The fact that no one cares about this word anymore makes me curious.
When the word “sustainable” or “sustainability” is spoken out loud, I can see in my mind a vast group of people rolling over their eyes and shrugging their shoulders like, “Here it comes…”
But honestly, I do not understand what such an allergy is about.
Sustainable, according to the dictionary, means:
- It can be sustained;
- It can be defended;
- Or something that has the conditions to continue or conserve.
With that said, I think it’s more clear now!
Sustainable is not an exclusive term for measures or laws to combat climate change and pollution.
Sustainable” is an adjective—a word that describes someone or something that can be sustained, defended, and/or that is in good condition.
It is obvious that the systems we created to live in this world do not follow that meaning. And for that reason, they are associated with the word, along with everything that seems a solution for these problems.
But before applying it to the current systems, this word should be applied to ourselves.
If you ask someone what that person wishes to be or to have in life, in the majority of the cases, they wish to be happy and to have a lot of money.
And I get the idea, but before wanting to be happy or rich, we should want to be sustainable—on the contrary, happiness or richness will not endure for a long time.
Simply because it is not compatible to be happy without being sustainable first. And it is not compatible to be rich without, beforehand, being sustainable.
Let’s think about it:
Living a sustainable life is nothing more and nothing less than living a life compatible with ourselves, with those around us, and with the world we live in. Ultimately, it is about living a balanced life that is possible to live, without causing harm to anyone.
Example: If someone lives their entire life in a job they hate, sooner or later, their mental health will be compromised. And therefore, doing what you hate your whole life is not at all sustainable.
No one is happy if they do not live a life they can defend, that is, where they have freedom and can live in a way aligned with their principles and needs – which must also be aligned with the world around them.
Example: If someone believes that the only food they can eat is bananas, well, there won’t be enough bananas for that person because, as we all know, no human being lives on bananas alone – eventually, that person’s own body would end up with some problem due to their diet. Therefore, living solely on bananas was not a sustainable way of living because it simply would not be compatible with one’s body, nor with nature, because if we all lived on bananas, all the land in the world would never be enough to cultivate monocultures of banana trees! The soils would increasingly lack the nutrients consumed by the banana plants, and there would be no other plant species to replenish them, since we would only have banana plants planted all over the world! Not to mention the species that would cease to exist because they were replaced by banana plants. And this, logically, would not be remotely viable.
No one can live a happy life without long-term conditions to maintain it. It is not a life that can be lived for long, because some of those affected will certainly end up giving in!
Example: If someone has a fortune sufficient to buy the entire world and one day decides that they will only be happy if they buy the entire world – we would all become dependent on that person to live, because everything would belong to them! Logically, this was not a minimally acceptable reality to live in and therefore, it would not be sustainable.
Sustainable is not having less, nor is it having too much.
It should be seen as the ideal aspiration of all beings in this world and the main objective, before any other.
After all, even if our goal were to be rich, what good is achieving wealth if it is incompatible with the world? Wealth allows us to buy resources. And since the resources of this world are limited, having money is of no use to us if in the end there is nothing to buy.
Sustainable, it is the basic requirement to live in this world.
And no one can live sustainably without being sustainable in the first place.