Epilogue: Toward a Sustainable Society

Abstract

While the principle of a sustainable population is unchangeable and independent, in real population history, the background determinants play a decisive role to set the direction, timing, and speed of population development. Therefore, the challenges to transform a shrinking society into a sustainable society require a total reform of our present society; they are Sustainable Economy, Sustainable Ecology, and Sustainable Culture. For the sustainable economy, we should have a new principle on distribution, someone does not work shall eat either, even without his/her own capital. It is because a huge production capacity will be meaningless and does not work without enough effective social demand/consumption. For Sustainable Ecology, we need to shift the weight of social production, from material goods to nonmaterial information and personal service. We should also develop food supply chain, which replaces the domesticated animals and plants by synthetical food technology. This will prepare the way to recover the biodiversity and to release the cultivated land for other use. As Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the weight of our consumption is shifting from physiological needs to safety needs, to social needs, to esteem, and to self-actualization. This shift could be caused by extending the average lifetime and by changing the weight of social production from material goods to nonmaterial information and personal service. The main human activity in the lifetime will be shifted from productive activity to cultural activity. For Sustainable Culture, it requires universal and lifetime education. All humans are born and dead as a member of the society. This fact should be unchanged, but the social systems in which the individual belongs will be greatly changed from the family level to the global level. While the diversity of family will inevitably increase, the stability of family will decrease. Many of the present social systems will be substituted by a large-scale functional network, which is based on geographical borders and expanding over local communities, national states, and international organizations. From these social networks, some general common ties on a global level will develop, which helps to organize the Sustainable Society on the planet Earth.