Sustainability

What is Sustainability? 

There are many ways to define sustainability, and it will mean different things in different contexts. Wikipedia describes it as follows:

“Sustainability is the capacity to endure. For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of responsibility, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of stewardship, the responsible management of resource use. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time, a necessary precondition for the well-being of humans and other organisms. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems.”

Not all social, economic and environmental aspects will always be in perfect balance. Rather, they will exist in an oscillating state, centered somewhere around the sustainable threshold. The challenge for us humans is to determine where that threshold is and to plan our actions and adjust our demands on resources accordingly.