Sustainability is becoming a very popular concept and I have heard the term used with increasing frequency in both a corporate and domestic context. It’s a great thing, seeing the green movement finally becoming mainstream after 35 odd years of fringe-dwelling and the majority of people are making day to day decisions based on the knowledge that our resources are limited and must be managed wisely. That said, sustainability not simply about acting within the Earth’s carrying capacity. It has components of equity and social justice as well – poverty and war are the two phenomena that do the most harm to us and our planet.
The first question that should be asked when talking about sustainability is "What are we trying to sustain?"
The answer is, "Us".
For individuals it usually means they want their lives and those of their friends and families and their broader society to continue on into the future. For companies it means they want to continue operating and making a profit into the future. Sustainability is more about enlightened self-interest than anything else.
Responses to the realization that our current way of operating is unsustainable vary greatly, usually depending on how far from sustainable one believes our current lifestyle or modus operandi to be.
Some corporations go about pouring their effort into keeping their staff happy and talking to charities about helping them out through donations and sponsorships and volunteering programs to gain credibility with their staff and their customers — to talk about this activity alone as sustainability is greenwash. Others seek to reduce the environmental impact of their business through environmental management programs, which is moving into the realm of real sustainability, but it not if their response stops there. Those who are actually serious look at their actual business model and ask, "Is what this company does contributing to creating and maintaining a sustainable society?" Companies that, on balance, have any negative social and environmental impact cannot respond positively to this question.
In the next 20-50 years we need to redesign our economy so that our activities complement and support natural systems, so that greenhouse gas emissions are in balance with the rate of their absorption, so that flow rates of rivers are high enough to support the ecosystems of which they are a part, so that populations of wild animals, birds and fish flourish and so that all people are able to share the wealth that our technologies have created.
While these things mean that our environment is able to sustain our species, we must also meet people’s social needs. Poverty has a huge impact on our environment and our ability to sustain ourselves. It’s one thing for Sydney to clean up it’s harbour but it’s something else entirely for poor countries like Laos to do something about the smog that covers much of the region. Poverty is not only a lack of money, but a lack of power, a lack of control, a lack of skills, of knowledge, of support. Communities without money can achieve amazing things, but those that are truly poor can never be sustainable so we must banish poverty to history if we are to create a sustainable society.
I personally think about sustainability and sustainable develop in terms of health. I think the chemist Michael Braungart explained it best when he pointed out that a marriage that is considered "sustainable" is something to be pitied, not celebrated. What sustainability is really about is health. A healthy ecosystem, a healthy society, a healthy economy. We want to have a high quality of life, fruitful and satisfying work and beautiful and bountiful nature to provide us with clean air and water, tasty and nutritious food and all the other good things we associate with it.
So the challenge we set before us is not to be simply a ’sustainable’ individual or company or society, but to be healthy, rich, bountiful. We must have a positive impact on our community and our environment, not a less negative one or even a neutral one.
It is this that we are aiming for and anything less is at best to be pitied and, at worst, unsustainable.
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[...] Just wanted to highlight an excellent post that Duncan, one of my colleagues at Digital Eskimo, wrote on the (newly launched) company blog, entitled Sustainability v1.1. [...]