I certainly agree that we (global society) need a new future. Unfortunately I simply don't see it happening in a rational way but only as a result of collapse and die off. But, who knows how that might play out.

There are too many vested interests for all of them to reach a consensus as to the "good" society. To take my own beliefs on one issue -population density, i.e. a low density, rural, agriculturally based society vs those who posit that the answer is high density cities. I'm simply not willing to compromise on this. I don't have time to go into detail on this although I have mentioned many of the reasons in past posts.

There are those of us who live close to the future you foresee but I don't see people flocking to our doors seeking advice as to how they too could live like we do.

Todd

Louis,

Excellent essay. Thanks.

I am a longtime reader of the oildrum and a new participant. The oildrum has been an invaluable resource for me. Thanks to the oildrum, I am an expert on peak oil and surprisingly knowledgable about oil and gas production technology.

Most of my colleagues and I are practical people. Honestly I believe it is a stretch to decribe our community as mythological.

Your argument turns on the assumption that our society is facing "the first signs of physical constraints to development." I just don't understand this yet. Personally, thanks to the oil drum, I'm becoming a bigger and bigger fan of wind and solar. The peaking of production doesn't change the fact that there is plenty of fossil fuel left in the ground. Our ability to harnass wind, solar, and other alternatives is progressing at a breathtaking pace. There is plenty of time. I just don't see catastrophe when I look about me.

I would think that you would agree with me that knowledge is the real foundation of wealth and power. The ability of society to share information was, compared to today, primitive at the time of our birth. By the time we die, today's ability to share information will appear, in hindsight, equally primitive. The future is bright. There is every reason to be optimistic. I want to make sure you realize that large groups of thoughtful scientists and engineers believe that it possible to believe in peak oil while remaining optimistic that civilization's best days lie ahead.

One last comment. Most scientists and engineers, myself included, understand that exponential growth eventually comes to an end. Some day, civilization of the universe will, like fossil fuel production, peak and decline.

This is the most spectacularly honest and eloquent post I have seen anywhere in a long time.

"Sustainable" development, "recycling", or "reuse", "green" are basically code words to conceal attempts to flog on the unsuspecting and unlearned public what are massive transfers of wealth, power, and money into the hands of the management and operators of these programs.

Evaluating many of these programs in terms of energy / resource consumption, it is amazing how many of them are net energy / resource sinkholes that cost actually more than the "savings" they promise and actually, reduce system wide sustainability.

I for one have benefited enormously from fossil fuel accelerated development.
You can't have much of a life if you are dead from TB, my probable fate before vaccination or antibiotics.
All animal life is at the expense of life living more directly on sunlight so using fossil fuels is quite logical.
It is the top animal lifestyle, peak oil is just another turning point in our evolution.
Sustainable development is a non-issue if we can absorb it and use it we will just like a crow will take a meal as it can.
Meta-physical meaning that's a good one I expect you have never been hungry in a foreign country and with no idea where your next meal is coming from.
Not sure I want to be part of a civilisation spelt with a Z ;¬)
http://slightlypreoccupied.blogspot.com/

Can Sustainable Development be sustainable?...
In the same resource the definition for Development will be given as growth or progress.

I can't see any conflict or contradiction with sustainable progress.

prog⋅ress
–noun
1. a movement toward a goal or to a further or higher stage:
2. developmental activity in science, technology,etc..
3. advancement in general.

So it really depends on what your end goal is as to how we define progress. BAU is the antithesis of progress according to my personal goals and my personal definition of progress. Therefore I can strive towards a goal of living sustainably and make progress toward that goal.

So what is your definition of progress and why doesn't it include the goal of living sustainably?

BTW all biological systems and individual entities start out small, they *GROW* (this is not a bad thing),then they mature and stop growing and enter a steady state equilibrium until they either live out their normal life spans or external circumstances change their environments in such a way that they are no longer viable in the new environment and they become extinct.

Synchronization vs Dispersion.

We can view sustainable growth as a form of stable growth. But what happens when the nature of our information society generates such unpredictable dynamics that essentially forces the economy to lurch all over the place? The following opinion piece suggests that the way our infrastructure is synchronized that we can no longer prevent bubbles and collapses:
http://www.eetimes.eu/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217800001&print...

