The other day I stumbled across this interesting diagram titled with two of my favorite words: Sustainable Balance.  I spend a lot of time thinking about what sustainable means, and what balance means, and why I often feel as if I am alone in being drawn to (*cough obsessed with cough*) these two words.

This diagram and its accompanying description are a simple but elegant illustration of the fundamental relationships that make up a community.  On a bad day, you can see the eleven million things that could go wrong, disrupting everything and causing the downfall of civilization as we know it.  It is also a profound statement about scarcity and its role in defining everything that we… well, just everything.

When you live on an island, what you see is what you get.  And that is all there is.  The concept of scarcity is much more real to you when, in the space of a morning’s drive, you can see all your resources in sum; the opposite of “out of sight, out of mind.”

But scarcity is true for those of us who live on large continents as well.  It is just several steps removed from our consciousness, especially in a global economy where much of what we use is not produced domestically.  Our store shelves remain stocked as if by magic, and we rarely brush up against the crushing knowledge that we are consuming, in tiny bits, increasing amounts of our planet’s finite resources.  I know that the list of complaints against WalMart is extensive, but perhaps the greatest damage the company has done lies in giving us the idea that we can really have anything we want, any time we want it.  The efficiency of its immense distribution system has all but eliminated visual scarcity of goods.  What you see is what you get.  And that is anything you could possibly need, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

I grew up in California and Colorado, two states plagued by years of drought.  For me, I think it served to counteract the myth of infinite resources adopted by recent generations of Americans.  Just a bit, mind you.  I admit to sometimes feeling that pang of incredulity when I go to the store and they are out of something I truly “need.”  But it is tempered by a greater knowledge of what “out of” really looks like.  Out of isn’t Safeway not having organic bananas.  Out of is having to truck in water from neighboring states for your family and livestock.  And out of is watching on the news as forest fires consume not one, but two of your family’s houses.  (The trees that burned were dead already, made vulnerable to deadly pine beetles by drought and a changing climate.)  And, to look at the hard truth of things, that is not even “out of.”  We could truck water in from other states.  We had the financial resources and they had the water.  And we were able to rebuild a house from the ashes and the insurance money.  We were lucky.  But scarcity was closer, there, than it was when you walk into WalMart.

There is little incentive to preserve what we have when we live under a cultural myth of infinite resources.  Our companies have done their jobs, ramping up production and designing efficient distribution to create a country in which there is no sign of scarcity.  (Except at the edges, where it nudges at our awareness.)

We must begin to seek sustainable solutions.  To do that, we need to regain an awareness of scarcity.

No related posts.