Don't mock. People with penises growing out of their feet have a wicked hard time finding comfortable shoes.

I actually think that's kind of cool.

And then there's this one .

Like B, I sort of enjoy the thought of phalluses sprouting everywhere, with a different symbolic meaning for each location.

Did your attempt succeed?

Since there are sustainable organic carrots and cucumbers, there are therefore sustainable organic sex toys.

Also, WTF does "sustainable" mean? No one has ever given me a good answer to this question.

Without having clicked on Becks's link, the comments are leading me to think this is the time to mention these surreal French HIV-prevention public service ads.

4 - It did succeed. These sex toys are vegan and, I believe, recycled.

Also, WTF does "sustainable" mean?

"Not unsustainable." You're welcome.

I was kind of thinking that whoever ripped Becks off had a kick in the ass coming, but I hadn't quite imagined this.

"Sustainable" means "no need to contact a doctor if it lasts over 4 hours."

I'm not sure why contacting a doctor would help with a long-lasting erection. Some doctors are hot.

More seriously, though "sustainability" generally seems to be used these days as a vague buzzword, my understanding is that the basic concept is actually pretty straightforward: depleting resources at a rate slower than that at which they are replenished.

I see you've found the official footwear for George Washington.

Um, how does one use this toy. We need a demo.

3. For the amputees presumably.

Analyzing the concept "sustainable" is the single most important project in environmental philosophy. A lot of people are working on it, but not nearly enough, largely because a lot of environmental philosophy is not often done using the tools of analytic philosophy.

The best start towards a definition I've seen comes from Paul Thompson, who suggested that the first step is to define the exact system that is at issue. This includes value decisions (what do we want to sustain?) and empirical judgments (what processes are linked to the things we value). A sustainable system is then one that is completely free of internal threats. No system can be protected from uncontrollable outside events. If a big enough meteor hits the earth, any system is doomed. "Sustainability" is merely a matter of guaranteeing that the system doesn't undermine itself.

These boots are made for fuckin'
And that's just what they'll do
And one of these days these boots are gonna cum all over you

6.--I really like the woman underwater ad. The male version is just a little too literal. Still, very cool!

Clearly, the product in the main post should be packaged together with this one.

A sustainable system is then one that is completely free of internal threats.

Like a perpetual motion machine? One of those laws of thermodynamics comes in here, right?

I wonder if one reason "sustainability" has so rapidly collapsed into an utterly vacuous buzzword is that the concept itself is problematic. There are other issues too besides the obvious one above -- are the choices of the people in the system external or internal to it?

If you wanted to operationalize it, perhaps you could start with the notion of an equilibrium or steady state.

As long as we've got the sun in the system, the whole thing has the potential thermodynamically stable for the next billion years.

Stability is actually a more modest goal than what the economists assume we need: unlimited exponential growth.

"Sustainability" isn't an empty buzz word, but it's heavily misused.

I was going to mock 19, but then fucking helpy-chalk has to come in and pwn me with an actual helpful comment.

Helpful, maybe, but not grammatical. Insert a "to be" in sentence 1.

Re: whether human decisions are part of the system: Thompson has a long discussion of this, borrowing terms from anthropology about internal and external perspectives. I don't remember how it winds up going. You certainly can't leave human decisions out of the system, though.

Thanks Rob. For not mocking me. I now see that 19 was indeed very mockable and I am appropriately humbled. At least for the duration of this paragraph. OK, done.

I still think sustainability is problematic as a concept. It just does not offer a useful guide to action. It is too dependent on the values and resources one wishes to sustain, the time scale one is looking at, and the assumptions about how the system will work over that time scale. Corporations easily adapt the rhetoric of sustainability because they are thinking about sustaining profits rather than natural resources. Environmentalists argue for massive population reductions in the name of sustainability because they care about sustaining natural resources, not population. Economists believe that our current technological system is sustainable over the long run due to technological progress, in using things like solar that we can't make much use of now...the sustainable solar argument is actually a cornucopian one.

Anyway, saying you want a system to be "sustainable" provides very little guidance about how to design that system. The work is all happening in deciding what you want to preserve and predicting how the system will function. I'd actually love to see analytic philosophers bring more clarity to this, but I suspect it will just open up ground for more debates.

Stability is actually a more modest goal than what the economists assume we need: unlimited exponential growth.

You probably know this, but just to be fussy about it -- economists don't assume we need unlimited exponential growth, or indeed any growth, in use of natural resources. There is no contradiction at all between economic growth and reduced use of natural resources. Granted our economic growth metrics should better count natural resource use, but that is a different question.

