Imagine a group of us live on a spaceship.

The spaceship has machines to replenish oxygen, grow food and filter water. The limits to each of these are set by the efficiency of the technology aboard. The total amount of each of these “resources” needs to be divvied up by the number of people on the spaceship.

To keep everyone alive and happy, we each want to be able to each receive a reasonable amount of oxygen, water and food.

“Earth is also a spaceship, just a bigger one. And due to its large size, it’s easier for us to forget this important fact.”

The levers you have to play with are:

a) the number of people on the spaceship
b) the technology
c) people’s behavior

Due to the small size of the spaceship, people are conscious about the risk of living beyond their means. As such, people work together to plan carefully how to use the levers to ensure everyone gets a decent lifestyle.

“We’re at the point where you divide the amount of resources by the number of us, and you don’t have enough for everyone to have a satisfactory lifestyle.”

Earth is also a spaceship, just a bigger one. And due to its large size, it’s easier for us to forget this important fact. It’s simply more abstract and harder to connect our individual actions with the planet itself.

That said, due to the exponential growth in our numbers, the increase in the power of our tools to extract/modify/pollute our resources and the amount we use per person, we’re cluing in to the fact that we’re bumping up against the limits of what our earth can handle. We’re at the point where you divide the amount of resources by the number of us, and you don’t have enough for everyone to have a satisfactory lifestyle.

So…what is green? Green is understanding that the earth is finite, that our technologies and our behaviors matter and that we need to work together to redesign the way we live on this planet so that we can all share a decent lifestyle far into the future. Green is anything that makes that possible.

—Graham Hill

A Designpreneur, Graham has built companies including web shop SiteWerks, product company WeAreHappyToServeYou.com, TreeHugger.com now part of Discovery and now; LifeEdited.org. He studied Architecture and ID and schemes how he can help humanity avoid rapid extinction. Follow him at twitter.com/ghill.