Sustainable Living is The Path to Our Long-Term Survival
Money and technology is not enough to get us there.
Sustainable Living is achieved when:
- We have mastered the tools available to us to balance our economic and environmental capital and meet our obligations to everyone,
- Recognize the tribal nature in the way we organize ourselves when confronting conflict and finding lasting solutions, and
- Fully recognize what Sustainability means and are willing to shape our character, values, attitudes, and beliefs that allow us to take meaningful collective action, especially in support of our human and social capital.
The path is already littered with rubble from the Four Pillars of Sustainability, which support the concept of Sustainable Living. However, we should still be able to forge ahead.
The Four Pillars of Sustainability
Many think that if they can live to a comfortable old age, Sustainable Living has been achieved. Little consideration is given to how their lifestyle choices impact future generations. After all, it now becomes someone else’s problem.
Instead, imagine a world where the four pillars of Sustainability — social, human, economic, and environmental — stand in perfect harmony. They support each other in this world, paving the way for a better and happier life for all generations.
It’s crucial to understand that these pillars are not isolated entities. Still, they are interconnected and interdependent, each playing a pivotal role in Sustainability on a National and Global level.
Achieving Sustainability requires understanding and self-discipline, which hasn’t been demanded of us since WWII. It’s not just about awareness of the need to balance and strengthen the four pillars but also about making some uncomfortable choices to make it happen.
RMIT University’s business course in Sustainability describes the composition of these four pillars. This comprehensive approach delves into the essence of who we are and how we must respond to existential threats we already recognize.
Economic Sustainability — “… aims to improve the standard of living. In the context of business, it refers to the efficient use of assets to maintain company profitability over time”.
Environmental Sustainability — “aims to improve human welfare through the protection of natural capital (e.g., land, air, water, minerals, etc.)”
Human Sustainability - “aims to maintain and improve the human capital in society. Investments in the health and education systems, access to services, nutrition, knowledge, and skills are all programs under the umbrella of Sustainability.”
Social Sustainability — “aims to preserve social capital by investing and creating services that constitute the framework of society. … focuses on maintaining and improving social quality with concepts such as cohesion, reciprocity, honesty, and the importance of relationships amongst people.”
Slicing and dicing demographic data helps us understand the scope of the effort needed and the problems to be solved along the way. However, the numbers alone are not enough.
We, as individuals, hold the key to identifying the character and behaviors of the people around us within these demographics, motivating them toward Sustainable Living, and achieving better outcomes. Each of us has the power to make a difference. It is called leading by example.
Environmental and Economic Sustainability are deeply rooted in science and technology. The costs and benefits for both are quantifiable and measured using rational thought processes to help us take action.
We have financial tools to help determine the costs and value of investing in new technologies and environmental remediation. All benefits are more difficult to quantify, but developing mathematical models helps with risk assessment. However, reaching a consensus on who absorbs the cost and benefits is often debated.
Social and Human Sustainability are rooted in the character, values, attitudes, and behaviors that are subject to individual interpretation and the potential to be emotionally charged. Recognizing costs and benefits is more difficult to quantify, making it more difficult to take meaningful actions.
It is a far more significant challenge when Sustainable Living principles are attempted in larger geographic areas where social and human diversity and economic inequity make cost-benefit decisions more elusive. Common attitudes and beliefs take more work to find. This leads to conflicts that scientists, planners, and developers are often ill-equipped to resolve independently.
Climate change is an excellent example of change being variable in the scope and timing of its impact. Parts of the global population are already severely impacted, resulting in disproportionate economic and human losses. Other parts have the infrastructure and resources to mitigate climate change over the short term, making it more manageable and reducing potential disruptions. Massive population dislocations strain economic and social resources, creating large-scale conflict. Enter the Government.
An often reluctant government is assigned the task of resolving conflicts created within the human, social, and other pillars of Sustainability, which the private sector chooses to avoid. The regulatory and legislative track record at both the State and Federal levels is spotty at best. From a voter perspective, the Government is the last one standing when anything fails on the path to Sustainable Living — we then demand that “there ought to be a law.”
In the meantime, the rubble along the path to Sustainable Living continues to build. Needs go unmet, conditions worsen, resources are diverted or stockpiled, things get complicated, and conflicts arise. Sustainable Living has become politicized.
When We Feel Threatened — It’s “Back to Basics”
This is code for becoming more conservative in our worldview — socially, politically, and economically. Then, it is time to regress into something familiar and safe.
Climate change, a major Pandemic, and over twenty-five years of continued military actions have altered the current social and political landscape. These external and internal threats, which historically would bring us closer together as a people with resolve, are instead forcing us into behaviors more akin to those of our primal tribal roots.
Once again, we watch opportunities for advancing Sustainable Living slip away with distrust of science, Government, and National/corporate interests to protect our existing lifestyles.
It’s time to find our tribe and hunker down.
