Title: 3 Challenges To Sustainability | Bioneers
Headings: 3 Challenges To Sustainability
3 Challenges To Sustainability
1. Rewarding the Wrong Activity
2. Industrialization of Biological Systems
3. Treating Nature Like a Slave

Content: Economist Hazel Henderson said, “The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacities, confronts dominant paradigms of progress, which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth.” As a result of that kind of thinking, nearly all of the dominant systems in place today are unsustainable: energy, food, agriculture, economy, education, etc. And if they are unsustainable, then by definition, they will fail. Eco-farmer Joel Salatin, who Michael Pollan writes about in Omnivore’s Dilemma, says, “Every paradigm exceeds its point of efficiency… only now has the industrial paradigm in agriculture come to the end of its workability. What happens is all these things we’re seeing — campylobacter, E-coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella that weren’t even in the lexicon 30 years ago. [ They are proof of] the industrial paradigm exceeding its efficiency.” Social and economic systems mimic natural systems. Things in nature don’t expand forever. As an old system goes into decline the opportunity, space and resources become available for something new to grow.