From Thucydides to Florida: Stable Adaptation, Social Depth, and the Seamless Generation of Unforeseen Futures

This article explores conceptual flaws in the notion of sustainability as it applied to economic and social systems rather than ecologies, focusing in particular on rural and regional Australia. The notion of sustainability is a confused concept, even when we confine ourselves to exploring the relatively simple dynamics of agricultural production and those people dependent on it. But rurality no longer equates with agriculture or other forms of primary production as the countryside takes on a variety of additional uses. Not only has this led to increasing conflict of interest and notions of the contested countryside, but also to increasing pressures for economic and social change. Consequently, we have begun to talk about stable systems and concluded in earlier work that 'stable rural economies are those that fluidly adapt to changing circumstances, seamlessly generating unforeseen futures with a minimum of stress on the participants or the natural environment'. We develop this idea further in this article through the twin notions of stable adaptation and social depth, arguing that social deepening, through a judicious – and interrelated – combination of government policy, market forces, and changing individual or group behaviours, continues to ramp up the pace of sustainable change in contemporary Australia.A concluding section suggests that the origins of this line of thinking are long-standing and polyglot, ranging from Thucydides to Florida, and including ideas from political philosophy and evolutionary biology. It seems, for example, that both ancient Athens (c.2400 BP) and organisms' responses to complex and rapidly changing ecosystems can teach us lessons about optimal development strategies in modern rural economies and societies.