To me, sustainability and adaptation go hand in hand. to err on one side over the other is a route to failure. you could spend way to much time figuring out how to build the perfect indoor garden and thus forget to spend the time actually planting it. or worse yet your indoor operation fails and you starve because you relied on its yield too heavily. on the opposite side of the spectrum you could go try to live solely off what nature provides and spend countless hours in the woods trying to track down enough food to survive just to find out that natures yield is far too small to sustain a healthy diet. the balance would be to spend an equal amount of time building your "natures catastrophy- proof" garden as you do hiking through the woods identifying edible plant caches, finding fishing holes, and tracking the movements of game. here are some examples of how technology and sustainability work with each other:
gore tex hunting gear to prolong the periods of time you can spend outdoors tracking your prey.
petersons field guides on plant and tree identification
satellite imagery to track changing weather patterns (climate shifts), herd movements, bird migration patterns, and topography

unfortunately technology relies way too heavily on the "sociatal strucure" (ie. the power grid, fossil fuel processing, nuclear power, the telecommunications grid, grocery store chains, ect) to exist. . given a catastrophy like a war, an economic depression, or a really bad storm - all of the sudden the means to produce this technology come to an abrupt standstill and you are left having to wander off into the woods to find something to eat or sit in your house and starve hoping society will begin to produce again. also, just as unfortunate is that the planet (nature) is suseptible to changes in the cosmos - one space dust cloud or asteroid away from complete desintegration of a hospitable biosphere.
i believe by balancing these two conflicting points of "world view" each individual could - on his or her own - and given any climatic catastrophy or a civil catastrophy - could produce and find more than enough sustinance to survive a healthy existence . being the fittest is a balance between intelligence and strength. studying technology and applying it to your lifestyle makes you more intelligent. getting out into nature and busting your ass trying to find food makes you physically stronger. relying too heavily on one over the other makes you dead.

yea not like our jumping into new technological advances without caution has ever messed anything up before..

SUVs and Industrial factories are only the beginning, what about CFCs, plastics, radioactive waste. shit ever since we invented the internal combustion engine its been a blessing and a curse, sure it gets us places faster, and it also lets us deforest areas at an alarmingly efficient rate.

I think assuming humanity is more competent about restoring ecological balance than nature itself is retarded. anyone who has studied ecology realizes just how interconnected every system on this planet is, and every time we go meddling with one thing, there are unforseen consequences else where.

Nature is going to always attempt to balance out the free radicals, in this case we're a pretty big one, so the weather is going to get crazy and there could be complete global shift into iceage again, its hard to say. its like a dog with fleas and we're the fleas, right now its scratching.. would you prefer to frontline the planet and get rid of us once and for all?

not that I'm a ludite against technological progress, but I dont really see GMO plants or growing corn in the midwest as helping anything. the midwest aquifer will be drained in about ten years at the current rate of consumption (or so a geologist who specializes in ground water has told me, believe what you will) and corn is about as inefficient as it gets for making fuel. we could feed the whole world if we just grew wheat, but you know the corn lobby is pretty powerful and we got to feed something to our mass produced livestock besides themselves.

I agree. time for a complete and utter world view change, time for a conciousness shift and paradigm change. if we can quit our ethnocentric ways and stop putting so many resources into bombing each other, then yea, maybe we can repair this little spaceship of ours. I'm holding out for the best but people trumpeting screw sustainability arent really helping, at least individuals who are concious about their own consumption are trying. so saving a little on the carbon foot print isnt a big deal individually, if a decent amount of people did it suddenly we buy a little more time to find solutions to the problems we've created.

alright I'm done with my soap box.

this post was possibly one of the most ignorant things ive read recently.