My husband and I keep a personal blog which is chiefly about our adventures moving from the US to Australia, buying a rural property, building a passive solar strawbale house and attempting to become self sufficient. The property is now for sale, because the price to finish the project has escalated beyond our reach. It's been a roller-coastery journey, we've made plenty of mistakes and learned an awful lot on the way- things that we take into consideration as we move onto the next stage of the adventure in Bundaberg. Our blog is read mainly by family, friends and acquaintances, and occasionally we get feedback from our readers.

Recently I received a two part email from a reader. She builds loft homes in Mexico with her church group, and after reading about the benefits of composting toilets on our blog, thought they'd be great in these constructions in Mexico- but they're so expensive! Aren't there any reasonable ones around? I replied, "Composting toilets are indeed expensive, and given the way our current culture and markets operate, they will remain so until the demand increases. And of course that won't happen until the general population gets over fear of their own waste and accepts responsibility for it! And though it's absolutely necessary for us to be responsible for our own bodily waste and ALL other types of waste, I don't have strong hopes for that happening."

The second part of the email was telling me of this article about a house in San Diego county (my hometown) that is one of only 40 LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum certified buildings in the world. I replied, "The article about the house was interesting, and it's good to see some developers starting to think a bit less conventionally. But a 3,000 sq. ft. house in the likely price range of $600,000 to $2 million with a parking lot is a long way from sustainable - we learned our hard lessons in housebuilding with our own project: houses need to be small, inexpensive and easily repeatable (and with the increasing overpopulation of the planet, they also need to be stackable if we expect to have enough land to feed everyone). Every practical bit of land around the homes needs to be used to grow food, instead of gardens full of "drought tolerant" ornamentals. The houses you and my grandmother build in Mexico are a heck of a lot more sustainable than the mansion in the article, but those of us in wealthy countries normally wouldn't consider living in something like that ourselves."

"Sustainable has become a popular word, but the definition is rarely considered. One of the most comprehensive definitions of sustainable is something that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." (Brundtland, 1987) I think this applies not only to generations but also to countries - with our intensive use of resources, Americans (and Australians, and the English, and...) are compromising the abilities of developing countries like Mexico, China and India to meet their own needs. This isn't fair or sustainable. In the long term a sustainable global population is going to require a leveling of the standard of living between the rich and poor countries."

I don't know if the acquaintance who emailed made the connection between the first part of her email and the second, but it certainly jumped out at me: composting toilets would be perfect for quick, easy to build homes for the poor in Mexico, except they're too expensive - they cost more than the entire home itself. (I'm guessing those homes won't be the recipients of composting toilets.) Just over the border in San Diego, hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars are spent to build "eco-friendly" mansions that get called Leaders in Energy and Environmental Design - awarded for squandering resources. If anything, those Mexican whack-em-ups are the leaders of the future.

I imagine this kind of disconnect is common - I never considered "sustainability" before I learned about peak oil in 2004, and I don't know many people (greenies and non-greenies alike) who consider it - real sustainability - even now. As a culture we aren't taught (for the most part) to think critically about how we live compared with other countries or future generations. Even now, sustainability, to many, seems to mean little more than increased efficiency and a bit of recycling. True sustainability is just now finally starting to get attention, but not much action.

So how do we change this? I welcome your comments.