What is Sustainability?

Fri, 4 Apr 2008 15:37:50 -0700

Simply put, an activity is sustainable if it is possible to continue the activity indefinitely, or at a minimum, for a very long time.

The time frame that would be considered a long time varies from activity to activity. For example, what would be a long time for a physical human effort like running would not be very long compared to societal efforts like building a city or even a single building. Running a marathon takes endurance on the level of hours. A sustainable city would involve time frames of centuries or even millennia.

Table 1 suggests time scales appropriate for sustainable efforts for several different activities:

Activity Sustainable time frame

Running hours
Living spaces (homes) centuries
Cities centuries (or millennia)
Energy systems centuries
Health systems decades
Educational systems decades
Economic systems centuries

A way to think of this is to consider the durability of items. Some of the items available to us last for many years. Houses last several decades and can last as long as several centuries. Cars last a few decades. Cities span several centuries. Large appliances last about a decade while small appliances last only a few years.

Some items have only a fleeting use. Product packaging fits into this category. Once the cookies have been eaten, the packaging that them held them securely is no longer needed (see picture). Unfortunately, cookie packaging is very likely made of plastic, a compound that has a very long lifetime and that is resilient to biodegrading. It is ironic that such packaging has such a short useful life but persists almost indefinitely as waste. Such packaging, however, makes a really good counter example to sustainability. Sometimes it is easier to define something by looking at examples that are exactly the opposite.

Packaging that is designed to be useless once the product is removed or consumed and that persists indefinitely is a perfect example of an unsustainable activity. It is unsustainable because the result of the activity is an ever larger pile of debris. The debris pile never gets smaller and if our input materials are limited, we will soon run out and be left with just the debris. Clearly this activity cannot be continued indefinitely.

On the other hand, designing cookie packaging out of a biodegradable material such as cellulose or cardboard would produce a sustainable product (see picture). This product while still having a fleeting use would not contribute to a debris pile because the cardboard will degrade via natural bacterial processes into humus (a constituent of soil). Such packaging could be grown, created, used, disposed of and degraded back into soil for hundreds of thousands of years. Now that's sustainability!

Why Sustainability?

Fri, 4 Apr 2008 15:34:03 -0700

Why focus on sustainability? The main reason is that we need time to work out how to live together on planet Earth in such large numbers. The Earth has never before had to support so many humans so we're moving into totally uncharted territory. We have been successful so far but there is no guarantee that our way of life will be able to continue. There are just too many indicators that we have overshot the sustainable level of many activities. On this web site, we will not be dwelling on the current problems but instead we will be focusing on solutions (there are plenty of web sites and books out there to go into detail about our current problems -- a simple web search brings up hundreds of resources). The areas of concern are:

Food -- How to grow enough food for all without soil loss and while improving the nutrients in the soil
Energy -- How to power our machines and heat and cool our buildings without pollution, green house gases or deforestation.
Transportation - How to move from place to place safely, efficiently and without pollution.
Societal systems -- How to live peacefully together where everyone con contribute and opportunities exist for all.
Natural world -- How to live in harmony with the other beings on the planet. How to make space for them and enhance wild places to renew our spirits.
Economics -- How to empower peaceful participation in the society. How to reward creativity and effort.
Development -- How to dynamically reconfigure our society's infrastructure and systems to provide essential services without negatively impacting other life systems. How to fit-in with the life system on the planet.
Population -- How to manage our fertility and longevity so as to stabilize our total numbers and minimize our collective impact.

The goal of this web site is to explore the concept of sustainability and how it relates to the decisions we are making every day. Remember, our impact as humans on the planet is the sum of the individual actions we choose every day. By making different choices, we can steer the society into a sustainable direction thus helping to make sure the world our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren inherit is as good or better than what we have today.

Sustainability Blog

What is Sustainability?

Why Sustainability?