Infinite Growth Impossible of a Planet of Finite Size
For a small but growing number of people, less is becoming more; small is becoming big. Does that mean some people won’t always want their lives surrounded by stuff, pursuing the erroneous notion that things bring happiness? Of course not.
But eventually, “living small” will become cool. Things like SUVs will go out of fashion.
If you think all this is malarkey, when was the last time you saw a Hummer? When Hummer drivers began to be regarded as pigs and other drivers started to flip them off, GM dropped the brand like a hot rock.
More and more people are living according to the notion of sustainability, and they aren’t forced to do it; they want to do it. I don’t want to live a life fulfilling my “needs” in such a way that it makes it impossible for future generations to fulfill theirs, and I don’t think you do either.
Expect change.
Greta Thunberg’s criticism cannot be resolved by simply choosing a hybrid instead of a hummer. It’s a start… but that path still leads to devastation.
The industrializing world is growing at a rate that far outstrips the rate at which the industrialized world is improving… and that will be the case for the next two generations – at least.
We’re on the same page, you and I… But the problem is we should be somewhere in the next chapter, and neither of us really knows what is in that chapter.. we just know that we aren’t far enough along right now.
I suspect that in the end we are going to have to fundamentally rethink societal infrastructure. We need to have a super-majority of our travel be through public transportation or non-vehicular travel (I include things like electric bikes, Segway skateboards, etc..), which would require a radical change in suburbs. We need to have a super-majority of our food grown indoors and local. We need to have more focus on shared walls: condos and apartments rather than individual houses. We need to get to 100+% renewable electricity generation as fast as possible… etc..
Even then, if you consider 9 billion people living that lifestyle, then the future generations are in trouble. But it’s not a farce.
Again, this isn’t said as a “I’m better than you” type of judgement… I’m not doing better. I’m in the same boat. But we SHOULD be much further now, and it’s absurd that we’re fighting about SUV’s vs efficient hybrids and some pollution controls on coal power plants vs no pollution controls…
We are failing. Badly.