tandempower

There are so many ways to sacrifice the long term good for short-term convenience, and the money people can make from that leads them to choose the easy path over the more disciplined path of long-term sustainability.

Look at the basic principle of fire, which is the essence of combustion-driven industrialism: fire takes energy that has been stored up over a long period of time by wood-growth or coal/oil formation and releases that energy quickly. That intense energy can generate levels of torque and (horse)power and thus speed, etc. that surpass what natural systems and organisms can do. So there is a tendency to get used to these unnaturally impressive levels of power and dismiss the significant of natural levels of energy and power.

But when you look at the big picture of how natural 'machines' and other mechanisms/systems of nature work, they are sustainable because they must feedback into the larger ecosystem beneficially, or else they wouldn't survive, long term that is. If totally unsustainable, destructive organisms/systems survived, they would destroy everything else and undermine their own support base, and that hasn't happened as far as I know yet.

But humans have this uncanny ability to innovate and the question is whether they can temper that innovative power with the power to take responsibility for the long-term effects of the technologies and systems we establish. I.e. can we achieve sustainable industry and development? To me it is as simple as maximizing nature's ability to spread and thrive in all the ways that it has evolved to, including maximizing humans' ability to use our bodily energy/power for transportation and other productive activities. But others seem to want to make it more complicated than that because they see rivalry between my way of thinking and a status quo that they feel they must urgently defend against critical questioning.