To: m.bunting@guardian.co.uk
Re: Still scratching at the surface of the Problem of Sustainability
Date: Thursday 26 August 04

Dear Madeleine,

 

It was interesting comparing your comment ("Put us all on rations") with the leader ("The long good buy") in today's Guardian.

 

In the last, short paragraph of the leader its author, having devoted all his previous words to relatively irrelevant economics, finally scratches the surface of the real problem, while you, in your comment, have scratched a lot deeper. 

 

However, even you are still only scratching the surface. The Problem (of achieving a sustainable global economy and lifestyles for what will soon be Earth's 7-9 billion inhabitants) is far bigger and more urgent than almost anybody realises - which is why we cannot bring ourselves to face up to it. 

 

It will not go away, though, but go on getting bigger (at an exponential rate!) until it consumes and, quite possibly, destroys us completely. We have very little time in which to find and largely implement a solution: 2 or 3 decades, at the most, is my guess.

 

The biggest obstacle I had to overcome was understanding that such a huge majority of people, including the best informed and in the highest positions, many of them far more intelligent and better educated than myself, could be so blind and have got things so terribly wrong.

 

Politicians, who tend to be lawyers, see the solution in terms of drafting the right legislation; scientists in terms of developing the right technology; good journalists in terms of informing people and raising their awareness.

 

Certainly, legislation and technology have an important role to play, but above all else it is a much neglected matter of personal MORALS, i.e. of right (sustainable) behaviour (particularly in respect to how we earn, spend and invest our money), which in turn is based on people's values, attitudes and aspirations. It is many of these which are inherently non-sustainable; but changing them is hardly possible in a society and economy based and dependent on these very same values, attitudes and aspirations.

 

At first sight, if you are following me, we seem to be in a hopeless double bind - another reason for sticking our heads in the sand and waiting for doomsday to arrive (hopefully after we personally are no long around to experience it; but pity our children!).

 

But there IS a solution, beautifully simple and long in the air, as good solutions often are: we have to create an alternative, sustainable society(s) and economy(s), based, not on the values, attitudes and aspirations of what is in fact our "more animal than human" nature, as at present (understandably in view of what we now know about human origins), but on our more enlightened human nature. 

 

The beginnings of such an alternative already exist (organic farming, fair trade, moral investment funds, recycling, renewable energy etc. etc.), but currently just form part (a small part at that) of the existing, non-sustainable socio-economic order. They have to organise themselves into a distinct and increasingly independent alternative (based on different morals and sustainable values, attitudes and aspirations), within and parallel to the existing non-sustainable socio-economic order. As it grows, we (those of us wise and responsible enough to want to) will be able to transfer more and more of our dependency and activity from the old to the new. 

 

Once we have woken up to reality (which had better be soon), we have to initiate the greatest and most rapid revolution in human history. The 20th Century should have taught us how NOT to go about it.

 

It is a huge, and initially intimidating, challenge, but surely far, far better to face up to it (even if we should ultimately fail) than to continue sticking our heads in the sand!

 

We need not just one, but many models of the fair, humane and sustainable socio-economic orders we need to create. The one I'm working on I call, perhaps rather vainly, but appropriately, "ROGER'S WORLD".  I'm still struggling with formulating a draft of its moral foundations, making them firm and clear, which they need to be, but not authoritarian and dogmatic.

 

Perhaps you would like to give me a hand.