The Sunday Read: ‘What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

Across the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles. As environmental collapse threatens, the journalist Noah Gallagher Shannon explores the lessons in sustainability that can be learned from looking “at smaller, perhaps even less prosperous nations” such as Uruguay. “The task of shrinking our societal footprint is the most urgent problem of our era — and perhaps the most intractable,” writes Shannon, who explains that the problem of reducing our footprints further “isn’t that we don’t have models of sustainable living; it’s that few exist without poverty.” Tracing Uruguay’s sustainability, Shannon shows how a relatively small population size and concentration (about half of the country’s 3.5 million people live in Montevideo, the capital) had long provided the country with a collective sense of purpose. He also shows how in such a tight-knit country, the inequalities reach a rapid boil, quoting a slogan of a Marxist-Leninist group called the Tupamaros: “Everybody dances or nobody dances.” Looking for answers to both a structural and existential problem, Shannon questions what it would take to achieve energy independence.

Transcript

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0:30.8	For most of human history, it seemed as if there was only one way to get people out
0:37.8	of poverty or to improve one's quality of life.
0:41.4	And that was, burn more oil.
0:45.2	Whether you're driving a new car or buying a bigger house or starting a new industry, that
0:50.8	was the end result you were resigned to.
0:53.7	But climate change has put an end to that, because there's simply no way for all the developing
0:58.1	economies around the world to increase consumption while also meeting global emissions goals.
1:05.3	Consumption on that level is just not sustainable.
1:08.3	A lot of long-range outlooks on climate change have vividly rendered what a world like
1:12.5	that would look like, if we exceeded our emissions goals, and it's terrifying.
1:18.0	Still, as a climate reporter and also just as a human, I found a better future than that
1:26.4	pretty hard to picture.
	...

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