Tools for the transition to sustainability

Abstract

We have been writing about, talking about, and working toward sustainability for decades now. We have had the privilege of knowing thousands of colleagues in every part of the world who work in their own ways, with their own talents, in their own societies toward a sustainable society. When we act at the official, institutional level and when we listen to political leaders, we often feel frustrated. When we work with individuals, we usually feel encouraged. Everywhere we find folks who care about the earth, about other people, and about the welfare of their children and grandchildren. They recognize the human misery and the environmental degradation around them, and they question whether policies that promote more growth along the same old lines can make things better. Many of them have a feeling, often hard for them to articulate, that the world is headed in the wrong direction and that preventing disaster will require some big changes. They are willing to work for those changes, if only they could believe their efforts would make a positive difference. They ask: What can I do? What can governments do? What can corporations do? What can schools, religions, media do? What can citizens, producers, consumers, parents do? Experiments guided by those questions are more important than any specific answers, though answers abound. There are 'fifty simple things you can do to save the planet'. Buy an energy-efficient car, for one. Recycle your bottles and cans, vote knowledgeably in elections-if you are among those people in the world blessed with cars, bottles, cans, or elections. There are also not-so-simple things to do: Work out your own frugally elegant lifestyle, have at most two children, argue for higher prices on fossil energy (to encourage energy efficiency and stimulate development of renewable energy), work with love and partnership to help one family lift itself out of poverty, find your own 'right livelihood', care well for one piece of land; do whatever you can to oppose systems that oppress people or abuse the earth, run for election yourself. All these actions will help. And, of course, they are not enough. Sustainability and sufficiency and equity require structural change; they require a revolution, not in the political sense, like the French Revolution, but in the much more profound sense of the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions. Recycling is important, but by itself it will not bring about a revolution. What will? In search of an answer, we have found it helpful to try to understand the first two great revolutions in human culture, insofar as historians can reconstruct them.