The two biggest myths about a sustainable future

For the past fifteen years, I have worked to improve the ways our buildings improve quality of life, not just for those that use them, but for everyone whose lives are impacted by them. The past two years especially have shown me how much I did not know or understand about the ways in which we have organized ourselves as people. Even with all that I have seen people accomplish, with all the great innovation and passionate discourse, we have made little change in the path of our potential destruction. If anything, with the natural forces of population growth and economic development, we have increased the rate of our damage to the environment. Watching this happen, it has become abundantly clear that we have been misguided on two major fronts of the battle to save ourselves from ourselves.

First, it is not about human behavior

So much of the dialogue about the sustainable energy future, one where we do not harm anyone with the way we use energy, has focused on the individual choice. We celebrate devices that give the user more information to make their own choice, or that learn our patterns and adapt our choices for us. We create campaigns that teach - or sometimes shame - people not to do things that are wasteful or harmful, placing the blame for the harmful outcomes on the fact that someone made a choice in their home or place of work. "The fish in the Atlantic are getting poisoned with mercury because I fell asleep in front of my TV and wasted all that electricity."

The sustainable future has nothing to do with the individual choices we make to save energy, recycle, conserve water....it's all about infrastructure.

There are a small number of people who have gone "off-grid" and have found ways to create sustainable existences, but their success is not about the day-to-day choices they make, but rather in how they have changed the infrastructure of their lives. They live in smaller, more manageable spaces that do not need energy to supply the comforts of living. If we powered our planet completely off the sun, we would not have to reduce one lick of energy use...the sun provides many, many times the amount of energy we all need to survive in comfort.

Instead of building a civilization around systems that fully sustain life, we have created the infrastructure of our existence around systems that destroy one part of our world in order to prop op other parts of our society. Especially in America, where our entire infrastructure was built during the Industrial Revolution, when energy was cheap, we have not even remotely considered how wasteful we are until very recently. If we are to make things different, protect all people from the dangers associated with the depletion of resources and the environmental damage that comes from the ways we process them, then we need to focus all of our efforts on infrastructure. In many ways, focusing anything on human behavior creates a negative feedback loop that causes more harm than good.

Only by making large changes at the infrastructure level will we have any hope of creating a civilization that supports life.

Second, and most importantly, social equity comes first

The mantra of triple bottom line has worked its way successfully into the corporate world. We now hear people talk regularly about the economic, environmental, and social bottom lines. Somewhat more colloquially, we hear leaders talk about people, planet, profit, but if we are to be truthful, the former triad is more accurate. Our current political and business models focus most if not all their efforts on the economic bottom line. The leaders of industry were educated by mentors who had no concern for anything other than profit, they have operated in and furthered a system that rewards profit above all else, and even when faced with mounting evidence of the harm being caused, their focus is on how to value people and the environment within the system.

The current political-economic system does not value people or the planet, and it never will.

In creating this modern economic system that rewards only profit, we have made money the equivalent of power. Those with money have the ability to shape policy and infrastructure, and only through mass action within the economic system - purchasing certain products while avoiding others - can people of limited economic means have any say. Outside of that, people have only limited ability to shape the future, as even the electoral choices we make come between options that are presented to us by those with power and capital.

The thinking for the last decade was that the movement to a sustainable future would create one of social equity, but we have it backwards. Only by focusing first on social equity can we achieve a future that is sustainable for all.

When threatened with security, loss of food and shelter, or separation from those we love, we retreat to the easy and comfortable - namely the systems that already exist. Only by freeing people of these fears can we create a populace that collectively makes choices in everyone's best interest. A society that rewards active participation in the systems that support life by compensating with enough resources to give each member a voice in that society creates equality. This does not mean everyone has the exact same, it just means that we all have enough to influence the decisions made that affect us all. Especially in our modern society where the economic choices sometimes have more influence than even our votes, balancing the flow of capital so all can participate stands as imperative.

We glimpsed this after World War II in this country. We did not reward equally across racial lines, but we did reward across class lines within the population of white Americans. In that system, we saw greater potential for equity. In making some strides over the past decades against systematic racism, we have lost much ground on overall social equity. Only by creating equity across all social systems can we hope to create a sustainable future. This begins with movements to raise the minimum wage, or to create a similar system whereby people who work get the capital to have a voice in what happens.

A sustainable future will not create social equity or improve our infrastructure. Our challenge is to work that in reverse. We must fully realize the vision of a nation in which all are created equal if we are to create a sustainable society. If we leave power only to those who profit from the existing infrastructure/systems, then the choices they make will dominate everything. Only after we establish that everyone, regardless of race, gender, preference, or class has equal say, and eliminate the wasteful systems...only then will we truly have a sustainable future.