If you think for a moment about anything that you want to endure -- a family, a life, a career, a species, a planet -- the key feature is that "it" must be sustainable.
At a holiday party this weekend several of us got to talking about eating too much. We'll try to eat less in the new year, and lose weight. Isn't it a shame that we crave food that makes us fat? we lamented.
Well, for several hundred thousand years, human beings have struggled to get enough to eat. Our "tastes" evolved to achieve sustainability in an environment of scarcity.
Last month, my daughter's third grade curriculum had a brief unit asking the students to compare the lives of the Pilgrim's at the first "Thanksgiving" with our lives. What I came away impressed with was that for almost all peoples in temperate climates, harvest time is not a time for gluttony. It is a time to complete the careful, prayerful storing away of food for the long winter. When the snow melts, it is not harvest time again -- it is months before there are crops to harvest. Putting food away, saving, conserving were, for all the generations of humanity but the last, the foundation of survival -- sustainability.
Contemporary society lives in the oblivion of wealth. Historically the"people" distrusted the wealthy who were wastrels. The wealthy who were rulers who did not make sustainability the hallmark of their reign destroyed their realms and are regarded by history as fools, e.g. the Bourbon kings of France.
The challenge of the 21st century will be to reorient our mores and social structures toward sustainability. Can a species as intelligent as ours continue to live in a social structure -- religion, morality, government, economics, habits, social life -- that is inimical to its survival?
What happened in the 1950s, 60s and 70s in America that the value of saving and conserving that was shaping pattern of adults shaped in the Great Depression was lost?
Families must begin saving for sustainability, eating for sustainability, using fuel for sustainability.
We have been blinded by the success of the Market. We assume that if we can afford it -- the food, the gas, the car, the energy wasting house and lifestyle --the expenditure is okay because it is "blessed" by the Market.
Is the Market ever wrong? Of course. Who triumphs in the Market? Everybody? Of course not. The Market can seduce you, can't it?
In what ways can our market-worshipping culture be re-educated about how the market values sustainability?
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