Paolo Soleri in his Arcology vision, manifesto and theory of the world/universe he lists the two drivers of the mass grand delusions that sustain the current economy and world view Consumerism and Suburbanization. The two go together to create a perverse synergy in modern life that promotes, accelerates and enable Entropic processes that degrade the ability and resilience of both human and planetary life support systems.
Increasing levels of consumption have been we are told the main way to measure social progress and development. The assumption is the more we consume we are told the better and that all forms of economic growth are good. The idea put forward is that money can indeed buy you happiness.
The problem with this is much of our economic growth is short term orientated in the mad dash to much as much money as quickly as possible. It looks good on paper, but usually does not consider the larger ecological and social ramifications. Indeed unsustainable levels of consumption often lead to the symptoms of overdevelopment with include trends of social decline as well as increasing levels of addiction and corruption in modern societies.
One symptom of overdevelopment is that we tend to undervalue our natural capital in the race towards an developed "affluent" status in the world both individually and collectively. The system is that we accumulate wealth over the short term while depleting the natural capacity of nature to sustain that wealth creation machine over the long term.
Consumption has become our way of life. Its patterns of development are much like that of a cancer that rapidly infects the body. One does not have to be a genius to see this is a dead end. And yet for most people the implications of their lifestyles on the future are not obvious. Most people in materialist, consumer orientated societies are actually socially instilled to give little ecological thought to the implications of their activities. We are trained from birth to act without adequate thoughtfulness in relation to how our actions weigh on the world around us. This is understandable since the prosperity of our economy for the most part in one way or another is based on unsustainable and exploitative activities. In the modern world the act and the experience of consumption replaces our communities, our history and even our sense of the sacred. Consumerism has become a sacred experience since modern life as we know it would not exist without it. It has become basic to our existence.
Sustainability is the Synthesis to the "Dialectic of Mainstream Materialism" which has defined humanity since the dawn of civilization and now is the dominant way we see reality under capitalism. Sustainability is based on vision of creating an economy that consumes at a level that is considerate of impacts on planetary environmental systems. Some refer to this as a Steady State economy where conscious consumerism emerges as an alternative to bigger is better excesses of capitalist driven consumerism.
A comprehensive exploration of the impact of the modern world on natural features and systems makes it clear that we are rapidly and radically altering the natural environment. Sustainability is a word that has come of age only as the result of our sudden realization that we now have the power as a modern civilization to affect natural systems in a disruptive way, and that this may have a very disruptive if not devastating impact on humanity. As we have modernized, we have been removed of the important reality of nature in our lives. Our ecological footprint has increased, while our respect for the natural systems of the planet has if anything decreased.