Web forums are often reduced to impassioned comments because, hey, the internet is a crazy place to hangout. Especially when the subject is sustainability which still gets a bad rap in Spokane.

Little did DTE know that on our brief Monday post about “Where did we go wrong?” we would still talking about it on Thursday. It seems like an incredibly vain, moral failing to post material from a comments section but this is such a bizarre, lengthy exchange about the definitions of sustainability, and reveals some Spokane weirdness, that we just can’t help ourselves. The Spovangelist is certainly not an echo chamber of ideas, and readers do occasionally put real thought into their responses to the challenging ideas put forth. Plus, we really like Kitty. After the jump are some bitter highlights.

Contrarian:

The past is always displaced by the present, Paul, which will in turn be displaced by the future. That is what history is — the record of that ceaseless dynamic process. It is not wise to ignore the past, but neither is it wise (and indeed is futile) to try to fossilize it. Settlement patterns will always adapt themselves to the needs and desires of the people inhabiting them, given the resources and technologies available to them, provided that natural adaptive process is not thwarted by Utopians determined to impose some future arrangment they’ve fantasized or some past arrangement they’ve idolized.

Paul:

"We were not given land, we gave you land.”
–Tlingit elder

The “past is always displaced by the present” is an extremely broad justification but you did just give a great response to where we went wrong. (Wink!) Settlement patterns? Consider this: Greens like Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir achieved conservation, progress for protected areas at the expense of impoverishing poor, indigenous people. Around the globe…languages have disappeared, cultures destroyed, human rights violated, communities evicted for imperialism.

Contrarian

“Sustainability,” BTW, is a nonsense term. Human societies and economies are dynamic adaptive systems with endlessly evolving successions of states, none of which need be, or will be, sustained for very long.

“My Utopia is producing economic well-being without compromising ecosystems. That hardly seems like a radical concept, right?”

It is only “radical” if “compromising ecosystems” is taken to imply any alteration to an ecosystem which would not occur in the absence of humans. Ecosystems adapt to whatever influences impinge upon them, and are indifferent to those influences. An ecosystem can be sensibly said to be “compromised” only when some human impact reduces its value to humans.

Paul

“Ecosystems adapt to whatever influences impinge upon them, and are indifferent to those influences.” Wow. That sort of speaks for itself. Humans have found various ways to reduce biological diversity without going near the land in question. Since indigenous people are one with that ecosystem, they too have been marginalized which is unforgivable. But you make a convincing argument for Manifest Destiny, consequences be damned. The concept of sustainability is to maintain the interdependence of ecological balance and cultural/economic survival. Sustainability is living smaller, and living smaller is an “adaptive system” as a response to an increasingly crowded place.

There’s much more. And so it goes.

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