The “Golden Mean” between two devils—having enough or having too much—and our civilization’s collective ability to identify where that point lies is important for “strong” sustainability. John Stuart Mill’s call for a steady state economy challenges the myth of progress. Moving ahead in the coming decades with deep decarbonization pathways that rightfully place the human enterprise as a subsystem of Gaian Law, requires humankind to respect and live within Gaian hierarchy—serving it and maintaining and restoring its critical order. It will require all of us in the post-industrial modern world to "reduce our level of consumption per head to a rate that allows everyone in the world to live on indefinitely."

The modernist values of “progress” and “nature” need to be put under the microscope...
In other words, our civilization's faith in technology to solve all future problems is the tenant of capitalism.

Our desire to compare ourselves against one another is an innate and deeply human characteristic that marketing grad students from Harvard and Yale have been happily taking advantage of since the 1950s.

The stories of modern civilization are molded around progress and nature--they are mutually exclusive. The majority of us do not attribute moral likeness to the nonliving (abiotic) and other living things in the commonwealth of life.

Modernism is built on a deep disconnection from nature. It freed humans from having guilt over exploiting nature's utility. If we fail to stop this freight train heading towards the end-of-life, it won't be because of lack of understanding or science, but because "the stories we accepted as most profoundly true, the ones that determined our social behavior, dismissed the idea that treating the world as dead would ultimately be deadly to us too" (Rodgers 2014).

Rodgers, Christy. 30 Aug. 2014. "Is the World Living or Dead? Or, the Trouble with Science." The Dark Mountain Blog.