How to Think About Sustainability
By: Alex Van Domburg
Tags: Climate Change, Psychology, Sustainability, Systems Thinking, Life

Sustainability can be vague and conflicting.

That doesn’t stop people from mentioning it virtually everywhere nowadays. They use it when they talk about climate change and environmental pollution. It’s a good thing that pressing issues like these are finally getting some attention. But too often, the frames they use distract you from exploring actual sustainability, resulting merely in greenwashed marketing.

To grasp what sustainability is, you need to think bigger.

The Systems of Life

Sustainability refers to the capacity of life to exist constantly.

What makes this concept complex is that all of life’s actions are unsustainable when you isolate them. You have to look at the bigger picture and inspect the connections in the system to see how sustainability emerges.

The Earth’s ecological systems are made up of groups of organisms that both consume and produce materials. One organism’s material production (i.e. waste) is consumed by another one or stored in a buffer. Chains of production and consumption then form a web of feedback loops that, supplied with energy from the sun, can run almost indefinitely.

Life thrives when environmental conditions are within certain bounds, a so-called sweet spot. But external forces, disturbances, and evolution can introduce imbalances.

In general, ecological systems can adapt and stabilise using the diversity of feedback loops that exists. This, however, doesn’t mean that everything will survive. Groups of organisms might die off so that others can rise and the systems are sustained.

If Earth’s systems fail to adapt to new imbalances, we stray away from the sweet spot of life and large scale destruction will follow.

The Symptoms of Our Unsustainability

Even though it probably wasn’t all too conscious, for most of history we have been living in touch with our environment. It was both a blessing and a curse to be at the mercy of the forces around us.

Craving for more certainty and stability, we took matters into our own hands. We used our ingenuity to bend the rules of our environment to our own will. We disrupted the systems we live in to improve our success.

We think we mostly act in our own best interests. But for the most part, we struggle to comprehend what the consequences are in the long term. Or even if we get that, we fail to act on this knowledge.

The consequences of our unsustainable behaviour are becoming more apparent than ever. We see that the needs and desires of a minority oppress the needs of the majority.

On the ecological level, we humans are this minority. This is resulting in climate change, environmental degradation, material resource depletion, and biodiversity loss that could end in mass extinction.

On the societal level, power imbalances exist where an elite undermines the needs of the majority of people. These imbalances have led to social inequalities in a variety of dimensions, including wealth, wellbeing, human rights, geopolitics, and knowledge.

Why do we endure the imbalances that torment us? Because we believe in them.

Yuval Noah Harari discusses this in Homo Deus:

Most human kingdoms and empires were extremely unequal, yet many of them were surprisingly stable and efficient. […] Threats and promises [that rulers employ] often succeed in creating stable human hierarchies and mass cooperation networks, as long as people believe that they reflect the inevitable laws of nature or the divine commands of God, rather than just human whims. All large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity.

Out of our own imagined powerlessness to the social order, we accept the rules and laws of our religions.

Modern religions, that focus instead on “our superiority”, can be even more toxic. Harari continues:

The founding idea of humanist religions such as liberalism, communism and Nazism is that Homo sapiens has some unique and sacred essence that is the source of all meaning and authority in the universe. Everything that happens in the cosmos is judged to be good or bad according to its impact on Homo sapiens.

We’ve inherited stories and imagined orders that make us believe we are either powerless or rulers of the planet. But as we finally begin to understand the consequences of these ideas, our beliefs start to crumble.

The Challenges on Our Quest for Balance

The stories we write should send us on a quest to a new sweet spot, where humanity and the natural systems we depend on can once again flourish.

This quest isn’t without challenges. Most importantly, we have to figure out:

What we actually need to live fulfilling lives . Life is more than just survival. At least, that is what we believe. Society has sold us a dream of wealth and status. But that won’t bring the fulfillment we long for. It’s best to recognise it sooner rather than later. We should instead identify what is really valuable in life, and create meaning and collective purpose from that.

. Life is more than just survival. At least, that is what we believe. Society has sold us a dream of wealth and status. But that won’t bring the fulfillment we long for. It’s best to recognise it sooner rather than later. We should instead identify what is really valuable in life, and create meaning and collective purpose from that. What our environment needs to thrive . We depend on what our environment produces. We should value it accordingly, and thus we have to create the conditions where it can thrive as well.

. We depend on what our environment produces. We should value it accordingly, and thus we have to create the conditions where it can thrive as well. How to handle conflicting needs. We face various imbalances that can conflict with each other and must be compromised effectively. One of the biggest is the conflict between the societal development of large parts of the world and the global climate crisis. We want to improve the lives of all humans but we cannot afford for these countries to walk the same path of fossil reliance. It is the responsibility of developed countries to step up, reduce their own footprints, and support sustainable development for others. Only then can we limit the intermediate stages of fossil dependency.

We face various imbalances that can conflict with each other and must be compromised effectively. One of the biggest is the conflict between the societal development of large parts of the world and the global climate crisis. We want to improve the lives of all humans but we cannot afford for these countries to walk the same path of fossil reliance. It is the responsibility of developed countries to step up, reduce their own footprints, and support sustainable development for others. Only then can we limit the intermediate stages of fossil dependency. How to consider future needs. Even though humans surpass every other species in planning for the future, we still suck at it on the long term scale. Seduced by quick gratifications, short-term profits, and comfort, we often ignore the consequences. But the future is arriving. If we care anything about our future selves and all our possible descendants, we have to take responsibility for our actions and think ahead. We have to see that decisions made for the future are not costs but investments, that will pay themselves back manyfold.

These questions require our collective effort to have a chance of being answered. But that doesn’t mean you are powerless as an individual.

How to Move Forward

The road ahead is tough. Then again, overcoming adversity is what makes life worth living.

You can take off by becoming aware of our collective unsustainable behaviour. And acknowledging your own role in it. You may not have created these problems, but everyone contributes to it, including me and you.

See that your actions do have an impact. Explore what their consequences are, on you and your environment. Now and in the future. That they can harm yet also can drive change, reduce, restore, or at least prevent worse from happening.

Then, reflect on what you actually value in life and talk about it with others. One person does not have all the answers. A diversity of perspectives can contrast your own experience and show you new possibilities. You’ll find your wisdom in the collective.

Your values are best discovered by having some life experience. If you’re still young, why not get some inspiration from the experiences of others as well? Even though we have had technological progress, our biology and thus our needs haven’t changed much. So have a chat with the elders around you, read a couple of memoirs, or get inspired online.

As you find bits that resonate with you, internalise and apply them to every part of your life. Shape your life around them. Introduce them bit by bit into your work, your relationships, your pastimes, and your political engagement.

Live by example and inspire others in the process.