Good reasons for not wanting to be sustainable

Economic activity requires natural resources inputs. We are currently using those natural resources inputs faster than we can replenish them and we are using them faster and faster every year. We are also cutting up and wearing out the natural ecosystems that provide clean air, clean water and other irreplaceable services, faster and faster every year. We are getting less and less sustainable every year. If we continue to do this, we will have a weaker economy and lousier lives than we have now.

The problem is we believe that since everything is good now (in the rich countries), it will always be good and if pressed, we say that new technologies will save us. There is no real concern that living unsustainably is something that we should really take any action to correct.

Sooner or later we have to live sustainably. If it is sooner, we can have a smooth transition and civilisation can continue to progress. If it is later, we will have a bumpy (and probably violent) road to learning that the earth’s resources are finite.

For a long time I have believed that not only is it obvious that being sustainable has to be done sooner or later but it’s also a noble, perhaps even heroic, thing to do. Take this moment in history to make the unprecedented changes needed to prepare society for a different kind of future. Leave the natural world in good condition for future generations. Wow! We’d be heroes to our children.

It’s not obvious, though, and not many people think it is noble, heroic or even very interesting.

After years of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why nobody wants to be sustainable, it occurred to me that people can’t be that stupid. There must be good reasons for not wanting to be sustainable. I’ve concluded that there are a string of reasons that are all related to our basic instincts as human beings. From our biological programming in the first million years of our species existence, to the things we learned as children.

Biological programming

Fight or flight

Our species would never have survived if we hadn’t learned to either fight better than our enemies (and predators) or run and hide better than our enemies. These are immediate responses to danger and they are hardwired into our brains. When you feel danger, adrenaline pumps through your body and you can fight, run or slam on the brakes, better.

An excellent example of the fact that modern intelligent people still follow fight or flight instincts, can be found in the On Line Opinion comments on contentious articles that usually degenerate into name-calling rather than detailed debate about the issues.

Nobody gets a rush of adrenaline when they hear the dangerous phrase “Cheap oil will probably be gone in 20 or 30 years”, or “The earth doesn’t have enough water or farmland to feed 9 billion people on a first world diet”. Boring.

Sustainability is complicated. Sustainability is multi-faceted. Being unsustainable is going to affect us and our children in the long term. Nobody can get excited about that. It’s boring. It’s your mum telling you to clean up your room and do your homework. It’s your dad telling you to check the oil in your car. OK, OK, but I’m watching TV now.

And even worse, sustainability requires co-ordinated action all around the world. We want to kill a lion or run away from a bear. We don’t want to be part of a co-ordinated effort all around the world to become sustainable. Too complicated.

Early in our existence we learned that the tribe or the pack could help protect us. If one lion came around, ten of us could take him. If we were alone it was much more difficult.

Past a certain point, the higher the population, the harder it is to be sustainable. Many politicians and other commentators say that the world is overpopulated, and that Australia should continue with high immigration levels. They see no contradiction in saying that the rest of the world should reduce its population, but Australia should increase its population. We need to protect the tribe. Australia needs more people to be more significant and more robust. We need to increase and strengthen our tribe. We even like to get the best people from other tribes and encourage them to join our tribe. If that weakens the other tribe, then all the better.

Humans survived for a million years by conquering the environment, not by living in harmony with the environment. If an animal needed to be killed, we killed it. If a tree needed to be chopped down, we chopped it. We didn’t do environmental impact statements. We conquered.

Another reason we don’t like sustainability is the negativity of it.

Australians and Americans are the rootin’ tootin’ cowboys of the world. We don’t act sustainably. We don’t live in harmony with nature. We kick nature’s ass. Even though America is the most obese country in the world and Australia is one of the most urban countries in the world, we still see ourselves as Hugh Jackman, sitting on a horse, looking over the horizon and conquering all we see. Being sustainable is what the the wimpy Europeans do. That’s not for us.

