Sustainability from a different angle

I am half way through an amazing book called Design Futuring: Sustainability, ethics and new practice by Tony Fry. Although I had painful moments of being back in grad school and reading academic literature that I know I am not smart enough to truly decipher, I was inspired by this book. He presents many themes, but the one I wanted to write about today was one that has been floating around inside my head and Mr.Fry was able to articulate it in a way that helped me gain clarity on it.

He frames sustainability in the form of anthropocentric. Previously as an environmentalist I would frame my argument as saving the environment... why?  because it is the right thing to do, because people are destroying the planet, because there is something innately wrong about economic growth at the expense of the environment and humanity.

Fry frames it this way - "Sustain-ability'... is an acceptance of anthropocentric desire - it is about 'saving humanity' by saving what we collectively depend upon (thus it refuses the deception of 'saving the planet') and it implies changing the processes by which our lives are sustained."pg 44

Hopefully you also see the shift - we still need to save all the trees, bugs, animals and people, but we do it from the way that people are designed anyway.  This slight shift all of a sudden makes every person in the world a player in this process for change.  As people on this planet we have a primal nature for sustaining ourselves, our families and our communities.  Now in order to truly do this on a sustain ability path, this means that our behaviors and practices at every level have to ask themselves am I sustaining by doing XY or Z?

If you were to look around to see if this is the way we live?  Not on a massive scale - so there is a need for a shift.  That shift will be huge at some point when we reflect on the way we used to live, but in the mean time that shift will occur when new ideas and designs present themselves informed by past ideas and designs, until we are eventually moving us into a world that truly is sustainable.