The End of Sustainability
The time has come for us to collectively reexamine — and ultimately move past — the concept of sustainability.
Sustainability
Sustainability, Resilience and Adaptability as Guiding Principles
An important part of many worldviews are key words that embody guiding principles. Freedom, liberty and justice represent three such words in the US, and in this post I’d like to explore a few that act as guiding principles in more limited contexts: sustainability, resilience and adaptability.
Kamikaze Culture
Modern society celebrates the suicidal consumption and despoilment of the earth by the rich, which will also kill countless others outside their ranks. As a society, we must learn to despise such acts.
The Global Energy Market’s Moment of Truth
Sustainability is not good for many businesses – in fact it means they’ll have to go out of business. This is what sustainability at its core is all about – things that are unsustainable will stop.
Keeping local communities alive
Globalization is a doomed venture in the face of more and more expensive energy costs, unfortunately before it falls apart it may destroy the local communities which will be the base of any alternative arrangements.
Sustainability Sucks
Framing a project or a business as "sustainable" no longer serves us. The dominant use of the word has ceased to mean what some of us orginally intended and, in fact, the term has been co-opted and watered down in many cases. Labelling something "sustainable" may even alienate potential allies, or at least people with whom you might want to get along. What do we really mean? What do we really want? Let’s find the new language set that can help us get there.
The man who ate himself: An agricultural fable
The beetle sighed. "This is all something you once knew, I think. It is something all beings have known from the beginning of time…It is a pity, this forgetting of yours."
What permaculture isn’t — and is
Permaculture is notoriously hard to define.
Worldwatch Institute Symposium – April 2013 Is Sustainability Still Possible?
On Tuesday, April 16, the Worldwatch Institute held its seventeenth annual State of the World Symposium to launch its latest book, State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? As contributors to the book, Pat Murphy and Faith Morgan were invited to attend the event, where Pat spoke on one of several panels. The complex topic of sustainability was addressed along with the need to measure it in order to prepare for the currently unsustainable future toward which we are making quick strides. The symposium was held in Washington, but an online live stream of the panels was offered for those of us who could not make it to D.C.
Toward Resilient Architectures 3: How Modernism Got Square
True resilience does not result from artistic metaphors, or by sticking veneers over the same failing industrial model.
