Sustainability

To sustain something implies valuing it enough to put an effort into maintaining its integrity. Sustaining a current system with its resource exploitation, ecological destruction and social problems will not be possible. So we must develop a vision of a society that is both physically and socially sustainable, that is able to accomodate the ethnic and cultural spectrum of humankind in all its diversity and that moreover permits the change and human development indefinately.

assuring physical sustainability is not enough for defining a sustainable path. A continuation of present trends, where a small minority lives in a luxury, partly at the expense of an underprivileged majority, would be socially and ethically unsustainabble in the long run.

Sustainablity therefore has physical, material, ecological, social, cultural, psychological and ethical dimentions. Human society can be sustainable only if it is sustainable on all of these counts. but one more important requirement: sustainability must remain a dynamic concept. Societies and their environments change, technologies and cultures change, values and aspirations change and a sustainable society must allow and sustain such a change. Such a change must be evolutionary and self-organising. A sustainable society will have to allow development without physical growth ( of material and energy flows and population). Its population must eventually remain below a certain limit. The per capita use of energy and materials must be less than what is now in the industrialised countries of the North. All energy must be renewable, all materials recyclable. These resources must support a system that maintains an unlimited potential or non-material cultural, social and indivisual growth.

Source: Earth at a crossroad - Path to a sustainable future.

Hartmut Bossel