Sustainability is not Sustainable

On April 20, NIH and CDC announced the availability of grants to increase the "diversity" of biomedical research labs. Finding the source of such thinking is difficult. Is it sentimentality? Posturing? Is it something worse; do people really believe that results are unconnected to the quality of the input? There is a Darwinian element here, the occasional advance of a species through random events.
It would be great to believe that science was somehow involved in plague research.



                           Sustainability is not Sustainable

"Naomi Klein and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would like to ..[solve the problem of our]... environment by ending capitalism. Their solution to climate change is what all non-human animals have always done: leave the environment basically unaltered by refraining from large-scale production, and wait around to go extinct. Unfortunately, as Deutsch writes, “Static societies eventually fail because their characteristic inability to create knowledge rapidly must eventually turn some problem into a catastrophe.” Thus, it is not that capitalism is the problem and sustainability is the solution, but that sustainability is the problem and capitalism is the solution."

This segment from a Zimet article only hints at the broader problem. For example, Growth causes problems but is it a problem? Sustainability is not the solution to growth--although, like arson and war, it would work. Sustainability is the threat of the ages, the decorated doorway to conflict, victimization, decline, and eventual the stratification that so characterized our emerging species. It demands controlled production, rigorous division of labor, punitive reaction against those who might try to better themselves, and, of course, a caste of "wise and enlightened leaders" to manage it.

Imagine in a universe whose hallmark is Change, a puny species trying to outlaw it.