What is “radical sustainability”?
- It is REAL sustainability, involving a radical re-design of our settlements and living systems to support HUMAN living in HARMONY with one another and the natural world.
- It is a way of living on Earth that makes room for Ocelots.
- It aims to ELIMINATE cars and fossil fuels, not just reduce their usage.
- It is about establishing a cooperative, significantly localized economy in sync with the regional ecosystem, not superficially tweaking the existing capitalist urban sprawl nightmare.
- It is about adapting our communities to live WELL on a small fraction of the energy and materials than North Americans currently consume.
- It is about building with local or on-site natural materials, not wood from genetically modified trees in sterilized forests, nor cement that requires enormous carbon emissions to produce and transport.
- It is about dramatically reducing crime, alienation, malnutrition, stress, economic insecurity, and major conflicts by building resilient communities and cooperative culture.
- It pursues robust social, whole-system solutions, not piecemeal individual changes.
- It challenges corporate-sponsored greenwashed understandings of “sustainability,” which receive a lot of funding and press, but which are not remotely commensurate with the scope of our ecological and social crises.
- It rejects quick and easy pseudo-“green” solutions that preserve profits and pose no inconveniences, and perseveres in love and diligence toward real solutions for which future generations will remember us with gratitude and not disgust.
- It is an evolutionary revolution to replace consumer capitalism and outdated 20th C. industrial paradigms with a new way of life rooted in cooperation, indigenous wisdom, and cutting-edge science.
- It is a new path forward, starting right here right now, that is based on love, inner peace, ecological awareness, and the power of community.
An excellent practical book on radical sustainability is Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-It-Ourselves Guide, by Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew.