“He told me “Being sustainable is living like you give a damn about the future.”
from Wendy Joan’s Eat Media op-ed, “Sustainable Journalism and the Next Generation of Writers”
I like this piece, but this statement is wrong. Being sustainable is simpler to measure and more complicated to do: it’s just fucking surviving for a long time.* Valuing sustainability is living like you give a damn about the future—tomorrow, next week, next year, and next decade.
*The trick is that it means surviving beyond tomorrow, which means you can’t use up all the stuff you’re gonna need next week. So often we treat survival (I’m thinking of the “think of the business interests!” politicians here) as a just-make-it-another-day thing, but surviving doesn’t have an end date, so it doesn’t count as surviving if we all die out in 50 years or keep losing people to climate-change-related natural disasters.
