What Is Sustainable: Remembering Our Way Home

A hurricane called Peak Everything is rapidly approaching, and we are not prepared for it. Looking through doom-colored glasses, the future appears turbulent and chaotic, for obvious reasons. But when we switch to rose-colored glasses, it's thrilling to see that dawn is breaking out all over. A dysfunctional way of life is dying, and this opens up a wide variety of new possibilities, some of which could lead to a genuinely sustainable future. No matter what we do, the Earth will heal. It will heal if we self-destruct, and it will heal if we remember healthy values and lifestyles. Are we capable of intelligent change? Yes. But problems that took centuries to create will not be resolved in a single generation. The purpose of this book is to encourage the healing process, to propose important questions, and to examine our reality from a different perspective. One thing is certain: the future demands a radically more intelligent worldview and skill set -- and a genuinely healthy future will have little in common with the way we live today. The four directions of this book are sustainable population, sustainable worldview, sustainable food, and reconnection with our past, our ancestors, and our non-human relatives -- the living world. Subjects discussed include ecological history, domestication, voluntary simplicity, collapse, materialism, peak energy, peak food, peak population, antibiotics, aquaculture, and agroforestry.