Sustainability and what it means to us
- Randi Pokladnik
- July 14, 2018
- 1126
If you have taken a biology class or a statistics class, you might remember the graph showing exponential growth. In the natural world, when a population has access to unlimited resources, it keeps growing and growing. Eventually something happens and the population hits the carrying capacity, the maximum amount of individuals that the ecosystem can support.
Most ecologists today will tell you the human population has reached the earth’s carrying capacity. If the 7.6 billion people living on our planet today all wanted a lifestyle similar to the USA’s, we would need an amount of natural resources equivalent to those found on two and a half earths.
Obviously we only have one planet, so the question remains: Can we learn to live sustainably on this planet or will we degrade our ecosystems to the point of no return?
Every single environmental issue that I have written about over the past four years is directly tied to our inability to live within the carrying capacity of this planet, whether the problem is a lack of clean water, a lack of clean air, a lack of safe food or a lack of adequate energy supplies. As the population grows, the situation worsens.
People all over the world struggle every day to live in environments where the air, water and land is not polluted. Environmental degradation is creating huge populations of refugees as people move from one region to another in search of a healthy environment.
Some estimates say that by 2020 there will be 50 million environmental refugees, and many will be fleeing their homes because of climate changes.
“Climate change is the unpredictable ingredient that, when added to existing social, economic and political tensions, has the potential to ignite violence and conflict with disastrous consequences,” Environmental Justice Foundation executive director Steve Trent said.
Economic growth often fosters the destruction of ecosystems. Regardless of the consequences, as the stock market grows, the natural world and the poor suffer the externalities. Even in rich countries like the U.S., we have vulnerable populations that have become refugees due to environmental disasters.
Our social, economic and political systems need to be restructured into sustainable systems. When it comes to sustainable living, we can take a lesson from Mother Nature.
Sustainability, simply put, is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
There are three main principles of sustainability: life depends on solar energy, biodiversity provides natural services, and there must be chemical and nutrient recycling to prevent waste in nature.
Our lifestyles require energy every day, and a quick comparison of the energy use of various countries shows that the USA eats the largest piece of the global energy pie, and most of that quantity is fossil fuel energy.
China used almost as much energy (renewable and nonrenewable) as the U.S. However, China also is one of the largest investors in renewable energy, and unlike the U.S., which has crippled solar and wind energy development with myriad new regulations, China is helping finance its solar sector.
China’s investment in renewable energy ($126.6 billion) rose 30 percent in 2017 and was more than three times that of the U.S., whose investment in the sector dropped 6 percent from 2016-17 to $40.5 billion.
Many countries such as Iceland and Costa Rica have committed to go 100 percent renewable energy by 2020, but we continue to subsidize the fossil fuel industry and punish renewable energy.
A second principle of sustainability is that biodiversity provides natural capital and services. But how does one assign a monetary value to an individual species or a natural service like a watershed?
“The value of ecosystem services typically goes unaccounted for in business and policy decisions and in market prices. For commercial purposes, if ecosystem services are recognized at all, they are perceived as free goods, like clean air and water.”
Norway is paying Indonesian countries to curtail logging and keep their forests intact because of the carbon sequestration they provide.
It is past time for the U.S. economic system to incorporate the value of these goods and services in their economic system. If our water becomes too polluted to drink, you can be sure private, for-profit companies will be more than happy to sell it to us.
The third principle of sustainability is the recycling of all chemical and biological substances. We are the one species on the planet that leaves behind enormous quantities of unrecyclable materials, even after we die.
Simply put: Humanity is living unsustainably.
Some steps that we can take are:
—We need to include the harmful costs of goods and services into their prices. Those fast foods will no longer be cheap if we’d do this.
—We need to shift from subsidizing environmentally harmful practices and materials, like fossil fuels and plastics, to subsidizing environmentally better choices like green energy and hemp.
—We need a carbon tax to encourage people to cut back on fuel use and a waste tax to encourage recycling.
Our worldview of nature needs to change. We need to stop believing we can manage nature and start realizing we are a part of nature and dependent upon it. We are not the only species on this planet, and nature does not exist for our sole use only. We need to recognize the rights of the natural world.