Sustainability: Definition

Lately I haven’t really had a chance to write about sustainability, considering everything that was happening. So you may still be wondering what the hell we are talking about here in this little corner of Sweden!!! (oh and sustainability is big everywhere else in Sweden, just so you know)

Taking another look at the posts entitled “sustainability stuff Part I and Part II” will help understand the context and why it’s important for us all to know about sustainability.

I’ll lay it out the way we were taught here: pretend you wanted to make the planet completely sterile, or at least deplete the biosphere enough so that very few species would survive. You would have to understand that the conditions allowing life (as it is today) took billions of years to create – then take action:

1. Heavy metals (mercury, uranium, etc..) are now deep underground, CO2 in the atmosphere was absorbed by plants which are now crude oil (also trapped underground), to name a few. You would want to bring the metals back up, and burn the oil to restore the extremely harsh atmosphere Earth had when young.
2. With the current technology, we are able to create chemical compounds that nature has never encountered before – pesticides, plastics, refined fuels, and other potent artificial substances. Just spread them everywhere.
3. With current technology also, it is possible to physically destroy the environment: using machines and other means: harvest, cut, clear, dig, bomb...
4. Finally if you want to get rid of people (not cool writing this kind of stuff), not only you would do all of the above, but you will restrict people in their communications, access to what they need, force them to work more than they should, to rely on less and less resources etc...

Phew... that sounds really dark and sadist. I don’t think anyone was really upset when Dr. Karl Henrik Robert talked about this, but then he’s a great speaker. See any correlation with our Society’s operation? No one actually WANTS to do any of the above (maybe in some rare cases), yet this is what the global society is doing. Everybody brings their ever-so-small contribution to making one big problem – as described in previous posts this un-sustainable behaviour is everywhere.

Now the good news:

In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing:

1. Concentration of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust
2. Concentration of substances produced by society
3. Degradation by physical means

And, in this society;

     4. People are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.

These four points are called the Sustainability Principles, as defined by the organisation The Natural Step. They keep us in check when planning for sustainable development.

Dr. Robert clearly explains the Natural Step's take on sustainability in this video:

Finally, our colleague Fúnmiláyò Akinòsì from Nigeria has contextualised her understanding in an article that I wouldn’t try to match; a good read published in The Guardian, Nigeria 19th November 2010 – enjoy!:

http://anotherhummingbird.blogspot.com/