Sustainability

What does sustainability mean anyway?

Haven’t we heard enough about this sustainability thing? Isn’t it just green wash? Some pathetic marketing ploy by big business? What does it even mean?

Sustainable can be a dirty overused word. We hear it all the time, on the stock market, from big business to sell their products. Has the meaning of sustainability changed or are we (as in us on Earth) just now facing the realization that we may not be able to sustain our way of life for future generations.

With the human population rising and the vast majority of the animal kingdom disappearing something has to be wrong. The Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40years. Is it any coincidence this aligns closely to population spike of the human race? I think so.

We as humans have to find a way to live with our Earth as it is. It is clear that something has gone wrong we have changed our way of life to suit our agenda today without worry of the consequences of tomorrow.

The answer is so simple yet so difficult to grasp. The overall perception of people to make a change is that we have to go back on the progress we have made as human beings and live as our ancestors did. This is far from the truth. We have become so advance as a human race. We must use our advancements in technology to aid in our quality of life and to enable the Earth and animal kingdom to recover from years of neglect.

We must steer away from oil, gas and coal, put all our resources toward renewable energy. Renewables get it they renew themselves, they don’t destroy the Earth we are so dependent on. A person’s reaction is to hold back and wait for an authority to redirect them whether it’s the State government, the National government or the United Nations. But we must all begin to make a change, this change won’t happen overnight. It will take decades to rewire the way we consume and the way we treat the Earth we live on. Though with small steps we can achieve a goal so large it will change the future of the world. Though if nothing changes and things carry on the same, I’d hate to think what our children will say about the mess we have left them.

I believe the move toward renewables is inevitable I only hope it is achieved in time so our children may prosper as we have.

To quote the former Saudi Arabian Oil minister “The stone age didn’t end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

Sustainable meaning – able to be maintained at a certain rate or level. Oxford dictionary.