You aren’t being sustainable, you’re being a conservationist
As I look around TreeHugger’s website I see videos and read articles in which people talk about how they are being sustainable. I just watched a video of a woman talking about how she was using finger food for her party to avoid using utensils so that she could ‘be sustainable.’ This term is quickly being misused and this is causing the idea behind sustainability to lose focus. In the mainstream it has basically become the new term for being ‘environmentally friendly’ or a ‘conservationist’. The term was well defined in the Brundtland Conference in ’87 as something that would describe a top-down approach to development. When people talk about their actions, that is simply conserving. Here’s an example: one might ‘act sustainably’ by flushing only when necessary (if it’s yellow let it mellow…you get the idea) but you are simply conserving water. Sustainability in this sense has more to do with the system and process. Is your toilet designed to use under 1.4 gallons per flush? Where is the water going? A sustainable system would be one where that same water would then run underneath your garden or lawn and irrigate food crops you eat. If that is the case, it really doesn’t matter how often you flush so long as your crops aren’t being irrigated otherwise. That is sustainability. It refers to the entire process. Essentially, a person cannot be sustainable in their actions (except maybe in the case of overeating) but one can conserve. It is the policy-makers, developers, designers and builders–those that create the systems–that have the ultimate responsibility of being sustainable.
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I would agree 100% that sustainability is by its nature a systems level concept–in fact, recognizing that is what its all about. Nothing is sustainable in isolation. Everything depends on energy flowing through it. I also like your conservation example. While acts of conservation might represent a nudge towards systems-level thinking (I use less paper because I have recognized that destruction of forests are a consequence of its production), its doesn’t really make sense to call individual acts sustainable. While some acts of conservation might contribute to the sustainability of a system (such as the paper example) others have almost no relation to the concept (e.g. conserving non-renewable fossil fuels). Moreover, the important point is that sustainablility lies in the connections, interactions, and energy flows within a whole system. If the term is to continue to have any usefulness, we need to be sure that it is used in a meaningful way.
This leads to the question: Does it make any sense to talk about sustainable interaction design? If computers can only be manufactured through the use of fossil fuels, any amount of greening of the industry will never result in a sustainable system. Bill Mollison says that fossil fuels should only be used as inputs in a one-time initial stage (e.g. using machines to make enduring improvements to the landscape). In this spirit, we might justify the use of computers to initiate a cultural change, but only if we are preparing for the day when we can abandon them all together…
You make a good point. I suppose the fundamental problem is that through manufacturing anything we are most likely never going to be sustainable. Though I suppose looking at the history of all animal species, there is no hope for infinite sustainability.
However, we have chose to become manufacturers and it would be difficult to find many people that will be willing to abandon manufactured goods. Because of this, I don’t really buy into the notion that we must one day learn to abandon computers altogether. We have made a choice as a species–unconsciously or not–that we are going to “enjoy” our lives on earth. There are no doubt many people who would argue that we can be happy without computers but I don’t see the ideology of “giving up” amenities as a likely solution.
If we are likely to one expire as a species why be concerned with true sustainability? We don’t want to live a stripped-down version of our lives to sustain the future. What is the ultimate purpose?I guess there is a more philosophical question at the root of this discussion concerning what the real point of sustainability is…
Anyway, I think we have lifestyles that we are willing to accept in this world and the call for designers is to redesign these lifestyles in a way that leads to greater sustainability. This in no way implies that we should be moving towards giving these amenities up in the future but we can hope that design may move our lifestyles in the right direction.
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