Sustainability and sacrifice, resilience and collapse

When we think of sustainability, we often think of sacrifice. Fewer flights, reduced spending, buying andhaving less stuff. And in a world where we are used to having more and more every year, sacrifice doesn’t seem like a viable option. Which leaves us between a rock and a hard place.

One way out is to reframe a sustainable lifestyle as a more abundant one. A sustainable future being one in which you can have more of the things that really matter – not more stuff, but more of the good stuff. This is where much of the promising work in communications and engagement is taking place. But it’s also worth exploring the notion of sacrifice; the possibility of scaling back, simplifying, making do with less. Not least because we may not be able to avoid it.

Disused petrol pump

Two things appeared on my radar this week that set me off thinking about this.

Firstly, Clay Shirky writing about complex business models and their tendency to collapse. In his piece, he refers to Joseph Tainter’s thesis that societies have historically collapsed because their complex, interdependent structures have been unable to shrink in the face of resource pressures:








Secondly, Rob Hopkins, talking about the importance of resilience, defined as: “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks” in Resurgence magazine.


Let’s take a supermarket as an example. It may be possible to increase its sustainability and to reduce its carbon emissions by using less packaging, putting photovoltaics on the roof and installing more energy-efficient fridges. However, resilience thinking would argue that the closure of local food shops and networks that resulted from the opening of the supermarket, as well as the fact that the store itself only contains two days’ worth of food at any moment – the majority of which has been transported great distances to get there – has massively reduced the resilience of community food security, as well as increasing its oil vulnerability. One extreme, but relevant, example of where sustainability thinking falls short was Tesco’s recent ‘Flights for Lights’ promotion, where people were able to gain air miles when they purchased low-energy light bulbs!


The concept of resilience emerged from within the ecological sciences as a way of looking at why some systems collapse when they encounter shock, and some don’t. The insights gleaned now offer a very useful overview for determining how systems can adapt and thrive in changing circumstances. Resilience within communities, for example, depends upon;

  • Tightness of feedbacks: bringing the results of our actions closer to home, so that we cannot ignore them

Together, these two ideas bring to mind many questions.

If sacrifice becomes necessary, given current social and economic structures, will collapse be inevitable? If so, is resilience a pattern we can deploy to help prevent this? How can we design systems that ‘degrade gracefully’ when resources are scarce (a concept familiar to any digital designer)? What are the critical ‘phase transitions‘ that we should be aware of, the stages of development in systems where turning back is no longer an option? Are there circumstances in which sacrifice could be a sellable proposition?

Answers next week.