Sustainability and the Industrial Revolution

As TriplePundit notes, the opening day of Socap09 produced this observation:

1. The sustainability revolution is not on par with the dot com bubble, but rather on par with the industrial revolution. This will be great retrofit of our lives… Everything we've ever created was created wrong. We need those all those crazy ideas. ~ Steve Newcomb, Virgance, The Future of Social Innovation on the Web

Not saying that I agree or disagree with this--what Newcomb's statement did was get me thinking about what was makes sustainability feel substantially different.

Namely, organizational technology.

The Industrial Revolution had it in abundance. Mechanized production decreased costs and maximized output. You could literally point to the engines that were changing the world; even a century and a half later, we can read the critique of, say, Marx and Engels, and their target remains in our sight.

Sustainability is more slippery. It's an idea, a goal, an ethic--yet its means of production are not so clear, let alone standardized. Sustainability is also in many ways not that energizing in ways that capture the human imagination--watering your plants with grey water is a far cry from the roaring engines that transformed the landscape while giving the masses power, new jobs and cheap goods.

Sustainability may get to the point of being a new Industrial Revolution. Not denying that at all. However, as of now it still needs something more.