Off-topic, but the photo essay of phone sex operators that Ogged linked before ascending? Mother Jones has a version of the same essay, but with about three times as may photos.

may s/b many

Economists do need unlimited exponential economic growth. They claim that this can be done without exponential demands on resources, but their claims are weakened by the fact that none of them know or care anything about geography pr the other earth sciences. I suppose that there are equations which claim to show that you can substitute for anything and miniturize infinitely and that the pricing mechanisms can solve any problem that comes up, but these equations are internal to economics and aren't based on study of concrete physical reality.

PGD, it's possible to look at a given practice and see that it's unsustainable. The Atlantic cod fishery was one example. Agriculture in the rain forest in present forms is another. Water use in the American West is another. Nothing problematic or meaningless about these examples.

To begin with, "sustainable" would just mean the absence of these sorts of unsustainable practices. You could have an enumerated list.

The fact that industry flacks can misuse a word does not make the word meaningless. The proof of this is left to the reader.

PGD,

There is no contradiction at all between economic growth and reduced use of natural resources.

In special cases perhaps. I find it hard to imagine an economy in the real world that used zero natural resources though. People do, after, consume things like food, which is, at the most basic level - chemical energy.

It really does all come back to energy. I'm not saying our energy usage couldn't be reduced but it simply cannot be eliminated.

I think that the constraints are water, topsoil, climate change, energy, air, and minerals in about that order.

Everything that happens will happen in the context of international competitions and the consumer demands of nation populations, so even after a theoretically ideal solution is found it's not a sure thing to be put into effect.

I just don't see any favorable long term outcome without both an end to population growth and a flattening of the growth in the average standard of living. Economists refusal even to think about this possibility is one of the big points against them. (Hermann Daley tried, but he testified that his efforts did his career nothing but harm).

The utopia of infinite growth seems wired into the profession.

PGD, it's possible to look at a given practice and see that it's unsustainable. The Atlantic cod fishery was one example. Agriculture in the rain forest in present forms is another. Water use in the American West is another. Nothing problematic or meaningless about these examples.

But your stereotypical orthodox economist has a ready answer to each of these: property rights. Often times that's a bullshit response, but in the three instances you cite the Tragedy of the Commons really is at work.

You guys -- Emerson in particular -- make it sound as thought economists are just pulling this stuff out of their asses, in an empirical void. There are numerous examples of pollution dropping as economies grow. There are also many examples of per capita resource consumption dropping as economies grow. E.g. U.S. Btu (energy) consumption per person is lower today than it was in 1972, despite the fact that our GDP per person is twice as high. Energy consumption per dollar of economic product is less than half what it was in 1972

Now what we need to do is reach a population steady state. The UN predicts this around the mid 21st century. If we can do that, there is ample evidence from the existing record that we can sustain plenty of economic growth while consistently reducing our use of natural resources and the level of pollution we emit.

I don't think that that's the problem in the rain forest. The land isn't worth anything until it's productive, but it's only productive for a few years and then goes dead. I don't think that there's a business model that makes it more worthwhile to exploit it long term at a low productive level than it is to cut and run. Much the same is true of forestry -- when privately owned forests go public, they come under tremendous fiscal pressure to maximize immediate return.

It wouldn't work for western water either. What kind of business organization would maximize its revenues over a 10,000 year span? As environmentalists say, for an economist ten years is long term, where as for an ecologist 100 years is short term.

Cod fishery, probably. Auctioning off fishing rights in an honest auction might have worked if there had been market or regulatory forces encouraging long-term management.

Economists have so much scorn for government that they effectively sabotage it with their pronouncements, thus making regulatory capture all the easier. (The same kinds of capture could happen for market-based environemental protection when the tax rates were set.)

PGD: yeah, and I'm sure that you can extrapolate the graph lines until in 2100 or 2200 the GDP/capita is $200,000 and energy use is zero. But there are limits to that kind of thing.

Not everyone grants an end to population growth, either. And very slow growth is still growth. YOu're talking about doubling periods unless growth is zero.

For a lot of important detail on "sustainability" I invite you -- I beg you -- to google "permaculture" ... which is where I spend most of my time in self-directed study.

You're allowed to assume sunlight energy as a driver, but for the most part you have to build such that inputs equal outputs. Think of the centuries of buffalo culture on the American Plains. Yes, people ate and used energy, but the basic cycle was sunlight, grass, buffalo, human food and buffalo-based skin and bone tools, with perfect recycling and no pollution anywhere in the system. The buffalo weren't going to become exhausted, and the human populations were stable.