Of course this is written from the perspective of an EE trying to understand the feedback dynamics in our society. He posits the idea that swings in decision making are so synchronized based on internet and mobile technology that we can no longer avoid feedback dynamics that lead to boom and bust cycles. Fixed latencies coupled with positive feedback force economic measures to forever bounce from rail to rail. Note that the stock market is hopeless based on this as well ...

Marced tried to put TSMC's recent problems and those of the industry in context. She said the depth of the economic collapse is unprecedented in the history of the electronics industry. "This is likely to produce the first negative global GDP figure since the Second World War and it is synchronized." Thus Marced made the point that in previous slumps one region would tend to be up while another was down softening the blow and allowing one or more regions to lead the others back into the economic light.

This time, with all regions suffering together, it is going to be necessary to invest and innovate our way out of the recession, Marced argued.

And then it hit me. It is not that we have had an economic crash and it is the worse because of synchronization. Instead it is that we have had a crash BECAUSE we are synchronized; because of globalization.

In the past different regions such as the United States, Europe, Japan had their own locally designed and manufactured products, across all products from automobiles and consumer goods down to integrated circuits and passives. And services were inherently local. This served to keep markets and cultures distinct and running on their own cycles.

However, over the last 50 years this diversity, both economic and cultural, has gradually been eroded.

I highlighted his uses of the word diversity; the term dispersion describes the temporal and spatial dynamics of diversity. Things move and spread at different rates.

I find this interesting because I assert that the extraction of oil is more dispersive than synchronized. As I have shown elsewhere on TOD, the Logistic curve itself derives from a dispersive search mechanism whereby slow rates of discovery prevent huge boom and bust spikes from occurring. This works as a built-in filter that modulates the synchronized dynamics of our economy. This is not necessarily a bad outcome, and will lead to a smoother landing than we would have otherwise. Can you imagine if oil was finite but discovery was synchronized? The collapse dynamics could be as harsh as an extinction event. Events like the infamous passenger pigeon and carolina parakeet extinction and the ongoing phosphate depletion were/are essentially single-shot synchronized boom and bust cycles.

I think dispersion analysis is critical to an understanding and I have spent lots of time coming up with the math to support the modeling of oil discovery. This turned out to be a corner of the probability and statistics world that has actually been critically ignored. Like Peter Clarke in the EE Times piece linked to above, I use many engineering and physics analogies in my analysis (frankly I think conventional econometrics theory, well, sucks). Clarke discusses the synchronization analogy as follows:

The electronic circuit parallel is what happens when you close-couple dynamic systems, and then increase the positive feedback between the elements of the system, as the internet has done in the global economic system. First it starts to oscillate, then oscillate wildly as it goes into a chaotic behavior and this, if allowed to continue, could eventually tip the system over into some sort of self-destructive thermal runaway.

Dispersion on the other hand in electronics leads to fat-tails in responses. I actually came up with a rather novel analytical formulation for the response behavior of amorphous semiconductors to a sharp stimulus.
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2009/06/dispersive-transport.html
I actually went through all the trouble of working out this theory in that it could give some credence and help with credibility in laying out the ideas of dispersive discovery. The physics and math is based on the Principle of Maximum Entropy and turns out to have very general applicability. I would rank my formulation for analyzing dispersive transport in semiconductors by itself to be a huge finding, but this importance dwarfs in relation to the use of dispersion theory in understanding our global outlook. This viewpoint is essentially comparable to what N.N. Taleb has done with his Black Swan theory but it shows the flip side to the analysis. He suggests that Black Swan events existing in fat-tails of probability distributions could either kill us or save us, while I say that the fat-tails will stretch out our soft-landing (fortunately).

I hold out hope that sustainment is possible and that however much our global economy is synchronized, that we still are subservient to the laws of entropy and that this will smooth out our road to sustainability.

