Close your eyes. Think of how a 'sustainable' lifestyle looks like to you. Imagine the landscape. The activities you are carrying out. The food you are eating. The transport. Everything about this lifestyle. Let me guess. You have ditched most of plastic packaging and are using paper bags? The food is produced in organic farms without those 'nasty' chemicals? There is no processed food? You are saying no to meat because animal agriculture is also not so sustainable? You have everything grown locally. You would rarely think of getting avocados shipped from Mexico, or bananas from Angola. You also talk about recycling your old stuff, replacing the old lightbulbs, eating local. You might have also imagined a landscape far far away. Far from the mad crowd, where you have picturesque landscapes similar to the places where *Lord of the Rings* is shot. It might have been a romantic life in the countryside next to a self-sufficient organic plot. You can open your eyes now. Everything about this 'sustainable' lifestyle is not as sustainable as you might imagine. Intensive livestock farming in feedlots has a lower environmental cost —  Paper bags are actually [worser to the environment compared to plastic bags.](https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/04/30/plastic-paper-cotton-bags/) Many might think that coal is a better option compared to nuclear energy, despite the fact that Coal emits 300x more CO2 than nuclear, and is around 1000x times safer. In the Works in Progress blog, the author argues that this problem stems from the fact that what is 'good' for the environment often doesn't line up with our intuitions. It can be termed as a 'natural fallacy' where things that seem more grounded in 'natural properties' seem better to us. In this twisted logic, natural equals good, unnatural equals bad. In India, we have this huge stigma against the use of 'chemicals' and 'artificial ingredients' in allopathic medicine, which is also why most of these Ayurvedic brands such as Patanjali are quite popular, owing to their use of 'natural' ingredients. > The fact that our intuitions are so 'off' is really a problem. --- **References**: Works in Progress. (2022, September 5). Notes on Progress: An environmentalist gets lunch. Retrieved September 9, 2022, from Substack.com website: <https://worksinprogress.substack.com/p/notes-on-progress-an-environmentalist> ‌