Sustainable living is a lifestyle that attempts to reduce an individual’s or society’s use of the Earth’s natural resources and personal resources. Practitioners of sustainable living often attempt to reduce their carbon footprint by altering methods of transportation, energy consumption, and diet. Proponents of sustainable living aim to conduct their lives in ways that are consistent with sustainability, in natural balance and respectful of humanity’s symbiotic relationship with the Earth’s natural ecology and cycles. The practice and general philosophy of ecological living is highly interrelated with the overall principles of sustainable development.
Lester R. Brown, a prominent environmentalist and founder of the Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute, describes sustainable living in the twenty-first century as “shifting to a renewable energy–based, reuse/recycle economy with a diversified transport system.” In addition to this philosophy, practical eco-village builders like Living Villages maintain that the shift to renewable technologies will only be successful if the resultant built environment is attractive to a local culture and can be maintained and adapted as necessary over the generations.
Derrick Jensen, a celebrated American author, radical environmentalist and prominent critic of mainstream environmentalism (According to Democracy Now!, Jensen “has been called the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement.”) argues that “Industrial Civilization is not and can never be sustainable”.
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