geographical positionings, and to fall in with social policies and neomodernist
strictures of the kind first introduced in chapter 1 as new-age pragmatics, culmi-
nating in the soft pathways and Matrixarrays given in this chapter.
As the population and energy construct given earlier as Global population and
energy use (box 3.3) showed, the time ahead over the first third of the twenty-first
century involves adjustments – environmentally, socially, fiscally – put in place by
political pragmatists who comprehend the seriousness of the sustainability imper-
ative. It will be necessary for soft pathways to be taken, andfor a democratic
mandate to be profiled and harnessed to the job of shifting closer and closer to
living ‘less off’ finite resource reserves; and living ‘more from’ free-flow resources,
and obtaining ‘more out of’ renewable resources. In short: there is, truly, no free
lunch and there is no quick fix. Mortal planners cannot play God: and, more to
the point, no President can become King Canute; for with global warming the tide
will indeed rise higher and the ranch will either turn to desert or be deluged.
Staying on target for that triple harmony – growth, community, environment –
requires changes in policy understanding and political sensitivity. Mostly this
comes down to common sense, responding to nature’s wake-up calls, and taking
socially appropriate actions down socially appropriate paths.The New Culture: Balanced Harmony
At base the ‘conservative use of finiteresources’, the ‘sustenable use of renewable
resources’, the ‘preservation of heritageresources’, and the ‘socially appropriate
exploitation of free-flowresources’ all comes down to political and public moti-
vation in the direction of a paradigm for sustainable co-evolution. This, in
summary, is an operational matter of conservation with development. The
approach outlined in this chapter is essentially neomodern because it is about
achieving a more tolerable harmony, calling for changes in the direction of
being ecologically clever. It accepts, as a moderating imperative, the necessity of
being and acting in a style which is sustainable in spirit. It is also about a future
which engages ‘softer’ production, consumption and recycling practices as a
matter of political policy. This sustainable and pragmatic style clearly sets out to
render day-by-day living more beneficial for everybody, giving rise to cyclically
reinforcing community outcomes. It positions communities where they can
bind into a steady state culture where all individuals ‘enjoy their environmental
habitat while also obtaining nourishment from it’.^28 In other words, enabling
communities to secure a sustainably conserved and developed habitat which
does not exclude any other individual’s rights of access to an enjoyable way of
living.
Taking the longer view, this is not merely a matter of contemplation, an either-
or-if option. The closed-off global ecological system, and the simple laws of
entropic disorder, establishes an imperative, which further predicates a ‘what to
do’ question. Moving right to the brink of inevitability for the hapless – those not
yet born or the unempowered – seems crudely ‘unintelligent’ for a consciously
generational species. Nature, in and of itself, has no mechanism, except the dilu-114 Practice