Blocked by sustainability

Trying to design and create sustainable systems, I usually get blocked, because it feels impossible to me to create something without externalizing some irreversible damage to another part of the world.

I understand as sustainable what can be recycled indefinitely. Pollution may stop this recyclability.

How do you manage to not feel bad when you generate irreversible damage to the world?

In Emergency Management, there is a reoccurring phenomena during disasters of analysis paralysis. Emergency managers would not take action when they have five different 'good' plans because they hope they can come up with one perfect plan.

I view making some progress better than not making any progress. We will be faced with challenges (life right?) and we might not be able to perfectly act in a certain way but we can act better than what a conventional person may do.

I find that consistently striving to be better, in all aspects of life, is a noble pursuit even if there are some bumps along the way.  

You should be proud of yourself just for thinking about the impact you have on other beings across the world. Not many people do that.

I have found that the way is slow, but worthwhile, to do things thoughtfully. Within reason—wearing ourselves thin while trying to do things well isn’t sustainability. My definition of sustainability is something where it helps the planet and soils and yourself, and younger generations want to follow in your footsteps. Do what you can, acknowledge where you are with compassion, and don’t try too hard.

When I think of sustainable I think of not harming the environment.

I believe in helping to restore or renew the environment by working to restore the soil.

I also believe in conservation and working to protecting natural resources.

I tend to believe that I am not causing irreversible damage to the world.

I do believe in the 3R's, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle and try to live my life the best way I can.

I am not responsible for what others do.

Mikel, would you like to provide an example for us to workshop? I could start talking about how we can grow food without minerals from the third world, but I'd just be guessing about what your hurdles are.

Maybe it's helpful to think less in terms of absolutes and more in terms of commonsense.

"Sustainable", able to be sustained, does not and should not imply "forever". Nothing is forever, and the laws of thermodynamics tell us we cannot create order in one place without creating disorder somewhere else.

Sustainable can have a human-scale meaning: if you implement this, can you sustain it without further considerable expense? Is it something there is will to do? Will implementing it once set in motion a kind of inertia so that the thing tends to "care for itself"? If the answer to these kinds of questions is yes, then it is sustainable.

I will use the example of my property: we have a mixture of grass and perennial native flower garden beds. The grass requires mowing, but we do nothing else to it. Anything further I would consider unsustainable, though even the gas and noise of the mower is already borderline unsustainable to me. Some of my neighbors spray chemicals, physically pull up weeds, or even drag giant barrels behind their mowers to smooth out the ground. And of course they remove any native plants the moment they pop up. Those activities are what I would consider unsustainable, because they require so much continuous input and provide so little output (just ask the pollinators who, thankfully, all flock to my house instead!).

Hi Mikel,

I feel better if I can make my corner better without having to intentionally hurt any other corner.  If I can recycle, that’s a little point in my corner but not a negative in any other corner.  I love to make my topsoil from woodchips which I decompose with Wine Cap mushrooms.  I have hurt no one, but my soil is magically better.  And I need no artificial fertilizer.  I don’t even need natural fertilizer like bone or blood meal.

I try my best to stay self sufficient on my patch of ground.  I am not perfect.  But perfection is a foolish goal—by its very definition, it’s is unattainable.  I do strive for excellence,  but I am human and I will fail sometimes.  Good,  Failure is the best teacher and I will learn from my mistakes and be better in the future.

I can’t, nor would I, tell you what to do.  My suggestion is to do the best you can with what you have where you are.  And if you have some guilt for what could have been done better—good!  You can do better next time!

I wish you the best of luck.  And if you need to come here and vent, by all means do so.


Eric

Christopher Weeks wrote:Mikel, would you like to provide an example for us to workshop? I could start talking about how we can grow food without minerals from the third world, but I'd just be guessing about what your hurdles are.

Thank you all for your supportive replies ♥️.

I think the only sustainable materials are the ones that are recyclable indefinitely, as plant based materials (wood, cotton, water, light...). But in the moment we use a plastic or metal tool to process them, recyclability is not 100%, sustainability dissapears and pollution and irreversible destruction start.

With that in mind, using all the modern knowledge, can we live sustainablelly in a more comfortable way than hunter gatherer cavemen? Can we "improve" that lifestyle?

Could we use some metal and stone for a few applications?

Building is an area far from sustainable and seems difficult to reach sustainability. Electricity, plumbing, waterproofing...

A wise man once said something like "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good!"

There's a danger that if someone insists on everything being 100% sustainable, then they'll never begin to make improvements.

Maybe the metal needed could be sourced used somewhere? Maybe start a thread here on permies to brainstorm alternative ways to solve a problem or alternative materials to use.

Most of the rural houses where I live are made from stone cut from the mountain that the house is built on, mostly whilst the terraces on the mountain were being made. My son's house is like that. It had been abandoned for years and years and he's renovating it as best he can so those stone walls can provide his housing for the rest of his life, and probably for a few generations beyond that. That seems pretty sustainable to me!

Some of the materials we are using for our rocket mass heater were purchased new. But the finished product should allow us to heat ourselves with waste wood for the rest of our lives. It's a balance. Some of the materials in the build were salvaged, people seem to be inspired by what we are doing, and hopefully the overall impact will be for greater sustainability.

Do something. Have fun. Learn what you can along the way. Don't punish yourself for not being perfect. Keep learning. And keep sharing.

I'll echo what others have said, that doing the best you can is good enough, and good enough is good. I'm also thinking that at the moment, there's a whole lot of tools and resources going to waste because it's cheaper (counted in money) to make a new one of whatever-it-is. If you use these things, you're not adding to the destruction, you're using part of a waste stream for the benefit of you and others. It seems to me that, other than food and possibly clothes, there's enough of everything right now to last all of humanity for a few generations, with reuse, repair and some ingenious repurposing and recycling. (How many axes can you make from one old steel pylon for a high-voltage power line?) After that, who knows, but if we try to chart a "perfect" course for the rest of humanity's existence, we'll just drive ourselves mad, at no benefit to ourselves or the world. I think we need to live in the now, do the best we can, take things as they come, and accept that we can't solve every problem for the future. After all, we need to leave the people living 300 years from now something to figure out!

On another note, I personally don't really see how metal (particularly iron) would be impossible to recycle indefinitely, at least in principle. It's a chemical element, it doesn't get destroyed or irretrievably lost. Even if we only think about what's practical and the immediate sources of useable iron, there are actually some that replenish themselves quite rapidly. I'm thinking about bog ore and other deposits built up by iron-oxidizing bacteria. These have been used sustainably in the past. Most farmers in Scandinavia back in the day did at least part of their own metalwork, starting from bog ore. The only reason it's not considered a viable source of iron at present is the sheer, massive scale of iron usage.

Eino Kenttä wrote:

I'm also thinking that at the moment, there's a whole lot of tools and resources going to waste because it's cheaper (counted in money) to make a new one of whatever-it-is.  

If someone started a coppicing operation specifically to grow shovel handles, including getting the equipment to shape those handles efficiently, they would be helping to undo a small part of the waste I see. I have 2 handle-less shovel blades, and a third who's handle will break as soon as someone stronger than me decides to use it. Currently, it's more expensive to buy a new handle than to buy a whole shovel???

But there's old knowledge there that the people who simply buy one at the store don't know. Which way one orients the grain of the handle to the flat of the shovel actually matters. The handle is stronger in some directions than others. Also, I know enough that some woods make better handles than others, but my ability to both know what the options are in my ecosystem, *and* to be able to recognize those trees, is marginal. Some information sticks in my brain, but tree identification and strengths of different wood aren't quite sticky enough!