Hunting and Gathering

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. There seems to be a neverending stream of talk about 'sustainability', thus diluting the term more and more. A lot of this rhetoric is also of a nature more palatable to the Business Roundtable et al, so of course must be taken suspiciously: eg. "They supported the government in closing down Timberlands on the West Coast, a lose-lose outcome on both economic and environmental grounds. " - I fail to understand how banning the logging of ancient stands of native forest is an envrionmental loss!?

The right-wing assumption is that technological solutions will be more effective than the ratification of emmisions controls, based on a fear that any climatic legislation will force an economic downturn, as other states are not handicapped in a similar sense. The argument is that the market will favour the most environentally apt product as it naturally becomes costlier to be un-environmentally friendly.

This is a nice idea, but of course true environmental costs are never included in the RRP, so market forces have been allowed to decimate the environment to the extent they have. The human, moral imperative is neglected by the right in favour of economics: sustainability rhetoric in this sense involves the rare occasions where environmentalism and the marketability thereof overlaps economic potential.

At our current point in human development, we really have our hands tied- however 'green' a given product may appear, in reality this will usually be a veneer of ecological respectability over a deeply un-ecological system of production and consumption. The hybrid car conspicuous-consumption craze is perhaps the most obvious example.

I do believe that there is a requirement for carefully designed solutions, principally because it is much easier to subvert the status quo with efficiency. The distributed microgeneration scheme I'm working on should be economically comparable to buying from the large providers, but foster an understanding of environmental realities concerning energy. Of course, the focus should be to question whether we really need so much energy in the first case- perhaps a renewed look at hunter-gatherer lifestyles is in order?

P.S. Can you possibly turn on visual validation in the comments? We've been innundated with spam lately....