A PERFECT WORLD

forever

Sustainability is the ability to continue something for a long time1.

There are three relevant levels for us:

  1. (i) the individual level: “I could do this all the time, for all of my life”
  2. (b) the boat level: “we could sail like this forever”
  3. (g) the global level: “We, humankind, could do this forever”

Individual sustainability is mostly limited by my time, my energy, my financial budget and by my body.

☑ I could, for example, practice Tai Chi every single day, with no problem.

☒ I could also sail for 48 hours without sleep occasionally, but I can not sustain a lifestyle without rest. It would harm my body and my brain severely.

Sustainability on the boat level follows a similar logic like the individual level. We cannot literally just sail forever. But we can forever sail and maintain the boat. Maintain in parallel (every day) or in sequence (major repairs in a harbour or dry dock, every few years).

Or, if you can build a boat from nothing but natural material, then you could forever build a new boat and sail it, and repeat. I can’t build boats (yet) but I want to shift the strategy towards natural or readily available material, such as wood and rope over plastic and metal.

Global sustainability is limited by globally limited resources such as space, water and food, as well as by accumulated negative impact on the planet’s body.

Divide every globally limited resource by the world population, and you get the fair share of that resource. We, as humankind, can only continue forever, if every human keeps their consumption and impact within the fair share.

The philosophy behind the fair share is also known as Kant’s Categorical Imperative2

Global sustainability is the foundation of long-term wellbeing for everybody, since a collapsing ecosphere makes all other achievements meaningless.

Take this absurd example, as a thought experiment:

Every person on Earth decided they deserved their own personal giraffe as a status symbol, so 8 billion giraffes × 34kg of leaves per day = 272 million tons of acacia leaves daily. Unfortunately, all the world’s acacia trees produce only about 50 million tons of leaves annually, meaning we’d need 2,000 times more acacia forests than exist — requiring us to convert every square meter of land (including cities, oceans if we could, and Mars) into acacia plantations. The math does not compute.

☒ A personal giraffe for everybody is not sustainable.

Take carbon emissions as a real example. In 2025, every person caused 4.7 tonnes of carbon emissions, averaged across the world.

People who wrote the Paris Agreement3 assume that we need to reduce carbon emissions worldwide to 2-3 tonnes per person and year. Otherwise the climate will continue to heat up and the biosphere will collapse.

I don’t know whether that is true. I choose to believe the Paris Agreement, so I assume that each and anybody has a fair share of 2-3 tonnes of carbon emissions to spend, annually.

On board A PERFECT WORLD we practice individual, boat-level and global sustainability.

Keys to a low carbon footprint are:

  1. reduce energy consumption down to scale that we can produce ourselves
  2. produce energy exclusively from renewable energy sources
  3. eat a plant-based diet on most days

These keys are reflected in our goals, principles and rules - for example: …

☑ Already today the crew on board achieves the carbon footprint goal, with about 3 tonnes CO₂ emissions per year (solo), or in a crew of 4 people with 2.2 tonnes per person per year4.

Join us, for a short or longer while, and you will see how truly sustainable life can work for you.

Background

Eco Sailboat Transition in 9 Proven Steps (post on LinkedIn)

References

  1. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability ↩

  2. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative ↩

  3. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement ↩

  4. source for the Carbon Footprint Calculation Model ↩