Small Steps Towards Sustainability

The cost of staple foods has soared, as has the cost of oil. Both items, which are a basic necessity for how we run this society, are becoming more expensive as we face what might be one of the biggest challenges to our way of life to date — global warming and world-wide resource depletion. In other words, we are quickly being forced to realize that the methods used to keep our “modern” societies functioning are not sustainable.

At this point though, I don’t think that’s news to anybody who’s paying attention. The big question is how: how do we make human life on this planet more sustainable?

The answer is not as elusive as many people think. The problem is most of us don’t want to give up the life of luxury we enjoy as a First-World country, and those countries that are just reaching our standard of living aren’t about to give it up on principal just because we scorched the earth before they’ve had a chance to. It’s our high “standard of living” — which is only possible through the cheap labour of our neighbors and the free labours of the earth — that we come to the problems we have today. In Canada, people below the poverty line can still manage to purchase their children the latest gaming console. In this country starving indicates that one hasn’t eaten in several hours, not several days. This state of mind is not only common; it’s expected. Today in this country we need only to be born and we’ll be able to survive in relative comfort for the whole of our entire lives, left only to complain about how sad it was that some celebrity died (while joking about how good or bad their cellulite was) and how it’s a shame that modern science has yet to figure out exactly how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop .

Humanity has lost its way, because it’s lost the notion that life is about surviving. We expect to survive; and when the surviving is easy we move onto lesser complaints, until we degenerate into the narcissistic consumer-based society we have today — a culture where we experience the life-and-death cycle via a video game we stay up all night to play, missing the real life and death that’s constantly all around us.

Despite the fact that we’ve created a world where surviving is effortless (a seemingly noble goal), we still find cause to escape the real world into our imaginations, into video games, and onto websites displaying wacky Asian game shows. Our world, built to make things quick and easy, has left many of us without joy, without the ability to realize our tiny pathetic place in the universe, and how having an opportunity to exist in this universe at all is a beautiful notion.

We’ve lost our way because of our feeble attempts to take all the real effort out of existence (and replace it with more lucrative but trivial work). Now we expect so much and so we take so much until nearly every experience is mediated by someone trying to turn a profit. The search for profits force speed and efficiency, leading to genetically modified plants and sweatshops, which lead to opening new markets and taking more until no more remains.

We need to stop living in luxury and start experiencing reality in all its splendor. While no one can command all of society (nor should they), we can have domain over our own decisions, which means the only way to make life more sustainable is to make our own lives more sustainable.

If we try to live our life in pursuit of maximum self- sufficiency, we’ll be forced to make more things ourselves, which will lead to growing things for ourselves and producing the crops we need to survive. If we remove the need to make a profit we’ll only supply ourselves with what we’ll need to survive, and thus we’ll become less likely to spend resources unnecessarily. By working in the dirt and with nature, we’ll grow to understand and respect the delicate balance of life more fully. We’ll move beyond the simple concerns of contemporary society and if enough people follow, we’ll become among the first enlightened societies of the modern age. We’ll measure our success not by economics and material wealth, but by how self sufficient and sustainable we are. This path is not for the lazy, and so I suspect few will buy into it; but for those that move towards it, happiness will be found in producing something of value to your own life. Those who move towards it will need not be rich for they will produce all necessities for themselves.

Corey King wants nothing more than to make this world a better place, despite its persistent, complex and sorted history. He knows he’s naïve, but he knows nothing else.