*Dealing with Eric's questions about these statements of mine: 
>>   I currently believe that if everyone on earth was living 
>> like me, we 6 billion humans would be using/wasting almost 
>> nothing, and our impact would be so small that all other 
>> species still living would be able to flourish. ... 
>> sustainable, measured by: 
>> (1) virtually no reductions in biodiversity, (2) no net
>> anthropogenic global warming (allowing some cooling), and  
>> (3) most of the livable land area on earth being 
>> unaffected by the existence of homo sapiens. 
>> (Obviously, humans would then be living within bounded 
>> spaces, similar in some ways to modern zoos.)

** Back on March 18-19 1999 I wrote (lightly edited):

** My two uses-of/meanings-for the word 'sustainable' require scale to be specified. Time, and numbers of individuals. Also, as with (nearly) all real life cases, there is a natural error, uncertainty, fluctuation-range involved - not precision.

description:
** The large-scale meaning is the most reliable. 'Sustainable' here can mean continuing into the indefinite future, and refers to an ecosystem (which can include humans). There will be change involved - an ecosystem is dynamic, with numbers and location of individuals changing day by day for animals, and season by season for plants. I include the rare possibility of a species going extinct, and a roughly equal probability of a new one arising. Thus sustainable includes: having no recognisable trend, over a time-scale of thousands (or at least hundreds) of years.

** The small-scale meaning, used by most people, refers to humans in their environment, and most times means the answer to: "what life-style can I adopt for the rest of my life, that (if all in the world adopted it) would enable the world we know (i.e. including within living memory) to continue with only slow change (tolerable by our environment) if any?" A common component is to have only local impacts, so that you yourself have some chance of keeping track of them.

I apply the word 'sustainable' to all these examples:

examples:

1. the hundreds of millions of years when the saurians (and even the dinosaurs) were the family that had the major effect on the earth's living things;
2. the several hundred thousand years when the homo group were hunter-gatherers;
3. the several thousand years, about 36,000 to 40,000 years ago, just after the Australian Aborigines arrived in what is now Australia, when they hadn't yet over-used fire. After that was a non-sustainable transition period, followed by perhaps 10-20,000 years of sustainable living controlled by cultural taboos, climate etc., that meant that the remaining species fluctuated in size (no. of individuals) but stayed nearly constant in number (of species);
4. the thousand years or more at about 4-5000 BP when agriculture-based "civilization" was centred on the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus and Yangtse rivers (but the human population there hadn't yet increased to an unsustainable level), and most other humans were practising slash-burn-plant-harvest-move-on agriculture and/or fishing;
     and (knowing the last two to be debatable):
5. the several hundred years between 800 and 1400 AD when plagues (& other common illnesses), wars in China, the Arab world and the Americas, and lack of food, meant the death rate nearly balanced the birth rate and the human population hardly changed, so its impact on other living things was again about constant; and lastly (though I'm having doubts about this most recent one:)
6. a period spanning my birth-date (1936), from when my father was born to about 1950, where people had the Great Depression to focus the mind on what is essential in life, and the range of consumption was (I think) tolerable, so if the human population and its consumption had been kept stable no further inroads into the living-space of the rest of the world's species need have occurred.

[David: ]
>> **   I was looking for some sort of dynamic balance, with 
>> the number of new species roughly balancing the number of 
>> extinctions, averaged over a long enough time ...
[Eric: ]
>I assume that, grossly simplified, the number of species is 
>actually increasing over time, though perhaps slowly. 
> Otherwise how is it that we have more species now than at 
>the beginning of life on Earth?  Does anyone have number on 
>the total (guess) numbers of species at different times 
>throughout the eons?  That would be interesting.

[Eric: ]
>-What you are doing may work well for you in your place and 
>time, but is it something people should work toward, as a 
>solution for sustainable living?

** So "is it something people should work toward?"; No. It's much too far; tully's tipi is even too far.   My guess is:
Someone living in an old community (small town or part of an urban area) who's sharing an old well-insulated house with quite a number of others, having a yard in which vegetables, flowers and fruit and nut trees can grow (and a chicken or rabbit pen), able to buy other necessities within walking distance, and having 4 hours work a day within cycling distance (for all those who want work), would be not far from sustainable. To leave more than half of liveable land area untouched, the human density should be high, but no more than in older parts of European cities (where they have no more than 4 floors, i.e. stairs not elevators). There are obviously other ways to live sustainably, but what I describe is very recognisable, and I believe relatively common in other, better parts of the world than the USA. I see nothing difficult in living sustainably for most people in the world, so long as the rich get onto it really soon. And population levels off; the sustainable level goes down as the population goes up. What I've described is almost certainly sustainable with 4 billion (when my first son was born, at the time of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring"); there's more doubt now there's 50% more people and far higher waste and pollution by the rich.

** Since my grandfathers' time (late 19th century), there has been far too much paving done; humans should pull out of all areas where wildlife is still vigorous and bio-diverse. That's a longer-term goal; moving in the next year or two to using-a-reasonable-minimum is essential.

** Eric had questions about whether the details of what I do are sustainable. It's worth asking about them, but my goal is "finding the minimum price of staying alive", and that dollar value is only a little affected by changes in the details.

[Eric: ]
>-Are the few things you do buy (I think I remember you 
>saying that part of your "experiment" is to see how little 
>money someone can live on while still buying everything they 
>need.) sustainably produced and transported?
>Do you buy your peanut butter, etc. in bulk or 
>mass produced in jars?

[Eric: ]
>mass transportation (bus?). Again, this may be easily avoided, 
>but using it and therefore the infrastructure it requires is 
>not sustainable, the way I use the word. 

[Eric: ]
>-Humans living in dense populations seems inherently 
>unsustainable, or at best very difficult to accomplish and 
>probably not worth the effort.Doesn't impact increase as the 
>population get more dense?

[Eric: ]
>- Are you considering that some (though perhaps unnecessary 
>for you) of what you use comes from others (wife, roommates, 
>community,etc.) who are not living sustainably? Using others'
> wastes and leftovers is fine, but if the lifestyle requires 
>an unsustainable society then it may not be sustainable.  
> You touch on this in your post on diversity in small groups, 
>but where does sustainable fit in?  
>I don't know if one can truly consider one's own lifestyle 
>sustainable if it relies on the unsustainability of others.

David.

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