The Single Most Important Principle For Sustainability
Kurt Cobb | Dec 02, 2013 12:48AM ET
No doubt you know someone who's told you about his or her great aunt who lived to be 98 and never went to a doctor. Or maybe it was a grandparent who led a vigorous existence and never went to a hospital, not once. We think of such people as being the hardiest of the species. But, there might be an additional explanation. Has it ever occurred to you that both people were that healthy and vigorous BECAUSE they never went a doctor or a hospital?
sharing economy is based on the relevant and longstanding tradition of sharing with neighbors. It is not really a technological innovation so much as it is a social innovation--one, that is, well, not exactly new.
What's new is that the Internet makes sharing across vast distances with people you don't know possible--sharing extra rooms, cars, and office space, for example. The founders of the sharing economy didn't invent sharing; nor did they invent the Internet. They simply took an age-old tradition and used now existing technology to take advantage of huge unused capacity available worldwide in people's homes and driveways.
By my lights, this is an innovation that has big advantages over building more cars, more offices, and more hotels, by lowering overall consumption and freeing people from ownership of things which they only need occasionally.
In this I'm admitting that the Internet--a hog for electricity--might have net benefits when these kinds of insights are applied to it.
The criteria I've suggested for evaluating innovations are not scientific, nor could they be since they touch on values. But at least they offer a way to sift through the plethora of ideas for a sustainable world and ask whether these ideas themselves are sustainable and advantageous on their face.
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