FROM "S.O.S. -TAINABILITY" TO
SELF-MANAGEMENT(SELF-MANAGING SUSTAINABILITY)
SYNTHESIS:
This discussion paper looks at the concept of sustainability which
is necessarily linked to the concept of self-management. These
conclusions are based on the analysis of living ecosystems and the
forms in which life is organised, and how these are supported by
network structures and the relations of co-operation and recycling,
in order to be able to continue existing both in time and space.
Quite the opposite of neoliberal ideology, which is based on
centralised control, on unconscious consumption and on the
exploitation of natural and human resources, destroying environments
both near and far. As a response to this, the strategy of
constructing social ecosystems that are sustainable and self-managed,
and organised in a network to exchange information throughout the
planet, in order to change the way the world we live in works, and
move it in the direction of global sustainability.
Neoliberalism crushes everything in its path, but sustainability
continues in a timid way in living social structures based on
intelligence and information, creeping in even as a buzz word for
political parties whose ideologies are absolutely unsustainable.
Sustainability, a key word in our age, which emerges as a
reaction to the deterioration of the planet and looks to the future
and to what is renewable, which alerts us to the way we are misusing
resources and to our excessive production of waste materials,
proposes new forms of relationship with the planet and with our
environment - and therefore, new relationshipswith ourselves.
Sustainability comes from a close observation of everything that
lives, from an analysis of the capacity for survival of woods and
jungles, from the study of marine ecosystems and reefs, from an
understanding of the planet as a single unit. The objectives here are
to "stay alive" - they adapt, transform themselves - and everything
that serves a purpose, that survives and perpetuates itself, in a
process of constant creativity, renewal, variation and mutation with
the aim of evolution, this is all life.
Sustainability is maintained by cycles of transformation, cycles
of consumption, recycling and further consumption, while the source
of energy is the sun that presents life with the photons it needs.
Ecosystems, living networks of beings and their environment, are
the base for this way of using energy. The planetary ecosystem, with
its tides and winds, its temperature differences and its constant
rotation, transports nutrients all round the world and thus allows
different ecosystems to continue in a self-managing way.
Without this external help these ecosystems could not continue,
but they maintain themselves through self-management. For this reason
when we want to make a city, a house or a person sustainable we must
be able to maintain ourselves by using all our own basic local
resources, re-using the subproducts and consuming only in accordance
with the rate at which we can renew raw materials and resources, by
applying awareness, knowledge and love to the space we want to
maintain, even if this means only our own interior space, as a way of
beginning.
Sustainable self-management challenges neoliberalism: its
centralism and the way it runs down resources, with its blind,
short-term view that can chop down a forest simply because there are
more of them and they are all up for sale. Five years after Rio, this
spectre has still complete freedom to manoeuvre, with its pockets
full and still spinning its web of unconscious consumption,
increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and
turning more and more of the planet into desert. Faced with this, it
is imperative that we put sustainable self-management into practice
wherever we are, generating lasting, living ecosystems, freeing
ourselves from that monopolising power and supplying our own needs as
far as possible.
Independent in energy, independent in food, independent in
clothing, independent in the consumption of information and in the
creation of networks and living structures, exporting sustainability
until we have woven a whole spread of sustainable and self-managed
ecosystems, and, to express it in their language, mercilessly tearing
away - through the building of awareness - the market shares which it
needs to maintain its grip, because the weak point of neoliberalism
is its dependence on consumers... if it has no consumers it will
die...or kill.
In the beginning, when life began, it created a network around the
whole planet that transformed its atmosphere. Success in the struggle
to subsist was passed from bacteria to bacteria in the form of DNA
messages, which circulated and were absorbed by bacteria that
incorporated these messages and thus learned how to survive, to use
the energy of the sun and to produce oxygen... such minute beings
were able to change the living conditions of the planet and allow the
kind of respiration we know today.
Some bacteria co-operated with other bacteria, incorporated
themselves and created more complex cells; and so there appeared the
first multicellular beings. This merry dance has continued right down
to the present day, when we, the multicellular beings of the present,
become aware of the situation and start to learn from life because we
are life, and to realise that we want to continue and to perpetuate
ourselves in a harmonious way, and not to destroy forests, create
deserts, impoverish the earth, bleed it, destroy it and destroy
ourselves at the same time.
Before, genetic information was distributed through that planetary
network of bacteria - now, using all the networks of information in
existence we have to distribute living consciousness, a consciousness
of universality and of forming part of this planet which is capable
of maintaining itself both in space and in time, making use of the
environmental capacity of life to constantly renew itself, based on
the energy provided by the sun.
We must become capable of creating these new sustainable,
self-managing and social ecosystems from within those unsustainable
ecosystems directed from the nuclei of power and capital, until we
attain that strength possessed by life and by Nature and tear down
those old dead walls and repopulate the planet with infinite,
sustainable, self-managed and universal life.