Good reasons to hope we can become sustainable

In my previous article in On Line Opinion (“Good reasons for not wanting to be sustainable”) I identified factors deeply rooted in the brains of most Australians (and most of the rich world) that keep us from wanting to act sustainably. I divided these into two categories:

1. the factors biologically implanted in our brains through a million years of survival and evolution; and
2. the lessons we learned as children growing up.

Although it might seem that these factors make ever being sustainable impossible, we have already seen some hopeful shifts and perhaps some of these trends will continue.

Biological programming

Fight or flight

A safer world has turned down our urgency for fight and flight. As living standards improve, more people become secure and educated. That means more people will be able to think about the future, rather than just scrambling to put food on the table each day. Sustainability is complicated, but as education becomes more widespread around the world, there will be a greater understanding of environmental issues. This could lead to a better understanding of the need for sustainability.

Protect the tribe

Never in history has it been easier to get information than it is today, and information technology is still improving. As we learn more about our world and its people, we realise that our tribe isn’t as narrow as it was when we lived in caves. More and more people are seeing their tribe as all of humanity. As this trend continues there will be less concern about small local tribes and more about our big tribe of all humans.

Conquer the environment

When today’s business and political leaders were growing up, there was a very limited environmental movement and certainly no environmental education in school. Today’s leaders didn’t grow up with the idea that protection of the natural environment needs to be considered in all the decisions about how we shape our world. The only consideration was, what is going to make us richer?

Since the mid 80s and accelerating in the 90s, environmental education has become an integral part of the primary and high school curriculum in most countries. Environmental issues like global warming, recycling and water shortages are in the news almost every day. The next generation of prime ministers and CEOs will have grown up knowing that protecting the environment is just as important as protecting the economy, democracy and the justice system. Understanding the importance of protecting our environment is the big step. The next step to sustainability is much smaller.

Lessons learned as a child

Everything is great and always will be

The notion that everything is great, is relative to what we expect and what we expect is based on what we are used to. We are used to things getting better and we expect things to get better. If things change gradually, we hardly notice. We might think traffic wasn’t this bad 20 years ago, but there was some bad traffic 20 years ago and our memories aren’t that specific anyway. When some greenies say that life expectancy is now dropping in Africa or fish stocks have been significantly depleted, it’s all just statistics. It doesn’t really have an impact.

As the changes occur more and more quickly, people are likely to notice that things aren’t always getting better and better. Most people remember when we didn’t need desalinisation plants and there were no water restrictions. Most people remember when petrol was 75 cents a litre. When people notice that things aren’t always getting better, they may look for reasons and they may start thinking more about the futility of trying to always pull more and more resources out of a finite earth.

The second hope for understanding that things aren’t always getting better is with the advancements in communications. We now see poverty in poor countries. We see the food riots in Mexico and Haiti. We see the refugee camps in Darfur. We don’t just read about it. We see the starving children and the violence.

Get money and use it wisely

Money rules our lives and prices are the landmarks that we use to travel through life. One of the strongest arguments against being sustainable is that things are always getting better and if things are getting better, why change. It follows then that if things are always getting better that means things must be getting cheaper. Economist Julian Simon famously won a bet with sustainability advocate Paul Ehrlich in 1980 that commodity prices would fall by 1990. If they had bet ten years ago (Simon died in 1996), Simon would have lost.

The last 10 years commodity prices have increased substantially. Coal is up more than 100 per cent. Oil is up 200 per cent. Iron ore is up more than 200 per cent. Wheat, corn and rice are all up more than 60 per cent. Median wages are up 40 per cent, so maybe that’s OK.

I believe there is logic in the Peak Oil theory, but I also believe that nobody is going to care about peak oil until the oil price goes up and stays up. We might be seeing the start of that now. There is no better proof that the earth’s resources are finite than rising prices. Endless growth economists have said for years that the ingenuity of the human mind would develop technologies to replace any resource that started to run out. They’ve also said we just need to let the free market be free, because rising prices provided incentives for new technologies.

If prices stay high with no new technologies coming along to bring them down, we probably won’t need any esoteric arguments about ecosystem destruction, water shortages, non-renewable energy and the logic of cramming as many people as possible, onto a finite earth. The high prices will make an argument that is much clearer.

Bigger is better

The age of electronics has made us hesitate when thinking bigger is always better. Everybody wants smaller phones and smaller computers. We are starting to see that things can be smaller and better.

Lessons not learned as a child

Long term thinking

Long term thinking has recently made the headlines with the changes to superannuation in the Federal Budget. With the discussion of intergenerational equity in paying for super and years like 2023 and 2047 being thrown around, the ice has been broken on talking about what the world will look like in 2023 and 2047. The more we think about 2023 and 2047, the more we will think that we need to live sustainably or we won’t have much of a world to spend our superannuation in.

Of course the trillion dollar question is: how long will all this take?

I don’t know.

I do know, though, that every effort that we make to understand each other better and understand the natural environment better, gets us closer to being sustainable.

Rethinking all the deep seated ideas that we were born with and learned as kids, won’t be easy, but it is our time in history to do the difficult things that are necessary for civilisation to progress.

Stop Climate Change Today (sponsored link).