Nick Radford, Director of Ecoliving Design, talks about what sustainability really means, referring to resource accounting and human hunter gatherer history.
Nick Radford has formally studied architecture, horticulture, environmental science, organic farming and permaculture. He practices permaculture, which is a multi disciplinary sustainable design approach and has lived in the Bellinger valley for over twenty years, putting theory into practice.
Nick argues that humans were hunter gatherers until relatively recently – some 12,000 years ago in Jordan/ Syria and 3,000 – 4,000 years ago in Britain. Given that humans evolved a few million years ago, then biologically and instinctively we are fundamentally hunter gatherers. Hunter gatherers evolved in times of almost chronic scarcity. They are biologically driven to consume foods high in salts, sugars, fats, protein and calories, and any glut of such foods was short lived. Modern humans have not adjusted to the relatively recent abundance of food, and tend to over consume. Over consumption is not limited to food, the behaviour applies to all resources.
The result is a steady, unsustainable depletion of soil, water flow and quality, forest cover, biodiversity, fisheries and increased pollution. Sustainability can be considered an accounting exercise where there is no net loss of resources over the lifetime of a system. As economic activity doesn’t properly account for environmental cost, then economic activity more or less equals environmental degradation and economic debt roughly equals environmental debt. The logical conclusion is extinction, demonstrated many times by past experience such as on Easter Island. There is no law of nature that says humans must live on earth, but plenty that say we will be evicted if we don’t behave.