Sustainable Contrariness

I took as my name here Contrary Goddess so really it should come as no surprise that I am somewhat on the contrary side, of a somewhat contrary turn, that I sometimes say what other people aren’t willing to say or look at something from another angle and thus see it differently than is popular. And sometimes this little trait of mine, a trait about me that I like and appreciate, sometimes gets turned around and viewed as being a nay-sayer, or as a negative person, or something like that. I don’t particularly like those things but hey, I’m not in charge of how you view your world.

But I have been doing a bit of nay-saying around the blogosphere. Over on MadCap’s I’ve said (probably among other things) that her Blogotopians were all going to die, and that a “green” housing project was not actually so green at all. I commented about an Arcologist link the same sort of thing, that becoming a tourist trap was not a sustainable endeavor. This is much like my saw that government grants aren’t sustainable, so a grant for sustainable anything is just ignorant. There are other examples, no doubt.

So, since we are talking sustainable, what would I consider an example of sustainable on a scale larger than on Eleutheros’ homestead and Jim’s backyard? The only example that comes to my mind is Cuba.

Not that I know all that much about it, but let’s look at what happened there. It was a high flying place. Then Castro and the US boycott and embargo, but even those things didn’t do that much to hurt them as long as the Soviets were sustaining them. Ah, but there came a time when the Soviets were stretched too thin to even help so small a place. No outside inputs equals (with some provisos) sustainable. The cars they have are American vintage 1950s. There are gardens everywhere, and pretty much everyone is involved, somewhere somehow, in producing at least some food. Their external input is money for sex, which you have to admit is a renewable and inexhaustible resource.

And Cubans are poor. The politically powerful as always extract their excesses, but by our standards their excesses are most modest. The common person is what we might call grindingly poor.

Sustainable looks like grinding poverty to our excess-jaded eyes. Grinding poverty is a good thing. That popular left-wing blog banner about eliminating poverty, that’s just exporting our lifestyle and the environmental and human degradation that goes with it.

But please, look again. Grinding poverty is not so grinding. Most “poverty” is only poverty due to comparison with the excessive lifestyle. Poverty is freeing, it is enlightening, it is ENOUGH.

And enough is very little.