WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY?
Our Gift to Future Generations

The Fresh Outlook Foundation is passionate about and committed to ‘sustainability,’ but what is sustainability in the community context?

The concept of sustainability, or sustainable development, emerged in the 1980s when growing numbers of people recognized the need to balance social, cultural, and economic progress with environmental stewardship. The concept gained worldwide momentum in 1987, when the Brundtland Commission reported that “sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

In 1991, the acclaimed publication Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living expanded on the Brundtland definition by saying that development is sustainable when it “improves the quality of life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems.”

UBC professor and internationally acclaimed speaker Dr. Williams Rees, in his book Our Ecological Footprint, explains that people today often see themselves apart from nature and, therefore, can justify its destruction. He argues that “human enterprise cannot be separated from the natural world even in our minds because there is no such separation in nature.” And that “sustainability requires that our emphasis shift from managing resources to managing ourselves.”

The Sustainable Urban Development Association warns that, “A community is unsustainable if it consumes resources faster than they can be renewed, produces more waste than natural systems can safely process, or relies on distant sources for its basic needs.”

Whatever your definition, you can’t argue with astrophysicist Robert Bilman’s golden rule of sustainability: “Do unto future generations as you would have them do unto you.”

Balancing Community Objectives

Communities everywhere are exploring sustainable development as a way to balance and integrate socio-cultural, environmental, and economic interests and objectives. The challenge is that ‘sustainability’ is a difficult concept that means different things to different people at different times. As described by Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Sustainable Community Development, “Activities that the environment can sustain and that citizens want and can afford may be quite different from community to community. Rather than being a fixed thing, a sustainable community is continually adjusting to meet the social and economic needs of its residents while preserving the environment's ability to support it.”

The popular sustainability models below reflect the CSCD’s definition of a sustainable community as one that “resembles a living system in which human, natural, and economic elements are interdependent and draw strength from each other.”

Concentric Circles
Society (people, communities, nations, etc.) and the economy (businesses, markets, policies, etc.) it creates and maintains are both nested in the environment, and are therefore bound to its limits and capabilities.

Three-Legged Stool
Society, economy, and environment are equally valued in this model, which demonstrates that if one leg is removed, or is not as strong as the others, the stool will collapse! Not many people consider the role of the ‘bench’ in this model. The bench (e.g. government, business, community, or other human organization that seeks to be sustainable) keeps all legs firmly together.


Overlapping Circles
This model, the most commonly used of the three, also places equal value on society, economy, and environment. The overlap between circles indicates new opportunities, while the overlapping of all three in the centre indicates sustainability.