Lovelock on "Sustainable Development(sic)":

Lovelock’s impatience with feel-good “Yes, we can” liberal environmentalism borders on contempt. There are passages in Vanishing that, were it not for their eloquence, could have been uttered by Glenn Beck. The delusional rhetoric about “sustainable development” peddled by green politicians and businessmen, writes Lovelock, just shows that we have “weaved the sound of the alarm clock into our dreams.” In one of the book’s many memorable passages on the green politics of hope, Lovelock compares sustainable development to deathbed snake oil peddled by an alt-medicine quack.

“Just as we as individuals try alternative medicine,” writes Lovelock, “our governments have many offers from alternative business and their lobbies of sustainable ways to ‘save the planet,’ and from some green hospice there may come the anodyne of hope.”

Perhaps you're attacking a (recycled?) paper tiger.

As someone who was involved in the discussions that lead to the launch of the "sustainable development" bandwagon, I had, and still have, reservations about the concept - but these have nothing to do with the polemic of this thread. What the Brundtland Commission proposed in 1987 was not a magic eco-fix to ensure sustained econonomic growth ad infinitum. The idea was that perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea if both industrialised and developing countries (dubious categories that were popular at the time) were to switch to development paths that would enable them to transition from stock-depleting/environmentally destructive techno-economic systems to ones that could be sustained over time ("steady state"). Not an inherently bad idea - definitely better than business-as-usual.

The problem I had, and still have, with this is that our natural environment is anything other than steady state - it gets increasingly unsteady as we throw all kinds of noise into its feedback loops. Even our resource base is getting unsteady (check out a recent issue of the New Scientist on methane clathrates: on one page a cogent argument for focussing on CH4 rather than CO2 to address climate change concerns, a few pages away an article highlighting early stage technologies that might enable CO2 injection to push clathrates into massive use, but they may not - we don't currently know; clathrates may/will be a big headache as the permafrost melts but - hey! - happy resource times could be round the corner, take your (currently random) pick).

My conclusion is that what we need need is lifeboat development. For the Davos policy crowd this probably needs to be re-branded as something like "mitigation development", where the mitigation has to do with resource depletion as well as climate change - and where, as with the Brundtland Commission, the scope clearly prioritises the needs of the poor that constitute the global majority.

Alas, we're nowhere near genteel steady-state day-after-day tea-at-4 solutions. We are in an emergency. We seem to have depleted massive hunks of our capital stock of low entropy/low cost-to-extract-and-process energy and material resources whilst continuing our fun-loving exponential ways, and to have ejected equally massive and ever growing amounts of problematic entropy-increasing substances into the atmosphere and hydrosphere. The Titanic is heading for lots of icebergs. We need to do whatever it takes - preferably yesterday. Most probably it won't be as pretty as "sustainable development". It will need better fossil and nuclear (thorium anybody?) technologies as well as oodles of renewables and, far and away the most important, much more discernment at the root of the problem: energy demand (aka "energy efficiency" or "rational energy use" or "frugality").

It's time to move on from the paper tigers to the real tigers.

- Colin Moorcraft

This article is another restatement of the fact that in economics, as in mathematics, 2+2=4 rather than infinity. Of course since the vast majority of people believe that in economic arithmetic 2+2= infinity, repeating this obvious truth is worth while. However, the vital question is how do we restructure our social institutions so that ecological intelligence can effectively inform our economic decisions?

Right now the US economy is contracting, which is to say that we are consuming less resources than we were two years ago. Intelligent contraction is obviously the way forward, and yet it is almost impossible for people not to desire that "consumer confidence" should recover and that merchandise should start moving off the shelves of our stores at "healthy" rate. Our job security and the security of our retirement funds depends on this sort of economic "health".

I have quoted Kenneth Boulding's assertion that "Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is a madman or an economist" to several people and received a very positive response. And yet any suggestion of a solution which goes beyond private capital market driven infrastructure investment is rejected out of hand. The reason for this rejection is the (correct) perception that any attempt to seriously limit the power of private finance capital will required a radical rewriting of the social contract which will (at best) be painful and difficult to achieve.

Make no mistake about it, however; The social contract will be rewritten. This change may happen in a purely reactive mode and the result may be something highly unpleasant (i.e. right wing dictatorships, left wing dictatorships, warlordism, etc), but one way or the other political change is coming.

