Our mortality is the thing we understand from the time we become aware. We will all die. This is our underlying strength and overriding weakness.
Man’s design flaw was built in. You and I cannot be sustained forever. Is this why we have designed all other things to follow the same principle? Designed for Demise. Take care of today, tomorrow will look after itself.
If we accept this, maybe the concept of sustainability, of an infinite future, could not have been built into our endeavours, as we planned that future with our demise as the inevitable outcome. As we know we will certainly die, have we designed all other systems to follow us in the developed civilized world? Have we in effect designed end of life into all our activities?
The financial crisis has happened before, as it is happening now. It repeats a pattern and is a simple example of how we illogically sleepwalk down a well trodden road to nowhere. Man has evolved into an invasive species that unlike all others that survive on available and sustainable resources, cohabitating in balance with others, we consume out of balance with the laws of nature. We change the natural environment to suit, not just our needs; but our wants. We consume. We consume out of balance to the point of extinction not only of all other ecosystems on which we also depend on for our own survival, but soon to the tipping point where it will be written ‘The Rise and Fall of Man’.
The model of developed and developing economic industry has a single and simple flaw. It was designed by man and designed for demise.
From the time in history when we changed from hunters and gatherers, we have designed out sustainability. We have discarded any guidance that was provided by nature, which is the model of sustainability, in favour of a redesigned manmade finite future. The demise design selected wasn’t planned by our ancestors with malice but we continue to follow it illogically and at our ultimate peril.
All species of plants and animals adjust to their natural environment, living in a sustainable way on available natural and renewable resources; if they don’t, they perish. If they are invasive and consume more than the natural environment can continue to provide, they are doomed.
We tell our children to share but we show them how not to. Finite resources means going, going, gone. But every industrialized process, every commercial practice, every economic activity, every consumption pattern, revolves around the depletion of finite resources until they are going, going, gone. From the time of the first unnatural activity design, we have continued to build on what is a basically flawed process. Even though we can look back and see the outcome for past civilizations whose over consumption of resources caused their ultimate extinction, we choose the same outcome. Our activities are not designed according to the laws and guidance of nature. Each of the cups, whatever the resource, if finite, will run out—built in inevitability.
Had we started the process of man’s endeavour without knowledge of our own mortality, we may have emulated the natural system. Any future that has a sustainable future, not a finite one, needs to start with a complete redesign. We are good at looking back, not forward. We react to issues, not to seeing them coming. It’s not our fault, just our training. Live for today, tomorrow never comes. Don’t worry about it, it may never happen.
But we do have the advantage of 20/20 hindsight on this. We can historically see where civilizations went wrong. We can now see a future, which unless we actually want one that is finite, we must change. It is still our choice!
As I look around me, and you can do the same, everything I have has come from our collective finite resources. It’s nearly all extracted, milled, mined, distilled and depleted from fossil and finite resources, unsustainable and designed for demise.
When we ask ourselves honestly and logically the following questions will our decision with 20/20 foresight be to continue with the growth machine until our demise?
The business, economic model of ever increased return on investment, indefinitely. Designed for infinite sustainability?
The developed and developing country’s drive for sustainable increases in GDP, exports, prosperity, and job growth. Designed for infinite sustainability, or designed for demise?
The democratic process for the short-term election of our political leaders and decision makers. - Designed for sustainability of sound policy?
Manufacturing until we run out of resources. - Designed for infinite sustainability?
Mining and extractive resource depletion?
Extraction and burning of fossil reserves?
Agriculture for an ever increasing global population. - Designed for infinite sustainability?
Plant geneticists genetically modifying seeds for crops that will not produce viable seed for future crop plantings. Not only unconscionable but deliberately designed for demise?
Water resource depletion of fossil aquifers for current and increasing consumption. -Designed for infinite sustainability?
Clearing of rainforests—Designed for infinite sustainability, or demise?
Polluting our waterways and oceans with industrial activities?
Polluting the air we breathe?
Raising the levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases—Designed for infinite sustainability, or designed for demise?
Our answer must logically be that we are on a freefall to the unknown and the ground is rushing up to meet us. Like all freefall, we are accelerating as we descend.
We are not in for a soft landing that we can walk away from; we indeed may arrive at terminal velocity. Our design for demise model needs a reinvention of self. Emulation of the natural system must be our guide on the road of our collective futures.
Future generations will not have the resources on which we have built the industrial and economic model of the developed and developing nations. They will need to survive without them and adapt their lives to survive. They will need to develop infinite and sustainable systems. They will have no other choice. If they do not adapt they will perish. I have confidence that they, with survival of the species of man at stake, will find new ways of living within the boundaries of the natural system, taking no more than can be provided with infinite sustainability. It will be the world we have left them and the only one available.
It cannot be a system designed for demise.
We can look back with 20/20 hindsight of which it is said we can be wise. We can look forward with 20/20 foresight to the destination at the end of the road we are on, will we be wise?
We would be so much kinder to "do it now", as the old Canadian Tire ads used to say. Year after year the mass of people keep rejecting any real change that might help the cause for a future with humans, AND EVERY SINGLE TIME IT IS THE WORRY FOR THE WALLET!! I see it daily in the regular news paper. We managed to ban residential lawn chemicals here in Toronto. There was no celebration, there was a big fuss so golf clubs are exempt. Who would be the heaviest users? I ask. Such a small change, lordy!, we do seem bound, bent on and determined to go straight to hell before we parish. Ha, so, for as long as the world exists, there will probably be life on it, it just won't be us. As I wittness our apathy as a whole, I can only consider the words I raised my children by: "All actions have consequences, good or bad. Think!"
Very well written. Sometime in the 1940s/50s, our capitalist paradigm changed. We went from a productive (although not exactly green) society wherein most things were built to last and well-designed to a new marketing and business trend of building things to "junk."
Our mindsets followed suit and now, as Americans (and westerners in general), we are into consumerism rather than ownership. That big difference means that we no longer think of commodities as things we own, but just as things we use.
Witness the tool shed of the average middle-class American home: a lawnmower that's replaced every three to five years, garden tools that get replaced every couple of years, cheaply-made hand tools for working on vehicles and such, etc.
Our vehicles are good for 3-5 years before trade in. Our cell phones are good for six months or so. Our computers are good for perhaps a year. Our shoes are worn for six months or so...
All of this gets thrown away and we buy new versions.
This is, in my mind, the greatest thing ruining us as a people. Humans rarely see items as anything but disposable and we rarely know where they come from or even how they're made. Let alone who made them.
This consumerism is our #1 enemy and it will be our downfall and possibly the downfall of the planet. Though I'd be willing to bet that once we've finished ourselves off, Earth will eventually restore itself with time. We think in terms of 50 years of so. Earth thinks in millennia.