Sustainability

The question of whether we will be sustained is not dependent on our definition of this word.

Or is it?

I want to understand sustainability and...

I have a hunch that the way we are using the word is not sustainable. It's become fluffy. What are the things we are trying to fluff up, can we be honest about them? Do you associate the word sustainability with the colour green? If so, why and when did this happen? What does 'green' mean or does the green just lead you back to 'sustainability'?

While we play our little word games, things are happening that are likely to have an influence on whether (take your pick) will be sustained or not.

Without uttering a single word, the push, pull, matter, and sparks we are entangled in might ask:

‘Are you sustainable?'

'No?'

'Ok, bye.’

There will be no more debating. Peaceful.

When we gather to make decisions about what a word such as 'sustainability' means, but leave our humanity, our humanness at the door, we create empty words that lead to empty debates - emptiness that fills emptiness. Fluff.

Sustainability as a noun is simply the 'ability to be sustained'. It's not fluffy and leads us straight to the question 'Can this be sustained?'. This simple question did not satisfy though. We had other ideas about the role sustainability might play in our lives. This Wikipedia article prepares us for how nothing is clear when we talk about sustainability by stating from the get-go that, 'Specific definitions of this term are difficult to agree on. They have varied with literature, context, and time.'

Note that other nouns formed in a similar way haven't caused such a stir. 'Traceability', the ability to be traced, seems to work just fine for us, no disclaimer required. Context influences meaning, but where does this meaning exist? Ultimately, within each of us. We get to make meaning, and using language, in turn, get to shape our world.

So, what does sustainability mean to you? Join the debate, it's ongoing. If sustainability is, as the Cambridge Dictionary suggests, 'the quality of being able to continue over a period of time', what do you currently want to keep doing? Is that possible taking into account life's very real limits?

We already have plenty of definitions directly linked to economic processes, and not having these processes exhaust the resources of the ecosystem we’re part of (important note: were part of even before we built any kind of economy!).

Search results lead to topics such as green energy and zero-plastic movements but if we zoom out and leave Google and our dictionaries behind for a minute, we (hopefully) remember that we form part of an ancient ecosystem where everything is ultimately connected. Sustainability is already built into this very system to a large extent.

The system follows certain rules and has the ability to maintain or support an unimaginable amount of different processes over time. It is constantly learning how to sustain itself and if we don’t want to take the course that is being offered we will get suspended from the program altogether. It’s a practical program. Any processes we create will either be sustained by the overall rules and balances that apply in the system, or not.

Processes that cannot be sustained within the larger system come to an end, which is exactly why humans are in danger of extinction. We have not been paying attention to how the system works for way too long. We seem to think that we can just build our own little system within the system and that by some reverse logic, our rules would suddenly apply to the larger system, not the other way around.

Based on this error in our thinking, when we do talk about sustainability, we mostly are referring to a little corner of our human experience where, with concern and urgency, we now want to slightly change the rules, hoping that this will appease the system’s balance. I would actually argue that we have gotten ourselves so boxed in that at times we really believe we can market sustainability to the ecosystem that birthed us and will one day take us back again. We seem to believe it cares about buzzwords.

You cannot create isolated little boxes within a fully interconnected system unless you are doing a little controlled science experiment. That's not what this is. We are talking about life - our lives, other species' lives, aliveness. It is not at all controlled. And to call it an experiment given the aforementioned, well that is really what we need to decide - are we ok with getting behind that?

For humans, there is no source of sustenance if not the Earth. So, if we say that sustainability is the ability to support a process over time, and we are focussing on economic processes mainly, then we are literally taking the sustenance out of the definition of sustainability. We think we are sustaining ourselves, but we are doing the opposite because we have forgotten who we are, where we come from, and how we function.

There is no sustainability outside of the ecosystem that already knows how to sustain itself. Always knew. Always will know. We don’t get to opt out. If we are going to spend (precious) energy talking about sustainability this, sustainability that, I would really prefer to have us do it properly and opt in. How?

By opting into our humanity.

Opting into our own nature equals opting into sustainability (not perfection…that’s something different entirely). For ourselves, we are a portal so to say, to getting in line with the system, because we were built by it. That doesn’t mean that we are somehow more special or have some unique or superior role to play versus other parts or participants in the system.

The main reason it would be wise to start with us is because that is the vantage point we have. We live, view and experience the world as humans. Not accepting this vantage point means we have a warped view and everything else we do from there is laced with denial. Bypassing ourselves, we are bypassing what is. In other words, more of what we're already doing.

This post is about sustainability, but digging into what it means to be human, I vote, is generally underexplored and a bit of a blind spot. In the past we have left it to philosophers to grapple with this 'big question', but not grappling with it just leaves us in the dark. I'm sure there will be more posts on what I mean, but the relationship we have with our own bodies for one, says a lot about how we have not fully embraced being human beings. We seem to simultaneously inflate and underappreciate our role, craft tales, and debate about definitions but struggle to do just that - be human.

So what if our definition of sustainability went more like this:

Sustainability: the recognition that we are human

We need a definition, that is grounded in who and what we are, and what we can do as humans, and what we cannot. If we pretend human is a verb, we need to learn to sustainably 'human' first and foremost.

Instead of grasping for far-removed concepts, we can simply return to our initial question of 'Can this be sustained?'. We can ask this about any of our strange human habits - eating, sleeping, moving, and our relationships to name a few. And we can ask it about our habitats.

From there on, we can apply the question to anything we want, but what we cannot do is lose sight of the fact that we are human. Grappling with terms without grappling with our embodied reality, might cover some of our anxiety in the short-term, but we cannot define ourselves into a sustainable present or future. The recognition that we are human includes the recognition, by choice or fact, that we do not have the last word on this matter.