The instant you allow any vector to grow without pause, no matter how slowly, you're unsustainable ... and your civilization is dead.

Economics, and a number of other disciplines we hold fondly, will have to change drastically to contribute to human survivability (let alone stop being incredible detriments). The simple idea that energy consumption per capita can grow forever dooms us -- and the sooner we understand that the claim of a dollar to some future labor is really the claim on future energy expenditure, and that can't grow faster than energy capture, which is limited to sunlight capture, the sooner we'll have a chance.

Carter tried to put us on a track for sunlight capture during his Presidency, and had solar panel installed on the White House while he started the Energy Department. Reagan, upon entering office, immediately removed those panels, and dead-ended the Energy Department.

If you live in America, you're the only industrial country with no national energy plan -- what you get is what corporations work out for you to get, and since they are in business to profit, what you get is likely to benefit them more than you.

One of the most important terms of art in Economics I know (of course, I'm no John Emerson) is "externalizing costs." If you look with intellectual integrity at any economic transaction (and follow it through the entire resource-to-buyer transaction chain), you can see the effort of all parties to externalize as many of the real (total) costs as possible. When you do the work of internalizing those costs in the transaction, it's very difficult to find any transaction that would actually occur among rational parties.

By way of example, we can see the extreme reluctance of the energy industry to have anything to do with nuclear power absent the government assuming huge, unmeasured, and frankly immeasurable external costs.

What staggers environmentalists is how many utterly unevaluated costs we've been willing to take on -- at the same time we laugh at the Romans for lead pipe -- like the casual use and disposal of millions of tons of plastic every year into the sea and environment. Plastic particles, many known carcinogens, are now in everyone's blood. Is that a price we really wanted to pay for cheap and convenient packaging?

32: You might also want to consider looking beyond national borders when you're talking about the relationship between "growth" and pollution. It's not like the US economy happens in a vacuum. Then there's that whole "over time" thing.

I was under the impression that the picturesque Plains Indian culture of killing bison from horses was a very recent development when whites became aware of it at the beginning of the 19C, that it had radically destabilized cultures, that the tribes now called Lakota where very recent arrivals, who had been driven from their homes on Lake Superior by Ojibwa with guns, and had "lost the corn" as recently as 1796.

37 gets it right. The US economy produces huge amounts of pollution which happens to be located in the places where the factories that make up a large part of the US economy are located, that is, China, and in the places where the garbage that makes up a large part of the US economy is deposited, that is, China, India, the ocean, et cetera.

