I think we’ll really see how sustainable we are when we come up against sudden, large scale crises - our agricultural methods are productive, but not very sustainable. What if we deplete our soil nutrients to the extent that they aren’t able to produce as highly as before, or screw with our food production in some other way? (loss of pollinators, desertification, pollution, loss of a region’s access to fresh water etc.). Things can continue to work pretty well until they don’t, and that change can happen quite quickly. A lot of humanity is based near the coasts, so can we cope with large groups of people having to move due to climate change? Our own lifestyle is horribly unsustainable if we have any sense of justice - of course people in other parts of the world also want a variety of fresh food, comfortable, air conditioned living spaces, personal transport, computers etc. They deserve it at least as much as we do, and large numbers are starting to get it.
None of this means that we can’t be sustainable, but our civilisation has been built more on the ability to overcome obstacles and continue to grow rather than the ability to self-regulate. It will be interesting to see if we’re able to adopt a suitable change in philosophy before it’s too late, because it will be by the time we all agree that we have to change.
