WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY?

Sustainability is the capacity to endure. In ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. Some examples of sustainable biological systems are Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests.  For humans, sustainability is the capacity and potential for long-term maintenance of well being, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions.

Definition Of Sustainability by James Chronicle

A healthy ecosystem and environment provides vital goods and services to humans and other organisms. This is what we need to implement and maintain in Gwinnett and (everywhere). There are two major ways of reducing negative human impact and enhancing ecosystem services. The first is environmental management; this approach is based largely on information gained from earth science, environmental science, and conservation biology. The second approach is management of human consumption of resources, which is based largely on information gained from economics.

Sustainability interfaces with economics through the social and ecological consequences of economic activity. Sustainability economics involves ecological economics where social, cultural, health-related and monetary/financial aspects are integrated. Moving towards sustainability is also a social challenge that entails international and national law, urban planning and transport, local and individual lifestyles and ethical consumerism. There are many ways to live more sustainably and this can take many forms from reorganising living conditions (e.g., ecovillages, eco-municipalities and sustainable cities), reappraising economic sectors (permaculture, green building, sustainable agriculture), or work practices (sustainable architecture), using science to develop new technologies (green technologies, renewable energy), to adjustments in individual lifestyles that conserve natural resources.

To add complication the word sustainability is applied not only to human sustainability on Earth, but to many situations and contexts over many scales of space and time, from small local ones to the global balance of production and consumption. It can also refer to a future intention: “sustainable agriculture” is not necessarily a current situation but a goal for the future, a prediction.For all these reasons sustainability is perceived, at one extreme, as nothing more than a feel-good buzzword with little meaning or substancebut, at the other, as an important but unfocused concept like “liberty” or “justice”.It has also been described as a “dialogue of values that defies consensual definition”

The underlying driver of direct human impacts on the sustainability of the environment is human consumption.This impact is reduced by not only consuming less but by also making the full cycle of production, use and disposal more sustainable. Consumption of goods and services can be analysed and managed at all scales through the chain of consumption, starting with the effects of individual lifestyle choices and spending patterns, through to the resource demands of specific goods and services, the impacts of economic sectors, through national economies to the global economy.Analysis of consumption patterns relates resource use to the environmental, social and economic impacts at the scale or context under investigation. The ideas of embodied resource use (the total resources needed to produce a product or service), resource intensity, and resource productivity are important tools for understanding the impacts of consumption. Key resource categories relating to human needs are food, energy, materials and water.  Sustainability encompasses all of this.  Research is needed to further or achieve a sustainable planet.

Green In Gwinnett Area – Keeping Gwinnett County Green and Sustainable

A Definition Of Sustainability

- James Daniel Chronicle

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