Ways of Life Versus Lifestyle Choices

Living in Ladakh has increased my aversion to the word “sustainability.” My aversion has nothing to do with the principle behind the concept. The problem for me is that the word wraps so much into such a small package that its driving ideas are simply passed over by many people. When confronted with a single word, a similarly quick response is natural and allows one to pass over the things that matter.

We need words behind this movement toward environmental responsibility and it pleases me to see the media giving attention to the movement, no matter what the motivation. In the same breath, while popular culture confronts us with these principles it legitimizes the denial of these principles for many people. We live in a society where so many ideas are presented as an all-too-simple right or wrong, where a yes or no choice can be made and that’s that. And in the process of turning everything into a two-sided debate, we undermine ideas that have already been proven to work.

Looking at our own society we see lifestyle choices everywhere: clothing, building materials, transportation, diet. All of these represent the many choices we have thanks to the resources at our disposal. Take a place like Ladakh though, a high-altitude desert where choices are diminished due to climate constraints and isolation, and people are presented with a way of life that creates no choice but to live in harmony with the environment. Lack of rain and altitude present two large challenges to agriculture and animal grazing, creating the need for a simple diet. Development and tourism widen the paths of trade and bring about imports which threaten the delicate balance in Ladakh, and turn a way of life into a lifestyle choice. In the process, the need for conscious decisions regarding environmental responsibility is created in a place where formerly an environmentally sound choice was no more than a choice to survive.

Maybe it isn’t just the word “sustainability” that irks me, but rather the newness of it, the fact that it tells us that only now must we make a decision regarding our future—that only now should we make such decisions. Yet it is true: only recently have we become aware of the damage that we must now try to limit, and eventually reverse, thus necessitating such a word and the choices that come with it. Perhaps the more choices we have the more opportunities we give ourselves to argue about them, and the more we forget about the basic necessity to live in harmony with our surroundings.