The Limits of Sustainability

I spent a nice long weekend with my cousins near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the de facto center of the Amish world. Having never before experienced anything of the sort, I was fascinated by their chosen style of life: partially because it is so foreign to a good portion of the rest of America, but also because, in a lot of ways, it is exactly what the rest of America needs to emulate. They pool their resources for the good of the community, help their own who have fallen on tough times, pay cash for everything, and they have a long (and recently publicly displayed) history of forgiving completely in response to being horribly wronged. These are all wonderful things, and if I were authoring a different type of blog I would certainly do these qualities more justice. But what I want to commend them for is the way they think about their relationship with their environments. In fact, this way of thinking may be so important that it lies at the root of the other qualities that I mentioned above.

When I think of the most basic difference between the Amish and the rest of Americans, I cannot help but think that the great disparities boil down to the fact that the Amish have set limitations and boundaries on themselves and have recognized those boundaries as good, while the rest of us often fail to recognize any limitations whatsoever. Take, for instance, our opposing transportation preferences. The Amish choices of transportation are limited to walking, biking, and riding in horse-drawn carriages. From what I saw this past weekend, they make ample use of all three of these modes. For the rest of America, the choices are much wider, and seem to be growing and getting faster by the decade. We can still walk and bike and ride horses (though the carriages have gone by the wayside), but we can also attach a motor to the bike or scooter, step onto a Segway, ride a bus or train, drive our own personal high-speed vehicle, or (very soon, hopefully) sit in a bullet train that goes 200 miles per hour. None of these, mind you, are inherently bad, and, in fact, some of them are a vital part of a sustainable city, yet we have to consider what the impacts are of such variety, speed, and general “no boundaries” outlook on ourselves, our cities, and our world.

An Amish community, by choice, must confine itself to a fairly small geographical area. The work that a family and a community takes on must be limited to what they can physically handle with their own bodies. The products that they consume must be kept within the bounds of what they can really afford. The by-products of one portion of life must by the sustenance for another. Thus, they have no use for wastefulness or excess in any form, including landfills, fossil fuels, agricultural chemical inputs, soil nitrogen replenishments, payday lending, credit cards, mortgage-backed securities, state budget disagreements, and especially not suburban sprawl. We, on the other hand, are slaves to all of these things, because we don’t know when to say no.

What would it mean to recognize limits? Would cities exist without these limits? I’m sure they would, though probably in much different forms than what we currently have. Limited cities would be more walkable and equitable, just as unlimited cities have become car-dependent and discriminatory. David Orr, a professor of environmental studies, makes a strong case that we cannot live in healthy environments, or be healthy ourselves, as long as we do not recognize the boundaries that exist. And this is precisely the point: the boundaries exist, whether we acknowledge them or not. There is a limit to which life and community can sustain itself, and if that limit is exceeded, systems will begin to fail. Orr argues that in order to recognize this, we must be taught to think in systems or ecologies (in which one part is a component as well as a product of many other related parts); and in order to recognize that we must think in systems, we have to recognize that there are natural limits to the actions that we can take in order to maintain sustainability. Until we accomplish this unlikely feat, we are unlikely to solve our environmental, social, or economic problems.