Sustainability Principles
A network of international scientists have developed four system conditions, based on scientific laws, that would enable human beings to live sustainably within the system of Planet Earth. Those conditions can be reworded into basic principles that are easy to understand.
System Conditions
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Sustainability Principles
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In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing: 1 ... concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth's crust.
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1. Minimise mining and its impacts on nature. That doesn't mean we need to stop mining (we can't build wind turbines without steel), but we need to be smarter with what we mine and how we manage mined materials - specially the toxic ones.
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| 2 ... concentrations of substances produced by society. |
2. Make only what nature can process. This means producing substances only at the rate that nature can process them. It includes reducing the production of plastics, pesticides, fire retardants ... and carbon dioxide. |
| 3 ... degradation by physical means. |
3. Protect nature's systems from being physically degraded. That doesn't mean we have to stop harvesting natural resources - we need them to survive - but we should take them only from sustainably managed ecosystems and use them efficiently. Otherwise there will just be fewer and fewer left in years to come. |
| 4. And, in that society, people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs. |
4. Provide all people with their basic needs. This involves our social responsibility to ensure everyone can live and work in a safe and healthy environment and be paid a fair price for meaningful work. |
Planning for a sustainable future
[Image: www.naturalstep.org (Creative Commons)]
Beginning with a vision of where we would like to be in the future (what a sustainable version of our organisation or community would be like) allows us to look back from that vision to work out what we need to do to get there. This is known as backcasting.
It is more effective than forecasting because when you forecast you inevitably continue the same way you've been going, projecting today's problems into the future, which can stifle creativity. But when you turn towards a new vision, you open up a brand new path along which many new innovative strategies can be explored.
What is the first step you could make towards your own vision of a personally more sustainable future? (Find helpful handbooks here.)
(Visit The Natural Step for more detailed information about the four system conditions and the international organisation that developed them.)