Our true destiny...is a world built from the bottom up by competent citizens living in solid communities, engaged in and by their places.

For three decades and longer we have been developing the ideas, science, and technological wherewithal to build a sustainable society. The public knows of these things only in fragments, but not as a coherent and practical agenda indeed the only practical course available. That is our fault and we should start now to put a positive agenda before the public that includes the human and economic advantages of better technology, integrated planning, coherent purposes, and foresight.

Real security, in other words, is inseparable from issues of energy policy; education; public health; preservation of soils, forests, and waters; and broadly based, sustainable prosperity.

... laws governing pollution tend to move pollutants from one medium to another. So, for example, we scrub SO2 from power plants only to dispose toxic sludge on land. We "clean" water only to disperse toxic-laced solids on farmland or landfills. Pollution control becomes a kind of giant shell game by which we move pollutants between air, water, groundwater, and land.

The dialogue about sustainability is about a change in the human trajectory that will require us to rethink old assumptions and engage the large questions of the human condition that some presume to have been solved once and for all.

Our true destiny...is a world built from the bottom up by competent citizens living in solid communities, engaged in and by their places.

Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world cannot be sustained because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors, Genuine sustainability, in other words, will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to humankind growing up to a fuller stature.