Getting to Know Ourselves and Our Tribes
Unlike economic and environmental Sustainability, human and social sustainability pillars require managing the remnants of our primal behaviors, especially when we are threatened and scared, which are imprinted from our early tribal evolution and are still used today to function in society. “Fight to the Death” and “Fight or Flight” are natural responses that we react to instinctively even today.
Here are six attributes that help describe a tribal formation, most of which you will recognize.
1. Shared Identity — often tied to ancestry, language, culture, and territory (race, religion, nationality, urban, rural, North or South, East or West)
2. Leadership and Governance — organized leadership structures and systems to manage internal and external affairs (council members, religious and social organization leaders, etc.).
3. Cultural Practices — traditions and laws that foster loyalty and continuity (religious affiliation, college attendance, fraternal organizations, unions).
4. Coordinated Response to Threats — collective actions to external challenges to survival and needed resources (military, paramilitary, charitable organizations — Red Cross, United Way, volunteer police, and fire).
5. Attachment to Land — ancestral homelands and spiritual significance (neighborhoods, towns, religious and burial sites, countries)
6. Reaction to change — the ability to accept changing social and environmental conditions from external forces.
Demographic data tries to capture attributes such as ethnicity, age, family size, income, language, location, religious preferences, type of residence, and so on.
These same attributes produce labels that we use to describe neighborhood features. Chinatown, Greektown, Uptown, Northside, Southend, Suburbia, and Boonies are just a few informal labels that we use to describe where groups of residents in many neighborhoods and local communities live today. They help give our “tribes” identities.
However, demographics do not adequately describe the values, attitudes, and beliefs that the people in these demographic segments possess. The Human and Social components of Sustainability are far more complex.
Think of the types of active institutions within these “tribal boundaries” — public and private educational institutions, religious and fraternal orders, veteran organizations, political parties, labor unions, and more.
Look around any local community, regardless of size, and you will find buildings dedicated to their existence and influence. Here is where the American Character and Sustainable Living support reveals itself and lives.
Tribal sizes can vary dramatically. They largely depend on how homogenous the population’s core values, attitudes, and beliefs are. The degree to which Economic and Environmental equity is distributed within the population also plays an essential role in shaping values, attitudes, and beliefs.
Tribes In Action
Joshua Greene’s recent book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gaps Between Us and Them offers a fresh perspective on resolving conflicts that block the path to cooperation — a key element in successfully expanding Sustainable Living on a large scale.
Greene describes intra-tribe conflict as (me vs us). The conflicts are centered on selfishness as opposed to concern for others. Since values, attitudes, and beliefs are shared within the tribe, at least to some degree, a moral framework is created, and a level of trust is formed. Consensus, mutual sacrifice, and compromise often offer the best resolution for these intra-tribe emotion-based conflicts.
The balance between the four pillars of Sustainability is more easily achieved within a tribe. Relationships and trust allow for the melding of emotional and rational thought and advances toward Sustainable Living.
Inter-tribe conflict (us vs. them) requires a different approach. Here, practical reasoning is applied to solve moral and other problems. I call this building a win/win proposition among tribal interests.
Greene offers utilitarianism as the means to solve inter-tribal conflict. Its definition is different from the traditional one. It still includes components of intra-tribe methods but is more heavily weighted towards defining strengths and weaknesses in arguments and negotiating based on mutually recognized financial and tribal security benefits. Equity is not a precondition for mutual acceptance of a solution.
Relationships and trust so carefully maintained within a tribe now need to be shared outside the tribe, allowing the tribes to function as one.
Enter Character
We all possess specific values, attitudes, beliefs, and character strengths that shape who we are as individuals. While many of these attributes may be common within our tribe, some are shared with others. The key is to identify and strengthen the common character attributes.
We may not speak the same language, pray to the same God, physically look the same, wear the same style of clothes, or eat the same type of food, but we share character attributes. These are reinforced by similar values, attitudes, and beliefs about who we are, allowing us to build relationships based on mutual respect and trust.
The VIA Institute on Character identifies 24 different character qualities we all possess and share with others to some degree. These include honesty, creativity, kindness, fairness, perseverance, self-regulation, bravery, love, spirituality, etc.
We all need to take the time to know our tribe better and be more active in it if we want to continue down the path toward Sustainable Living. Look for the groups or institutions inside your tribe shaping its character and become an influencer. We all have a chance to become a more significant part of the solution rather than observing from the outside and lamenting as the prospects for Sustainable Living continue to erode.
Remember, our choices in allocating our time, energy, and finances impact the balance of capital available among all four pillars, not only for ourselves but also for others inside and outside our tribes. The institutions created within tribes — churches, schools, fraternal orders, and other non-profits — raise our awareness of who we are and our role in achieving Sustainable Living conditions for all.
Sustainable Learning is critical to strengthening and balancing the four pillars of Sustainability. If you want to hear more, send me a “clap” to let me know you enjoyed the read, and click “follow” to hear more. Stay Tuned.
