Can we just stay like this?

The word “sustainable” is curious to me. It is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as “able to continue over a period of time.” This broad definition, with a vague future perspective, is sometimes confusing; experts working in sustainability are often unsure how to define it uniformly. 

If we translate this word to Bangla, it is known as “tekshoyi”, and if we look into another definition of the word tekshoyi, it fills in more of a clue of what that word means, apart from being sustainable. Tekshoyi, is defined as being “durable; lasting; sturdy; strong”. While the time aspect is the same for both definitions, it also gives us a clue to what other values something sustainable could hold.

In light of climate change and our changing realities, it is known that excessive meat consumption is not a sustainable venture. Meat production lies in a system that contributes an excessive amount of greenhouse gases and the status quo of this venture is not a long term one. When a system does not exhibit long-term behavior, it will at some point undergo a change or a transition. 

Now, for argument’s sake, if we went back to the time when acquiring meat from a hunter’s perspective was the only available and long-term food source, and to people in that time, this food source would last them long. Changes in food systems were driven by people with the resources to move to farming, and it was often the case that those with more resources could transition to farming rather than those with bare minimum resources. 

In that time, nobody had to think about sustainability; they were purely driven by their values to transition to this new reality. Our value systems shifted over time, with definitions of what is sustainable changing across spatial and temporal dimensions – resulting in what we know as the Anthropocene today.

What is sustainable here and now, might not be sustainable there and then.

If we think of a fisherman who lives by the river and knows that place to be their entire life. His livelihood comes from the river; the river feeds him, and the river allows him to thrive. As the person spends more time with the river, he notices that the water flow has become increasingly erratic, with floods disrupting his livelihood. Soon, the river starts taking the land, and this man is now at a loss for their livelihood. They begin a transition. 

We must acknowledge that this person’s transition also depends on the place’s governance and on the inputs and outputs of diverse stakeholders. For this man to undergo a sustainability transition, he would have to undergo a complex process involved in shifting established systems towards enhanced sustainability. In other words, in a just world, his transition would be durable, lasting, sturdy, and strong.

Now, if we think of something that is more relevant to us – the human body. The human body is a system of complex, interdependent components that work together to sustain life. Breathing is not just the lungs working, but the coordination of the brain, muscles, diaphragm, heart, blood and cells. Walking is not just our legs moving, but an interaction among the brain, nerves, muscles, bones and sensory organs. Everything human works together to produce something extraordinary.

This is the nature of social systems; they often cannot work independently. They will always be linked to a network of vast stakeholders, governance, technology and the environment they are based in. Another nature of life is that it is ever-changing – only change is the one constant we can depend on. With change comes transition, and with this transition, we need to look into how we move beyond this in-between to feel that the new system is now fair to us.

Our values are what ultimately lead us to this new system. If this system prioritises self-protection, it looks different. If this system prioritises self-protection with awareness of durability, longevity, sturdiness, and strength, then the new system looks entirely different.

A mere 30 years ago, quality was a value associated with being tekshoyi, but those value systems have changed ever since then. Recently, the term "enshittification" has captured this shift in value: products and services have gradually deteriorated as quality and durability give way to profit maximization. 

Entire value systems are now driven by profit maximization, without considering the resources the system can sustain. If we think of something that exhibits durability, longevity, sturdiness, and strength, we build it in a system that protects its own resources. This system wants to prosper not just for now, but for a long time.

The people who shifted from being hunters to farmers must have had a lot of stories to tell. When we look into the stories of these transitions, we can find insights into how their values affected them, and maybe that’s where we should start when we want to understand how to transition our systems to a sustainable one.

Raida A. K. Reza is Doctoral Researcher at the United Nations University's Institute for Integrated Management of Material Fluxes and of Resources (UNU Resource Nexus), Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER), and Dresden University of Technology (TUD).