It took me approximately ten seconds after I realized that peak oil was a near term problem to understand that the rewriting of the social contract was the place where the rubber meets the road. I am still surprised by the relative dearth of discussion of this issue on TOD. Even the relocalizers are not really addressing it in my view. Getting most of your food, building material, etc. from nearby is a reasonable technical response to rising transportation costs, but such actions do not in and of themselves address the issue of the social contract. If local economies are based on the every nuclear family for itself / the larger my savings account in the local bank the more secure I am principle, then the problems of the larger economy will be reproduced in miniature.

From my casual reading in cultural anthropology, my impression is that cultures with truly local economies (i.e. hunter-gathers bands and neolithic villages) spent large amounts of time and emotional energy performing ritual ceremonies which psychologically and emotionally bound the community together. It is quite ironic that people whose level of technology would have allowed a nuclear family to survive on its own were emotionally bound to their tribe in a way that modern homo-economicus cannot begin to comprehend, while a modern family living out in the country with a pickup truck, two automobiles, a garage full of power tools, and a house full of electronic appliances can rattle on about how the "independence" of the nuclear family is the foundation of advanced civilization.

We are, as a matter of objective fact, dependent upon each other and upon the services of the ecosystem in which we are embedded. Functioning, healthy, social and ecological communities are the only possible source of long term security. If recognition of this objective fact makes me a communist in the eyes of some people, I can only raise my hand and plead "guilty as charged". I am not, however, a Marxist or a believer in dialectical materialism. I do believe that our primary job as economic actors should be to preserve the true sources of our long term wealth rather than to accumulate private fortunes.

I realize that all of this talk about economic cooperation will raise in many people's minds the specter of a creepy socialist group think which will completely destroy individual freedom. I personally do not see why these two ideas are inextricably linked. At the level of the family where cooperation and resource sharing are the norm, I do not perceive that individuality, creativity, and freedom are inevitably annihilated. There is more in heaven and earth that was dreamt of in Lenin's and Mao's philosophy In any event if the only choices are cooperation or war to the death, I will attempt to bring about the former even if it turns out to be a losing cause.

I am a just recently graduated senior from highschool, and I will be attending the University of St Andrews in the fall. The main reason I applied to the school was for the degree they offer in "Sustainable Development". I sat in on a introductory talk about the course on visiting weekend and got the sense that the course focuses on the following things: energy, the environment, water, species extinction, health, general resources, etc. What wasn't entirely clear was in what regard these subjects are studied. I wasn't really able to get a sense of whether they were in the camp of "we can grow sustainably for the forseable future" or if they are actually more understanding of the fact that the name "sustainable development" is an oxymoron, and they just use the name because the UN told them to create the course.

Anyway, I will probably found out all the answers to these questions in a few months when I start school, but I was wondering if anyone knew more about the course, or could comment on the UN effort for Sustainable Development in universities.

As a side note, I heard that St. Andrews recently hosted an "energy conference" thingy, to which Colin Campbell was invited.

There have been some excellent posts over at Bill Totten's weblog recently about the work of Frederick Soddy, A 1921 Nobel laureate in chemistry for his work on radioactive decay who set aside chemistry for the study of political economy. In four books written from 1921 to 1934 Soddy carried on a quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships. An article by Eric Zencey at The New York Times is especially good, and this concise observation I believe captures the heart of the matter:

He offered a perspective on economics rooted in physics - the laws of thermodynamics, in particular. An economy is often likened to a machine, though few economists follow the parallel to its logical conclusion: like any machine the economy must draw energy from outside itself. The first and second laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetual motion, schemes in which machines create energy out of nothing or recycle it forever. Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth - a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

Following Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen and other ecological economists argue that wealth is real and physical. It's the stock of cars and computers and clothing, of furniture and French fries, that we buy with our dollars. The dollars aren't real wealth, but only symbols that represent the bearer's claim on an economy's ability to generate wealth. Debt, for its part, is a claim on the economy's ability to generate wealth in the future. "The ruling passion of the age", Soddy said, "is to convert wealth into debt" - to exchange a thing with present-day real value (a thing that could be stolen, or broken, or rust or rot before you can manage to use it) for something immutable and unchanging, a claim on wealth that has yet to be made. Money facilitates the exchange; it is, he said, "the nothing you get for something before you can get anything".

