Isn’t it curious, how “in the beginning” the leaders of our culture accepted the idea that reality was made of words, deterministically controlled by a third party, and all of nature was given to man to control, subjugate, domesticate. It’s fanciful, yes, but whoever first wrote that couldn’t have possibly have studied much ecology. Virtually everything we see that works well in the world does so by having parts that take care of themselves. Living systems don’t seem to share in the strange delusions of mankind, but thrive on opportunity without conflict.

I think “sustainability” has a strong meaning: “learning how to take care of ourselves”. Perhaps it begins from breaking our “dependence on ideology” as Livingston points to. The most people habitually interpret the world as their own ideological construct makes it particularly hard for us to have words that mean anything real, or study our real relationships. So just noticing that there actually is a physical world with its own parts and processes, that we can see but never “know”, would need to be a first step. Someone has to break the news to people, though, that the real world isn’t in our heads!