Sustainability Is Good, But Not Enough; Let’s Aim For Satisfiability

By Ooi Kee Beng, Penang Monthly editorial for May 2026

“SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT” makes good sense as a concept. This term was definitely coined to draw attention to the dangers inherent in unrestrained “development”, in a world where all countries have ambitions of becoming “developed”.

We cannot, for practical and moral reasons, stop any country from wishing to become developed, but the inherent ecological cost of allowing every country to develop without restrain would be unacceptable. This is the great paradox of our time. It could mean the destruction of Mother Earth’s life-sustaining ecologies, and the very ecosystems within which the human species came into being and thrived. We are now clever enough to observe and describe how human activities in recent centuries have actually disrupted the circularity—the sustainability—of Earth’s basic processes. Should the resulting fluctuations become too large or unpredictable, then human life itself is threatened, not to mention that of countless other species.

This is the key lesson learned from the histories of industrialisation in those countries that first managed to become developed: pursuing exactly the same modes of development would simply be “unsustainable”.

Life-forms depend a great deal on environmental stability in order to thrive. Their evolution, we realise, depends on adaptability to new conditions. But we also know that if conditions keep changing fast and ceaselessly, then no new species can emerge, while old species will merely live in a protracted state of crisis. And if the changes are too great, then extinctions will become common—and rapid. Already, the speed of environmental change is very high, and in fact, most of us are already speed-blind.

Humanity as a whole, shocked at what it has done, now propagates the idea of sustainability. We have to make governments and peoples conscious of the need for sustainability in all that humanity, as a whole, undertakes. As the United Nations (UN) puts it, we have to work towards implementing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Our general consciousness has been raised, and SDGs have been normalised, even institutionalised, as a norm in modern thinking (but bear in mind that bureaucratised thinking, which often signifies conservatism in thought, thenbecomes a problem in itself). For all their benefits, are SDGs a crisis or a stopgap measure? A buy-time strategy? A comforting blindfold? After all, they were first articulated only when the dangers became obvious: at the cliff’s edge, the roar of the rapids becoming deafeningly louder.

So, are SDGs a prescription for the terminally ill? Are they just delaying the inevitable by giving us false hope?

I prefer to think that they are at least buying us time. The issue, then, is what we do with the time that they are buying us.

The biggest problem to solve is really knowing how we got here in the first place. How did a species, which evolved under sufficiently stable conditions, come to seriously undermine the very ecological processes that gave birth to it? Why are we destroying the earthly dynamics that gave us life?

Truth be told, humanity’s concern today is not about merely surviving, but about “progressing” and “developing”, not to mention raising the gross domestic product ad infinitum. Although we now know where this fixation is leading us, can we really stop ourselves?

Short of changing course entirely, what we first have to do is to at least manage our fixation with established patterns of development, and limit the destruction that it brings. If we all do our little bit to make sure that our means of production, lifestyles and consumption patterns do not lead to scarcity, to pollution, to ecological upsets—in other words, if we think sustainably—then maybe the slight shift in trajectory of human development will be good enough, and things can work out in the long run.

Secondly, we should also act upon sustainability’s strong heuristic function. The more we act in awareness of the critical value of ecological balance, the greater the likelihood that later generations will become less demanding of Earth’s resources, less careless with their wastes and more conscious caretakers of the world.
We can hope. Meanwhile, we need to work towards a human philosophy where Sufficiency and Satisfiability are of higher ethical and economic worth than Affluence and Dominance; one where communal values define culture more deeply than financial calculations; and where mutualism is recognised as a greater good than competitiveness.

*Note: For in-depth analyses of Penang’s sustainable tourism prospects, see: Ong Wooi Leng et al. (2026). Penang Economic Outlook. Penang Institute. https://pen-anginstitute.org/publications/reports-and-papers/penang-economic-outlook-2026/.