How sustainable is sustainability?

I once reviewed a book that argued hunter-and-gatherer societies were the most sustainable. There was and is no better model for sustainability, I read. Yet, there is sustainable, and then there’s sustainable. I also read that irrigated agriculture was touted precisely because it sustained year-around production.

I want us to entertain a thought experiment. Assume current levels of above-average consumption, production and pollution are halved and then halved again. High population levels are halved and then halved again. The mass extinction of biodiversity stops, fossil fuel extraction stops; industrial fishing, farming and forestry stop; and all manner of government stupidity in the form of harmful subsidies, incentives and distortions stop.

Now ask yourself: What if these interventions also prove unsustainable? What we thought was true or truer sustainability proves to be unsustainable as things change, we are told, for the better.

Degrowth leads to now stronger states invading now less resourceful ones; changing diets leads to new infirmities or recurrence of older diseases; reducing fossil fuel doesn’t reduce demand for plastics and other petroleum based products; the growing middle classes, once considered essential to the advancement of democracy and states, are now killing the global biosphere; . . . yet all the while the demand that whatever critical infrastructures are in place–even ecologically sensitive–be highly reliable, that is: at least more reliable and safe than the hunter-gatherer societies of the early 1960s and 70s!

What if we the future don’t want any sustainability–be it irrigated agriculture then or regenerative agriculture ahead–that is unreliable and that is unsafe? It’s been said that the relative absence of scenario planning in old Soviet bloc countries was largely because there were no alternative scenarios to compare there. The more strident the calls for this-way-only sustainability, so too the more visible the absence of scenarios for “what do we do now that too is unsustainable?”