Problems arise when wealth and debt are not kept in proper relation. The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment - and by the amount of high-entropy effluent from an economy that the environment can sustainably absorb. Debt, being imaginary, has no such natural limit. It can grow infinitely, compounding at any rate we decide.

Whenever an economy allows debt to grow faster than wealth can be created, that economy has a need for debt repudiation. Inflation can do the job, decreasing debt gradually by eroding the purchasing power, the claim on future wealth, that each of your saved dollars represents. But when there is no inflation, an economy with overgrown claims on future wealth will experience regular crises of debt repudiation - stock market crashes, bankruptcies and foreclosures, defaults on bonds or loans or pension promises, the disappearance of paper assets.

It's like musical chairs - in the wake of some shock (say, the run-up of the price of gas to $4 a gallon), holders of abstract debt suddenly want to hold money or real wealth instead. But not all of them can. One person's loss causes another's, and the whole system cascades into crisis. Each and every one of the crises that has beset the American economy in recent years has been, at heart, a crisis of debt repudiation. And we are unlikely to avoid more of them until we stop allowing claims on income to grow faster than income.

http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2009/07/mr-soddys-ecological-economy.html
http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2009/07/frederick-soddy.html

Garrett Hardin had much the same thing to say in his book "Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos". I highly recommend reading the chapter "Growth: Real and Spurious" which I transcribed into PDF format and which the Garrett Hardin Society graciously agreed to host on their site:

http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/docs/hardin_living_within_limits_ch_...

Cheers,
Jerry

This post reminds me of a post I wrote back in March called What does sustainability mean for energy?

In it, I showed this graphic:

I probably also could have added, "Doesn't depend on rare minerals" even though this is more or less a subset of "Low Imports".

Rated on this scale taking into account these factors, wood comes out best, but the catch is there isn't very much of it. It is hard to find anything renewable that is very scalable.

Permit me ro relate a true story re: sustainability. I may have told this story long ago on Clusterfuck Nation, Jim Kunstler's blog. I was invited to the first Chancellor's summit on campus sustainability. She had a panel of invited experts on energy, both local and invited from out of towm. I looked around the room and saw many familiar faces, the energy aware from many of the physical sciences departments. There were presentations, and Q&A from a open mike. The main topic was how the campus was to continue paying such a high price for its air conditioning, this was a main focus I kidd you not.

So, while I'm sitting there, trying to think of some clever question to ask this bunch about our energy future, I start to look around the room. It was held in Thomas Jefferson hall of the East-West Center. The architect, a famous one, won an award for it. Presidents, foreign and domestic, have come here to give speeches when in town. The ceiling is probably 40 feet high of the floor. There is fabulous hardwood paneling that soars up to cement scupted I-beams supporting the roof. I thought of the sheer aamount of energy that it took to make it all, and what it would take in the future just to maintain it, much less replace it. And there we were, some of the brighest minds on campus, with all the energy experts in attendence, worrying about the rising cost of campus air conditioning.

I'm as skeptical about 'Sustainable Development' as any, but let's try a little thought experiment.

I had a patch of grass. For many years the grass grew and died, grew and died. Not a lot was removed or added to the field. Sustainable.

Then I dug it up and turned it into a vegetable garden. All very organic and permaculture with no artificial external imputs beyond labour; waste was composted, including from the compost loo. Instead of rough grass there was now a complex and diverse ecosystem of fruit and nuts, vegetables and flowers. Sustainable. But now the field supported the feeding of me.

I think that is development. It may even be Sustainable Development.

Clean, unlimited, cheap energy will be our's sooner than most of you think.

The next boom is going to be RE: atomic, wind, geo. It will happen very fast, and it will be a tough transition, but it will happen.

And it will succeed, because it CAN succeed. It is logistically possible and so it is the path we will take.

