Sustaining sustainability

Sustainability is all the rage these days. It’s a major marketing job-creator in all sorts of industries striving to convince customers, regulators and the public that what they do makes lots of green money and, in the process, may even increase the wildlife available for hunters to shoot to death.

Pardon my optimism, but the planet is infested with humans for whom sustainable living is way beyond anything we’re very good at. Sustainability requires sustained cooperation and self-sacrifice, rarities humans usually reserve for World Wars and other problems amendable to carpet bombing.

A big problem with sustainability here in the Valley is that it has to be implemented by humans in political subdivisions with clearly united communities of interest.  That’s certainly not our Valley, where communities are sharply divided by income, class and ethnicity and run by powerful commercial interests (wine & tourism) determined to maintain the status quo.

We’ve seen how cooperation isn’t working well when it comes to something simple, like water, where vineyards and wineries are on a well-drilling binge despite declining water tables. And while municipal water agency structures look democratic, in practice they aren’t. For example, they impose increased water rate schedules unless 50 percent of system users object. Heck, nearly 50 percent of adults bother to vote in real elections.

Even science deniers know environmental issues transcend boundaries. But as the sphere of needed cooperation expands, the sustainability steering wheel becomes less attached to the wheels.  The signature achievement of global ‘climate summits’ in Kyoto and then in Lima was an agreement to meet again in Paris to kick the climate can farther down the road. Paris will be better, but only because the wine and hors d’oeuvres will be first rate.

Locally, sustainability will require the rich and powerful to eschew economic self-interest in a cooperative effort to reach a truly sustainable socio-economic stasis for the Common Good or, as some might call it, “Socialism.” Good luck with that.

What’s worse, no one hereabouts mentions the elephant in the womb: population.  Forget that leaders in China (pop: 1.4 billion) just doubled the number of allowed babies per family. In our little Valley, birthrates, in-migration and more tourists could swamp efforts to stem the Valley’s slide into the environmental pits. Often cited is the amount of water it takes just to produce one pound of beef from a steer that lives only a few years before slaughter (6,500 gallons). Consider the Valley water needed to sustain a human to age 75, or a tourist for a weekend.

Fortunately for the Valley’s economy, reproductive sex is fun because free market capitalism requires new customers and workers to generate growth, without which it collapses like a Ponzi scheme.  Unfortunately, in a world and a Valley reaching limits of finite resources, change may be constant but constant growth is not, what’s the word… sustainable.

Despite these challenges I’m 100 percent optimistic that the best thing we can do while trying to prevent the worst from happening is to remain calm until it does. There is comfort in knowing that complete environmental collapse likely won’t be our problem but that of the yet unborn whose parents-to-be can often be seen with their heads in their apps.

In summary, like the Confederate battle plan at Gettysburg, Sustainability is theoretically doable. But as Colonel Pickett said to General Lee as he stared at the Union troops and cannon amassed atop Cemetery Ridge: “Y’all can’t be serious.”