What do You Understand by Sustainable Living?

 Sustainable living and the Theory Behind it?

The photo was taken from Pexels.com.

To cover everything underpinning Sustainable Living is beyond the scope of this post.  It starts touching on the rationale behind the topic, then familiarises the scientific terms in the context, and ends by suggesting steps to achieve its objectives.

Wikipedia explains Sustainable Living as a lifestyle that attempts to reduce an individual's or society's use of the earth's natural resources.  It's often called "earth harmony living" or "net-zero living." It is a minimalist or austere lifestyle. 

A new lifestyle, cutting down the luxury and comfort that the majority global population enjoy and strive for, may not be taken kindly by those who consider it an antirich, anti-city, anti-industrial.  And the modern lifestyle, most practitioners believe, is a mark of their demanding work, achievement, education, upper social status, race, privileges, tradition, influence, and power earned through religion, politics, class, scientific developments, so on and so forth. 

The critics' view needs to be addressed, explaining the rationale behind the sustainability calls. 

What is the rationale behind the sustainability calls?

To make sense of it, we should first understand the present sustainability situation of the earth.

Currently, the earth is facing a multitude of sustainability issues.  The earth dwellers, in general, have exhausted their natural resources at a rate that they cannot be regenerated to sustain.  Nature, in our perception, seems expansive, never-ending bounty.  But it has limitations. 

We have developed a lifestyle that demands industries, shelters, food production, agriculture, the market, and other economic endeavours.  As the population increases, our demand for them also increases.  Then the earth fails to renew its resources to meet new needs and waste products like greenhouse gases (GHG), carbon dioxide and methane, fuel-burning waste etc. 

As the earth's ability to renew the resources and the waste deteriorates, it turns unsustainable.  The more it turns untenable, the more threat to its inhabitants.  Hence, the need to address the issue of its sustainability.

However, sustainable living or an austere lifestyle is not a novel consideration.  Stephan C.Schuster writes how Koi Sans, the likely direct descendent of the first anatomically modern human, who migrated to Southern Africa more than 130,000 years ago, sustained nature.  "They had an incredible knowledge about the environment and animal behaviour, kept egalitarian values, preserved the economy to have minimum impact on nature, used small bows, and arrows smeared with caterpillar poison for hunting, made traps using tree branches grass and leaves."

The indigenous farmers in India had kept farming methods imposing minimal damage to the ecology and earth. 

We live at a time more advanced scientifically than the ancient times hence our tools and methods are also modern.

The Contemporary Scientific Approach to Sustainable living

Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity.

These are two terms discussed in the contemporary academic and interest groups discussions on sustainable development.  Shall briefly explain what I know about them.

What is meant by Ecological Footprint?

The ecological footprint is a term that appeared for the first time in a publication by William Rees in 1992.  And a method to calculate its value was developed by Mathis Wackernagel under Reed's supervision from 1990 to 1994.  They have jointly developed a definition for Ecological Footprint--"the amount of the environmental resources to produce the goods and services that support an individual's particular lifestyle."

This term is difficult to understand, so I shall try to explain it in diverse ways.  EFP is a metric that adds up human demands that compete for the planet's regenerative capacity.  "It just documents the resource dependence of the cities-- like a fuel gauge documents a car's fuel availability."

What is meant by biocapacity?

"Biocapacity or biological capacity of an ecosystem is an estimate of its production of certain biological materials such as natural resources, and its absorption and filtering of other materials such as Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."

Bio capacity is expressed in global hectares per person, depending on the population at a place or the nation.  It is an adjusted unit representing the average biological productivity of all productive heaters on earth in a particular year.  There were 12.2 million hectares of biologically productive land and water area on this planet in 2016.  Dividing it by the number of people alive in that year, 7.4 billion, gives a capacity of 1,6 global hectares per person--including the area of wild species that compete with them. 

The Global Footprint Network uses these terms in global sustainability studies and calculations.

In summary, the ecological footprint measures human demand for resources.  And biocapacity, the planet's regenerative capacity, restricted by population; carbon dioxide emission stemming from fuel burning, Green House emissions; climate changes; ocean acidification etc. 

According to GFN, there is a 'biocapacity deficit,' when the ecological footprint of a population exceeds the biocapacity of the environment in a certain year.  In 2016, humanity was using 1,7 Earth.  

That indicates the need for improving the biocapacity of the environment to bring down the ecological footprint.  Those interested can see the National Footprint Accounts edition for 2016, based on 2012 results for various nations.  For USA, the biocapacity deficit was -1416.04, China, -3435.62, India, -878.05, UK, -483.83, South Africa, -113,16, measured in gMha

The Science behind Sustainable Living/Development?

The advantage of the present time is we can define, measure and understand sustainable developments using scientific methods and mathematical calculations.   

If the ecological footprint or the demand of the regional ecosystem is more than the biocapacity, the environment cannot sustain itself.  This can result in global environmental degradation, resulting in people's deaths until the population falls to what the degraded environment can support.  Sustainable living is to take measures to avoid that happening.  

Is the answer to sustainable developments reverse developments?

We cannot think of going back to a state of no development.  What we can do is sustain the growth as--"The practice of maintaining productivity by replacing used resources with resources of equal or greater value without degrading or endangering natural biotic systems." And it has moral implications too.  It is the present generation's responsibility to generate and improve the planetary resources for future generations. 

How can we Generate and Improve Planetary Resources?

The planet belongs to us, and the responsibility to improve it rests with us.  Need not stress that the responsibility increases at the rate of resource usage.  As per the biological capacity calculations, every person owns 1,6 global hectares of productive area.  But how many millions of the population remain landless in every country?  How can we make them responsible for depleting the natural resources? 

Steps Needed for Making Lifestyle Changes

The image was taken from my device

The steps and their details are enormous.  I just list down here a few.

1.  Shelter.  Follow green practices--use materials that have neutral impacts on earth and use sustainable building materials, e.g. wood.  Practise energy efficiency and water conservation.  Use greywater, including water from washing machines, sinks, and showers, may be reused in landscape irrigation.

2.  Practise Rainwater harvesting

3.  Power conservation: Generate renewable energies like solar, gas and wind energy. 

4, Consume local and seasonal foods

5.  Reduce meat consumption

6.  Organic gardening

7.  Urban gardening.

This post is part of Blog Chatter's Cause A Chatter.

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