Before the industrial revolution, societies were not as destructive to the environment as were are today. That’s because they didn’t have the means to pollute on a grand scale. But you can bet that if they did know how to pollute on a grand scale, they would have. Modern comforts and conveniences always come at a cost, the cost usually being the degradation of our environment. For example, it is comfortable and convenient to drive your car to the supermarket to buy butter instead of walking, but that convenience requires that you burn gasoline and emit the exhaust into the air thereby degrading the environment just a little bit more. But if each and every one of our planet’s 7 billion humans are contributing just a little bit of pollution to the air water and soil every day, the aggregate result is environmental devastation.

Before the industrial revolution there were many societies that did damage to their environment. The most common method of damage was the clear cutting of trees.

In Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel, he writes:

"But most of food production in outlying areas depended initially on Fertile Crescent domesticates. Their spread was soon followed by that of other innovations originating in or near the Fertile Crescent, including the wheel, writing, metalworking techniques, milking, fruit trees, and beer and wine production.

Why, then, did the Fertile Crescent and China eventually lose their enormous leads of thousands of years to late-starting Europe? One can, of course, point to proximate factors behind Europe’s rise: its development of a merchant class, capitalism, and patent protection for inventions, its failure to develop absolute despots and crushing taxation, and its Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition of critical empirical inquiry. Still, for all such proximate causes one must raise the question of ultimate cause: why did these proximate factors themselves arise in Europe, rather than in China or the Fertile Crescent?

For the Fertile Crescent, the answer is clear. Once it had lost the head start that it had enjoyed thanks to its locally available concentration of domesticable wild plants and animals, the Fertile Crescent possessed no further compelling geographic advantages. The disappearance of that head start can be traced in detail, as the westward shift in powerful empires. After the rise of Fertile Crescent states in the fourth millennium B.C., the center of power initially remained in the Fertile Crescent, rotating between empires such as those of Babylon, the Hittites, Assyria, and Persia. With the Greek conquest of all advanced societies from Greece east to India under Alexander the Great in the late fourth century B.C., power finally made its first shift irrevocably westward. It shifted farther west with Rome’s conquest of Greece in the second century B.C., and after the fall of the Roman Empire it eventually moved again, to western and northern Europe.

The major factor behind these shifts becomes obvious as soon as one compares the modern Fertile Crescent with ancient descriptions of it. Today, the expressions “Fertile Crescent” and “world leader in food production” are absurd. Large areas of the former Fertile Crescent are now desert, semidesert, steppe, or heavily eroded or salinized terrain unsuited for agriculture. Today’s ephemeral wealth of some of the region’s nations, based on the single nonrenewable resource of oil, conceals the region’s long-standing fundamental poverty and difficulty in feeding itself.

In ancient times, however, much of the Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean region, including Greece, was covered with forest. The region’s transformation from fertile woodland to eroded scrub or desert has been elucidated by paleobotanists and archaeologists. Its woodlands were cleared for agriculture, or cut to obtain construction timber, or burned as firewood or for manufacturing plaster. Because of low rainfall and hence low primary productivity (proportional to rainfall), regrowth of vegetation could not keep pace with its destruction, especially in the presence of overgrazing by abundant goats. With the tree and grass cover removed, erosion proceeded and valleys silted up, while irrigation agriculture in the low-rainfall environment led to salt accumulation. These processes, which began in the Neolithic era, continued into modern times.

Thus, Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base. Power shifted westward as each eastern Mediterranean society in turn undermined itself, beginning with the oldest societies, those in the east (the Fertile Crescent). Northern and western Europe has been spared this fate, not because its inhabitants have been wiser but because they have had the good luck to live in a more robust environment with higher rainfall, in which vegetation regrows quickly. Much of northern and western Europe is still able to support productive intensive agriculture today, 7,000 years after the arrival of food production. In effect, Europe received its crops, livestock technology, and writing systems from the Fertile Crescent, which then gradually eliminated itself as a major center of power and innovation.

The Japanese society prior to the industrial revolution, in my opinion, came the closest to being environmentally sustainable.

The book “Just Enough – Lessons in living green from traditional Japan” by Azby Brown covers the Edo Period in the history of Japan (1603 to 1868) that was characterized by economic growth, strict social order, isolationist foreign policies, sustainable forest management policies, and popular enjoyment of arts and culture. Edo was the name of the city that is now Tokyo. The Japanese were the first to practice sustainable forest management policies.

Design was crucial, as was the timely collection and distribution of information. But more than anything else, this success was due to a pervasive mentality that propelled all of the other mechanisms of improvement. This mentality drew on an understanding of the functioning and inherent limits of natural systems. It encouraged humility, considered waste taboo, suggested cooperative solutions, and found meaning and satisfaction in a beautiful life in which the individual took just enough from the world and not more.

As an adult, I’ve discovered that I just want to be happy like in the clichéd end of a story...”then they rode off into the sunset and lived happily ever after until they were visited by the terminator of delights and the separator of companions.” That’s how I want to live, happily ever after. I used to think that maximizing fun was the best philosophy, but you can have fun from time to time and still be an unhappy person. I’ve also discovered that you can live happily over a long period of time with occasional bouts of unhappiness, so my fun maximization philosophy has been replaced with happiness maximization aka unhappiness minimization. And how does one cultivate happiness? That’s not an easy question to tackle, but I think a good start is what Azby Brown brings up in his book when he talks about, “finding meaning and satisfaction in a beautiful life.” And he gives us some clues on how to do this when he talks about the pervasive mentality in the previous paragraph.

