There's this basic assumption that the current level of our basic needs and creature comforts cannot be replicated with alternate paradigms. Some of the way we do things now are ineffective or even, inefficient.

Let's take clean drinking water and sanitation. We have buildings and machines that take river water and aquifer water and purify the water to drinking level standards. We then pipe them (and sometimes those pipes have toxic buildups), introduce chlorine to help maintain its safety when delivering water.

But then we use that drinking-level standard water to (1) water our landscape and (2) flush the toilet.

That's kinda like that use of a microchip capable of running Doom to read the a paper strip on a preganancy test. (It made its round on twitter last couple of days).

To look at it a bigger picture and more abstractly, we're cleaning our human wastes using the hydrological cycle rather than the carbon cycle.

There's a community outside of Taos, NM that experiments with what are called earthship designs. (There are actual people living for years inside these earthships). These earthships are designed so that waste water cycles through the system three times before feeding a leach field, using landscaping plants to clean the waste (carbon cycle). By that I mean, clean water for drinking and washing gets reused as grey water, cleaned by plants, and then reused as toilet flushing water.

That integrated greenhouse is also a part of a passive heating and cooling system that keeps the inner environment a comfortable 70 - 80 degrees, with vents that can adjust the temperature. It maintains that temperature range in a high desert. In addition to temperature regulation, greenhouse provides supplemental food, part of the water purifications system.

That covers sanitation, adjusting climate, and some answer to a more secure food supply. I can deep dive what it means to have a distributed, decentralized food supply (in which compared to our centralized food supply that is fragile, ecologically disasterous, and not really nutritious for humans).

Our medical system is very good at treating acute problems, but very poor at treating chronic issues. It is generally not holistic, and there are blinders in the paradigms that prevent researchers from looking into effective treatments. Furthermore, in the US, medical care is in a runaway feedback loop between insurers and providers, significantly increasing costs for everyone. (Except say, the Amish. They get significant discounts from the hospitals because they always pay a large upfront deposite in cash before service, pay their bills, and have a religious sanction against suing the hospital and doctors). I can also deep dive on this, though the solutions here are murkier than what I can say about decentralized food systems.

But the main thing is: sustainability is _not_ enough. That is essentially saying, "do less harm". Baked into that paradigm is that the harm from our current practices is inevitable, so we should strive to do the least amount of harm with that inevitability.

Instead, we should be looking at regenerative practices, and one that is not anthropocentric. It requires a different way of seeing. We don't have to "regress". We can do a lot better.