Definition of sustainability as it applies to courses. (STARS)
I recently received an inquiry that I thought might be of interest to folks that visit this forum. A colleague asked if the STARS team knew of any institutional examples of a working definition for sustainability as it applies to sustainability-focused and -related courses.
Does anyone have a definition that they would like to share?
Thanks!
Does anyone have a definition that they would like to share?
Not an institutional definition, but a quotation from Simon Dresner's "The Principles of Sustainability"(2002), citing Nitin Desai, who worked on the Brundtland report: "the issue is not defining sustainable development, but understanding it....The value of any definition of development is simply the clue that it gives to the moral premises of the person who's giving the definition." And Dresner goes on to comment: "The problem in agreeing on the meaning of sustainable development is not fundamentally about agreeing on a precise definition, but about agreeing upon the values that would underlie any such definition" (p. 70).
For an extensive philosophical elaboration of this point, there's Bryan Norton's monumental Sustainability (2005), which emphasizes the diverse values organized by the term and the need for ongoing conversation and social learning about the significance of sustainability.
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Well, there's the classic Brundtland Commission definition of sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brundtland_Commission for more on this.)
Then there is the three-e model for decision making, which argues that a decision is sustainable when it takes an appropriately balanced view of ecological, economic and equity concerns. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_development for more on this.)
Synthesize across the two and you're close to a working defintion of sustainability, it seems to me.