Sustainability

Sustainability is the ability to continue a defined behavior indefinitely.

For more practical detail, the behavior you wish to continue indefinitely must be defined. For example, environmental sustainability is the ability of the environment to support a defined level of environmental quality and natural resource extraction rates indefinitely. Then there is economic sustainability, which is the ability of an economy to support a defined level of economic production indefinitely. And we must not forget social sustainability, which is the ability of a social system, such as a country, to function at a defined level of social well being and harmony indefinitely. An alternative definition of sustainablity, one that is close to the popular meaning of the word, is environmental, economic, and social sustainability.

There is a bird's nest of interdependencies between these types of sustainability. Social sustainability depends on economic sustainability, and vice versa. Social and economic sustainability depend on environmental sustainability. To a much smaller extent, environmental sustainability depends on economic and social sustainability. But the dominant dependency is that from a systems thinking viewpoint, the human system is a subsystem of the larger system it lives within: the environment. Therefore, of the three, environmental sustainability must be society's top priority.

However, this priority is anything but clear in the standard definition of sustainability. This originated in the Brundtland Report in 1987, which defined sustainability as sustainable development, and sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Here is what Herman Daly, a widely respected ecological economist, wrote in Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, in 1996:

"Sustainable development is a term that everyone likes, but nobody is sure of what it means. The term rose to the prominence of a mantra—or a shibboleth—following the 1987 publication of the UN sponsored Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, which defined the term as development that meets the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

"While not vacuous by any means, this definition was sufficiently vague to allow for a broad consensus. Probably that was a good political strategy at the time—a consensus on a vague concept was better than disagreement on a sharply defined one. By 1995, however, this initial vagueness is no longer a basis for consensus, but a breeding ground for disagreement. Acceptance of a largely undefined term sets the stage for a situation where whoever can pin his or her definition on the term will automatically win a large political battle for influence over out future."

Which is just what happened. Daly defines sustainable development as "development without growth beyond environmental limits." But economists like him were unable to get others to see things this way. He describes the dire results:

"One way to render any concept innocuous is to expand its meaning to include everything. By 1991 the phrase [sustainable development] had acquired such cachet that everything had to be sustainable, and the relatively clear notion of environmental sustainability of the economic subsystem was buried under 'helpful' extensions such as social sustainability, political sustainability, financial sustainability, cultural sustainability, and on and on. Any definition that excludes nothing is a worthless definition."

Which is why we define sustainability as the ability to continue a defined behavior indefinitely.

Throughout this website, whenever we say just "sustainability," we usually mean environmental sustainability, because if that is not achieved, then none of the zillions of other types of sustainability matter.