Hipster Duck
Senior Member
Your definition of sustainability isn't the widely accepted definition. The widely accepted definition (said by the UN,) is that "sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
"My" definition was created by scholars in response to the incompleteness and vagueness of the Brundtland definition (the one you posted) above.
When you think about it, "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" is a nice sound bite, but it doesn't mean anything. You don't know what future needs are going to be nor what it will take for future generations to meet whatever needs they have. You don't even know what present needs are - the things you mention: High speed rail, cities that are dense and car-free, some sort of abandonment of American culture, etc. are your desires. They are not universal needs, because there are no universal needs. Yes, there are basic needs of all human beings, but only when expressed in very vague and broad terms: shelter, food, education - when you start outlining what kind of food, what kind of shelter, what kind of education, people need, you immediately begin to see divergences in opinion and value.
Your definition is a functionalist "solution" for sustainability, which totally disregards the fact that our society today is very much unsustainable
Okay, so tell me how your 2-line sound bite from the UN website offers decision-makers a better guideline about how to act in the face of adversity than my suggestion of thinking about complex problems in terms of interconnected systems, identifying people who are involved in a local-scale component of the wider problem and then working collaboratively with them on a jointly-owned and managed solution strategy at their scale.
Am I asking here for a Stalinist government to forcibly relocate people to the prairies? No, and I don't understand how you'd even think that. I'm asking for a democratically elected government which carries out it's plans by doing things like raising or lowering taxes, making it easier to do things that are in the plan, outlawing very bad things like dumping waste, and building infrastructure to make it easier for people to live certain lifestyles.
Very few democratic societies can offer that kind of control. You will find that a government that is democratically elected that begins to do things very rashly doesn't stay in power for very long.
Nowhere is it forcing people to give up their old ways or whatever you, just making it easier for people to pick up new ones.
Regardless of whether you like it or not, rapidly expanding the population of the country and spreading people into places that have not seen growth in several generations is going to result in people being forced to give up their old ways.
I'm sure that there are many immigrants that want to live in the country, or make their own communities where they can find a niche, but can't because it's too hard to. So these people are forced to live in the cities, where there is a way of doing things that makes it easier for immigrants to live there. I'm sure a bunch of people who want to live in their hometowns or cities, but can't because the economy can't support them. So they move to new places. Do you think it would be a command economy if the government just made it easier for people to live there?
I am not sure how the government will "make it easier" for people to live in rural Canada. It could be the result of very heavy-handed central planning and social engineering or it could be the result of weaker incentives and a shifting of resources from the cities to the countryside (which is what we currently already do, to little avail). Whatever the method, this is sort of like forcing water uphill and the results almost always end in failure. Gravitating to the largest cities is a natural process all across the world, and it hasn't ceased - even in countries where the central government starved the cities while lavishing subsidies and economic development programmes on rural areas. In the end, I think you're just going to encounter significant resistance from everyone: city dwellers who must pay through the nose to subsidize rural economic development schemes that don't help them, and rural Canadians who will not be too happy about having hundreds of thousands of newcomers foisted upon them.
Plus, no democratically elected government would play around with fire like that.
EDIT: Though interestingly enough, the only country in the world that meets global sustainability requirements of "high" HDI and under the sustainably footprint for the globe is Cuba, one of the only communist command economies in the world.
By definition, a country that is run under the central command of a politburo is not a sustainable country. Sustainability implies some form of participatory democracy.