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Underground > Switchboard >

What do you mean by sustainable?

12:47 / 24.04.07

I noticed this morning from No Impact Man referring to a post from Visualize Whirled Peas on the question of what the "sustainability" people talk about, means?

I see it as an important question, because it's about the definition of my goal. I need to think about what my goal looks like to be able to make a plan to get there.

The lack of comments to the posts suprised me, and I haven't put together my own there yet. I thought instead I would bring it over here and ask other people here about how they define what is sustainable.

I know there are lots of related threads in various places on the board. Perhaps people could link their favourites as relevant?

Do most people know about the Odums' emergy (embodied energy) measure? I think that's near the base of my own concept of what is sustainable for humans. I want to know that the energy powering my life is primarily solar in the current geological time frame - the old permaculture motto 'harvest only sunlight' is obviously relevant, as is David Holmgren's admonition to use fossil energy only as capital expenditure.

I thought Switchboard rather than Lab to start because I think applied science flows into politics very fast, and my focus here is towards collective goal definition to serve politcal and social actions.

21:47 / 24.04.07

Well, firstly, I have no idea what Odums' emergy (embodied energy) measure is - I know google would probably answer my question but do you fancy giving it your own spin, or link to your favourite definition...

Secondly my notions of sustainability have largely come to me filtered through Newsnight Journalist Justin Rowlatt's year long ethical man experiment. As a year long experiment, you could easily argue that the whole enterprise was pretty far away from sustainable - Rowlatt and his family were able to take a variety of measure to reduce their carbon footprint, but Rowlatt acknowledges that he couldn't really continue to live in the same manner as he did during that experiment. (Air-travel appeared to be a particular bone of contention). They also found that some measures, such as loft insulation were uneconomic for him to pursue.

On the plus side the Rowlatts managed to change their light bulbs and found it so easy to survive without a car that they ended up giving their away to someone who would lend it back to them on occasion.

All of which probably says very little. Sustainable is a movable feast and you could easily make the arguement that it isn't moving very far.

09:01 / 25.04.07

I realize I don't see 'sustainable' as a concept that changes much - is that what you mean by 'moveable feast' sleaze, like moving goalposts?

To me it's based in well-understood limits of the planet's systems. Resources renew themselves at certain rates - they get used at certain rates. Bottom line: sunlight's a continuous input, and (unless someone finds a way to harness cosmic rays) basically sunlight is the only thing we can harvest.

At the moment the majority of human activity is unsustainable in a number of senses but I think the most pressing one is, it's energetically funded from fossil fuel reserves. The calories powering the industrial machine are primarily coming from digging up the banked sunlight of a previous geological age. That's what our carbon crisis is: carbon is being released from geochemical storage - fixation in the earth - into the atmosphere.

I'll reply a bit more later and will include some stuff about emergy as a measure of value.

09:13 / 25.04.07

When people like Friends of the Earth use the term sustainable, they mean "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" as defined by the Brundtland Commission.

I don't think that's what people mean in general though. I think people use the world 'sustainable' to mean broadly 'being green' or more cynically, offsetting their long haul holiday flight. This is not sustainability as I understand it, because it definitely will "compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Carbon offsetting is just a way that people make themselves feel better.

There's some rather interesting and relevant discussion on sustainability in the recycling thread.

10:32 / 25.04.07

I was attempting to use 'sustainable' to talk about both about man's willingness to adopt long term changes in their lifestyle as much as the well-understood limits of the planet's systems. This might well be a mis-use of the term but what I was trying to get at was the need at the consumer level for 'sustainable' to be easy and economic, that is sustainable for average consumers to impliment.

I guess all this is more concerned with the consumer end rather than a top down governmental approach...

17:19 / 25.04.07

More about emergy: some links: Howard T Odum (wikipedia), essays here is the best I can get together right now.

I guess I'm most interested in sustainability [in the sense of, based on the realities of the planet's ecological system] as sound investment. I love seeing the various ways permaculture design, based ultimately on the energetic limits of this planet system, can be made into tasty business ideas. I think both Government and consumers are too weak to answer the call of the necessity in this time of crisis, but I think intelligent business models just might be part of the solution.