Why is there a "yearning" to live a Sustainable Lifestyle'

Why Sustainability?

To stay useful, sustainability must mean more than merely surviving or trying to keep a degraded world from getting worse. Otherwise, why bother? Invoking nature's capacity for sustaining life, as Fritjof Capra suggests, is critical. A sustainable community worth imagining is alive, in the most exuberant sense of that word — fresh, vital, evolving, diverse, and dynamic. It cares about the quality as well as the continuation of life. It is flexible and adaptive. It draws energy from its environment, celebrates organic wholeness, and appreciates that life has more to reveal than human cleverness has yet discovered. It teaches its children to pay attention to the world around them, to respect what they cannot control, and to embrace the creativity with which life sustains itself.

Fortunately, observes Centre for Ecoliteracy cofounder Fritjof Capra,

“We do not need to invent sustainable human communities. We can learn from societies that have lived sustainably for centuries. We can also model communities after nature's ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms.

Since the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain life, a sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its technologies and social institutions honour, support, and cooperate with nature's inherent ability to sustain life”.

- Centre for Eco Literacy

“Our yearnings are always for a paradise that has been lost through our own making- through foolishness, corruption or greed; such stories appear time and again in the world’s mythologies and religious texts... In the Bible Adam and Eve’s disobedience results in their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to which we are forever trying to return. Similarly, today we point to our own recklessness and indulgence inn destroying hacitats, air quality, water quality and the ozone layer and are now striving to regain a vanquished ideas through something we have termed sustainable development.”

- Sustainable by Design / Stuart Walker

• A sustainable community is the idea- the contemporary Garden of Eden that we are trying to create. It may seem impractical but that doesn’t make less important or the right thing to aspire for.
• We are trying to move towards a better future, and mend our consumption methods to make them more sustainable not to achieve an end state- but to taking on the task of learning how to live in the world.
• Sustainable living in a way preaches an ideal way of life, like in the Bhagvad Gita or Bible, except it’s completely secular and made relevant for today’s world and society so that it can be accepted by us. We are yearning to move towards it as it is the known "ideal" that can help improve our and the planet's well being.