The Sustainability Factor – What Sustainability Really Is Posted on October 13th, 2009
Lately, I have done a lot of research. That research is now culminating into a new white paper I’m penning titled The Sustainability Factor: What Sustainability Means and Why You Need to Know. The following is the introductory chapter of that paper. It lays out the gist of the piece and what it hopes to accomplish.
I’m including it here to show you this because this is the core issue behind this entire blog’s existence. When The Sustainability Factor is finished, I will be putting it up on the site for download, free of charge. You’ll note the addition of a “donate” button to the left. Please go to my About Me page to find out what that’s all about.
So, without further ado, here’s the introduction to my new paper. It should be complete and available here on the site in the next few days. The paper itself will have sources and a bibliography, of course.
What Sustainability Really Is
The term “sustainability” or “sustainable” is used a lot these days, almost always in relation to something that’s considered green (ecologically non-impacting, or at least more so than the alternative). It’s often used wrongly, especially when it’s used to tout products or services.
The problem with the word “sustainable” is that while it’s easily defined, it is hard to quantify with so many things in today’s consumerist world.
By definition, sustainable goods and practices are those that can be perpetuated almost indefinitely without lowering the future potential production of the good or practice. Until recently, the term was used most often to describe an agricultural method or technology. It is often used by economists to describe an economic trend or practice as well.
Using nearly any measurement, the sustainability of our current technologies and lifestyles is not feasible. While Al Gore and the other global warming hypsters go on about our pending doom with the planet’s atmosphere, they ignore something more fundamental and far more seriously threatening. They ignore peak production and extraction models.
This idea has been around, generally on the fringe, for a long time. We’ve heard about Peak Oil and Water Shortages, and all the rest. These are almost always laughed off by the main stream because they are, to put it bluntly, impossible to really quantify and come to grips with.
Those two issues are deservedly on the fringe. Peak Oil will not be an issue so long as we are willing to go to great lengths to get the crude. Including warfare and monetary disaster. Peak Water, similarly, will only be an issue in the foreseeable future in those areas that we don’t generally worry about (meaning: somewhere that’s not right here).
The problem with reaching peaks in any resource is that the individual resource is often not likely to reach a peak. Oil, for instance, can be infinitely available for as far into the future as we wish to project, provided the other resources that make it possible to get the oil are still easy to extract. Conversely, so long as we have cheap energy (oil), we can raise the amount of our reserves for any other resource because it becomes possible to extract it indefinitely.
Eventually, however, we’re going to hit a synergy where we won’t have one or the other to rely on for supplying our usage. We’ll eventually reach a point where oil is too hard to get because we just can’t afford the cost in oil to extract the metals required to make the machinery for extracting the oil. Or the phosphorous for fertilizing our fields to make the food to supply the workers to get the oil.
All of our resources are not in a chain, but a web. Just like the synergy between foods, markets, economics, and so forth the resources of our planet are also tied into a web. Each affects the other either directly or through a chain of connections.
Currently, we are seeing two major changes in that web that are affecting everything else: economic upheavals are changing the landscape of oil’s availability as the largest purchaser on the market is replaced by another, who stands on slightly firmer economic ground. This upheaval is causing big changes in other market sectors as food production, which requires a large influx of oil to power its machinery, shifts towards using food as a fuel. This shift causes the food itself to become a hotter commodity on the market, making it more expensive to get. In turn, other markets are being affected as the economics all bump into one another vying for their new position in the web.
It’s my belief that long before the claims of doom and destruction from Al Gore and the global warming parade come to pass, we’re going to face something much more sinister and much more telling. We’re going to see the collapse of our industrial agriculture and thus will be facing starvation on a planetary scale.
I know that sounds extreme, but the evidence is all there if we just look for it. We’re reaching a “tipping point,” to steal one of the favorite climate change phrases, wherein we will not only reach Peak Oil, we’ll reach Peak Everything.
In this discussion, we’ll look at the various aspects of the resource web and how they’re changing and beginning to play against each other. Rather than supporting each other in a balanced web of usefulness, they are now pulling against one another and will eventually collapse—likely nearly all at once.
We will like at peak water, minerals, fertilizers, petroleum, etc. Then we’ll talk about what needs to change and how it can be done. That change won’t come from where you likely believe it would.
That’s getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s first look at how these various resources are beginning to waver.
Related posts:
- The Sustainability Factor – Booklet Now Available
- Take Notice of the Sustainability Factor and the Disposable Economy of the World, Part III
- Take Notice of the Sustainability Factor and the Disposable Economy of the World, Part I
