Surplus and Sustainability
The bold transformation of the industrial revolution has hit a plateau, and to rise beyond it we need a power boost of sorts. The material and energy obsessions that inspired the early modernist are no longer suitable for today’s lifestyles.
Complacently accepting the current system, we still hunger for a compelling new motivator. So it is exciting to imagine that around the corner, beyond our view a force of change is waiting to accelerate progress in a new direction. A mission to recharge the vitality of an overwhelmed and exhausted population must commence at the source of the discontent.
Making sense of our insatiable appetite for material gratification is probably a good place to start.
For decades, even centuries, modern man has been preoccupied and distracted by surpluses — of data, ideas, products, and subsequent commercial demands. Surpluses, of course, were the catalyst for agrarian societies and all the cultural advances that followed. Surplus provisions offered security against scarcity, flexibility of use and distribution, freed up labor time for leisure and other pursuits.
But, there are also downsides to accumulating material surpluses.
First, they are only valuable when effectively distributed, and utilized or consumed. Grain in a silo is worthless if it sits too long and spoils.
Second, whenever surplus becomes excessive it implies waste, particularly of natural resources where its economical and ecological value diminishes.
Third, individuals and communities are ultimately weighed down by material excesses; they diminish our agility; hold us back from achieving new goals; and reduce our willingness to take on new responsibilities.
Still, there is always a line separating surplus from excess, and it is up to us individually and as a society to define where that line falls.
Not only are our surpluses physical, but they extend into every segment of society.
We have grown our surpluses of knowledge by multiplying, dissecting and dividing, and with each pass complexity has increased. Big Data has both overwhelmed science, as it attempts to catalogue every aspect and element of the material world, and yoked society with an invasive, material-driven political system, and the explosive growth has destabilized our economy.
As time passes, it becomes more and more difficult to reign in our surpluses, to organize them efficiently, or to find secure places to store them.
However, a new worldview is coming to light, and it should begin to make sense of this world of excess and disjointed pieces. Try as it might, science cannot deliver the results alone.
We need not only scientists, sociologists, physicists, and economists, but also artists in fields including visual arts, media arts, dance, music and architecture, to come together to begin sorting through our surpluses looking for recurring holistic patterns.
To find order in the chaos, we must face the challenge of gathering the salvageable fragments and piecing them back together. If we get it right, a vibrant scenic landscape should emerge, the one that nature still dangles before us, the mythical paradise.
Examined under a collective lens, the reassembled parts will inevitably reveal an unexpectedly familiar, comprehensive, and harmonious whole. The shards and rubble of a toppled materialism, composed in accord with reclaimed knowledge of nature will suddenly assume new distinctions and relations, with each part making a fundamental contribution to the larger whole.
By segregating the sciences we were able to hone in on the details. Now, by reconvening the specialist and engaging them in common goals, a new level of knowledge is bound to emerge.
(Gustavo Quepón on Unsplash)
In many segments of society there has been a growing attraction to intuitive, mindful, interrelated mental processing and cooperative activity. We are regaining an awareness of natural laws that in the past were for everyone mere second nature.
The momentum of this approach has probably been greatest in the area of global resource management, or sustainability, where broader holistic thinking is critical to our future environmental prospects; everything from reclamation of ecosystems; discovery of new materials and energy sources; and exploration of strategies for damage control and repairs the to the environment, anywhere we have managed to destroy or make a mess of it.
A comprehensive outlook should ultimately lead us into a future inspired by a more stable, gracious and charitable humanity, living comfortably in a natural and built environment that is rich, resilient, beautiful and fully sustainable. A viable and worthy ambition, I think most would agree.
