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Archive for the ‘What is Sustainability?’ Category

Upcoming movie premier: “The Greenest Building”

Posted in Events, Implementing Sustainability, Urban Infrastructure, What is Sustainability? on January 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

There’s an intriguing documentary premier upcoming:

“The Greenest Building”

(A Wagging Tale Productions Documentary)

Monday, Jan. 31, 2011, 6:30 – 8:00 P.M.

The Gerding Theater at the Armory
128 NW Eleventh Ave., Portland

Movie description:

    Over the next 20 years, Americans will demolish one third of our existing building stock (over 82 billion square feet) in order to replace seemingly inefficient buildings with energy efficient “green” buildings.

    Is demolition in the name of sustainability really the best use of natural, social, and economic resources? Or, like the urban renewal programs of the 1960’s, will this well-intentioned planning result in devastating environmental and cultural consequences?

    (more…)

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Nature’s Accountability

Posted in Uncovering & Evaluating Sources, What is Sustainability? on January 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

A special issue of the journal Science as Culture (19:4, Dec. 2010) is focused on “nature’s accountability” and provides some insights into the historical development of sustainable practices.:

    The past three hundred years has seen a rise of scientific measures to account for the human uses of nature. These measures have monitored, recorded and visualized nature, its uses and over-uses. From early concepts of sustainability in the 18th century, to models of sustainable fisheries of the late 20th century, accounting measures have always involved economic and political accountability. They are exercises of power, norm-setting and sanctioning. Such measures highlight some aspects of human involvement, while obscuring others.

    This special issue explores how nature has been taken into account for maximizing sustained yield and producing sustainable quality in forestry and agriculture through cosmopolitan science in the context of capitalist development. Contributions develop an interdisciplinary, historical perspective on sustainability as a concept and practice.

Chapters include:
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Greenwashing Detection

Posted in Greenwashing, Quantifying Sustainability, What is Sustainability? on December 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »

In the face of complexity, many people conclude that sustainability is impossible to define, or that the use of the term is so broad that it means nothing. The SHP holds that sustainability certainly is a complex topic but that it is not at all beyond comprehension or definition. One way to attempt a definition of sustainability is by describing what sustainability is; another way is to determine what sustainability isn’t.

How do we do attempt the latter?

One interesting project to help us evaluate claims of sustainability is the Greenwashing Index. This web-based tool is a project of the Enviromedia Social Marketing and the University of Oregon, and has three goals:

    1) Help consumers become more savvy about evaluating environmental marketing claims of advertisers.
    2) Hold businesses accountable to their environmental marketing claims.
    3) Stimulate the market and demand for sustainable business practices that truly reduce the impact on the environment.

Greenwashing is “whitewashing, but with a green brush”: businesses that inflate their environmental credentials to obscure environmentally harmful activities.

The Greenwashing Index is a forum where anyone can contribute to evaluations of business practices. Through this community input, these practices are rated on a 1-5 scale of “Authentic” or “Bogus” green claims. This project achieves some of the critical elements of the SHP’s definition of sustainability because it provides quantifiable metrics and because it’s open & participatory.

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PSU Sustainability Education Week, Nov. 6-12

Posted in Events, Implementing Sustainability, Organizations, Quantifying Sustainability, What is Sustainability?, tagged on November 2, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Students for Leadership in Ecology, Culture and Learning will be hosting the second annual PSU Sustainability Education Week, Nov. 6-12, 2010.

Students this quarter have been invited to attend one or more of the events and write-up a blog post about it for the SHP website, and anyone else interested in providing feedback, links, or other items for discussion are also invited to post a comment below.

Community partners for the event include:

and PSU campus partners include:

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Critiquing two critiques of “sustainability”

Posted in Critiques of Sustainability, SHP Fall 2010, Student work, What is Sustainability? on October 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »

[The post below was written by students Ian C. and Brian H., with notes by James V. Hillegas]

This week we looked at two articles that are critical of sustainability, “The Roots of Sustainability” by Glenn M. Ricketts, and “Is Sustainability Sustainable?” by Daniel Bonevac.[1] Both authors take strong anti-sustainability stances.

Ricketts mostly criticizes sustainability as a political movement. He accuses sustainability proponents of being dogmatic, and spreading their beliefs in an evangelical manner, calling it a secular religion. According to Ricketts, a culture exist within academia that is hostile to any critique of sustainability. Though he does little in the way of actually offering critiques of the principles of sustainability themselves, except to point out that the more dire predictions of previous decades have not yet come to pass. He focuses on presenting a sinister-sounding narrative about the people and social trends supporting sustainability rather than engaging with the ideas behind it.