Lessons learned as a child

Everything is great and always will be

Anybody born after World War II has only experienced good times. With the exception of some “business cycle” downturns we have been getting richer and richer every year. I stress that I am only referring to the rich world. In half the world, day-to-day life is still a challenge.

As a kid growing up, we saw our parents buying better stuff all the time. We heard our grandad say “When I was a boy we didn’t have fancy colour TVs and air conditioners”. Now we say to our kids, “When I was a boy we didn’t have mobile phones and the Internet.” The message is clear. Things are getting better. They always have and they always will.

The everything-is-great idea is the theme of Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist and several articles in On Line Opinion in opposition to any measures to be more sustainable and who can blame them. Why rock the boat when it is clear sailing? We’ve heard the doom and gloom before, and it never happened.

A partner to everything-is-great is “change is difficult”. Staying on the same path is easy and doesn’t cause any problems. We know just what to expect, so we don’t have to worry. Things need to change to be more sustainable. That’s got to be trouble.

Get money and use it wisely

One of the earliest lessons that most of us learn, is that dad (and often mum) have to go to work and the reason they have to go to work, is to get money. Most of our lives revolve around going to work and getting money. Once we’ve got the money, we learn that we better not waste it. We need to know the price of the things that we are going to buy, because mum and dad had to work hard for that money.

So what’s that got to do with sustainability? First, since we focus so much on things that cost money, we tend to ignore things that are free or very low cost, even if they are tremendously valuable. Things like clean air and clean water, the ozone layer, and a comfortable climate are very valuable to us, but since we don’t have to do any work to get them, we don’t give them any value. Why be sustainable if it means going to a lot of trouble to protect the things that are already free?

Second, the prices that drive our free market society, and make it so efficient in allocating goods and services are the result of the interaction between supply and demand. The demand, though, is set in today’s market place where the only bidders are people who have money today. Future generations can’t bid in the free market, so they don’t increase the demand and the price stays low. If the price were higher we might conserve resources, but the price is low, so we don’t conserve. We use everything now and we know we are right, because we learned a long time ago that the price is the only guide we need.

Third, prices are so convenient. We know exactly how much a litre of petrol costs and how much a cheeseburger costs, so we can plan our lives accordingly. We don’t know how much clean air and clean water for the next generation costs, so how can we make our decisions? This sustainability stuff just can’t be trusted.

Bigger is better

As kids we learned that big people (adults) are in charge. Big kids ruled the playground. Somebody who has a big house and a big car is successful. In all things, bigger is better.

Population growth advocates argue that Australia would be a better country with a higher population. We know per capita income drops slightly with a higher population and the environment is worse off, but that doesn’t matter as much as being a bigger country, because bigger is better.

Countries with big populations, are the important countries. It doesn’t matter that people are rich and happy in Luxembourg, it is a small country, so it’s a loser country. It doesn’t matter that millions of people in India and China live in horrible poverty with few rights. India and China are big, important countries. Proponents of sustainability say that increasing the population makes it harder to be sustainable, so they are dooming us to be a loser country. That means proponents of sustainability are losers.

Get money plus bigger is better

The more we consume the happier we are. The more stuff and the bigger the stuff we have, the happier we are. Advocates of sustainability want us to recycle and conserve energy and lots of other stuff that isn’t as much fun as spending money on big new stuff. That means they don’t want us to be happy, so sustainability must be a bad idea.

Lessons not learned as a child

Long term thinking

When you are five, you think long term is next week. When you are in high school you think long term is next year. Young people aren’t thinking 20 and 30 years in the future, even thought that is when they will be running the world and the choices that we make today will make it either easier or harder to run the world in 30 years. Most of the people interested in sustainability are old. Who cares what they think, they will be dead when all this stuff they are talking about happens anyway. Sustainability must not be very important. If it was, young people would be interested in it.

With all these natural factors working against sustainability, it is no wonder that there is no push to be sustainable.

In fact, though, there may be some changes coming soon that start us doing more about sustainability. More about that next time.

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