To tackle the increasing problems of draw down, depredation and degradation (pollution) of environmental resources we are trying to promote green products, green processes, green technologies, green industry. More importantly we are sensitizing people to adopt green lifestyle, green culture and green consumerism to shrink our ecological footprint and to make a peace with our Mother planet Earth. But it's easier said than done! How 'green' is green enough? How good is good enough? Please elucidate with informative thoughts, insights and illustrative inputs.
The theoretical limit to the greening of culture is just short of the point where it causes a backlash by challenging the dominant neoliberal identity. The point people cannot accommodate the transformation in their sense of selfhood. That identity is distributed and extended across brains, bodies, and environments so the change has to be directed at all three simultaneously.
The issue is that we are focused on adaption and not remediation. Green or Sustainable needs to be changed to regenerative. Simply changing what we do without regenerating what has been depleted is not going make a difference.
At an absolute minimum:
- A community must have an ecological footprint that is not larger than it's biocapacity measured in each biome (live within means);
- A community must not import resources or export wastes to meet needs (for resilience);
- A community must be able to meet all the needs of all it's people in less than 24 hours per day per person (for social justice) (note: 'be able to' is quite different from 'does', and the boundary of needs must be defined by the community)
- And knowing that we don't know everything about our ecosystems, a community must set aside some non-declining portion of each biome it manages to be retained as 'wilderness', that will be neither a source for resources nor a sink for wastes.
Sustainability at any scale smaller than 'community' (individual, corporate, buildings, etc), would only have to show that they are not making any of the above conditions worse, while making at least one of them better.
That will be enough. I don't think anything short of that would be.
The issue right now though is the fact that we have passed 400 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere. We are beyond the point where treading water is ok. We must fix what has been broken.
sorry but green consumerism is the weirdest and most paradoxical word I ever seen in my career...
Moving from environmental economics to ecological economics and strong sustainability gives a glimpse about how green we need to go and thereby need to transform our current economic system rather than treating symptoms with the same thinking we applied to create these problems in the first place. Rather than aiming at "good enough" we should first acknowledge "enough is enough" and that consumerism wont be the panacea
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