What a Sustainable Future Looks Like

Here are a couple of my reactions to the meme here:

I really don’t think anyone, regardless of where he resides along the political spectrum, wants any aspect of our behavior to be required, even as benign as composting may be.  When I was a little boy in the early 1960s, all families in our township were offered “bottle day,” every other Wednesday, where left-over glass containers that were left out on our curbs would be swept off, melted, and reused.

Participation wasn’t compulsory.  If you hated the idea of being a team player, i.e., you were a hateful moron, you were completely at liberty to throw away your bottles in with the rest of your garbage, store them in your attic, or do whatever the rest of the sociopaths did. The idea of choosing to be a good citizen was as appealing then and it is today.

Similarly, I’m not sure I want fashion to go away.  Yes, I would say that fashion, generally, is frivolous, wasteful, and decadent.  But no one wants to see a path from our consumer world to one where fashion means nothing and no one is permitted to express himself with the way she dresses, wears make-up, etc.

The best we can rightfully expect to see is a world where living small is the new living large.

Most of us would love to see the world of 2038 as a time where values like justice, kindness, and peace supersede the thin veil of riches that mean so much to us today.  But they need to proceed naturally from where we are today, not forced upon us.