Sustainability
A city is a community on the arrow of time, an upward-trending arrow demanding perpetual growth.
Growth is the engine of the city—if the increase stops, the city falls. Because of this, the local resources are used up quickly and the lands around the city die. The biota is stripped, then the topsoil goes, then the water. It is no accident that the ruins of the world's oldest civilisations are mostly in deserts now. It wasn't desert before that. A city tells itself it is a closed system that must decay in order for time to run straight, while simultaneously demanding eternal growth. This means it must outsource its decay for as long as possible.
For this reason, a city is dependent on the importation of resources from interconnected systems beyond its borders. The city places itself at the centre of these systems and strips them to feed its growth, disrupting cycles of time and land and weather and water and ecological exchange between the systems. The exchange is now only going one way. Matter and energy are still neither created nor destroyed in this reaction; they are directed into static heaps rather than cycled back through and between systems.
The exponential destruction caused by cities feeds the exponential growth of infrastructure and population. For this they misapply laws like supply and demand: in order for economic growth to occur, there must be more demand than supply. Roughly translated, that means there must be more people needing basic goods and services than there are goods and services to meet their needs. Put another way, there must be a lot of people missing out on what they need to survive in order for the economy to grow, or in order for anything to have value. As the growth continues exponentially, so do the masses of people missing out.
There is no equilibrium to be found here.
You need to stave off disruptions from those desperate masses with bread and circuses, football and Facebook.
You need to fragment them so they are not supporting each other in communities or extended families, otherwise your demand base decreases. Above all, you need them to breed like rabbits, so you make sure their only asset is the potential energy of their children.
I don't think most people have the same definition of sustainability that I do. I hear them talking about sustainable exponential growth while ignoring the fact that most of the world's topsoil is now at the bottom of the sea. It is difficult to talk to people about the impossible physics of civilisation, especially if you are Aboriginal: you perform and display the paint and feathers, the pretty bits of your culture, and talk about your unique connection to the land while people look through glass boxes at you, but you are not supposed to look back, or describe what you see.
But that The first Law is still there. We need to be brave enough to apply it to our reality of infinitely interconnected, self-organising, self-renewing systems. We are the custodians of this reality, and the arrow of time is not an appropriate model for a custodial species to operate from. If I think about all those grannies and nieces and sisters now, I wonder if I haven't gone the wrong way charging down all these wormholes of physics and poking every negative particle. Those women just quietly get on with things and keep creation systems in motion through kinship and they don't worry about much, except what kind of mess I might make next. Maybe they've got this. In a lifeworld where your great-grandchildren become your parents, you have a vested interest in making sure you're co-creating a stable system for them to operate in and also ensuring a bit of intergenerational equity. So, in quiet moments, I just like to sit on Country within the comfortable embrace of that women's spirit of creation. I can still hear the bulldozers coming and I can no longer hear the frogs. But I can see the flowers. 🌺
Considering that the catastrophes we are experiencing may take decades or even centuries to play out, then another century for us to recover after that, it may be advisable for us to get ahead of the game and begin creating cultures and societies of transition, to lessen the impacts of this calamity on our communities and potentially avoid post-apocalyptic stress altogether. We need to start working with the land, rather than against it. Our communities need to share knowledge with each other while maintaining their own unique systems grounded in the diverse landscapes they care for.