Comments on: Simplicity vs. Sustainability

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:03:34 +0000

I hear you. Definitely a good deal of the sustainability literature tries very hard to define the concept closer to my emotional feeling about simplicity in this post, as well as tries to keep it close to that sense of money in, expenditures out. But I really do feel there’s a maximalist tendency in some sustainability activism, as well as a tendency to actually complicate the work of everyday life. If I need to march all over the place just to make consistently sustainable choices, then that is in and of itself not especially sustainable (either in the sense of conserving personal energies or in the sense of making inputs and outputs align).

By: Stentor

Stentor — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 19:42:52 +0000

This is interesting, because — perhaps due to spending my days immersed in that sustainability literature — I have the opposite valence to my reactions to those two words. For me, “sustainability” connotes attention to the goals of an enterprise and concern for how you’re affecting others or your own future (which I suppose is not too far off from your conception, though I interpret “sustainability” as being much more “good enough” than some other, more maximalist ways of thinking). Whereas “simplicity” to me sounds like fetishizing one means to sustainability, and in that sense much more limiting.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:25:49 +0000

See, I somewhat obviously am wary of that. Simplicity is a shared cultural property, so it needs talking out, and that can sometimes verge on a regulatory experience. But the idea that it need enforcement would be, as often, a place where we split and you go vaguely communitarian and I go vaguely libertarian.

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:42:18 +0000

Heh. You know me too well, David. I was just thinking of sending Tim an article I’ve written on simplicity and bicycling. It’s thesis is that “keeping it simple” actually sometimes does involve “creating elaborate regulations or structures or standards which then need to be recited or enforced at every turn.”

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:37:50 +0000

Russell is going to love this.