A Simple Interpretation of Sustainability to Proceed
(Section Summary)

Sustainable development represents the taking of actions to define our problems and solve them in a way that is long-lasting. The combining of economic and environmental considerations in planning and implementing strategies, however, is what seems to create difficulty and cause confusion, resulting in unsustainable actions. We must search for ways to be more open and flexible, examining our capacities to create co-action while doing no harm to the life-giving environmental elements that sustain the future of people (Gibson, 2002). But, developing a comfortable understanding for sustainability can often be messy, especially at the grassroots level where community values do not usually fit nicely into disciplinary boxes. An alternative is to begin by developing a simply stated concept of sustainability that most can agree with. Then establish a community-based set of principles that integrate information characterizing human understandings, relationships, and activities, that will actually move across the traditional sector boundaries (Gibson, 2002) that must be integrated to successfully address sustainability issues.

The essence of sustainability is to take the contextual features of economy, society, and environment – the uncertainty, the multiple competing values, and the distrust among various interest groups – as givens and go on to design a process that guides concerned groups to seek out and ask the right questions that will help them progress through incremental improvements toward common goals despite challenges (Norton, 2005). A hierarchical analysis, to truly establish the values important to a particular community through their own dialogue and struggle for agreement, developed from the bottom-up, is the way to proceed. In this way the community can avoid the trappings of trying to work with a one-size-fits-all sustainability definition conceived somewhere else. The hierarchical analysis will promote a community’s solidarity around a simplistic definition of sustainability. This simple, or as Norton (2005) suggests, “schematic,” definition of sustainability can be turned into specifics by real communities of people that choose important criteria and indicators based upon their particular values.

So what would a simple, graphic definition of sustainability look like for a community embarking upon this journey? Societal members should be concerned about making sure that the opportunities they have to achieve their own values, the things important to them, are not in any way constrained for other places or the future by actions they might take. And this process must encourage the connection of scientific information with cherished human values (Norton, 2005). Sustainability includes both a descriptive component – it says something about what will be left for people of the future – and an evaluative component – it expresses moral concern about whether our legacy is fair to future people (Norton, 2005). .......... read more!

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