sustainability save us

talked to john about Sustainability this morning.  john studied under Bill Mollison, the god-father of permaculture, back in the 70s when Mollison was in Maui certifying followers.  the concept of permaculture is to create an ecosystem in which humans function and sustain themselves.  it seems sustainability is one of those finicky words that have been translated into a concept.  now conceptualized, the once meaningful action, to sustain, has been bloated into a marketable fantasy-ship that becomes more difficult to connect with the living world each time someone evokes its name.  it is hard enough (thus far impossible for me) to understand sustainability as a practical reality while living on a farm eating almost entirely from the garden.  to translate, from function to concept, back into achievable function, how people on a mass scale should change their behavior in order to realize sustainability at the level of a national economics, seems an asinine proposition.  so i don't have a whole lot of hope for the myth of sustainability becoming any more than a myth.  

this, though,  is no denouncement of sustainability. only a reasonable shift of perspective.  in the best interest of preserving our national way of life as we know it, it is not the accomplishment of sustainability as a holistic reality that will save the day, but rather the proliferation of its myth.  so, sustainability will save us, not when its concept is made manifest in a global economy, but when its myth is placed at the head of every household.  Sustainable, must be coaxed to the same pedestal heights as Godly, Democratic and Cool when children are sat down and their aspirations placed before them.  and just as being godly does not save a people by turning them into gods or acting cool does not turn the masses into movie stars, by shifting sustainability to the forefront of why we do the things that we do (even though it will never be the concrete what) society may well boost itself into a new paradigm, facilitating a shift in social reality as profound as the instigations of monotheism, democracy and rock n' roll combined.