Why Sustainability Isn’t Sustaining Itself

While global leaders preach sustainability with near-religious fervour, the green promise risks collapsing into empty ritual without incentives or a moral framework.

Few ideas command such effortless global consensus as sustainability. From the annual pilgrimage to Davos to gatherings of the G20, BRICS, ASEAN, SAARC or the SCO, no conclave of world leaders now ends without solemn invocations of climate change and its looming toll on health, biodiversity, agriculture and growth. Targets are announced, timelines are unveiled and pledges made to cut emissions and embrace green energy. Yet, the action rarely keeps pace with the rhetoric. Awkward questions like who will pay for green technologies, or who will accept slower growth to meet emissions targets are quietly sidestepped. Sustainability, as a result, risks becoming little more than a ritualised exercise in moral signalling.

Part of the problem lies in how the issue is framed. Even well-meaning experts often blur the message. On World Environment Day, speeches and public campaigns routinely urge people to “save the planet” accompanied by images of human hands cradling the Earth. This is misleading. The planet is 4.5 billion years old; life has endured for over four billion of those years. Homo sapiens, by contrast, arrived only some 300,000 years ago. Even humanity’s total extinction would barely register on the planet’s geological clock. Life would persist, perhaps even flourish, without humans. The Earth does not need rescuing. What is at stake is far narrower and far starker: humanity’s own survival upon it. Framing sustainability in those terms may be a better place to begin.

Inadequate Response

If public messaging is muddled, governmental responses have been either half-hearted or plainly inadequate. The Kyoto Protocol, ambitious on paper, was signed by the United States - then the world’s largest emitter - but never ratified by its Senate, stripping it of force. The Paris Agreement, though more inclusive, rests largely on voluntary commitments and falls well short of what climate science demands. The Trump administration has already signalled its intent to withdraw from several international bodies and treaties, while actively encouraging expanded oil and gas drilling. Elsewhere, governments have embraced the comforting language of “net zero” but only on timelines stretching three or four decades into the future. In a volatile geopolitical climate, the credibility of such distant, non-binding promises is uncertain at best.

India, for its part, is no exception. Rapid economic growth and breakneck urbanisation often in defiance of planning norms have come at a steep environmental cost. Encroachments on forest land, illegal mining, and the unchecked dumping of untreated industrial waste into rivers and the air are exacting a toll that stretches from the retreating glaciers of the Himalayas to the fragile ecosystems of the Western Ghats.

General Apathy

While there is apathy at the government level, ordinary citizens too are indifferent and unwilling to change their habits. Reducing use of plastic, abandoning use-and-throw culture, segregating recyclable waste, taking due care in disposing used batteries, electronic waste, expired medicines, etc, are simple measures that one can, but rarely does, take at an individual level.

While everyone talks about sustainability, no one seems to be willing to walk the talk. Perhaps one reason is temporal comfort: the gravest consequences of climate change are unlikely to fall squarely on the current generation. Those who will suffer most will arrive too late to avert the damage, left only to live with the outcome. Even when a country is inclined to act and accept short-term economic costs, it fears being undercut by others that choose not to. Self-interest, defined narrowly as ‘here and now’ continues to shape the behaviour of citizens and states alike.

Yet climate change demands a longer view than politics usually allows. It requires choices that extend beyond immediate gain and electoral cycles. The predicament resembles a game of Jenga: every player knows that each move weakens the shared structure, but no one wants to stop first and lose. Whether this deadlock can still be broken remains the most uncomfortable question of all.

Simpler Times

There was a time, not too far ago, when people all over the world, and most certainly so in India, indeed had a culture and a lifestyle that was a lot more sustainable. Their needs were comparatively very less. They believed in coexistence rather than competition. Ordinary people genuinely believed that the collective good of the entire society was the only mechanism to best serve an individual’s self-interest. They saw divinity in almost everything in nature (plants, animals, sea, rivers, mountains, five Elements, and so on) around them and worshipped it. This belief, and the value system it created, made them care for, and coexist with, people and the nature around them. Reuse was high, and as a result, carbon footprint was low. They believed that good-deeds (‘punya’) come back to benefit the doer and one has to certainly pay the price for the sins committed (‘paap’) - either in this life itself, or in the next one after rebirth. Whether out of fear or faith, cultural beliefs had shaped the behaviour of the masses for a long time, and made them rise and think above and beyond the short-term gain.

Regardless of whether one agrees with them or not, those beliefs were addressing mass psychology rather effectively. It used selfish interest as a tool to nudge and incentivize people to think about others, about their surroundings, and on a timeline that transcended beyond their own lifetime. One may not care much about what happens to subsequent generations of humankind, but one would certainly want good things to happen in one’s own current life, and the ‘next’. Not everything was right with those beliefs even then. Exploitation of a large number of ordinary people by a few did happen using precisely this blind faith. However, it did help in propagating a lifestyle and behaviours that did promote sustainability in a very big way.

Then came an era that shattered those cultural beliefs. Modern education, knowledge, new frontiers of scientific and technological progress removed an aura of divinity around everything in nature. Increased exposure to global opportunities spurred ever increasing ambition and competition. Industrialization and its market forces promoted use-and-throw culture to increase demand. Fast paced economic growth that it triggered seemed to make everyone happy with rising income levels for the masses, affordable machines to make daily life easier and more comfortable, higher profits to entrepreneurs, and higher GDP growth with better tax collection for governments. However, as economic wisdom goes, there is nothing like a free lunch. While all stakeholders were indeed happy, it took a heavy toll on the environment and made the rosy picture just too good to sustain.

They failed to bring up any alternative idea, or an ‘ism’ that would incentivize people to think of the larger good of the society and in the timeframe that would transcend one’s lifetime. In dislodging all the old cultural beliefs and the way of life, it has unknowingly thrown the baby out with the bathwater. It has created issues that are now spiralling out of control with no realistic solution in sight. This situation is similar to a no-confidence motion that can easily pull down a functioning government citing all its real or perceived flaws.

However, it could plunge the State in an even worse situation if it fails to simultaneously offer an improved and practical alternative government. It is always easy to dislodge a working model by highlighting what was wrong with it, but it is not easy to provide practical alternatives to sustain the right in it. It calls for intellectual honesty to acknowledge and appreciate what was working well then, irrespective of whether it was a purposeful design or not. An approach that removes the wrongs, but carefully reinstates and builds upon what was right, is the only one that will sustain. Whether such intellectual honesty exists today and can it offer innovative practical alternatives, will decide the future of sustainability and that of the generations to come.

(The writer works in the Information Technology sector. Views personal)