Sustainable means forever
Live long and prosper?
One of the rationalizations for continuing our current economic system is that we appear to live in an era of unprecedented prosperity and health. We can buy all the toys imaginable, we live longer, and so on.
That of course is an extremely short-sighted snapshot taken now, or perhaps in a recent utopian past in the imagination of someone from a developed country.
Homo sapiens is currently causing the sixth great extinction of species on this planet. Homo sapiens is currently about half way through burning up the legacy of fossil fuels on this planet, and determined to burn the second half in a much shorter time than the few hundred years for the first half. Homo sapiens is currently contaminating the entire planet with very persistent toxins, to the point where we are even looking deep under the surface to dump our waste. And Homo sapiens (which John Gray has also called homo rapiens) is determined to maintain political and economic structures which perpetuate these atrocities.
And through all this, over a billion people still live in abject poverty, functional illiteracy rates run at thirty or forty percent in so-called “developed” countries, ordinary people in those countries suffer the consequences of “corrections” in markets and housing prices, and global conflicts over ideology and resources escalate.
When we talk about health, it appears as though we are more concerned with the “health” of the economy, than the health of the planet and the average person on it, especially now that trickle down economics has clearly shown itself to be nothing other than a way of perpetuating a system to reward the wealthy and maintain the status quo.
Indeed, we are at a point where a “healthy” economy is in direct conflict with a healthy planet, and with the continued existence of our civilization.
So, whatever prosperity some of us may be enjoying at present comes at the direct cost of impoverishing our children, and theirs.
Wishing this to continue is pure, simple, and shortsighted greed.
That of course is an extremely short-sighted snapshot taken now, or perhaps in a recent utopian past in the imagination of someone from a developed country.
Homo sapiens is currently causing the sixth great extinction of species on this planet. Homo sapiens is currently about half way through burning up the legacy of fossil fuels on this planet, and determined to burn the second half in a much shorter time than the few hundred years for the first half. Homo sapiens is currently contaminating the entire planet with very persistent toxins, to the point where we are even looking deep under the surface to dump our waste. And Homo sapiens (which John Gray has also called homo rapiens) is determined to maintain political and economic structures which perpetuate these atrocities.
And through all this, over a billion people still live in abject poverty, functional illiteracy rates run at thirty or forty percent in so-called “developed” countries, ordinary people in those countries suffer the consequences of “corrections” in markets and housing prices, and global conflicts over ideology and resources escalate.
When we talk about health, it appears as though we are more concerned with the “health” of the economy, than the health of the planet and the average person on it, especially now that trickle down economics has clearly shown itself to be nothing other than a way of perpetuating a system to reward the wealthy and maintain the status quo.
Indeed, we are at a point where a “healthy” economy is in direct conflict with a healthy planet, and with the continued existence of our civilization.
So, whatever prosperity some of us may be enjoying at present comes at the direct cost of impoverishing our children, and theirs.
Wishing this to continue is pure, simple, and shortsighted greed.
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