[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Well sustainable is an imaginary conception anyhow. Nothing is sustainable indefinitely. Whenever the word is used, it needs to be qualified with a timeframe.

The fact is, scaling back resource consumption could have consequences that make the human race less sustainable due to slower progress of technology. It's easy to imagine us stuck with 1800s technology where 95% of us are farmers just subsisting, and being completely oblivious to a world ending meteor headed toward us. Just as easy to imagine is having developed technology that both detects the world ending meteor and averts it.

Sure, we don't need bottled water, and individually wrapped food items, and tons of other mostly useless junk, but it's basically impossible to distinguish what is waste from innovation from some sort of policy standpoint.

Good luck with that.