Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, 2021a

D.5 <strong>Human</strong>ity’s Long View 406
or depletion rate of less than 0.007% per year, which is essentially
zero-growth.
It becomes clear that long-term success is practically synonymous with
the word sustainable. Any practice that is not long-term sustainable will
fail to continue. 51 We therefore cannot depend on any non-sustainable
resource if we strive for success.
D.5.2 Sustainable Living
Imagine that you have a stash of $100,000 tucked under your mattress,
<strong>and</strong> that you have figured out a way to live on $20,000 per year. You
could decide to live on this fund for five years, <strong>and</strong> then figure out later
how to keep going. Perhaps this is not the wisest move. A smarter move
would be to figure out how long you expect to live—maybe 50 more
years—<strong>and</strong> ration out the fund, allowing $2,000 per year. You’ll still need
a job earning $18,000 per year to meet the $20,000 annual goal. Maybe
the smartest move would be to ignore the money under the mattress <strong>and</strong>
get a job for $20,000 per year. 52 Now you have the safety of resources
should you need it, <strong>and</strong> can even pass it along down the generations
to kids <strong>and</strong> gr<strong>and</strong>kids who have also been taught not to use it, but to
survive on their annual income.
The analogy is clear, <strong>and</strong> perhaps it is also clear why we did not
allow interest accumulation, as many of Earth’s resources are one-time
endowments that do not spontaneously grow larger. 53 If our human
civilization succeeds at surviving uninterrupted for 10,000 years, it
will necessarily be because we figured out how to live on the annual
income 54 provided by Earth’s natural renewable flows, rather than on
the inheritance in the form of finite resources that are not replenished.
In other words, humanity needs to learn to refrain from any dependence
on one-time resources (the inheritance).
51: Any activity today not geared to contribute
to ultimate success (true sustainability)
is therefore likely only contributing to
failure. Most activities today are in the latter
category, alarmingly.
52: . . . hardly different from $18,000 per
year, so if you’re going this far already, why
not?
53: Interest is an artificial construct made
possble by accelerating resource use.
54: Annual income would be in the form of
solar energy delivered <strong>and</strong> biomass that has
grown in the course of the year, for instance.
Success, therefore, puts humans as a part of nature, not apart from nature.
Anything else is failure. The closer we are to nature, the more likely we
are to succeed.
Nature prepared a biosphere that has stood the test of time. Natural
selection has operated to eliminate non-viable solutions <strong>and</strong> create interdependencies
cleverly balanced in a stable equilibrium of sorts. Elements
of modern human civilization—our cities, agricultural practices, fossil
fuel dependence—have not withstood the test of time, nor can they.
Which system would be the wiser bet for long-term survival: the well
adapted natural world, or the artificial world humans have erected <strong>and</strong>
operated for a few dozen decades—without attention to sustainable
principles? The answer seems obvious.
© 2021 T. W. Murphy, Jr.; Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Lic.;
Freely available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions.