We asked our friend and Science Fiction Legend Kim Stanley Robinson to share with us his thoughts on sustainability. Here is what he said:
Sustainability is now a very smeared and vague word, having been used so much in so many different contexts, and also to an extent a "captured word" in that when you combine it into the phrase "sustainable development," it is often intended to mean just the opposite of what it meant at the start of its use in this context. "Sustainability" meant practices that could be maintained over the long haul; "sustainable development" often implied "we want to keep doing what we are doing, or as close to it as we can get away with." It is too closely allied with various other green-washing behaviors, and only when defined by specifics can it mean anything; on its own, it's too vague to be able to form a reaction to whatever else is being said.I thought the term "permaculture" was a way of shifting ground a bit, using a term from what you might call progressive agriculture, or sustainable agriculture. Permaculture suggest permanence but also permutation, which I like because that indicates that it is likely to be a flexible and dynamically changing system rather than any end state.
These words bring up questions we have not answered. What is the "carrying capacity" of humanity on the Earth? What factors would contribute to the answers? Are we in an overshoot, fueled by rapid carbon burn? As some now advocate getting back to 350 parts per million of CO2, should we be working toward some best number of humans that might be lower than what we have now? If decarbonizing our civilization is not economic, should we do it anyway? Don't we kind of have to? Does economics as defined by a field so subservient to the rich deserve anything but a thorough-going revision? Is economics really scientific? Our medicine is scientific, and is working better all the time; shouldn't our economics be scientific too? Which values are embedded in these fields that we don't usually see? Isn't economics astrology? Isn't science a utopian politics, unaware of itself as such and working dumbly away at making things better?
It's true these are leading questions.
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