There is no such thing as a free lunch
I must be an extremely optimistic techno-idealogue (who doesn’t read the news and is unaware of the negative environmental trends around me). Unfortunately, I am not these things but I still believe ‘sustainability’ is an important idea that we all should subscribe to. There’s more than a little cognitive dissonance here.
Resilience science can offer many insights on the challenges that currently beset us, but I don’t see its current deployment as anything more than a strategy of obfuscation and displacement, the strategy you roll out when you don’t actually have a plan
The growing body of evidence, unfortunately, is that our world is not on a trajectory of sustainability. If anything, we are accelerating away from it. However, there was a time, no so long ago, when there appeared to be a growing international consensus that sustainability was a real and achievable goal.
The divide over environmental policy was not part of the political landscape when environmental concerns first became prominent in the public consciousness in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rather, it emerged much later as vested interests, realising the implications of the policies necessary to counter environmental decline, pushed back hard, including by framing issues in terms of the ‘environment vs jobs’ dichotomy that reflects the dominant and still-powerful post-war paradigm, that of economic growth as progress.