One of the hardest constructs for people to grasp is that resource development is not only a function of its geographical quantity, quality or location. Resource development is predicated upon the human factors of economic development and the political system that governs any particular locale.
Centralised, bureaucratic, stasist governance has never resulted in effective, efficient resource management. Which is why ecomyths exist: to put the element of fear into the populace and thus justify the continued intervention of centralised, bureaucratic, stasist governance into resource development.
Sustainability is a wonderful construct. Sadly it has largely and exclusively been confined by an insistence on thinking of sustainability as a stasis construct of prevention and conservation. In fact, where elements of sustainability have actually been implemented it is where the notion of sustainability as dynamic change has been embraced -- to be sustainable one had to be open to change: change in practice, change in design, change in thinking, change in dominant constructs. When an ideology is set, closed to modification and self-assured in its dogma -- as is contemporary environmentalism -- there can be no dynamic change, no learning, no new design, no new ideas: no sustainability.
It is this contradiction that leads environmental ideologues to protest so loudly, to be so afraid of contrary perspective and to embrace the authority and power of bureaucracy, stasism and government: they are their shield against change, against new ideas, against the dynamism of the globalization and the stochastic nature of natural environmental change and adaptation.
The world is, and can remain, sustainable. But to be sustainable, we must be open and receptive to change and not afraid of the challenges change poses for us.
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Conversely, we can accept with increasing passivity the notion that politics is now primarily a means of imposing conformism on the population using a series of unnecessary laws that are less a practical measure to address a real problem than a politico-moral intervention designed to shape wider public opinion in the way that old-fashioned Politics no longer can.
That these laws are imposed on us by politicians who are closed-minded, stasist and singularly unable to adapt to dynamic change, should be the real source for alarm.
To paraphrase Shakespeare: a leader, a leader, my kingdom for a leader.
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