They valued well-being over consumption. Instead of assuming that someone who consumes more is necessarily better off than one who consumes less, since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.

Rural communities depended upon gathered fallen wood for all of their fuel needs, and fuel consumption was strictly limited to that which can be satisfied by the amount of wood found lying on the ground – limbs and branches, mostly, with special permission required to take possession of fallen logs. Enforced by both custom and government policy, this practice had far-reaching implications. In essence, with very few exceptions, fuel needs have been satisfied for centuries by a fully renewable resource, that is, trees. But by eliminating tree-cutting for fuel, a potentially major source of environmental pressure from the rural population has been eliminated, and more lumber is made available for building and for producing charcoal fuel for the cities.

This value system definitely sacrifices a large measure of personal liberty for the greater common good. It may seem unfair, and some aspects of it such as infanticide, even extreme. But the voluntary limitation of birthrate and family size led to a stable population nationwide for nearly two hundred years to the benefit of all.

While not explicitly prohibited, large families were strongly discouraged by social norms, and adequate resources for all could only be provided if the population growth of the village was inhibited. Many sons were taken as adopted heirs into childless households or those with only daughters.

Taking a hot bath was an extravagance because all of the fuel needed to heat the water. Some samurai would not heat their homes in the winter except on really cold days when it was done for health.

Rethink the meaning of “Comfort”

Should we stop trying to be so comfortable all the time? Though strong arguments are made to the contrary, with some insisting that lifestyle and value change is not necessary and that technical solutions will allow us to solve our environmental problems without any inconvenience, in fact we probably should reexamine our notions of comfort and convenience first. At the very least we should pay attention to what we are doing on a day-to-day basis, decide to walk more often, stop sitting at home in a t-shirt with the heater on, and in general assume that energy is more precious than comfort. The fact is that we have as yet found a way to use energy on a mass scale without damaging the environment. There is a lot that we do in the name of comfort that we should do differently, or stop doing altogether.

What this entails is self-regulation. Our notions of comfort have led us to expend far too little physical energy in the course of our daily lives and to consume fuel for reasons that are difficult to justify on the basis of health or well-being. Walking and biking are healthier than driving or riding, and they consume little or no fuel. A simple increase in these activities, which would mean increasing the pedestrianization and bikeability of our communities, would go a long way toward reducing our already dangerous obesity levels. Allowing ourselves to become comfortable a few degrees warmer or cooler than usual and adjusting our thermostats accordingly could reduce overall fuel consumption significantly. Reconsidering our wardrobes, as the Japanese have begun to do in recent years, going so far as to abandon the wearing of business suits during the summer months, will help. We are not talking about instituting a Spartan regime that will leave us either shivering or drenched in sweat, but about minor shifts in thermostat settings that will effect a marked cumulative reduction in fuel use and hence carbon emissions, and an increase in natural heating and cooling methods that consume little or no fuel whatsoever. It also means, perhaps, integrating our homes more closely with the natural environment in a manner that became instinctual for the Japanese, and allowing the outside in.

Promote New Ethical Standards

There have always been people who take advantage of status or economic power to consume far more food, energy, water, and building materials than they require, often purely in order to demonstrate that status or power. Though a grand lifestyle such as that enjoyed by the highest ranking samurai of the Edo period or a corporate baron of today may appear superficially beautiful, this beauty invariably conceals grotesque underpinnings. We can hope that our ethical values will soon change so that, instead of feeling proud of megalomanic overconsumption and waste, people will simply feel embarrassed.

Recognize the benefits of an urban tree canopy

The tree canopy of Edo was remarkable in its extensiveness and vigor, and it has had few parallels in dense metropolises, before or since. The benefits it provided were legion. Beauty is one, of course, but so is the shade it gives in summer (a mature urban tree canopy can reduce ambient air temperatures in a city by ten degrees Fahrenheit) and its use as a windbreak in winter. An extensive tree canopy provides connections to the surrounding ecosystem, both for botanical species and for birds and other animals that depend upon it for food and habitat. Trees and their roots aid the healthy functioning of the hydrological cycle, and their leaves provide natural compost and mulch. Many of them provide food for humans as well. Trees are essential for urban health and climate control and to reduce water runoff and for the role trees can play in mitigating the urban heat island effect.

Edo samurai gardens

Their trees were diverse, both naturally seeded and transplanted, and were selected according to their individual features-fruit, flowers, shade, medicinal properties-as well as for their interactions with other species-providing optimal understory conditions for flowers and shrubs or natural soil management for others. They left hollow trees, fallen logs, and stumps, which are the preferred nesting sites for many birds as well as for other wildlife. Farming provides a degree of self-sufficiency that is impossible to obtain in other ways, and it brings with it unquantifiable psychological and social benefits.

Principles for sustainable design

Insist on human rights and sustainability

Recognize the interaction of design with the environment

Consider the social and spiritual aspects of buildings and designed objects

Be responsible for the effect of design decisions

Insure that objects have long-term value

Eliminate waste and consider the entire life cycle of designed objects

Make use of “natural energy flows,” such as solar power and its derivates

Be humble, and use nature as a model for design

Share knowledge, strive for continuous improvement, and encourage open communication among stakeholders