hro001 -
I came to a realisation this afternoon. Looking through historical examples, of course many thousands of glorious things occurred, were possible, and wouldn’t have existed had there been an obsession with sustainability.
Obvious and really important.
But at the same time, where things were happily sustainable everything was Hunky Dory too – no need to do anything new, just potter along with the same food/fuel/technology/medicine.
And then I realised what is so pernicious in the modern obsession with ‘sustainability’. It is the guilt or fear-driven need to impose it on everything – to treat it as a sort of mantra and therefore to brand anything ‘unsustainable’ as morally bad.
So using peat as a fuel was always terrible because it was unsustainable and was always going to run out? And charcoal to fuel the industrial revolution? Then coal, Gas , Oil – all awful because they are unsustainable?
It’s like leaps into the dark are not allowed because humanity might come to harm! Things might go wrong! We might get punished for using up too much stuff! Jeepers, we might get thrown out of the Garden of Eden AGAIN!!!!
There’s nothing wrong with sustainability – if it isn’t used as a proxy for expressing guilt or fear and as a means to prevent exuberant development for all.
[Glad I got that one sorted out 
]