Defining Sustainability

What is sustainability? I have spent the last three weeks learning about sustainability and trying to come up with my own definition for it. At the moment, the accepted definition for sustainable development is “meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” For me, this definition is inadequate, broad and leaves questions unanswered. This definition fails to define what is the future needs are. Those needs could be fifty times smaller or larger than the needs that we are meeting now. Needs is also undefined here and is left to be openly interpreted. Again, what we consider as needs now could mean something completely different in the next few years. Due to the different ways that sustainability is defined, I feel like it needs to be broken up into categories so that a better understanding and meaning of the word can be obtained.

To make this definition less broad, I feel like sustainability should be looked at in different categories. The two main categories that sustainability fall under are environment and society. In the case of the environment, I believe that sustainability means doing your part to preserve natural resources and reducing your footprint so that Earth is healthy and can be inhabited. In the case of society, I believe that to be sustainable means that the well-being of everyone is being maintained, with the intention of keeping a diversified culture.

This is a starting point on grabbing a sense of what sustainability is. There isn’t one definite definition and everyone is going to interpret it in a different way. To avoid any confusion, there should be separate categories that the word can fall under like sustainability in business, sustainability in the economy, and sustainability for humans. After taking this class, this is now how I choose to define sustainability and I intend to work towards discovering different categories that sustainable development falls under and forming a definition that works for me.