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So far we have seen how humankind is evolving and what the long-term scenarios might be. Now is it worth picking one of them and trying to go after it? Does it make any sense at all? Is it the right time? Are you the right person? This section comes back to the complexity of the changes under way and why that induces a scary uncertainty that is worsening with time, thus an urge to act. Then I will try to express how thinking and acting according to these ideas gives a sense and interest to my life. Finally we will try to relate these issues with moral values we might share.
a) Make sense of chaos
As seen in page I. We’re changing because we’re not sustainable, multiple factors are driving the evolution of our society, interacting among themselves and making for extraordinarily complex system dynamics. You might have noticed I barely tried to dig into and discuss the causalities and the mechanisms I have evoked. You might have felt frustrated. Well, that is because they are indescriptible, there will always be something left aside that can change the whole game. Instead, the previous sections tried to give broad probable lines. The only certain thing is that we need to change, because the way we are functioning now is unsustainable.
Physicists call it chaos and it is a striking phenomenon. Consider a system as simple as an articulated pendulum. Two sticks hanging one after the other from a nail. Give them a kick: they will oscillate in a pretty familiar and predictable manner. Now hold them over the nail and let them go. They will break into an agitated dance that has nothing to do with whatever your brain might be trying to anticipate. It is not only your brain. I have done it myself: try to write down the equations of the pendulum’s movement, then simulate them on a computer. You will see a movement that is similar to the one of your sticks, but never the same. If you do a second simulation, barely changing the starting position (and by barely I mean a millionfold of the first one). Let it run for a mere couple of seconds. Then compare both situations. They simply have strictly nothing to do with each other.
So much about our trivial articulated pendulum. How can one even imagine to predict something as complex as the course of humankind, interacting with a way wider ecosystem? Let aside climate change. That is comparatively “easy” to simulate because the atmosphere and the oceans are a slow and uniform system, and yet scientists have been doing mistake over mistake about it (not always in the alarmist direction). In science that is just normal trial and error of simulations to develop models that make sense of the world around us – yet always fail to give a full account of it. But predicting human evolution in the context of a hardly predictable changing climate? No way.
And that is the first reason to act now and counter our current unsustainable way of being. For pure fear of the unknown. Not the stimulating unknown of a calm horizon you want to drive across. The terrifying unknown of an unmapped swamp at dusk, where you know you will fall victim of quick sands, poisonous frogs or slower infected mosquito bites. If you are to cross such a swamp, you should first wait for daylight, not be alone and take step after step, carefully, rather than continuing to run full speed ahead as we have been doing in the past years.
b) Make sense of our lives
Achieving a sustainable world (in the sense of social sustainability presented as third option before) requires a large collective effort. It requires discussing the solutions together to then build them in collaboration. It therefore requires thinking about these complex issues, building friendships and creating hope. Even if the prospects are gloomy, I never enjoy conversations more than when they are around existential sustainability topics. There is a cliche that young people always think that they know better and want to change the world. In this case, we are all back to youth, effectively changing the world. It is sometimes frightening to not know whether we are doing the right choices, because we never thought it all through, but if we can share and be with others to make our mistakes as well as the right things, it is the process that is pleasant per se.
One way or another, by thinking and discussing about these topics we are building our understanding of the world. Do you know that feeling after you have cleaned your apartment or your office, putting things away, and for a moment you just know where everything is and can enjoy sitting back on your chair and look at what you have done? I imagine that is the feeling we will get by taking care of our common house.
More importantly, it is a way of evading our current way of life, where we are prisoners to our job position, whether we like what we are doing or not. We are seemingly bound to watch our politicians take the wrong decisions and we are supposed to stay quiet at home enjoying movie series. Going to the gym helps us feel better about it, because we feel we are doing something for our body. Is not the feeling we are doing something for our fellows and our natural world even better?
c) Make sense of our values
The two first reasons to change now and quickly rely on survival instinct and herd instinct. That gives me good hope that they will ultimately prevail, in one or another way, in preventing complete environmental collapse. The third reason relates to our moral values, which are more of a social construct but also provide a rationale to how we should address sustainability issues taking into account the social component. You may not adhere to these values or decide to be cynical about them, but then let us know what your motivation is to get out of bed every morning.
In my view (that of an European early Millennial), thinking of the mounting inequalities related to our current lifestyle is a strong motivation to act. On the further side, people in remote countries are suffering and dying every day to provide the goods that I can consume at home. On the closer side, I see friends struggling to find a meaningful job and a sufficient income while we know a happy few are earning as much as half the worlds income annually just from investing their immense wealth. Note that many solutions proposed to mitigate climate change nowadays do not address this issue.
At the harder end of this, though, is the idea of so much life being erased from earth due to our lifestyle. Not only human life, but also wild animal life (the elephants and such you might have heard about), bugs (remember the collapse in bee populations?) and in the darkness all kinds of vegetal life. It is not much the dead of individual beings that affects me, but the disappearing of entire slices of ecosystems to which I feel easily bound as soon as I am out in natural spaces, hiking in the mountains or just enjoying the sun in a city park.
Then there are some individuals whose death or illness I can not with certainty blame on how we live today, but which might be related. Think of friends taken away by cancer (which prevalence likely increases with our exposure to plastics and chemicals in everything we touch and eat) or elders left to age in retirement homes because our social fabric is not solid enough anymore to provide them with care and company at home. Could it not be different?
Conclusion
This page gives some of the reasons why I feel I can not live my life without thinking about the sustainability challenge. Avoiding cascading collapses of our ecosystems and our society. Avoid wars. Work with others and feel better with them. Live according to the values my parents and my educators have given me. There certainly are other reasons and you might feel more or less concerned about them, but you are now given the choice: change or not? And how much are you ready to change?
It would not make sense if all of us went to work into « sustainability related » companies and involve in activism and political duties. But there are things we can do in our everyday lifes to lay with all our weight on the right side of the change and abstain from working against it. The next section shares some ideas for that.
Next page: IV. What to do?
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