How do you define sustainability?
The Office of Sustainability views sustainability as...
"Balancing the relationships between environmental stewardship, economic development, and social responsibility while meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations of people and ecosystems to meet their own needs."
Campus Sustainability
According to Peggy Barlett and Geoffrey Chase in Sustainability on Campus: Stories and Strategies for Change (2004), they explain that "sustainability is not a problem, not something to be solved, but rather a 'vision of the future that provides us with a road map.'
This map helps to focus our attention on a set of values and ethical and moral principles...to guide our actions" (Viederman 1995, 37). Viederman's approach echoes the three domains of sustainability, arguing that our societal goal is 'to ensure to the degree possible that present and future generations can attain a high degree of economic security and achieve democracy while maintaining the integrity of the ecological systems upon which all life and production depend' (37). Sustainability in this instance is not an end point, not a resting place, but a process.
The process of sustainability begins with the awakening to emerging problems caused by conventional norms of behavior (both institutional and personal) and then a discernment of new directions without a specific sustainability checklist" (pp 7).
Paul Hawken's view
In his book, Blessed Unrest (2007), he describes sustainability as, “Sustainability is about stabilizing the currently disruptive relationship between earth's two most complex systems – human culture and the living world.
The interrelationship between these two systems marks every person's existence and is responsible for the rise andfall of every civilization.Although the concept of sustainability is relatively new, every culture has confronted this relationship, for better or ill.
For thousands of years, civilizations have not been able to reverse their tracks with respect to environmental damage but rather have declined and disappeared because they forfeited their own habitat.Today, for the first time in history, an entire civilization – its people, companies andgovernments – is trying to arrest the downspin and understand how to live on earth, an effort that represents a watershed in human existence...
At this point in our environmental free-fall, we need to preserve what remains and dedicate ourselves to restoring what we have lost" (pp 172).
Hawken, P., (2007) Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. New York: Viking