Q:  What is sustainability?

A:  Good question.  According to two dictionary definitions, ‘to sustain’ is a verb meaning “to keep up or keep going as in a process”, or “to supply with food, drink, and the necessities of life”.  Synonyms include: “to maintain, nurture, back, help, or support.”  Sustainability is then a noun meaning the ability to sustain.  It could be modified by adjectives to indicate a greater or lesser degree of the ability to sustain.  However, without a modifier, the term sustainability would be understood as the full ability to keep a process going (one process being to supply with food, drink, and the necessities of life).

From the point of view of a human, the process to be maintained of most far reaching interest (and on which the maintenance of any other interest would depend) would be that of human life.  To say this another way, for a human being, although there may be other interesting processes to maintain, such as a good job or good health, these, of course, are first dependent upon the maintenance of life.

People have applied the term sustainable to mean such things as ‘environmental’, ‘organic’ or ‘green’ endeavors which are intended to be healthier for the Earth.  These popular connotations often modify the meaning of sustainability, defined here as the ability to maintain a process on an ever-lasting time frame, (and thus is the infinite ability to sustain), to something meaning simply a greater ability to sustain than an alternative process.  This may or may not be a big deal as words are constantly being modified to mean something slightly different than their full intention and new terms will be created to reassert the actual intended meaning.  The same change has happened to the term ‘organic’, which has now been modified to mean something less than the more rigorous intended meaning of forty years ago.  The term ‘beyond-organic’ is now being applied to better differentiate techniques that are more sustainable from the now lesser sustainable ‘organic’ ones.  The one drawback that watering-down the definition of sustainability has is that it limits the maximized concept of sustainability into something less then what can be fully contemplated.  We will hold onto our maximized definition of sustainability, until like ‘organic’ its connotation has been modified to such an extent that it can no longer be understood.  We will use the most rigorous definition so that it can be modified with adjectives to more accurately describe and understand the relative sustainability of one endeavor over another.

The understanding of sustainability accepts that the life process to be maintained for humans can only happen on the Earth.  This is a fundamental assumption of sustainability.  However, even though this point might seem obvious, many who believe in: ‘faith in science’, ‘pseudo-science’, science fiction, or ‘the supernatural’ might maintain otherwise.  A point of view promoting sustainability, accepts that the Earth, with a limited (not infinite) supply of resources is the only rationally acceptable place on which human life can depend, and is fully in opposition to those other competing belief systems.

Sustainability accepts that mother-nature is ultimately beyond the control of humans no matter how we choose.  For instance, it is unlikely that humans could control the dying of the Sun.  However, over many things (more than we would like to admit), humans can greatly affect outcomes.  This is because humans have the ability to not only act simply on desire (or impulse) but are able to apply rationality to understand the likely future result of a current action.  This allows humans to have some control over their fate.