Sustainability

Sustainability refers to the long-term viability of a community, set of social institutions, or societal practice. The idea rose to prominence with the modern environmental movement, which rebuked the unsustainable character of contemporary societies where patterns of resource use, growth, and consumption threaten the integrity of ecosystems and the well-being of future generations. Sustainability is presented as an alternative to short-term, myopic, and wasteful behavior. It serves as a standard against which existing institutions are to be judged and as an objective toward which society should move. With respect to governance, it implies an interrogation of existing modes of social organization to determine the extent to which they encourage destructive practices as well as a conscious effort to transform the status quo to promote the development of more sustainable patterns of activity.

Sustainability resonates with cognate concepts such as sustainable yield, sustainable society, and sustainable development. Sustainable yield relates to the harvest of a specific (self-renewing) natural resource—say timber or fish. Such a yield is one that can in principle be maintained indefinitely because it can be supported by the regenerative capacities of the underlying natural system. A sustainable society is one that has learned to live within the boundaries established by ecological limits. It can be maintained as a collective and ongoing entity because practices that imposed excessive burdens upon the environment have been reformed or abolished. And sustainable development denotes a process of social advance that accommodates the needs of the current generation and of futurity, and which successfully integrates economic, social, and environmental considerations in decision making.

In contemporary debate, sustainability often serves as a synonym for sustainable development. On other occasions, it is associated more exclusively with environmental constraints or environmental performance, and the expression environmental sustainability is used to emphasize this point. Parallel references can be found to social sustainability, economic sustainability, and cultural sustainability, which allude to threats to long-term well-being in each of these domains. Local sustainability emphasizes the importance of place. Corporate sustainability is another common usage, which relates both to the survivability of the individual corporation and to the contribution that corporations can make to the broader sustainability agenda. Central here is the notion of the triple bottom line—that businesses should pay attention to social and environmental performance as well as to financial returns. And there are connections to debates about reforming corporate governance, encouraging corporate responsibility, and designing alternative (sustainable, green, or ethical) investment vehicles.

While all sorts of practices are cited as threats to sustainability (political corruption, social inequality, the arms race, and profligate government expenditure), environmental issues remain at the heart of the discussion. Of course, what is conducive to environmental sustainability remains a matter of intense debate. Approaches range from a moderate “greening” of current social institutions to a radical transformation of the global political and economic order. A gradual adjustment toward sustainability relies on governmental initiatives to orient production and consumption into less environmentally destructive channels. This implies a reengineering of industrial and agricultural processes, a transformation of land use practices, and a shift in household consumption. Potentially renewable resources should be managed to conserve their long-term viability; nonrenewable resources should be extracted at rates that allow an ordered transition to alternatives; emission of waste and toxic substances must remain within the assimilative capacities of natural systems; and more vigorous measures must be taken to preserve species, habitats, and ecosystems. Managing long-term environmental issues such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity are of critical importance.

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