Pretend you wanted to make the planet completely sterile, or at least deplete the biosphere enough so that very few species would survive. You would have to understand that the conditions allowing life (as it is today) took billions of years to create – then take action:
- Heavy metals (mercury, uranium, etc..) are now deep underground, CO2 in the atmosphere was absorbed by plants which are now crude oil (also trapped underground), to name only a couple. You would want to bring the metals back up, and burn the oil to restore the extremely harsh early atmosphere of the Earth.
- With the current technology, we are able to create chemical compounds that nature has never encountered before – pesticides, plastics, refined fuels, and other potent artificial substances. Just spread them everywhere.
- With current technology also, it is possible to physically destroy the environment: using machines and other means: harvest, cut, clear, dig, bomb...
- Finally if you want to get rid of people, not only you would do all of the above, but you will restrict their communications, access to what they need, force them to work more than they should, to rely on less and less resources etc...
In many regards, our society functions in ways that do these things, sometimes obviously but most of the time slowly and unconsciously.
To define what a sustainable society looks like, the NGO The Natural Step established four principles from a scientific consensus. These are negations of the above four ways to "destroy the planet":
In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing:
1. Concentration of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust
2. Concentration of substances produced by society
3. Degradation by physical means and, in this society;
4. People are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs*.
These four points are called the Sustainability Principles. They keep us in check when planning for sustainable development. The founder of The Natural Step, Dr. Robèrt explains their take on sustainability in this video:
*When talking about human needs, we use those identified by Max Neef, which are:
- Subsistence
- Protection
- Affection
- Understanding
- Participation
- Idleness
- Creation
- Identity
- Freedom
You can find Max Neef's work here:
http://www.max-neef.cl/download/Max-neef_Human_Scale_development.pdf
