Sustain "Sustainability"
As has happened so many times over the course of the past years, so it has happened over the course of human history: the changes we affect often find their motivation in momentary and immediate influences, and not in "common sense" or accumulated wisdom. Current and pressing issues will make themselves known in the most excruciating fashion, and with great good will we set about removing the source of our discomfort; opportunities appear with a siren song -- often amplified to a deafening number of decibels by those who have made siren's music their specialty -- and with that Greater Good will we leave behind what previously was enough for a run on what may be better. Today's puffed-up panacea is anything and everything natural, organic, eco-friendly as though blessed by Mother Earth herself.
The problem with panacea is that it makes the mind comfortable, and gives the appearance of Doing Something, while having little effect on Cause. How we long, as individuals and as a species, to have control over this dizzyingly complex array of competing information and warring theories, to find security in a world without walls, and stability in change. Social evolution, seen through a Buddhist's lens, can be traced by history's finger from one violent repulsion to another violent grasping, with brief interludes where perhaps the spinning world says, Wait.
So it is with some mixed gratitude that I view this recent burst of commercial and social energy: to harness technology as though harnessing oxen, to turn the blade of Promise toward fallow soil, to paint the greenest picture that has ever been painted, to prove our present is wiser than our past. On the one hand, having travelled extensively and having lived abroad in a number of (by Western standards) less than flattering situations, this upswell of environmentalism at least gives lip service to simplicity, to a balance with the natural world that, in less material-laden societies, is either wisely tasted or forced down a nation's metaphorical throat. Tasted or force-fed, there is the constant reminder that consequence exists, and an easy equation -- like kindergarten math -- for calculating how much is lost for being foolish. That our new technologies nod to the sobering fact that we are literally torching our own house (and there isn't another one), suggests that this latest response to the harpys and the sirens may be built on a somewhat solid foundation.
Unfortunately, balance means moving toward the middle, and involves compromise. One dictionary defines balance as "The stable state characterized by the cancellation of all forces by equal opposing forces; the ability to maintain a stable position or stillness of the center, while either stationary (static balance) or moving (dynamic balance)." There is something breathless in the media's assumption that this is the Challenge of the Age. It feels not at all like stillness or the careful, precise cancellation of all forces. I find that I mistrust high winds, having seen their penchant for destruction and for sweeping objects away; and I doubt the staying power of the breathless. And there is something a little vile, slightly rotting around the edges of that bright, forever-green garden, as the greatest polluters on the planet line up with their freshly-painted and green-tinged placards, proclaiming a change of heart; something almost intolerable (why is it tolerable?) in watching the manufacturers of millions of discardable automobiles, as they wear their little green membership badges, parading boyscouts who are cutpurses in their spare time.
Despite my cynical simile, this is not to assign guilt: all who are trying to improve the lot of the Living Earth have nothing to be guilty about, whatever their motivation. Immediate results notwithstanding, our choices can still be wrong, held up against the broader canvas of history, or measured by any reasonably Golden Rule. When the movement of ideas and information is as fast as lightning, our ability to understand the consequences of a single bolt striking the earth can be difficult. Wait.
So where does the cofounder of an ecovillage get off, talking down change for the better? You mistake me, friends. I don't want to undercut sustainability, but rather encourage a sustainability that is sustainable. The mirror, if it reflects at all, would show this face: calm, sober, committed, content. What is enough? How do we gain mastery of the practice of balance?
The life of a nation is the life of a person: a series of attempts, not a series of arrivals. There is no earth-bound Eden, so long as you consider that place to be free of work, or the end of a road. But there are some very, very fine gardens I know, some of them wilderness, and many of them shaped by a human hand.