Let's recap a good foundation for understanding sustainability.
Alex Magnin summarizes sustainability best in his short Youtube videos [1] [2] and crash course [3]. He covers the three pillars of the Brundtland Report definition and how to see the relationship between life (the biosphere) and the earth (lithosphere) through thermodynamics, including the funnel between carrying capacity and societal pressure -- the Natural Step Framework [4] (28 years ago).
We live in the biosphere... a cycle that is well balanced... Very slow geological cycles bring matter from the lithosphere... to the biosphere... these cycles are also well balanced... Sustainability is the capacity of our human society to continue indefinitely within these natural cycles.
20 years ago
John B. Robinson, George Francis, Sally Lerner, and Russel Legge, provided an excellent summary of sustainability in "Defining a Sustainable Society" [5].
Sustainability is the persistence over an apparently indefinite future of certain necessary and desired characteristics of the sociopolitical system and its natural environment.
This definition relies on two principles of sustainability and three key characteristics which involve deeper ecological and sociopolitical principles.
Basic value principles
The continued existence of the natural world is inherently good. The natural world and its component life forms, and its ability to regenerate itself through its own natural evolution, have intrinsic value.
- Cultural sustainability depends on the ability of a society to claim the loyalty of its adherents through the propagation of a set of values that are acceptable to the populace and through the provision of those sociopolitical institutions that make the realization of those values possible.
Key characteristics
- Sustainability is a normative ethical principle. It has both necessary and desirable characteristics. There, therefore, exists no single version of sustainable system.
- Both environmental-ecological and sociopolitical sustainability are required for a sustainable society.
- We cannot, and do not want to, guarantee persistence of any particular system in perpetuity. We want to preserve the capacity for the system to change. Thus, sustainability is never achieved once and for all, but only approached. It is a process, not a state. It will often be easier to identify unsustainability than sustainability.
Robinson et al explain several deeper ecological and sociopolitical principles, which touch on several ideas we understand much better today:
- protecting and restoring life-support systems (ecosystem services)
- protecting biodiversity
- establishing adaptive strategies
- respecting planetary carrying capacity boundaries
- ensuring equity
- incorporating ecological priorities into politics
- increasing public involvement in open political processes
- improving social justice, opportunity equality, legal justice, political freedom, information and education access
These ideas permeate the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which the nations of Earth agree upon as a foundation for our universal journey towards a sustainable society.
[1]:A. Magnin. Sustainability explained with simple natural science. Sustainability Illustrated
[2]:A. Magnin. 4 principles to win the sustainability game
[3]:A. Magnin. Sustainability crash course
[4]:David Cook. The Natural Step: Towards a Sustainable Society. Green Books. 2004.