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December 12, 2005
Sustainability's Slow-motion Revolution
What makes the impossible become inevitable? History shows that an unarguable principle and a small corps of dedicated people can slowly but surely change the course of the future.
Today, NEW is publishing a year-end essay by executive director Alan Durning that applies history's lessons of social change to the Northwest's movement toward sustainability—a healthy, lasting prosperity grounded in place. In the piece, he sets the campaign for a sustainable economy and way of life beside similarly ambitious causes of the past, such as emancipation and suffrage, finding reason for optimism.
We’d like to hear from Cascadians about your work in sustainability and what keeps your optimism afloat. Click here to read Alan Durning’s essay and then join the discussion below.
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Tracked on Dec 14, 2005 7:11:22 AM
Comments
Thanks for this wonderful essay -- really important for us to step back and look at the long arc. But there's a critical difference between the emancipation/suffrage movements and the sustainability movement. The latter must succeed under time constraints that we can't even accurately predict. For sure, we do not have the leisure of taking however long it takes.
I don't say this to be discouraging, but rather, I think it's an essential strategic point that shouldn't be passed over simply because it scares people.
Posted by: Phil Mitchell | Dec 14, 2005 4:13:53 PM
I partly agree: extinct species don't come back; climate change can't easily be reversed and can even become a vicious circle; ecological challenges can push economic and political systems beyond the breaking point.
And I partly disagree: many aspects of sustainbility are matters of degree, such as pollution levels, human health, population size, economic security.
There's an unfortunate tendency among some sustainability thinkers and advocates to dramatize the issue with apocalyptic imagery and metaphors.
But, if you really think hard about it, you're likely to conclude that an unsustainable future is definitely NOT one of zero humans surviving. Rather, it's one in which perhaps fewer humans survive but, mostly, everyone has a much harder time thriving.
If you think about it that way, it's not so terribly different from the outlook from the perspective of 1787 on a future with continued slavery.
Posted by: Alan Durning | Dec 14, 2005 4:46:44 PM
Great article and a nice thought with which to begin the New Year.
While I agree that analogies have a limited use the basic premise is sound.
It is very difficult to imagine the type of mass change necessary to 'solve' the challenge of our energy misuse and its attendant ills. Personally, anything that provides me with a glimmer of hope is welcome.
I think of it like the pre-Enlightenmnet period, a time when many different people struggled to transcend their paradigm; not knowing where it would lead but knowing it had to happen.
Hopefull there is an Issac Newton of sustainability out there who can speed things up a bit.
Posted by: Gordon | Jan 3, 2006 3:43:17 PM
Thanks for including this article in the latest email update --- I must have missed it over the holidays.
Imagining the kind of "mass change necessary to 'solve' the challenge" reminds me of Ernest Callahan's 1975 book, Ecotopia. In that book (if you haven't read it, you should), California (?Cascadia?) seceded from the US and locked its borders in order to pursue a sustainable life. In fact, I wonder if that book was the source of Alan's comment: In Cascadia, sustainability has traversed the same ground from ridicule to tacit agreement—but not yet adequate action—in just 33 years.
Posted by: Callie Jordan | Mar 10, 2006 6:13:42 PM