One of the favourite arguments of the warmist is that we might as well cut back now because our resources won’t last forever and the faster we use them, the sooner the crunch will come. They say we must be sustainable. The purest form of this would be to use only as much as we can recycle/regenerate. A tall order.

Funnily enough, that bastion of leftishness, the BBC, has already demonstrated how hard it is. Remember The Good Life? A tale of two successful suburbanites who decide to give up the rat race and live on what they’d got? If you study it, you’ll find that despite having all the major necessities of life (home, land, good climate, utilities on tap, clothes etc) it was a continual battle against failure. They were permanently cadging things from others and, worthy or not, recycling is only possible if someone has cycled the stuff in the first place. Their lifestyle was not sustainable. In global terms they had too much land (huge garden, allotment and grazing common) to be multiplied across the billions..

More significantly we’ve also seen huge experiments with sustainability that lasted decades. We usually call them Communism. One of the reasons why capitalism reared its head in modern China was one of the fundamental problems with sustainability. In the beginning, people were only allowed to wear set clothes. This created a unique problem. Once you had enough little green Chairman Mao outfits for a full wash, plus one for Sunday best, why would you need any more until they fell apart? Unlike food that needs to be constantly replaced, the clothing market dried almost to a stop. Money trickled towards the farmers who didn’t return it because there was nothing for them to spend it on. If there’s no consumerism, what do non farmers do? Once you exclude all the essential professions, you leave a huge and irate population with nothing to do.

So alternatively you arrange enough work and consumerism to just keep the machinery turning but don’t drift into greed. This has also been tried and it was also under the aegis of Communism. Some time back a friend was in the USSR countryside with a guide. At the edge of each field were piles of manure in various stages of decay. The guide explained that the farmers got paid for the number of hours they worked, not their productivity so there was no incentive to spread the stinky muck. The whole technology disparity between the East and West was largely the result of the stifling effects of sustainability. Why invent new things if you can’t benefit from them? Why work hard if you get the same life as the git next door who does the minimum (or does nothing, if we assume some will be on benefits in our sustainable utopia). Sustainability is the enemy of invention.

So do we reward people who invent more efficient things, irrespective of consumer choice? Hmmm, actually we already know how many things can be made more efficient, it just involves ignoring one or more of the other ideals we strive for. Cars for instance could be made much lighter by removing all the things that have made them safer and more comfortable over the years. Or even do away with safety rules altogether and hope the subsequent deaths ease the burden on the planet. In a sustainable world, is drinking and driving a good thing? Are smaller and smaller homes or flats a demonstration of developer greed or sound environmentalism? Have the naughty oil barons been heroes all this time by raking in large profits and making us use less?

There will come a time when the shortage of resources will threaten and change society but it will happen naturally. If we’re lucky, the ingenuity and… greed of mankind will come up with solutions. Would we have people who can still solve problems if we’ve bred generations to be happy with what’s sustainable? Do we think that environmentalists have thought about sustainability at all?

With so many straw-men, you have yourself a straw-army. Playing with toy soldiers has always entertained some simple souls.

That's the idea, insults rather than arguments!

Arguments? I have the feeling that you don't really want a serious argument or discussion about sustainability. Rather, you want cheers and agreement from people who don't recognise your introduction as the grossly untrue caricature it is. As someone who is capable of creating this discussion thread, it seems likely that you are also able to use Google to learn something about sustainability.

If you were to write a fair summary of sustainability and to offer some arguments against it I might bite, but I see no point arguing against your army of straw-men.

So you refuse to give me any reasons why I should believe sustainability is anything other than the latest buzz word, because somewhere on the net, those reasons exist? That's a winning argument. Lawyers the world over will stop presenting the evidence and just tell the jury to Google it.

I'm not even sure that those who use 'sustainable' have a common meaning. I've seen it used as a call to grow veg on grass verges and for an excuse not to build power stations. Who can say what's sutainable and what's not? 50 years ago the current global population was not sustainable but now it is. If sustainability is about having less so that all will all benefit in the long run, define 'less' and then justify it.

Define sustainability sensibly and identify what is wrong with the idea. Then it becomes worthy of discussion. Arguing about your fictitious image of "sustainability" seems futile to me, although I'm sure others here will enjoy indulging in comparative fabrication.

I can't define it, that's the problem. Like many warmist concepts it's amorphous and can mean whatever the user wants it to. How can you achieve a goal that has no definition?

"Tinymind: If you know what 'sustainability' is, please tell us."

