What is Sustainability?
Sustainability can be described as each of us doing our part to build the kind of world – economically, environmentally and socially – that we want to live in, and one that we want our children and grandchildren to inherit. It means becoming aware of all interconnections – visible and invisible – in which our day-to-day choices affect the intricate balance of social, economic and ecological systems.
Economist, E.F. Schumacher, wrote in 1973:
"The modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which it has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable (natural) capital, which it cheerfully treats as income. Fossil fuels are merely a part of the natural capital, which we steadfastly insist on treating as expendable, as if it were income. If we squander our fossil fuels, we threaten civilization; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself. A businessman would not consider a firm to have achieved viability if he/she saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital. Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side. We must thoroughly understand the problem and begin to see the possibility of evolving a new life-style, with new methods of production and new patterns of consumption: a life-style designed for permanence."
