I was buying fireworks on a nearby native reservation when the friendly guy minding the monstrous stand mentioned out of nowhere that all his fireworks were environmentally friendly and made from sustainable resources.
I was so floored by his claim I couldn’t call his bluff, and while I’m not an expert on the production of fireworks, I’m pretty sure that their manufacture in China is neither environmentally friendly nor sustainable.
His statement had me thinking though. How is it that terms like environmentally friendly and sustainable are suddenly so omnipresent that I can’t even escape them where they clearly do not belong? Either this guy had the idea planted in his head by some morons asking him if his fireworks were friendly to their earth, or he was wily enough to come up with the line himself. Regardless, I’m not sure where the fact that fireworks are essentially instant garbage was left out of the equation.
Later on that day I was reading E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, when I stumbled across his eloquent answer to my simple question
To get to the crux of the matter, we do well to ask why it is these terms–pollution, environment, ecology, etc.–have so suddenly come into prominence. After all, we have had an industrial system for quite some time, yet only five or ten years ago these words were virtually unknown. Is this a sudden fad, a silly fashion, or perhaps a sudden failure of nerve?
The explanation is not difficult to find. As with fossil fuels, we have indeed been living on the capital of living nature for some time, but at a fairly modest rate. It is only since the end of World War II that we have succeeded in increasing this rate to alarming proportions. In comparison with what is going on now and what has been going on, progressively, during the last quarter of a century, all the industrial activities of mankind up to, and including, World War II are as nothing. The next four or five years are likely to see more industrial production, taking the world as a whole, than all of mankind accomplished up to 1945. In other words, quite recently-so recently that most of us have hardly yet become conscious of it-there has been a unique quantitative jump in industrial production.
Did I mention he wrote this in 1973? Clearly it applies just as easily today, with gross squandering of resources, the explosion of industrialization in India and China, and the unprecedented changes forced on our embattled planet.
While Schumacher explains the obvious answer to my question, right now it seems to me that words like sustainable are being adopted solely for the purpose of selling us more stuff rather than affecting any real change. Unfortunately almost no product claiming to be sustainable actually is. We might create minute changes by choosing them, but if we continue to live the way we do the words are meaningless because I’m fairly certain that true sustainability will only arrive when it is forced on us by nature, not when we choose to buy it.
