting and doing what they could plainly see did work, namely igloos and kayaks, they kept feeding hay to cows in barns.
If we see that the tacit assumption is wrong, that the future is not necessarily like the past, then it follows that sustainability is the wrong mindset. We need a Plan B for every contingency we can foresee, and we need the flexibility to improvise when there is no Plan B.