A CHOICE OF LIFESTYLE
Lifestyle is that sense of inner wholeness and harmony derived by living in such a way that the spiritual, environmental, and material aspects of one's life are in balance. Before we can discuss lifestyle, however, we must consider the idea of "sustainable development" as outlined in the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, which calls for juxtaposing two mutually exclusive concepts in today's economic/political vernacular—that of "sustainability" and that of "development." Sustainability is the language of balance and limits—of a nonviolent, reciprocal partnership with Nature. Development, on the other hand, is the language of expansion, of expecting ever more in limitless fashion.
If we try to imagine sustaining our current, ever-expanding economic concept into the future, we soon bump into environmental crises, and we see the need to re-frame the old economic paradigm—that continued growth is the solution to all our social problems. No longer are we facing the old, simplistic question: "How do we balance development and conservation?" Instead, we are confronted by a new question based on a different reality, namely: "Can we have development without the conservation, when something is of use in the long term only if it is sustainable?" Conservation implies duration over time through wise use, i.e., the sustainability of that which is being conserved in order to use it, be the sources of its renewal, and pass it forward to the next generation in a condition that we, ourselves, would like to inherit.
The current characteristic of any strategy to raise material prosperity, often thought of as the standard of living, is the assumption that ever-expanding development is necessarily and ethically good, that it presents more material goods and thereby makes life "better" than it presently is—at best, a value-laden process. If development is important only so we can continue to achieve ever-higher levels of material prosperity, then to sustain environmental degradation only to accommodate development is unethical, if not strictly self-centered and immoral. If, however, a whole and harmonious lifestyle is important, then engaging in a mode of development that is anything less than ecologically sustainable is an oxymoron.
Whether a given lifestyle is even possible hinges on "cultural capacity," an analogue of "carrying capacity," which is the number of animals that can live in and use a particular landscape without impairing its ability to function in an ecologically specific way. If we want human society to survive the 21st century in any sort of dignified manner, we must have the humility to view our own population in terms of local, regional, national, and global carrying capacities, because the quality of life declines in direct proportion to which the habitat is overpopulated.
But if we substitute the idea of "cultural capacity" for "carrying capacity," we have a workable proposition for society. Cultural capacity is a chosen quality of life, which can be sustained without endangering the environment's productive capabilities. For example, the more materially oriented is the desired lifestyle of an individual or a society, the more resources are needed to sustain it and the smaller the human population must be per unit area of landscape to support it. Cultural capacity, then, is a balance between how we want to live—the real quality of our lifestyles and of our society—and how many people an area can support in that lifestyle on a sustainable basis. Cultural capacity of any area will be less than its carrying capacity in the biological sense.
We can predetermine cultural capacity and adjust our population growth accordingly. If we choose not to balance our desires with the land's capabilities, the depletion of the land—not of our desires—will continue to determine the qualitative level of our cultural/social experience and our lifestyles. So far, we have chosen not to balance our desires with the capabilities of the land, because we have equated "desire, need, and demand" as synonyms with every itch of "want." We have therefore lost sight of ecological reality.
If we desire to maintain a predetermined lifestyle, we must ask new questions, such as: (1) How much of any given resource is necessary for us to use if we are to live in the lifestyle of our choice? (2) How much of that resource is necessary to leave intact as a biological reinvestment in the health and continued productivity of the ecosystem for the sake of future generations? and (3) When the answer to question one is subtracted from the answer to question two, do sufficient resources remain to support our lifestyles of choice—or must we modify our proposed lifestyles to meet what the land is capable of sustaining?
Why the modification? Because "necessity" is a very different proposition from the collective "desire, want, need, demand" syndrome, so arguments about the proper cultural capacity revolve not only around what we think we want in a materialistic/spiritual sense but also around what the land can produce in an environmentally sustainable sense. Cultural capacity is a conservative concept given finite resources and well-defined values. Put differently, the more we want from the land, the fewer people it can support; the less we want from the land, the more people it can support. By first determining what we want in terms of lifestyle, we may be able to determine not only if the Earth is capable of supporting our desired lifestyle but also how we must behave with respect to the environment if we are to maintain our desire lifestyle.
These considerations are vital because every ecosystem will adapt in some way, with or without the human hand. That said, our current heavy-handedness precludes our ability to guess, much less to know, what kind of adaptations will emerge. Thus, we must pay particular attention to ecological "backups," of which biodiversity is the "nuts and bolts."
Each ecosystem contains built-in backups, which means that more than one species that can perform a similar function, thereby giving the ecosystem the resilience to either resist or bounce back after disturbance. But we have little knowledge about which species do what and how. So when we tinker willy-nilly with an ecosystem's structure to suit our short-term, economic desires, we lose species to extinction, thus reducing the ecosystem's biodiversity. With decreased biodiversity, we lose choices for meeting our social-environmental desires—not to mention necessities, which directly affects the Earth's cultural capacity and therefore our lifestyles. The loss of biodiversity may so alter the ecosystem that it no longer can produce that for which we valued it in the first place—a desired lifestyle.
If we want to choose the quality of our lifestyle by determining the cultural capacity of the land over time, we must abandon the cherished, mechanical notion of "sustained yield." We must instead shift our attention to "caretaking" the land as social-environmental trustees for a sustainable array of choices, which means we must afford the maximum protection to the existing biodiversity, regardless of the apparent, short-term, economic and political costs.
To those who insist that we can't convert capitalism to an ecologically friendly form quickly enough to protect existing biodiversity, I point out that our entire economy was transformed to a wartime basis in a matter of a year or so at the beginning of World War II. And it was changed back again to a peacetime economy in a similarly short time at the end of the war. The mechanism, which allowed the shift to the wartime economy and back again, was simply a choice of priorities. Similarly, a shift to an ecologically friendly economy today, which also will serve for tomorrow, is merely a choice of industrial/political priorities.
We must make the only viable choice we can, to consciously convert our society to an ecologically friendly version of capitalism as quickly as possible through the purposeful protection of biodiversity as our major source of renewable energy and the novelty of environmental adaptation. After all, what to sustain and what not to sustain in our capitalistic system is a choice of priorities in economic allocation—of wants, desires, needs, and demands as opposed to necessities.
Long-term, ecological wholeness and biological richness of the landscape must become the measure of economic health. We must therefore do our best to care first and foremost for land if we want the land to be able to provide for us. This brings me to the question of sustainability per se.
We cannot, however, "manage" sustainability for the sake of sustainability, because sustainability most often is thought of in terms of some one thing, such as a sustainable yield of corn, or salmon, or water, or cattle, or trees. Beyond that, every ecosystem is inevitably evolving toward a critical state in which a minor event can, and sooner or later does, lead to a catastrophic event that alters the ecosystem in some way. After such a catastrophe, a system may eventually be able to approximate what it was through resilience—the ability of the system to retain the integrity of its basic relationships.
Because of the dynamic nature of the evolving ecosystems we attempt to "manage" and because each is constantly organizing itself from one critical state to another, we can only caretake an ecosystem for its possible evolution—not for a sustained yield of products. Therefore, the only sustainability for which we can nurture an ecosystem is that which ensures the ecosystem's ability to adapt to evolutionary change, such as warming of the global climate, in a way that may be favorable for us. In other words, we need to caretake ecosystems for choice, which is synonymous with biodiversity, which, in turn, is a social-environmental "insurance policy."
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Chris Maser
www.chrismaser.com
Corvallis, OR 97330
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