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What’s The Real Problem With Sustainability? — Only the Rich Can Afford It
Sustainability is starkly inequitable.
While the fight against climate change rings out as a collective cause, its consequences have never been shared equally. The struggle for some claim to a common future repeatedly leaves behind those who have already borne the biggest compromises to health and wellbeing for the sake of development.
Communities of colour in America are as much as 75 percent more likely to live along the borders of oil refineries, toxic coal mines, and major highways — forced to breathe through corrupted lungs and live forever at odds over restless nights, urged by raging traffic; Indigenous populations across Canada have been made to endure several-decades-long water advisories — a direct result of chemical pollution (and negligence) and the diversion of freshwater to source the nation’s growing cities.
The patterns of conquest and exploitation prized by the Western world’s elite have left entire nations to struggle up the bottom rungs of the capitalist system we’ve created and know as normal.
But our solutions are perpetuating the same divides.
The real problem with sustainability — and our current pathways towards decarbonization — is that only the most privileged people…
