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I agree, but I also think that by saying a practice is not sustainable, they mean that if scaled up and run for a long time, it would eventually cause an impact

by Tyr42 5y ago

I agree, but I also think that by saying a practice is not sustainable, they mean that if scaled up and run for a long time, it would eventually cause an impact. You can swap out sustainable and scalable and it reads pretty much the same. So saying "their practices were relatively scalable, since they were at a small scale" sounds wrong, which is why I think you are being downvoted. Same way "I use gas to drive my truck" isn't sustainable, even if I'm the only one with a truck. The practice isn't sustainable, even if emissions from one person might not have a large impact.

Dylan16807 5y ago
Talking about "scaling up" seems like a very misguided definition of sustainable to me. Maybe if it was more like "if everyone in similar circumstances lived this kind of lifestyle". If a forest can safely supply 1000 trees a year, and a certain lifestyle has 300 people depend on that forest and each use two trees per year, then that's sustainable. It doesn't matter that 3000 people per forest wouldn't work. And if a million people all live this way, then they're splitting three thousand forests, so that's fine too. It's not reasonable to worry about infinite population density, because then nothing is sustainable. And prehistoric practices weren't using up fossil fuels; trees grow back if you let them. Though even the sustainability of gas is more complicated than "it's not". As far as CO2 goes, there is an amount that could be safely released per year. And if we were at that level, oil reserves would last a long time.