Then there will be a second, atomic energy boom after that. Then, when we have free energy, it will be easy to fix the other problems in the world. We have yet to see the golden ages. Anyone in science or tech surely knows what I am speaking of.

Unlimited resources / unlimited pollution cleanup (co2 extraction) / unlimited food. It's coming.

Luis,
To do justice to the question "IS Sustainable Development sustainable" you need to consider the range of possible definitions.
you have stated one;
Sustainable Development became the language of those that promise perpetual growth,

I don't accept that definition any more than I accept that renewable energy is just running a car on cooking oil, or that CCS is an energy source.

The definition I accept for Sustainable development is " improving the worlds human development index( or other measures of standard of living) using resources that will be available OR CAN BE REPLACED by other resources for as long as we expect civilization to continue"( read tens of thousands to millions of years but not an infinite time).

This may require more energy and resources per person or a more even distribution of present resources or a big increase in per capita resources but a decline in population. It will require some energy resources used today to be replaced by others in the future, it doesn't require infinite growth in resource consumption, but some growth in consumption of some resources.

I don't know anyone who is in favor of "sustainable development " who thinks this means infinite growth in resource consumption, but I do know of people who are not in favor of sustainable development who think this is the definition.

There are real reasons why there is a whole gigantic industry of sincere, intelligent and dedicated people devoting their lives to "sustainability", pursued by the technique of "development".

The reason they are unaware of the deep contradictions has to do with their never having learned how to think.

I’ve talked to them extensively. They don’t have the ability to see decreasing rates of increased quantities as still being compound accelerating increases. They can talk about 'scales' and 'rates' and 'totals', but it’s all metaphors, and they really don’t know the difference between integrals and derivative, rates, scales and accelerations.

When I talk to them I doo succeed in giving them anguish, yes, but after years of considerable effort I have not found a way to provide them any light. I conclude that's more or less the heart of the reason we're in such deep trouble.

Even people here on TheOilDrum where nearly everyone understands quantitative reasoning there are major lapses that get pointed out over and over but just never register in the discussion and might as well have not been mentioned. Should I mention them? I don't know, it seems that mentioning anything "off topic" even if it underlies or over hangs the topic, and is relevant as hell, is "off limits" here as elsewhere. What humans engage in is “banter”, and it has to do with engaging in the social activity, and is actually easier to have disassociated with understanding and steering complexly interconnected physical systems.

The linkages we need to understand are so vast and complex it is daunting to even refer to them. As a result our whole society has a major reasoning problem, disconnected issues, endlessly enjoying the banter of discussing our separated meanings for physically connected things and almost never noticing the irony or foolishness of it.

I’ve yet to persuade anyone, for example, that the problem with resource depletion is not that anything runs out. As our use of all our interlinked resources hits its point of diminishing returns EVERYTHING gets ever more expensive at once. Affordability is what runs out. We passed that point some time ago now from all indications, and those who are most actively pushing up the prices squeeze others out of having access.

We have a whole life support system actually dedicated to using up all the earth’s cheap resources at as rapidly an accelerating pace as humanly possible. That’s the definition of ‘optimal growth’, the direct consequence of maximizing the returns on investments devoted to expanding investments (i.e. 'making money').

But, as they say, discussion of “the whole system” is “off topic” and does not fit much of anyone’s compartmentalized view of the issues, so no one ever seems to have a ready response or curiosity about it, and it keeps getting passed over.

pfh
for ways to connect it... www.synapse9.com

At first I thought that Lious had horsewhipped this concept to such an extent that I could think of nothing to add.

Then I thought about something I just posted on another article,about looking over the elephant from a distance and from all pionts of view,without prejudice,and dealing in FACTS first and ethics or morality and desires second.

Anyone with an understanding of basic biology and physics or chemistry,plus just a smattering of other sciences such as astronomy or geology must come to the conclusion that sustainable development is just another head fake,an analog to religion as an opiate of the masses,or more accurately an opiate for the date rape of the masses.The irony is that some advocates are undoubtedly serious believers(remember Lenin's/Stalin's useful idiots)and that the "winners" will lose like the rest of us,but perhaps a few years later from the pov of individuals.

