Achieving Sustainability Is Harder Than It Looks

What’s the path to sustainability?  Those of us who try to wrap our wits around where we are and where we need to be uniformly find that this is not a straight-forward question.  For instance, would you like to see less consumption of resources?  Well, sure, if you’re talking about North Americans.  But in the developing world, we’d actually like to see more: greater use of energy, more materials for housing, expanded healthcare facilities, more water purification facilities.  What works in place X may be poison for place Y.

Here’s an article on Sweden, and how it has run so low on municipal solid waste that it’s importing MSW to keep its recycling plants running; now there’s a one-off problem if there ever were one.

It would be nice if we faced simple challenges that give way to easy solutions, but there’s a catch: one size very rarely fits all.