The universality of dharmic thought

Recently I came across an argument that sustainable lifestyles promoted by dharmic thought can be implemented only in "sustainable geography"-- meaning tropical regions where life forms thrives in abundance-- and cannot be implemented in "unsustainable" geography like deserts or colder regions of the earth. 

In this post, let me try to deconstruct this argument. 

There is definitely an influence pathway between "sustainable geography" and a culture of sustainability. But to say that there is an exclusive causal relationship between the two, would be a great oversimplification. 

Worse, this argument also leads to some kind of a fatalism. Other than tropical regions of the world, we cannot sustain anywhere else anyway, therefore either these cultures collapse, or they dominate and consume others (leading to a collapse of the entire world-- but much later). 

Such kinds of fatalism are typically only used to justify one's reckless acts-- for instance, a terrorist justifying his acts by saying, "What else could I have done? We are all doomed anyway!" 

If a culture of sustainability could have emerged only from sustainable geography, we can analogously argue that today's mechanistic culture could have only emerged from unsustainable geography, where medieval Europe fits the bill. But this does not mean that other cultures across the world cannot implement elements of mechanistic cultures like factories and production units. Most countries today are run on factories. 

Similarly, the core elements of dharmic culture are universal in nature-- and not relegated to only those regions where they were conceived. 

Such kinds of misunderstanding comes in because, we equate sustainable living with specific things like vegetarianism or low per-capita energy consumption. Dharmic or sustainable lifestyle does not directly imply either vegetarianism or low per-capita energy consumption. 

The essential element of dharmic lifestyle is a worldview that is not based on linear models. For instance, as long as we keep thinking in terms of food chains, world dominance, feudal hierarchies, social ladders, and so on, or we keep reducing a nation to its economy and economy to its GDP, we cannot build sustainable cultures. 

The main problem with economies today is that while economies are powered by factories and manufacturing units, the entire economy and the country itself is seen no more as a factory or a production unit itself. The metrics that are used to measure a nation's worth, and to provide rewards and incentives to its people, are all based on this paradigm. The second problem with economies today is to see everything outside of human societies as "resources" for our growth. 

Sure, we do need natural elements for our survival. A village in Siberia for example, cannot survive its winters if it does not consume natural "resources" to keep itself warm and consume its animal "resources" to feed its people. But advancements in technology-- like using solar or wind technology, and development of artificial meat substitutes, can greatly reduce the burden we are putting on nature. 

Sustainability is not a binary game, and sustainability is not eternal. The lesser burden we pose on nature, the longer we can hope to sustain. 

There are indeed specific elements of sustainability that are universally applicable. Here I try to list out a few I can think of, on the fly: 

1. Stable environments are conducive to sustainability: When building any business or our own individual lives, it is important to interact with an environment that is by and large, stable. Even if the environment is changing, its changes need to be bounded and largely predictable. Finding sustainable configurations requires reflection, search, and evolution. This cannot happen if the environment is too unpredictable. 
2. Innovate and change through diffusion, not disruption: When entering a foreign market these days, companies look for "disrupting" and "taking over" the market-- and not "blending into" and becoming a part of the target market's culture and social life. "Disruption" has become a virtue these days-- it never was and will never be. To give an example of diffusive versus disruptive innovation, consider how retail chains entered any market, and how say mobile phones and digital payments entered. Retail chains are known to be a "disruptor" of the market, that makes several small businesses bankrupt. For a long time, retail giants were barred entry into India for the same reason. But mobile phones and applications like Whatsapp or PhonePe diffused through the country without "disrupting" anything-- in fact, they made traditional interactions stronger by empowering them. There was much less resistance to these innovations from the society. 
3. Small is beautiful: It is much more easier to sustain societies and their expression, as a network of small communities, than a large conglomeration. Urban centres were traditionally (in the mechanistic world) seen as drivers of the economy, while in Indian thought small was always considered better than large unwieldy agglomerations. One of the reasons why large urban agglomerations developed was because factories of the past, required high amounts of manual labour. That is fast becoming a thing of the past. Manufacturing today is getting increasingly automated, requiring far lesser people to manage a large factory. It is important to note that the greatest contribution of factories is not job creation, but empowerment of the economy through mass produced, affordable artefacts. Automated factories would not only require lesser people, it would also empower small businesses in the ecosystem around, by making available affordable phones, affordable vehicles, affordable furniture, etc. 
4. The "footprint" method: In the erstwhile Mysore state, the 20th century saw several great feats of engineering. One of which was the building of the KRS dam on the Cauvery river, which enabled irrigation of vast tracts of land, making Mysore and Mandya districts into leading producers of rice and sugarcane. Another major feat of engineering was the Cauvery pipeline to Bangalore, which pumped up the Cauvery water to the city up a height of about 600 feet, over a distance of about 90 kilometers. But what this also did was to create an unsustainable solution to a problem. Bangalore grew by leaps and bounds without having a major source of natural water-- with an unsustainable assurance of Cauvery water. Today, the daily electricity bill of pumping water to the city is about 1 crore rupees! Similarly, emphasis on rice and sugarcane, which are water-intensive crops-- and creation of an ecosystem of factories and businesses dependent on them-- created an unsustainable solution. They not only eradicated earlier forms of food based on millets, they also became vulnerable to the vagaries of rain and water content in the river. To see why these are unsustainable, we need to look at any interventions from the "footprints" of their source and destination. The water needs of Bangalore was limited to the city of Bangalore-- but the solution to it, impacted the water needs of some population 90 kilometers away! Solutions tend to be sustainable when the footprint of the target is a superset of the footprint of the source from where resources are obtained from.

Sustainability is not an option-- it is mandatory. It is hence important to do whatever it takes to inculcate sustainable lifestyles around the world.