About Sustainability

What is it?

Sustainability means that man creates new ways to live and prosper while ensuring an equitable healthy future for humans and other species on earth.

Sustainable development improves and maintains the well-being of people and eco-systems without depleting or destroying the planet earth or compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Why should we care?

Earth's life supporting resources are decreasing like clean water, clean air, fossil fuels, and productive topsoil. At the same time the world population continues to grow and lifestyles worldwide become more consumptive which places even more demand on those resources.

Root Causes:

• We dig stuff like heavy metals and fossil fuels out of the Earth faster than nature can replenish them.
• We create harmful man-made compounds and chemicals like pesticides, fire protection compounds in carpets, and paints and allow them to build up faster than nature can cope with them.
• We damage natural systems and compromise the free services they provide - including climate regulation and water filtration - (for example over harvesting and paving wetlands). We fragment the natural ecosystems that other species need.
• We live in and create societies in which many people cannot meet their basic needs (for example, affordable housing and health care).

How can we change?

Through innovation, creativity and the unlimited potential for change we can build a better life on earth. We can avoid the depletion of earth resources, the loss of fauna and flora as well as hunger of people, and the collapse of world societies. This entails integrating economic, social and environmental strategies when possible and making choices among these objectives when integration is not possible.  People need to improve their relationships with each other and with the ecosystems that support them, by changing or strengthening their values, knowledge, technologies and institutions.

Major obstacles include lack of agreement on what should be done, resistance by interest groups who feel threatened by change, and uncertainty about the costs and benefits of alternatives.  Overcoming these obstacles requires continuing public discussion, negotiation and mediation among interest groups, and development of political consensus.

Benefits: Live a healthier, happier and fulfilled life.

To learn more:

visit:  www.naturalstep.org; www.naturalstep.ca

read: Strategies for Sustainable Development by Jeremy Carew-Reid, 1994