Joseph Tainter, Sustainability What Does Moving Toward Essay

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Joseph Tainter, Sustainability

What does moving toward sustainability really entail? Joseph Tainter's article on "Social Complexity and Sustainability" makes a crucial distinction at the outset, differentiating sustainability from resiliency. Sustainability entails a society's ability to continue along in current patterns or modes of existence, whereas resiliency is a society's ability to adjust and reorient itself during conditions of change. It is possible that unsustainable policies or activities may have put is in a position where drastic changes are to be expected, and where resiliency may be something we all require -- but as Tainter notes, "the goal of human groups is more often sustainability or continuity than resilience" (Tainter 92). Yet the concept of resiliency is important to understand Tainter's insight that "Given the role of complexity in both sustainability and collapse, 'success' consists substantially of staying in the game." I would like to consider Tainter's insight while ultimately pondering the question of what a move toward sustainability might indeed entail.

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Tainter's idea of "complexity" is an important one, although he chooses to define it largely in economic terms. But the basic sense is that complexity is the most profound and adaptable human tool for dealing with environmental challenges -- in Tainter's economic definition, societies invest in complex strategies (such as complex technologies) as a technique of problem solving, and the shared economic benefit ultimately outweighs the initial investment. In Tainter's definition, however, the idea of complexity is by no means limited to environmental challenges -- he shows how the idea of complexity can be applied to systems of information, such as the educational establishment or the current U.S. health care system. But his reliance on an economic definition of complexity is important to establish that, at a certain point, complexity may reach a point of diminishing economic returns, and might even begin to cause problems rather than solve them. This is important because….....

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