B.PhD @ 37 -- exactly. We try to make all those other countries eat our externalized costs, and what good corporation wouldn't? Now we're going to discover that international rule of law and a functioning United Nations is not going to be a good thing, it's going to be a necessary thing. Treaties are Law by way of the Constitution for a Reason.

~~~

I Don't Pay @ 38 -- It is possible to draw several differerent kinds of conclusions from the same data set, but I'm participating in a conversation about "sustainability" and providing a simple example of one that people may be familiar with, and you're ... where, exactly? Yes, the introduction of the horse was "new" technology -- but the lifestyle was "sustainable" within the context of this conversation.

I'm participating in a conversation about "sustainability" and providing a simple example of one that people may be familiar with, and you're ... where, exactly?

I think he's suggesting that the lifestyle was not proven to be sustainable, inasmuch as it wasn't sustained for more than a few decades.

Fatman @ 41
LOL ... yeah. Duh. We killed all the bison to have railroads, and then cattle.

Ironically, now we've discovered that the cattle are susceptible to all sorts of diseases that the bison are not. The bison will also eat shittier grass and is comfortable in more inclement weather.

We killed all the bison to have railroads get rid of natives living on them.

37, 39: yes, there has been a lot of attention to this in the literature. There may be some role for composition effects (sending dirtier industries overseas), but it seems clear that the declines in air pollution and improvements in energy efficiency with economic growth are much too large to be due to composition effects alone -- most of them have to be due to cleaner production. In the U.S. in particular, it is evidence that the timing is wrong. The improvements start with environmental regulation and attention to energy efficiency in the 70s, and the most dramatic drops occur then.

Also, there is lots of longitudinal evidence (over time) as well.

A lot of this stuff is clearly driven by regulation and attention, it's not automatic. But we are hopefully about to enter a period of greatly increased regulation.

There was a lot of easy conservation available in 1960. We have to expect some diminishing returns.

I'm a relative tech optimist on some of this stuff. What annoys me about economists is that as far as I know very few of them have been willing to consider the possibility that decreased consumption might be necessary at some point, or a that we may sometimes face a shortage of unsubstitutible resources such as water or topsoil. Whether or not this will be necessary, what are the consequences if it is? Whouldn't we work out contingency plans? I'm not really saying that such outcomes are inevitable.

And when economists tell me why they're sure that there will never be such a problem, their answers never are very good and never are based on a study of earth science.

We consume one quarter of the world's oil production directly. But a lot of our "stuff" is made in China and then sent to us.

Are we closer to a third of the world's consumption of oil? And responsible for its externalities?

Change has to begin here, where the power is, and where the power is used.

There was a lot of easy conservation available in 1960. We have to expect some diminishing returns.

true, but I think our national effort was really pretty crappy from the Reagan era to the present. Plus China and India are still using a lot of old tech. I think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit around right now.

very few of them have been willing to consider the possibility that decreased consumption might be necessary at some point,

one thing to keep in mind is that consumption doesn't necessarily mean material consumption. It doesn't seem at all impossible that sometime this century we'll reach a point where we all consume less material stuff and substitute into services and leisure consumption.

The simple idea that energy consumption per capita can grow forever dooms us

As I pointed out above, energy consumption per capita is lower in the U.S. today than it was in 1972. World energy consumption per capita has increased by just 12 percent from 1980 to 2005 -- and that's over one of the most explosive periods of economic growth in world history.

The next 25 years will be obviously be tough environmentally -- growth is expected to be just as fast as over the 1980-2005 period, but we'll be taking it on with much more attention to these problems.

I think we're in a bottleneck period. But if by 2050 we can bring population growth to a halt and also continue improvements in energy efficiency and environmental cleanup regulation and technology (which we will likely invest a lot more in over the next few decades than we have over the past few), then we can be OK. None of this is automatic, obvs.

I can't believe I took over a sex thread to rehearse the environmental argument yet again. I'm banned. I'm turning into one of those total fucking political bores.

I can't believe I took over a sex thread to rehearse the environmental argument yet again. I'm banned. I'm turning into one of those total fucking political bores.

If the political bores are totally fucking, they could liven up the environmental threads.

Actually, part of the reason the Sioux went into the plains west of the Missouri is because they depleted the buffalo east of the river, but whatever.

I'm turning into one of those total fucking political bores.

Don't worry, PGD, a shoe-dildo should help you loosen up.

Really the situation on the plains from the 18th century on was fluid enough - and connected to what was going on with European settlers to the east - that it's hard to draw any conclusions on sustainability. Pre-18th century was a different story, but I don't know anything about that.

This has been my non-useful contribution to the thread.

47, As you ignored above, energy use per capita in the U.S. for production has been outsourced.

49, No points for changing the subject (you probably know the fancy Latin name for this fallacy of logic as well as I); if you want to argue that "sustainability" means that outputs can exceed inputs, go for it. And if you know your history well enough to mention this, then intellectual honesty demands you also mention the main herds were not in the East.

52: The herds in the west starting being depleted in the early 19th century at the same time that the Sioux were expanding into that area. Much of this was the result of white hunters, though, hence my comment 51, saying that the situation was too complex to sustain sustainability stories. Could things have been sustainable without white traders being involved? Maybe so. But that's not what happened.

Again, pre-18th century when you had people living on the plains based on a combination of horticulture and hunting, was a different story. That might have been sustainable.

53; If we posit you're right, you're still bolstering my substantive point -- it's going to be very difficult to define and build a sustainable culture, we're not even sure we've seen one. And we could have done this the easier way, with non-renewable oil energy as a bootstrapping assist into technology and industrial production. Now we going to have to do it with a population of 6 billion and world economies built on gasoline priced like bottled water.

You may be optimistic, but I think we're likely to lose several billion people in the next 80 years -- unless we get to cheap, clean fusion, which is no certainty, and likely very difficult to scale.

We've mined the top 1/2 mile of the earth's crust everywhere for anything vaguely useful. We've exhausted large swathes of the Earth's agricultural surface, depleted many of the world's aquifers (some we've simply salt poisoned), made huge toxic waste dumps everywhere, and mucked up the weather and polluted the oceans. If we've done this with cheap energy, how can you be rationally optimistic we're going to do better with extremely expensive energy?