Radical sustainability
households reduces the wasted energy because it is transferred to other houses in the neighbourhood via blockchain energy systems. Innovative and cheap solutions like these can very easily reduce the carbon footprint, and more importantly, diversify the job market. Namely, businesses can be set up to provide these services, offering jobs in design, transport, marketing and construction, thereby strengthening domestic industry through competition and self-reliance. The protection of the environment also plays a fundamental role in the pathway towards sustainability. For third-world nations, protection can generate innovative solutions and multiple income streams. First, perhaps the most important, is reforestation. For over two decades, countries like Brazil and Malaysia have been turning trees into income, and to reverse global warming, nations with large land masses need to reforest. Costa Rica uses UAV drones to replant trees in deforested areas through a programme called agroforestry. It is one of the many mechanisms which corporations can use to propel carbon sequestration. The issue with reforestation is that corporations lack incentives to act due to insufficient profit margins. However, the prioritization of environmental sustainability means that instead of subsidizing coal and manufacturing industries, governments can redirect that money (from bonds and taxation) towards subsidizing environmental technologies, especially those made by private companies because they drive internal competition. For example, a method called phytoremediation was deployed in 1998 to aid the clean-up of Chernobyl, and since then it has been a valuable method for protecting nature. Phytoremediation is the process of using plants to absorb pollutants through natural processes. Especially in heavily polluted nations, the mass implementation of phytodegradation and rhizofiltration – the destruction of organic pollutants like oil and decontamination of water – can help reverse the effects of human development. Perhaps the most important way to protect the environment, while still generating economic output, is reducing the carbon footprint, most especially by importing EVs. There are two reasons. First, electric cars reduce greenhouse emissions. Shifting to EVs will reduce the total transport emissions by over 60%, and more importantly, by purchasing eco-friendly products, society automatically becomes more aware about protecting the environment. Second, importing products on a mass basis balances the import-export ratios in developing countries. An export surplus (from manufacturing goods and raw materials) leads to a reliance on foreign demand, as well as a neglect of domestic consumption. Increasing imports allows for better consumer product variety and improved diplomacy between respective trading countries, which exposes them to large political trade unions like ASEAN, BRICS, or the EU. China is particularly good at selling their EVs and products in developing countries through processes like binarized trading agreements and loaning. Therefore, prioritizing environmental sustainability does not just prevent polar bears from falling over somewhere in Antarctica; it is also a rational strategy which creates new high-skilled jobs, opens up new markets, strengthens domestic industry, and overall has the potential to pull developing nations out of the cycle of lower income. We stand at a branched path in the human story, where the old vanguards of growth tremble beneath the weight of the world they have created. For over two hundred years, economic development has been the sovereign measure of success, the metronome to which policy, politics, and popularity have ticked by. Nevertheless, developing countries have long been imprisoned within the cycle of multidimensional poverty because of traditional economic priorities like manufacturing and resource extraction. This essay has argued that it is now imperative that third-
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