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How should governments and corporations deal with the problem of sustainability relating to equity?

Posted in Implementing Sustainability, Quantifying Sustainability, SHP Fall 2010, Student work, What is Sustainability? on October 15, 2010| Leave a Comment »

[This post written by Jonathan F., Paul Quiring, Danny S., and Angelo S.]

We were lucky enough on Oct. 14 to have Dianne Riley from the CLF come to our class to introduce us to The Equity Atlas and she opened up a lot of ideas about what needs to be worked on in our community to improve sustainable living. One of the most overlooked aspects of sustainability is equity. While the majority of people working in the field of sustainability focus on the environmental aspect, equity is something that needs more attention in order for future generations to be sustainable too.

The idea of redefining the indicators of success plays a large role in developing social sustainability from the standpoint of corporate responsibility. There are many contrasts and difficulties that are faced when striving for both economic and social sustainability among corporations and business. This dilemma is largely due to the fact that economic success and social responsibility often times do not go hand in hand. Because the measure of success in the corporate world is mostly profit driven, social responsibility takes a back seat to making money. This is where the indicators of success could use change, or at least a tweaking. Society as a whole can demand corporate accountability and social responsibility, because as the consumers we have the ultimate say. If consumers demanded contributions to the development of social sustainability from corporations, and didn’t consume products from these corporations if they did not comply, the indicators of success would surely change and the reality of economic and social sustainability going hand in hand may emerge.

Cartoon from filipspagnoli.wordpress.com.

 

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On Sustainability, Fall 2010

Posted in SHP Fall 2010, Uncovering & Evaluating Sources, What is Sustainability? on October 15, 2010| Leave a Comment »

This quarter, I asked the students to compose blog posts highlighting what they felt to be the most important elements from their Reading Response 1 and 2 assignments.

As part of Reading Response 2, I asked students to pair an article I had selected with something from their own discipline or area of interest that addressed the broad scope and meaning of sustainability in this discipline. Below is a list of sources that students found themselves to complement the articles I assigned.

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Our Understanding of Sustainability

Posted in SHP Fall 2010, Student work, What is Sustainability? on October 12, 2010| 2 Comments »

[This post written by J. Orr, B. Green, & B. Bazsó]

As we try and come up with our own definition of sustainability, we have difficulty fitting everything involved into a single sentence or two. We believe that our idea of sustainability is in response to the idea that current practices in social equity, economics, and the ecosystem cannot continue. Having said that, we believe that sustainable practices are the ones that make an effort to have the lowest possible negative impact on all three areas.

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Sustainability means recognizing trade-offs & “the tragedy of the commons”

Posted in SHP Fall 2010, Student work, What is Sustainability? on October 12, 2010| 2 Comments »

[This post written by Jonathan F., Paul Quiring, Danny S., and Angelo S.]

Goat Lake, Lewis County, Washington, from Washington Trails Association, http://www.wta.org.

As our class begins the journey into the world of sustainability, we started the course by reading a couple of broad articles looking at sustainability in the big picture. After discussing the articles in class, we have started to gain a better grasp on how large the concept of sustainability actually is. Defining the word sustainability is something that is always changing and nearly impossible to fit into one sentence. One of the definitions we found that seemed to cover the majority of sustainability can be found on The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online (see “Sustainability“).

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Social sustainability co-equal to economics & ecology

Posted in SHP Fall 2010, Student work, What is Sustainability? on October 12, 2010| 2 Comments »

[The post below was written by students Ian C., Natalie T. Z., and Brian H.]

    Enhancing human capitol (through education) and strengthening social values and institutions (like trust and behavioral norms) are important tools to increase the resilience of social systems and improve governance. (Intergovernmental panel on climate change, 2000)

Sustainability simply means being able to sustain something for some period of time. When we speak of sustainability, what we aim to sustain are those things which are required for humanity to thrive. The three pillars of sustainable development have been defined as economy, ecology, and equity. Of those three, equity seems to be furthest from the spotlight. While protecting rainforests and wetlands can be the first thought that comes to mind when the concept of sustainability is raised, developing social justice and sustainability could have a greater impact on the ability of future generations to thrive. Stable social environments are a crucial building block in developing sustainable growth, Oluf Langhelle reinforces this concept saying “the environment does not exist as a sphere separate from human actions, ambitions, and needs” (Langhelle, 131).

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