100 PracticeBox 3.5 Sustainable co-dependency
Among the environmentally knowledgeable, engagement
of the generic expression ‘sustainability’ indicates the
application of an attitude of ‘balance’ with regard to
resource uptake and usage. But as was shown previously
in box 3.2,Resources within ecosystems, the postures
appropriate to the use of free-flow, renewable, finite and
heritage resources are each different, being respectively
to ‘exploit’, ‘sustain’, ‘conserve’ and to ‘preserve’. Within
this framework of usage, sustainability is seen to be a
management tool for keeping the economy, not merely
the ecology, healthy andabove the margin of non-
profitability or clean-up burden. What constitutes
‘appropriate’ sustainability can be explored further on
two planes.
Asjargon, ‘sustainability’ stands with the first and
second development decade (1960s and 1970s) calls for
‘modernization’, ‘excellence’, ‘integration’ and ‘compre-
hensiveness’. In line with the non-dictionary use of such
expressions, ‘sustainability’ varies in meaning depending
on the purpose or intent of the user! Thus a welfare ben-
eficiary wants a ‘sustainable’ level of benefit; a consumer
wants a ‘sustainable’ growth pattern; an environmentalist
wishes to pass on the resource platform in a ‘sustainable’
condition. What they all do is promote the ‘sustainability’
of what it is they have an aspiration for, as with the ideals
of ‘comprehensiveness’ and ‘integration’ in the past.
Generic sustainability is probably impossible to achieve,
yet it can be held in view as a target or objective to strive
toward, knowing it cannot be fully attained.
Asphilosophy, ‘sustainability’ is intended to reflect an
epistemological realism, and here it runs into a concep-
tual wall: namely that it cannot reconcile the different
pace of change between social and ecological processes.
The era of fossil-fuel uptake enabled modern nations
to skirt around that socio-ecological quandary; for pre-
industrial age peoples ‘social realism’ co-related to
‘ecological realities’ and a human-environmental co-
dependency was struck in a manner which was, for those
times, ‘sustainable’. But, fuelled by a hydrocarbon
abundance which provided the surplus energy for
twentieth-century consumerism, there has occurred a
global cultural outgrowth (Westernism). The imbalance
between a consumer-driven social system, and a carbon-
regenerating ecological system, cannot be now closed by
a superficial inclination toward ‘sustainability’, which does
not, of course, deny sustainability as a worthy goal.
My predication is that a loosely applied usage of the
term ‘sustainability’ will lead to the expression either
eliding into misuse orto it becoming sidelined as jargon.
The Anglo settler nations will hopefully evolve what might
be indicated as sustainable co-evolution, a husbandry
pattern for co-dependency, which strives to reconcile
equitable socio-economicsystems with harmonic socio-
ecological systems.the cynical claim of business and industry to ‘trust us’; and engenders engage-
ment of the wisdom to always ask enterprises to ‘prove it’.
The co-dependency call is for diverse, fully costed, impact-assessed, socially
analysed, locally sustainable projects. It also involves being wary of ‘harder’
technologies, particularly those producing discards which become embodied
in the biosphere (non-degradable toxins and the time-bomb parts of discarded
consumer durables).^24 Of course it also involves a factoring-in of conservation with
development: safe and secure habitations, equitable economic growth patterns,
natural population growth, environmental balance, and the reinforcement of what
a district region or nation produces best. Local communities in the Anglo settler
societies are democratically open and pluralist. They are blessed with an ever-
continuing centrist potential to affirm themselves as co-evolving with nature on
a co-dependency basis.
It is up to informed communities and their political leaders to stake a claim for
conservancywithdevelopment, in effect heeding the lessons of history.^25 Never
again to blunder on with lemming-like patterns of growth, consumption,
environmental decay and entropic disorder.