The Sustainability Revolution of the Twenty-First Century

The Sustainability Revolution of the Twenty-First Century

The direction the world is heading now is unsustainable. We have

explored the many facets of this unsustainability throughout our seminar.

It is real. And the essence of unsustainability, of course, is that we can

not keep it up. There will be change, and as a society, we cannot live in

denial of this fact. We must hurry up and figure out how to take control of

this change before the change happens to us.

What would happen if we let our society continue on its current

path without rethinking our values? It is very hard to conceive of our

"powerful" nation and fast-paced, glittery way of life ending. I am sure

that few Americans really can picture what would happen. It is easiest to

assume that we could remain indefinitely in this state of more or less

comfortable obliviousness. As long as we have a fresh supply of new

products around us, the instantaneous, superficial pleasures can keep us

distracted. To try to break through this lazy mindset, I considered

looking at similar situations over a larger time scale. There have been

many boom civilizations throughout human history that thought they were the

pinnacle of existence and could never be defeated. But they all ended,

sooner or later. The Greeks, the Romans, the Spanish, the British, etc.

etc. etc. (there are plenty from pre-history as well - the more we learn,

the more fallen civilizations we find). They are either taken over by

another group, are ruined by disease, or because of their inability to

change they use up or degrade the resource base that sustained them. To

look from a larger scale than just humans, the archaeological record shows

the rise and fall of many groups or species in a similar way. Earth was

once "ruled" by microscopic organisms, later by dinosaurs, then by

megafaunal mammals, and now by us (forgive the major jumps in evolution-

I'm just trying to make a point). Current trends towards globalization and

thus worldwide spread of materialism and consumption mean that we no longer

can consider our fate as an individual "civilization." We now must

realize that whatever fate befalls us, befalls humans worldwide.

Luckily, more and more people are figuring this out and getting

worried. I propose that there will be a cultural backlash against the

modern consumptive society, and that the trends will begin to reverse.

Just as each generation rebels to some extent against the previous one (and

each decade is appalled by the fashion sense of the one before), the next

generation or so will be disgusted with the overconsumption and excess of