Pretend for a moment that you have an infallible crystal ball, and it tells you that the only way to ensure the human race is still around in 3011 is for you to abandon your house, live in the bush and eat roots for the rest of your life. Would you do it? Seriously?

As Keynes said, 'In the long run we are all dead'. I'm perfectly willing to take steps to ensure that the thirty years or so left to me are happy and comfortable. If I can make the next decade or so after that smooth and safe for my children, that's pretty good too. But after that, when everyone I know now will be dead and the world changed beyond recognition? Why should I suffer one moment of distress and deprivation on the remote chance that it might benefit total strangers long after I've gone?

Realistically, none of us can have the slightest idea what effect, if any, our actions now will have in fifty or a hundred years time, and it's the height of arrogance to assume that we can. The best thing you or anyone else can do for your great-great-grandchildren is to accumulate all the wealth you can now: and just maybe, if there aren't too many intervening Green or Labor governments, they will get to inherit some of it.

As for posterity, bah humbug! As Heilbronner says, what has posterity ever done for us?

Well, there you go - Jon J has summed up Western mentality in one post!....and we think of ourselves as the "enlightened" ones.

Poirot, if your great-great-grandfather had said: "Our cities are being buried in horse crap! It's unsustainable! I'm going to start a campaign for horses to wear nappies!" -- how, exactly, would that have materially affected your welfare, or that of anyone you care for? Do you really, truly think that YOUR great-great-grandchildren are going to regard you as an ecological hero?

Here's a hint: try asking your children.

*Our political system is incapable of properly managing the all-powerful push from the big business sector for ever more of everything, and basically just panders to it.*

That is just an easy and lame excuse, Ludwig, for corporations are
nothing but paper entities.

Go down to your lotto outlet next time there is a big draw and see
people in a long line, dreaming of being rich and wanting more.
It is by far the majority of the population. Take a look at the
workers in the NW here in WA, earning 200k$- 400k$ a year and
still wanting more. Yet all you can do is blame the corporate
sector, which is nothing more then the aspirations of individuals.

Fact is its a human foible for a great majority of our population.

I often express the fact to friends and associates that I don't want
more, but am quite happy with my lot in life. People look at me
as if that is really strange.

Poirot has it all wrong too, its not just the West. Go to Africa and
ask your average African if he wants another wife or more children or
some extra cows or more money, he/she will grab whatever they can
get. Most of them simply have less opportunity then we have.

You guys really ignore basic human nature at your peril, but Darwin
had it all worked out when he wrote the Origin of Species. We kid
ourselves that we are above the laws of nature and are certainly
not smart enough as a species, to live sustainably in the long term.

Sustainability is?

Ultimately, sustainability is having enough to eat and drink and being able to breed to produce offspring that have enough to eat and drink and be able to breed to produce offspring that have enough to eat and drink and be able to breed to produce offspring that etc, etc, etc, etc.

That is sustainability in nature.

'Sustainability' is a feelgood catchword sometimes with references to anti- consumerism and environmentalism, though sometimes not.

Nothing is 'sustainable' in the long run. Its a silly word with no meaning.