My dictionary defines sustainable as something "able to be maintained at a certain rate or level"

It says nothing about communism or self sufficiency. I think people here and elsewhere (using the word) are imprinting their own preoccupations onto a simple concept.

Can you have sustainable living with economic growth? Can you have an environmental movement without economic growth?

I submit that the answer to both those questions is "no" and that the purpose of "sustainable" living is to stop economic growth. However without economic growth there can be no parasitic activities unrelated to the production of food and other necessities of life - so the death of environmentalism will follow (along with a thousand good causes like NSPCC, RSPCA, RSPB etc.) These are all children of the industrial revolution and economic growth.

The problem the environmentalists have is a distaste for their own species, not a love of the environment, and the paradox is that they can only exist if their own species is thriving.

Martin A
Ireland isn't the only part of the British Isles where subsistance was a way of life until recently (some would say it still exists in the far North West). The Black House was a feature of Highlands and Islands life until very recently.

I have probably mentioned this too often here, I grew up in rural Perthshire without electricity and other mains services. If Jeffrey Green can manage living there through two winters and still thinks if we, as environmentally-concerned individuals, focus on becoming self-reliant, then hats off to him, otherwise he is just like Those who are trying to force lifestyle modifications on the public, while they jet-set and limo around the world, and should be ignored. I will continue to ignore him.

I see no reason why sustainability is in conflict with economic growth. Suggestions that there is a conflict come about only because of deficiencies in measurement of the economy, where current measures do not consider environmental or third party costs.

"I see no reason why sustainability is in conflict with economic growth." Then you haven't understood the message. Sustainability is about stopping economic growth. I suggest you read Agenda 21, or the articles of the Club of Rome.

Excellent replies, even from Lovelock, thanks stewgreen. From Mike Jackson’s research “sustainability is improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems”.

To live within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems you have to decide how much of those eco systems must be left for nature and how you intend to protect it. It’s tough on the undeveloped countries if we draw a line in the sand and say ‘this far and no more’. One of the best ways of preserving the wild spaces is to lure people out of them and (as others have mentioned) that happened in the UK and Ireland with many people moving from rural subsistence living to urban based industrial occupations. Towns held an alternative to starvation and poverty. They were also the areas that saw the first advances in utilities and facilities. Mass power supply was a big part of that. A main theme of the ‘sustainable’ plans for the undeveloped world involves actively dissuading them from building centralised power systems and relying instead on solar power or hydro. Boutique power won’t lure people away from their rural locations, so instead of easing pressure on the wilderness, these plans actively encourage people to stay and impact directly upon the wildlife. At the same time, with modern medicine and food aid, the populations rapidly increase and land that really can’t support large numbers is stressed even further. Matt Ridley’s slide showing the difference between the Dominican Republic that imports fuel and Haiti that burns ‘renewable’ trees is a powerful argument against the warped idea of sustainability.

For some, organic and free range farming is the epitome of sustainability, but it’s actually very poor use of precious agricultural land. There just isn’t enough land to pander to such sentimentality. Just last month Prince Charles was praising rural parts of eastern Europe for retaining old methods of farming but he turned a blind eye to the poverty and ignorance that explained it. As clever farmers are finding, land that was barely scraping a profit can become as productive as the best, if modern farming know how is applied. This has spawned an undignified scramble to buy land in places like eastern Europe and Africa where the locals mutter about immigrants ‘coming over here, bringing their work ethic and superior farming experience with them.’ Of course you could argue that modern farming is more harmful to wildlife than the traditional methods but as wildlife is also on the menu to supplement poor farming and failed harvests, it’s not quite so cut and dried. Where in the world are deer becoming a pest?

Many, on both sides of the sustainability debate, would agree that population is the biggest reason for the erosion of wild places. While many of us worry about that, there’s very little that we can do about it. As far as I know, there are only four ways to stop population growth. Firstly you can try China’s one child policy but I doubt we have the stomach or the power for it. Second we could stop treating disease and promote wars, neither of which is a sane response to solve a problem that developed because we started treating disease and strove for peace. Thirdly, we could ask nicely if those people who rely on their kids as their pension and their old age carers could just stop having kids. We could supply them with contraception and advice. However that’s not working now and I see no future where it would. The only effective and humane way to reduce population is prosperity. It turns out that couples who are too busy, too comfortable and too self centred, don’t care to pop out more than one or two sprogs. Nobody has to hurt them, nag them or teach them about contraception, it just happens naturally.