Reduce.

As I delve into the world of sustainability (not just development) I am more and more aware of how far our lifestyle is beyond a critical point. Not just environmentally, which will follow, but economically, politically http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifand socially. I apologize to those who feel I may be strong arming the topic at hand, sustainable development, but I ask that you bear with me.

If those of us who live in Europe and North America have an environmental footprint of 6 or more while people in Africa have a footprint of about 1 (see Ecological Footprint) it seems to me that maybe we should be putting a lot more effort to "reducing" our footprint rather than increasing the footprint of the developing world. (This may be a controversial statement but in the end, I think, if we fail to do this the quality of ALL our lives will be far below the current quality of life of many people in the developing world.)

Many, many people are familiar with the Mennonite book "Living More with Less" and the cookbook "More with Less". These were first published in the '80s when the idea that our lifestyle could have significant implications on the world around us was just crossing the line from a fringe idea to an idea that many people began to hear about, if not believe. At the time that might have been true, that by reducing our consumption we may have been able to keep getting more and doing more. Unfortunately I think that time has passed; in 2011 we just need to reduce. Less of more. Less. Period.

John Naish has a very good book called "Enough". It's an easy read about how through the ages, specifically from an evolutionary point of view, we have been programmed to want and need more. However, for the first time in human history, a huge percentage of our population's physical needs are satisfied. Unfortunately we're still wired for more and so that same circuitry that helped us become a dominant species now needs to have the wires cut. Naish says the evolutionary key to the future will be the idea of temperance and knowing when is enough. (Certainly a well known concept throughout the ages.) He goes through the topics of Information, Food, Stuff, Money, Work and demonstrates how far overboard we have gone with each subject and what a detriment it is to our development. BTW, he also lists "Small is Beautiful" by E.F. Schumacher and "Limits to Growth" by Donnella & Dennis Meadows as the best books for this train of thought.

In the same way that people like David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist, have used arctic as an early warning signal of global warming and environmental chaos, I think someday we will understand that the environment itself and upheaval that it is going through is an early warning signal for us has a whole. The environment is a classic example of an extremely complex system where small perturbations have huge effects and some huge perturbations have negligible effects. Going one step back from that, our cultural, political and even economic systems have grown out of this natural environmental system and one could say are even founded upon it. The fact that our natural environment is changing drastically should serve as an early warning signal to us that those other systems are about to change as well.

And the more that we can do to mitigate environmental changes the more we will spare ourselves the pain of dealing with drastic changes to our economy, politics and society.

Kurtis (biking in Waterloo but still living unsustainably)