NOT CONSERVATION
We should conserve biodiversity for ethical reasons. However, it is always going to be difficult to draw the line about what is and isn't a valuable life, what should and shouldn't be conserved. And then there are disputes about how to conserve biodiversity, now that most ecosystems seem to be dependent upon human management for their sustainability.
One of the biggest problems lies in the fact that conserving biodiversity tends to take the focus off what it is that has endangered that biodiversity in the first place. Forests are not destroyed by loggers, but by offices and their use of paper. Rivers are not polluted by companies but by our desire for large volumes of paints, adhesives, plastics, etc. Species are not endangered by hunters but by people wanting large houses and holiday destinations and fast roads between these locations.
Sustainments are designed to deliberately refocus our attention on our built environments here and now. Sustainments are the sets of relations that sustain us in our artificiality. They will naturally have flow on effects for the conservation of biodiversity, but only because they have been designed foremostly to sustain themselves and us, promoting the care and value of all environments.
Sustainments recognise that humans 'naturalise' the artificial environments they live and work in. A sustainment thus aims to make sustainability 'second nature' to humans. A sustainment will have a reduced ecological impact upon the natural environment, but more significantly, it will reduce the long term ecological impact of the way humans live by making more sustainable attitudes and behaviours habitual for humans.
Since sustainments work with the fact that humans can make any environment habitable, sustainments are not bound to take natural ecosystems as their models. This removes the ambiguity that arises when trying to determine which aspects of natural ecosystems are the keys to sustainability. For example, is self-sufficiency the model that we should be pursuing or interdependence? Should a building seek to have no inputs and outputs or should it deliberately output wastes that can be used as resources by other buildings? The artificial sustainability of sustainments means that they free to use either strategy according to the appropriateness of their chosen circumstances.
