Peace, Conflict and Sustainability

Most definitions of sustainability, across history and cultures, come down to two themes: resources, meaning the wise use and management of economic and natural resources, and respect, meaning respect for people and for other living things. The two are deeply interconnected. True sustainability depends on an ongoing, dynamic balance between managing resources and respecting the living systems around us. Finding that balance may be the next real step in humanity’s evolution toward a species that lives in harmony with the rest of the biosphere.

But resources and respect can pull against each other. Managing any other species in our ecosystem imposes constraints on it that transform it in ways we cannot fully predict, simply because our knowledge of other complex living systems is incomplete. Interfering in the lives and evolution of other species with such limited understanding isn’t really respect, it’s arrogance, and arrogance tends to blind us to the true nature of whatever we’re looking at. Real respect starts with coming to know the other, whether an individual or a species, and we already know how hard it is to fully know even one other person. On the scale of an entire species, that difficulty multiplies many times over, especially since every species, including ours, is in constant evolutionary flux, shaped by its relationships with everything else in the biosphere.

Picture a web of countless, diverse beings, where any action by any one of them sends ripples through the structural and relational dynamics of the whole web. That’s roughly what happens whenever a species inside an ecosystem tries to manage its environment. True respect, then, has to mean something more active: a constant search for a more viable sustainability through intelligent, perceptive, compassionate interaction with every other species, plant or animal, that we share this planet with. In practice, that means treating everything out there that isn’t us as though it were us, which is the only way we’ll come to understand the ecosystem well enough to give back what we’ve taken from it, ideally with some care and improvement built into the exchange.