Sustainability In All Things

The poet Wendell Berry wrote, “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.” I love how he ties the Golden Rule to ecology. Our current environmental crisis isn’t just industrial or technological — it’s also spiritual. So many of us remain in deep denial about our interdependence.

Interdependence isn’t always pretty. It’s unsettling to realize how much our survival depends on fragile ties with people we may distrust or even see as irrational. Consider the current war: one obstacle to reopening the Strait of Hormuz isn’t just geopolitics, but a British insurer — Lloyd’s of London. If it won’t underwrite oil tankers, shipping stops. In other words: the world’s energy supply can hinge on a London boardroom.

Western psychology often overlooks this same interdependence. It treats emotions, like emissions, as matters of personal choice. Rarely do we consider that others must carry and process what we express. This doesn’t mean we should repress our emotions — that doesn’t work either — but it does mean applying the principle of sustainability to how we express them.

Take anger, for example. In the West, we tend to focus on whether we have a “right” to feel it. But anger exists regardless of justification, so the language of rights misses the point. The real question is what we do with it.

We often respond to anger with a form of self-deception: we lash out while expecting others not to do the same. The Buddha called this vera, a Pali word often translated as “animosity,” but which more precisely means the delusion that aggression won’t generate more aggression. Vera, he said, underlies not only war, but also our sense of scarcity.

If we want sustainable community, we have to communicate sustainably. That means listening with empathy, speaking without violence, and learning to hear needs beneath wants. It also means accepting a harder truth: while everyone wants reassurance that they aren’t “too much,” some forms of expression are too much. They're dependent on privilege, impossible to universalize, and incompatible with a livable future.

Léon-Augustin Lhermitte, "The Harvesters" (1880)