What is Sustainability?

• able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.
• a societal goal that broadly aims for humans to safely co-exist on planet Earth over a long time.
• Development that meets the needs of the present without jeopardising the needs of those in the future.

Sustainability: The use of the ecosystem and ecosystem services in such a way as to allow a community or society to operate indefinitely resilient to external changes / shocks. What are the Principles of Sustainability?

• The time window we pick changes our decisions.
• 100 years is probably too short (think of our kids).
• 10,000 years may be too long (too much uncertainty)?
• Maybe 1,000 years is a sweet-spot?
• Lots of connections between parts → resilience.
• Efficiency is much less important in sustainability.
• Think of solar panels’ lifecycle for an example.

Sustainability Illustrated on YouTube

In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing…

• Concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust.
• Concentrations of substances produced by society.
• Degradation by physical means.

… and in this society people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.

Permaculture Principles by Bill Mollison - World Permaculture Association

• Dynamic
• Egalitarian.
• Needs based.
• Networks of small communities.
• Individual autonomy with high co-orperation.
• Recycle everything.

Things we need to keep high-tech…

• Communication.
• Medicine.
• Some long distance travel.
• R&D inc. Earth defence.

The 3 P’s

• AKA “Triple bottom line”.
• People, Planet, Profits.
• This reads are corporate spiel.
• See UN’s SDGs for some sustainable goals.
• Not really actionable and misses the point.

The Rest of the Discussion

The limiting factor is pollution.

• If you can’t recycle it then you it’s not sustainable.
• It’s really important to spread the word, increase consciousness.
• What’s the social cost of transitioning to clean energy?

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