The Future of Sustainability: Have Your Say!

Week Two - “Human Wellbeing and Sustainability”
Comment / Comentario / Commentaire

Gary Gardner, Worldwatch Institute, USA

Moderating team: Gary Gardner, Director of Research at Worldwatch Institute calls on us to remember that moderation produces the greatest advances for human beings. He argues that the challenge everywhere is to find moderation: to remove constraints to progress in developing countries, and to apply restraint in developed countries.

Gary Gardner, Director de Investigaciones del Worldwatch Institute recuerda a los foristas que la moderación tiene grandes avances en los seres humanos. Argumenta que el desafío es encontrar la moderación: eliminar las barrearas al progreso en países en desarrollo y aplicar barreras a los países desarrollados.

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When we talk about overarching concepts like "the good life", or even about development or progress, we would do well to recall what our wisdom traditions have taught for millennia: that moderation produces the greatest advances for human beings. In wealthy countries, we have completely lost sight of this wisdom, and our economies and personal consumption center on maximization rather than moderation. But all true progress, it seems, is about moderation: great energy, on one hand, reined in or bounded by some sense of restraint, on the other.

The universe itself evolved from a mixture of the great energy of the Big Bang and the boundedness of gravity: energy alone would have dispersed into nothingness, while gravity alone would have produced little more than cold rock. It was the interaction of the two that produced a creative, developmental universe.

In developing countries, constraints dominate: lack of capital, income, jobs, or other assets. In wealthy countries, open-ended energy dominates: an overemphasis on material wealth, on constant stimulation, on the latest technology. To greatly oversimplify, the challenge everywhere is to find moderation: to remove constraints to progress in developing countries, so that energy there is allowed to stimulate creativity, and to apply restraint in developed countries, so that open-ended energy--in the form of materialism, overeating, and other excesses--does not do us in.