Sustainability History Project

[This post was written by Charlie Zigmond, Sam Medina, and Thomas Yarbrough. The post and complements previous students’ analysis of the question “What is Sustainability?”]

One of the more common perceptions people have with regard to sustainability is that it is strictly an environmental issue. Many people believe that if they recycle, or if they plant one tree to replace each one they cut down, they are being sustainable. The truth is that sustainability has multiple components, and many of the behaviors people commonly associate with sustainability are not enough in and of themselves to qualify as truly sustainable.

The UN sponsored Brundtland commission helped to flesh out a more meaningful definition of sustainability. This definition discusses the environmental, social, and economical aspects of true sustainability. The logic behind this is explained in “Sustainable Development: Exploring the Ethics of Our Common Future”:

When the terms of reference of our commission were originally being discussed in 1982, there were those who wanted its considerations to be limited to “environmental issues only”. This would have been a grave mistake. The environment does not exist as a sphere separate from human actions, ambitions, and needs and attempts to defend it in isolation from human concerns have given the very word “environment” a connotation of naivety in some political circles.(1)

One of the first examples that comes to mind where “faux sustainability” is prevalent is the electric car industry. Often times, people assume that just because they replace something non-electric with something electric, then they are being sustainable. The first problem with this is that alternatives that have the appearance of sustainability can be misleading. For instance, electricity that is produced via coal has environmental ramifications that are much different than electricity produced via solar panels. An efficiency tradeoff may not necessarily mean true sustainability.

For instance, even when an alternative does have a legitimate environmentally sustainable characteristic it still may not be enough to be truly sustainable. For instance, something that is environmentally sustainable may not be economically sustainable, or socially sustainable. True sustainability upholds all three pillars of the “Brundtlandian” definition of sustainability.

In order for this fleshed out definition to have true meaning it is important that each component is explained in a fashion that relates it to the other components. Of the three pillars, the common notion of the environmental component seems to coincide the most closely with the Brundtlandian definition. People have a strong understanding and passion for social equity, but rarely do they correlate it with their definition of sustainability. The problem with people’s understanding of economical sustainability is that they constantly allow it to override the concerns of the other two pillars. In the case of business, this is commonly thought to be the ONLY goal, but that notion is becoming less common every day. As businesses strive to achieve positive public image, they put these concerns at the forefront of their strategy. Even though it is not ideal that businesses are “forced” into sustainability by the marketplace, the result is nonetheless beneficial to society as a whole. It causes us to take a step forward towards becoming a truly sustainable society.

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(1) Oluf Langhelle. “Sustainable Development: Exploring the Ethics of Our Common Future.” International Political Science Review 20: 2 (April 1999), 129-149.

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