OK, so what is sustainability, really?

In honour of Earth Day.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=top-10-myths-about-sustainability

Points #4, #7, and #8 are particularly awesome.

I'm a firm believer in the theory of global warming through CO₂, but I'm not really the apologist I once was. Thing is, as one scientist interviewed in The 11th Hour put it, global warming is not the entire problem. Global warming is a symptom of our inability to live sustainably.

What's more, even if you don't believe that we're warming our planet, sustainability is still a valid topic. Example: whether or not you believe that your Hummer causes harmful emissions, you probably won't be driving it as much when gas is scarce and expensive.

David Suzuki illustrates this well:

While filming a special program on forestry for The Nature of Things in the 1990s, we arranged to interview loggers working in a cut block near Ucluelet on Vancouver Island. When we arrived and set up the camera, the loggers came out of the forest and began to cuss me out as an environmentalist who was threatening their jobs.

The confrontation made for good television, but I was frustrated at our inability to find common ground. Finally I told them, "I worked as a carpenter for eight years, and to this day, I love working with wood. No environmentalist I know is against logging. We just want to be sure that your children and grandchildren will be able to log forests as rich as the ones you’re working in now."

Immediately, one of the men replied that he’d never let his kids to go into logging. "There won’t be any trees left!" he said. And there it was. Those men knew that they were cutting the trees down in a way that ensured there would be no harvestable timber for future generations of loggers, but they saw the trees as the way to put food on the table day after day and make the house and car payments at the end of the month.

Here's the paradox: yes, learning to live sustainably will solve the problem of emissions. But when solving global warming means capturing coal emissions and pumping them underground, or putting loads of mirrors into the sky, we still won't be solving the root problem of sustainability.