Sustainable Development and Sustainable Economics -- Sustainable?

I had a dream yesterday morning, jut a little before I woke up to get ready to go deliver the mail.

I was visiting a young boy in a wheelchair.

I could tell his body wanted to do something active, so I lifted him up onto my shoulders and let him use his arms to climb around on my back and shoulders and swing from my arms, helping him when his strength was insufficient.

When he was played out, I turned my back to his wheelchair and let him slide back down to sit.

He wanted me to come back the next day, and so did his physical trainer and his parents. The trainer pointed out that it seemed to be a good alternative approach to helping him develop the muscles that were not developing.

I had to explain that I could not visit every day due to other obligations, and there was some discussion of how often I could visit.

There were several limits to my ability to visit every day. One was that I had other obligations. Another was financial limits, in that making a regular commitment would require me to refrain to commit to other activities -- activities that would bring in pay.

A third limit was that making the visits regular would quickly relieve the visit of its novelty, equalizing it in effect with other, more normal methods.

In other words, making it a planned regular activity would rob it of its effect.

I don't remember if I explained clearly to them that I was sure that they would end up making my visits part of his "new training schedule plans", where I knew such plans were not appropriate. If such visits ("sessions") did lead to progress, progress would be in fits and starts and reversions. And the boy would need freedom to not play some days.

It was about this point that my eyes opened and I checked the alarm clock.

Most of the jobs I have had in my varied and spotted career have been the sort that do not result in sustainable family economics. 

Many of my jobs just haven't paid enough.

In many of my software and computer related jobs, the company was looking for a superman, but what they needed was for everyone in the company to buckle down and learn what they were actually selling, what they were actually producing, and devote time and resources to closing the gap. And to learn what computers cannot, in principle, do, so that the sales group would quit trying to sell things that were impossible.

They thought I could be their superman.

People don't want troubleshooters. They want magicians. 

-- and that's not a sustainable economic model for anyone.

In my private tutoring in English in Japan, some of the parents and students understood what I was doing and approved. But most could not let the bait of improving test scores alone long enough to let their children or themselves really relax and learn to communicate in English. 

Side-track on test scores -- If you design a test to display what one group of students has learned, there are other groups of students who were progressing in different but equally important areas, and the test fails to show their progress. The test rewards the two groups unequally. And there is much more to be said on the limits of tests which will have to be discussed elsewhere.

The English lessons themselves are a case in point. The best way to help a child who has not been progressing in school is to let that child explore the subject on his or her own. The student knows where he or she is getting stuck, and it may be in a blind alley or it may not, but the gaps can't be bridged if the student is continually being forced to study for the test instead of being allowed to fill in the lacks. 

You can't plan lessons in advance for the kind of teaching that is needed.

But without a plan, you can't have a sustainable activity.

Without a sustainable activity, in the current economic environment, you can't have sustainable development or sustainable economics.

Which brings me to my point, but does not bring you to the same point, I suppose. Let's try another tack.

A common complaint about popular songs is that (at any particular point in time) so much of it sounds the same. And well it should. The captains of the industry are devoted to that great principle of sustainable economics -- if it sells, make more of it.

Every now and then, some artist breaks out of the mold in just the right way to catch a wave of interest, and you get another big hit, and then everybody works on figuring out ways to copy it without infringing on the laws on intellectual property.

In case you aren't aware of how those breaks (hit songs, boom cycles) happen, here is how it happens: there will be groups of artists who are willing to set aside the principles of sustainable economics and forego immediate profit. (Willing to, as a technology teacher warned his students, "eat dirt and go naked".) The new hits come out of a few of those groups. 

But the profits are rewarded (somewhat randomly) to individuals from those groups (who are then dragged away from those groups by management). The profits do not return to the groups where the hits came from.

Maybe that brings you closer to the point.

Is sustainable sustainable?

Yet a different tack on the concept -- 

Ideals are good, right? But every ideal humans have developed in all our recorded history sooner or later leads to a dead or violent end. 