The fact is that the world is a Darwinian place and shall forever remain so,in the true sense of the word Darwinian.The physical facts are on the table and there is essentially a zero chance that we will not pay the same price as all other species in massive overshoot-dieoff.(But maybe not right away in places like the US where the population density is low.)

Unfortunately the word has been hijacked first by some radical right wingers as a rationale for living high on the hog at the expense of the rest of the human race,as a reward for thier supposed "superiority",which is in actuality simply the luck of the lottery-being in the right place at the right time to get a big insurmountable lead. (Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel is absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to know why the people on top are ARE on top.)

Then people on the left found it necessary to condemn social Darwinism as a philosophy because it offends thier sense of fairness(mine too!) and they wished to deprive thier enemies of a potent intellectual rallying point-even though neither side understands the facts.

So now except for the techie nerds like us,the discussion of our future has been circumscribed to a large extent by a new social taboo successfully created and enforced by well meaning people who may one day realize thier mistake-too late.We just aren't supposed to SAY that word in rspect to human beings,unless the object is to discredit the existing priesthoods so they may be rplaced by others consisting of political scientists,sociologists,psychologists,etc,.

Luis - a nice rant which I will refer to in future. You could add "those who believe financial services create wealth".

In answer to your main question "is sustainable development sustainable?" the answer must be that is is more sustainable than unsustainable development in that it buys time. I think the only way toward true sustainability will require measures to control population. In other words fewer people using resources in a more considerate way than now.

"Sustainability" that allows population to grow toward 10 billion has clear limitations.

Luis -
I'm puzzled as to why you set up the straw man of disfunctional definitions of sustainable and of development -

To put the issue into a multi-millenial perspective (for evident sustainability), when the pre-historic inhabitants of this part of Wales started coppicing the native oak-woods along the mountains' shoulders (presumably at some point in order to provide good straight pales for pallisades around the hillfort up the valley) they were unaware that such coppicing would continue for thousands of years thereafter - they were, predictably, content that it functioned well in their lives and did not impoverish their childrens' heritage.

With a little replanting at each harvest (maybe 2% each 25 years) the coppices thrive as very productive woodland, supporting exceptional biodiversity, and allowing some valuable sheltered winter grazing for the flocks once the regrowth is well up.

The economics of capital resource erosion led to the local woods being left to go derelict when they should last have been harvested, and the 30 acres or so under my hand is now being considered for development from "Semi-natural" woodland into productive Coppice.

So perhaps you can tell me just why this development would not be sustainable ?

Regards,

Backstop

Sustainable development has some biological precedents. Probably the best is a seed. The plant produces a zillion seeds of which a few will survive depending on the conditions where the seed ends up. Spores of fungus achieve the same thing. An interesting organism is the slime mold. It lives a solitary life until things get bad - lack of food as indicated by hight CO2 levels. They then form up into a multicellular slug that moves off a short distance and then some of the cells become a stalk and the rest migrate up to the top of the stalk and then become spores that blow off into the distance. Hibernation sort of works in this same way, the bears need lots of food to build the fat to get them through the bad times. (Sort of 7 good years and 7 bad). However the one that I like best is the case of the tadpole. The pond is drying up and the tadpoles absorb their tails and develop into a frog and hop out just as the pond dries up. It used to be a algal eater, but now consumes insects. The tails sacrifice themselves for the survival of an entirely new organism. Lichen represent the same process as algal cells and fungus cells get together. The algal cell generally needs a lot of water to survive and the fungus generally eats the algae. The lichen however is an arrangement where the algae provides the food and the fungus protects the algae. The lichen can now live most any place whereas the algae needs water and the fungus had to live next to the water to have access to the algae. This is a nice story of how cooperation enables the organisms to survive the pool of water that is drying up. It also is an increase in the degree of cooperation than existed before and might be considered to be an example of evolution.

These are at least some examples that might be considered to be an attempt to develop sustainability.

While thinking about this check out an old movie of Woody Allen called the "Sleeper". "The Flight of the Phoenix" with James Stewart provides some insight as well.