Sustainability means meeting our present needs without compromising the prospects of future generations. The biosphere has a miraculous yet finite ability to support life and absorb wastes. As world population swell to over 6.5 billion humanity is exceeding Earth’s carrying capacity by 23 percent.
A sustainable campus would use an equitable portion of Earth’s bio-productivity to produce all they consume and to absorb their wastes. In practical terms this means driving less and using less electricity, heating, water, packaging, electronics, and paper -- consuming less stuff while using more efficient technologies.
We need to make significant (but often remarkably easy) changes in our daily and long-term practices. We need to shift our mindset from one of "take and trash" to one of "zero-waste." Once you make this mental shift, you’ll never be able to look at garbage or wastefulness in the same way again!
Sustainability can be a confusing term. It does not mean sustaining poverty and inequity, violent conflict, or human overuse of ecological systems. Today "sustainability" is commonly defined to mean sustaining the biosphere’s capacities to support life and complex ecological systems including societies’ capacity to provide for the welfare of all their citizens. The Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee, endeavors to forecast the implications of their daily actions seven generations into the future. Such conscientious sustainability widens our horizons to care beyond our own families, beyond our grand children, beyond humanity.
Sustainability asks us to evaluate our ethics and sense of fairness. Oren Lyons from the Onondaga has said, "What you people call your natural resources our people call our relatives." This speaks to the inclusive "rewiring" needed to foster a sustainable culture.
A somewhat more complex definition of sustainability has been formulated by Herman Daly and Joshua Farley (2004) in their book on ecological economics. They develop four guidelines for balancing economic, social and environmental concerns and priorities:
With advances in technology, science and information systems, humanity is capable of understanding, measuring, reporting and forecasting the long-term health of social and ecological systems at least as well as the Haudenosaunee. Researchers at the Global Footprint Network use "ecological footprinting" to quantify sustainability. The collective footprint of humankind is the amount of bioproductive land and sea area required to supply all that we use and to absorb all our wastes with prevailing technology. The Global Footprint Network and the World Wildlife Fund calculate annually the footprints of over 150 nations annually using over 4,000 data points in their Living Planet Report (Global Footprint Network). Footprints can also be calculated for institutions and individuals.
Source: Living Planet Report 2006
The results indicate that human consumption exceeds nature’s production by 25% as of 2003 meaning that it would take one year and about three months for the Earth to regenerate what is being used by people in one year. Quite striking in The Living Planet Report 2006 is the extent to which ecological impact or footprint is correlated to income.
As human numbers and consumerism grow on a finite planet, inefficient and wasteful economic practices threaten our future. NASA’s top climate scientist Dr. James Hansen warns that a global tipping point might be reached in 10 years if levels of greenhouse gases like methane and CO2 are not reduced. All ready, species extinction rates are 100 to 1000 times faster than normal. But if saving the planet isn’t reason enough to commit to sustainable practices, consider the fact that environmentally sound behavior also makes sense from an economic perspective. For example, companies that have followed the new green building standards ultimately see a significant return on their initial investment in saved utility costs alone.
