Limits to Sustainability - some musings

The theme of the conference was invisible structures, particularly finance and sustainable corporations. We heard presentations from some of the top foundations and corporations in Brazil. Two very large banks presented their sustainability programs. Other groups spoke of their Corporate Social Responsibility Programs.
For the most part I was under-impressed but I did come away with some provocative and new thoughts.

If one applies pattern to invisible structures then one has to figure out what are human patterns and how do they work. What seems glaringly obvious is that there is an order of scale problem. Rivers and trees have a limit to the orders of branching, but human constructs seem to be able to ignore limits. This is true of economics which allows one percent of mankind to control 40% of the total resource base of the planet, and of agriculture which allows a corporation to farm tens of thousands of hectares. Both of these examples are examples of exploitive systems. You cannot operate on such large scales without being extremely exploitative both of the environment and of humans. If this is true then to talk in terms of the sustainability of City Bank is an oxymoron.

Sustainability was the key word of every corporate presenter but not once did any of them give a definition of sustainability or their understanding of it. Tony Anderson who is an old permaculture teacher and designer from Denmark was of the opinion that to be sustainable one had to be constrained to ones bioregion – or that was the appropriate order of scale. Once you start importing and exporting product and money in and out of the bioregion the bioregion inevitable suffers. I’m sure we will spend some time hashing this out during the convergence.