It’s just going to continue and continue . . .
My favorite New Yorker cartoon shows a man in sackcloth and ashes carrying a sign. The sign doesn’t say “The world is ending;” it says “It’s just going to continue and continue”. My biggest fear about unsustainability isn’t massive and abrupt ecological or social collapse; it is a continuing incremental deterioration in the state of the world, both ecological and socio-cultural, which we adapt to over time.
This has two implications. First, there is already a great deal of social and environmental injustice and damage which we need to address, irrespective of future changes. Existing conditions of starvation and mass poverty, and of ecosystem and resource base decline, need to be remediated. It’s worth remembering that we need not only prevent future problems, but attend to those already in place.
Second, our ability to adapt as a species is both a cause for celebration and alarm. Celebration because change has already happened and will continue to do so; a static state is not available to us, so adaptation of various kinds is imperative. And alarm because our very success at adapting to incremental change (even when it is punctuated by abrupt events like fisheries collapses, extreme weather events, or wars) can militate against more fundamental changes in the underlying development path we are on. That is, if we can find ways to mitigate the worst effects of the changes we are experiencing, without making more substantial changes in the direction and nature of societal development, there is the danger that we will gradually come to accept social and natural conditions that are extremely undesirable, even if we don’t run into any abrupt discontinuities that would challenge our continued existence.
We should therefore be worried not just about the possibility of some sort of environmentally-induced collapse, but also about the possibility that we can avoid such a collapse by a continued decline in social and environmental conditions. This latter possibility includes the imposition of highly undesirable forms of environmental and social control to avoid such a collapse. The fundamental normative and ethical question, as always, is what kind of a world we want to live in.