sustainable differences

in an open journal post, i mentioned that even within the local community there are divergent views which cause paralysis. take 'sustainability' fer instance. in my girlfriend's group, some members believe that we cannot sustain our culture at the current energy levels and we must prepare for a low-energy future. others in the group believe we'll find a technological solution that will enable us to continue our high-energy lifestyle with some degree of sustainable adaptation .

high-energy or low, even the notion of sustainability is uncertain. david holmgren writes, in Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability (p. xxx):

The lack of any reasonable definition of sustainability has left it open to inevitable appropriation by the corporate spin doctors. But even the most genuine and useful sustainability concepts including permaculture contain an ambiguity about sustainability as a state or a process. Once we accept the reality and magnitude of energy descent, we begin to ask what "sustainability", "sustainable systems" or "sustainable system design" might mean. Even the idea of permanence at the heart of permaculture is problematic to say the least.

...In articulating Permaculture as the Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, I am suggesting that we need to get over our naive and simplistic notions of sustainability as a likely reality for ourselves or even our grandchildren and instead accept that our task is use our familiarity with continuous change to adapt to energy descent.

[emphasis is in the original]