One vivid way to highlight different approaches to sustainability is to consider the needs and responses of three very different stereotypes.
Noble savages are hunter-gatherers who live by their wits fishing and hunting wild game and collecting berries, seeds and grasses. We were all in this class once. It requires a lot of land, flora and fauna and relatively small and highly mobile populations. They tread lightly on the land, revere the Earth as their Mother and pass down traditions in story and song. They also often sculpted the land with fire-stick farming to create grasslands and hunting large animals to extinction. Their carbon footprint was low as was their GDP. However, their National Happiness Level was probably quite high as few of these native were tempted by the western “advanced” way of life.
Cowboys lived on the vast, seemingly endless open prairie of the American West. They hunted deer, moose, bison and natives (but that’s a different story). They also ate beans and bread and drank coffee and liquor; all products of an agrarian society. What set the cowboy apart from the settlers is that they were the adventurers, the first to move into the new lands, the first to see the enormous wealth of nature, and sadly the first to abuse it. Cowboys see only the bounteous abundance of the environment and ignore their impact upon it. The cowboys’ approach, rooted in selfishness and ignorance, is the very antithesis of sustainability and completely opposite to ideal of the noble savage. The cowboy mentality was, and still is, at the core of the American culture. Nature is just too big, too awesome for humans to damage. Humans cannot control the weather, cannot warm the atmosphere, melt the ice caps, kill the coral reefs, raise sea levels or wipe out fish stocks. It is either not happening or else it must be caused by natural events. Cowboys have a huge footprint on the land. They’ve exterminated entire peoples, driven species extinct including the passenger pigeon whose flocks were once 300miles long and a mile wide. Cowboys are truly dangerous dudes.
Spacemen have a problem, a huge problem. They’re stuck in a little tin can for years with only the supplies they brought along with them. They need to conserve and recycle everything; it’s a matter of life and death. They must recycle their waste, scrub the carbon dioxide from the air they exhale, grow their own food and even generate the own sunlight for their plants. They must also cooperate; arguments could easily result in the end of them all. In many ways spacemen are like the savages. But, savages could afford to move camp in search of better food; spacemen have no such luxury. They must conserve and protect their environment perfectly - absolutely no slip-ups.
While it may be technically possible to live like spacemen for a short time, the sociological pressures would be enormous as was apparent in the Spaceship Earth experiments of the 1970s. Humans are very social creatures; we value the opinion and strive for the respect of others.
Now it is time to respect and care for our mother earth. It is time to learn the lessons that the noble savage can teach us. We may be unable to live like spacemen but we are not in Kansas any more either. It is time to take off the spurs, put down the rifles and appreciate that we have an enormous affect on our environment. If we don’t grow up and act like a civilized society we will leave behind us a barren and bleak landscape in which our children may have to adopt the culture of the savage as they fight for increasingly scarce supplies of energy, water and food. We have made many animals extinct, now it’s time to do the same to the cowboy.
You can read more on this at The Socio-Capitalist