${White_supremacy} was an ideal that many found perplexingly reasonable -- mostly many ${whites}. But, surprisingly, many non-${whites} who preferred, perversely, to let someone else take the burdens of being socially superior. 

That preference may have been fear of retribution against contrary opinions in many cases, but in others was something else -- Leading is hard, and even most individual ${white_supremacists} perversely want someone else to lead the movement.

And basically, every political movement and ideal can be substituted in the place of ${white_supremacy} in the above paragraphs and it comes out the same.

Ideals adopted by the crowd quickly turn divisive and violent.

Should we get rid of ideals, then? 

Apparently, they are necessary. Otherwise people can't seem to see which way to head. But they are also necessary to abandon when the time comes. It is necessary to be ready to discard previously held ideals in favor of better ones, one at a time, when each ideal is no longer beneficial to the individual who has been holding it.

And society works much better when we don't all have to have the same ideals at once.

Sustainable development and sustainable economics seem like really good ideas. Okay, they are really good ideas. But in the end they are just another ideal.

The terms themselves contain an internal contradiction (just like all ideals, really). 

You cannot plan real progress, and without progress there is neither development nor economics.

Now, someone will point out that what is currently being called sustainable development in the international community is making use of our ecological resources in renewable ways.

Renewable?

How many people understand that all energy in our world comes, ultimately, from a very radioactive nuclear reactor in the center of the solar system? We are protected from it by distance, by atmosphere, and by a convenient magnetosphere. But without that huge source of (ultimately, non-renewable in a universe subject to entropy, but that's a long time away) energy, none of our economic activities are renewable.

Nuclear energy.

We have a lot of radioactive materials spread out all over the world. This was true well before such as the Curies, Einstein, Dalton, et. al. helped us understand the atomic nature of matter -- even well before Leucippus and Democritus. In some places they are naturally concentrated in ways that are dangerous to our safety there.

We also have a lot of nuclear reactor waste that has been concentrated by human means. And it's not going away anytime soon, either. 

Leaving it all there to slowly radiate away into the darkness is actually a waste of a good resource, a waste demanded by those who fear what happens when we mishandle it.

We are mishandling it now. 

We should be researching ways to use it safely, instead of sweeping it under the metaphorical rug of some mountain or desert in some remote part of the world we think we're safe from.

Most of the waste of our current economic activities is not radioactive. But it is still quite poisonous, quite dangerous to our health, and quite wasteful. 

Consider our old computers and portable phones. At least subliminally, you have to be aware that most of that ends up in highly toxic industrial dumps somewhere.

And the irony of it is that some of the very resources we are running short of are hiding in those dumps.

In too many of the ways it is used today, "sustainable" means "doing what we are already doing". That means continuing to call dumping waste "renewable", as long as we can find another place to dump most of it after a little processing to remove something currently of value.

And that isn't sustainable. Not in the long run.

So what is the answer?

Is sustainable not sustainable?

Or is it only temporarily sustainable and then you have to do it again?

Laws don't work. People always find loopholes so they can keep doing what they know how to do.

Right now, the answer is this: 

Those who have amassed great wealth by promoting the economic activities that generated the waste must learn to invest in their children's future by supporting the currently unprofitable activities of finding and developing safe ways to recover our waste -- preferably ways that don't entail seriously underpaid people working in slave conditions in distant countries poisoning themselves to got it done.

What if they insist on keeping their wealth instead?

What good will their wealth do if the next pandemic comes before we have proper vaccines for the current? 

Or if the slowly degrading plastics building up somewhere in the confluence of ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean ends up poisoning all the food-grade fish in the world? 

Or if the radioactive waste dumps in the deserts and mountains start leaking into the very place where rainwater for the continent is absorbed back into clouds to rain on the rest of the continent?

I don't see very many of our multi-billionaires jumping on this.

Popular movements, popular charities, popular areas of technological development -- things everyone is already doing, mostly activities that indirectly support the companies where they have their fortunes salted away, sure, they jump on those. 

But not on the unsustainable activities that will lead us back to a new round of sustainability.

We can't be sustainable with short-term views of sustainability, and five and ten years is way too short-term.