Reply to 'Red alert over Greens threat'
The Australian Financial Review's editorial, Red alert over Greens threat, included the laughable-if-not-so-treacherous 'weasel' phrase, "a headlong rush to sustainability".

We are currently commemorating the 40th anniversary of Rachel Carson's publication of Silent Spring (it took me, barely in primary school, a few years to work out which of the possible meanings that title meant). There were earlier discussions of the problems being caused by the kinds of things happening around humans, but this work caused a major public reaction where the others tended to be among specialists and particularly interested groups.

It is nearly 30 years since "The Limits to Growth" report from the Club of Rome was disseminated.

A lot of good work has been done since then, but the 'headlong rush' has in general been in the opposite direction to sustainability. Many statistics demonstrate this. Reports from even simple things like satellite images demonstrating the magnitude of human effects have been released in the last year.

The Fin Review also quibbles that 'sustainability' is poorly defined. Contemplate other poorly defined concepts such as 'life', 'death', 'love', 'money', 'good', 'evil' or 'human'. Somehow, despite sometimes violent disagreements about them, humanity has agreed that they have considerable importance. Many people and societies have come to ways of dealing with the majority of incidences of these of importance in most peoples lives, while conceding that there are 'hard cases' in all of them which fortunately occur less frequently than the others.

Consider perhaps some ideas opposite to 'sustainability'. Concepts like 'greed', 'selfishness', 'short-term vision', 'stupidity' (in the sense of failing to learn from repeated previous examples and/or failing to grasp clear logical connections), 'unviability' and particularly 'destructiveness'. Can the Fin Rev manage to support these in any kind of thinking way?

I hope this makes some sort of sense. I tend to get up to white heat very quickly when I see this kind of argument about issues close to my core philosophy - one reason that I've steered away from involvement in political parties despite requests.
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 11/04/2002 09:08:00 pm