John Manoochehri, BBC Green Room 10 Nov 09;
Forty years on from humans reaching the Moon, it is time for another epochal moment in history, says John Manoochehri. In this week's Green Room, he calls for us to recapture the spirit that took us into space and use that energy to save the planet.
In July, the UK government launched its Low Carbon Transition Plan, which it described as the best carbon plan of any developed country.
Unnoticed, it was unveiled 40 years to the day after the launch go-ahead was given for Apollo 11, the mission that put a human on the moon, and ended the space race in improbable, epochal success.
Enthusiasm for sustainability is everywhere. But is enough actually being done?
The day following the launch of the low carbon plan, operators managing the switchboards of the three departments responsible for the scheme said the same thing when I asked to speak to someone responsible for "sustainable technologies".
They asked: "Um, what do you mean specifically?" They then went on to tell me that there wasn't anyone particular.
Back to the future
In 2010, the future was set to arrive in style, in the form of the Dongtan eco-city, for at least 50,000 people as part of Shanghai World Expo.
They'll need to hurry up, or phone to tell the world's architects who still swoon over the artistic renderings, since not a single brick has been laid, and planning permission has been revoked.
Same for Europe's most spectacular eco-homes project, Mata De Sesimbra in Portugal. Five years after it becomes a rallying cry? Nothing.
Vision and feel-good are big parts of making change happen. But a great idea did not put men on the Moon 40 years ago; a vast, risky, people-driven and hugely uneconomic undertaking did.
Right now, the sustainability movement is heading for a monumental reality check, within the decade, as governments, businesses and people realise that the contemporary hullaballoo is built on no such undertaking. In fact, sustainability as currently proposed is unsustainable.
Back when the modern environmental movement was making waves for the first time in the 60s and 70s, the driving forces of change were big science, big government and big personalities. The Moon landings was no small part in such confidence at solving big problems.
Nowadays, sustainability is awash with fey compromisers, unburdened by brilliance. And the debate is not about grand governmental stances, or a world led by deep science, still less by ethics.
Rather the technical basis, and the whole worldview, of "planet saving", is essentially economics: if we can sell it (to industry, to a populace, to consumers), or if we can tax it, we'll have a go.
Sure, there's some science here - but it's pretty much limited to counting: enumerating environmental impact - such as the "eco-footprint" - and then trying to work out the "cost".
Specialist "environmental experts" now extol something calling sustainable development, which supposedly knits together environmental, social and economic development in one grand sandwich of wholesomeness.
Unsound foundations
Nothing is meaningless in this context, everything is possible. Leaders in this domain have perfected the art of saying everything and yet nothing.
But as it turns out, conventional economics and sustainable development are two of the most unsound foundations for grand societal change - the type required for sustainability - that have been devised.
Sure, investment, markets, and the consumer economy are possible that don't trash resources and people - in the way that fat, carbohydrate, and sugar don't have to have to make people obese.
Ideologies of social renewal are possible that are modern and inclusive; ie. not very ideological, and rather pragmatic.
Yet to build a sufficient sustainability movement requires much more truly scientific framework of economics, and much more rigourous formulation of sustainable development.
Today's economics is like Ptolemy's model of the solar system: devilishly clever, but oh so wrong.
Sustainable development currently is like a kaleidoscope: all you can do is keep going and enjoy the pretty patterns because there is no conceptual framework, still less a map or timetable that might tell you what it all means.
Both must be redesigned, and both injected with a huge new dose of basic, universal ethics.
It's time to relaunch the movement. The recent report from the Sustainable Development Commission - Prosperity Without Growth - ought to be a bomb under both economics' and sustainable development's easy chairs, with its tough message that growth economics is incompatible this particular planet.
But for the bomb to go off, a new generation of thinkers, agents, designers, and communicators needs to push the current "leaders" aside and set out a new, clear vision and build a truly grand project on truly robust foundations.
That would involve, as a start, colossal investment in a material economy that cycles everything, and compels industry (more than consumers) to design and produce things as part of that cycle.
Regions need to manage all their own energy and resources starting yesterday, through efficiency and building-integrated production.
Cities need to be designed for conviviality and convenience, without so much useless infrastructure - transport, waste, parking - clogging everything up.
Citizens need to take a break from worrying about recycling and climate change (which they have been unfairly dumped with solving) by taking time away from soulless work for unsatisfying consumption.
These are all the biggest, riskiest, most urgent projects the world has ever known. Rock on: who said history was over?
So near, yet so far
Enthusiasts - such as government ministers, hot-flushed with flabby economics and sustainable development rhetoric - will say they are taking steps in the right direction. The Low Carbon Transition Plan guarantees 1.2 million "green jobs" by 2020 - which leaves only 30 million "non-green" jobs. Sustainability isn't exactly rocket science, but if this plan is a step towards it, cobbling together a big firework is a step towards building a Moon rocket.
Right now, the euphoria of the summer has died down anyway.
The pre-Copenhagen climate talks in Barcelona have made it clear just how far governments are from really taking climate change seriously, let alone sustainability in any more systematic sense.
By all means, blame environmentalists and "sustainability experts" for their poor formulation of conception of change, but we must blame politicians for their disgraceful clinging to failed and outmoded concepts of perpetual, materialised, economic growth - and thus their inability to put any more substantial framework on the dynamics and direction of change.
The outcome from Barcelona, and raw data from so many sources, shows that things are not getting better at the scale that counts, despite the green enthusiasm buzzing in our ears.
The real deal of sustainability - truly massive reconfigurations of material culture - has sunk in a quicksand of ultimately unscientific economic mythology, and wilfully incoherent sustainable development generalities.
It's time, once again, to evoke an epochal response to an epochal challenge.
Four decades after the West won the space race with crazy bravery, why can't we do something similar for the human race?
John Manoochehri is guest researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and leads the sustainable design project studio, Resource Vision
He also wrote Consumption Opportunities, the policy on sustainable lifestyles for the UN Environment Programme, and the philosophical basis of the Green Party's manifesto
The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website
