What is Sustainable Development?


Sustainable development is the innovative, on-going, incremental process of human adaptation to a planetary environment that incorporates the following ideas:

1. Substances and materials from the planetary crust are not removed at a rate greater than planetary processes replace them, or the rate of substitution of a renewable alternative.

2. That substances produced by humans are, when no longer used by humans, not accumulating in the environment. That any substances or materials released into the environment can breakdown into non-toxic components. Non-toxic means that a plant or animal cell can metabolize it, without disruption of its nominal functions.

3. The productive capacity of biotic systems are not degraded by human processes. Harvesting of living materials is at a rate no greater than their rate of regeneration.

4. Delegation of human production and infrastructure functions that can be performed by other living things, to other living things when possible.

5. That any material or substance produced by manufacturing that is not part of a product be a feedstock for another human process.

6. The design of all products and services uses life cycle analysis and full cost accounting. No externalization to society and the environment of any costs.

7. Birth control.

8. That economic processes be equitable for the people involved.

9. A system of problem solving with increasing or stable returns, or diminishing returns that can be financed with energy subsidies of assured supply, cost, and quality.

10. The solution space for design is not bounded by simplification or ideology. Evaluation of design solutions considers scale, scaling, and emergent events across foreseeable time-lines. Technological implementation is evaluated across catagories and foreseeable time-lines, prior to roll-out. Design objectives are defined, and metrics created to measure success and early identification of feedback in the system. Solutions are resilient and incorporate redundancies, but also not be irreversable.

The definition I am using is in some part mine, but primarily from other sources: The Hanover Principles, The Natural Step, Herman Daly's Rules, The Bellagio Principles, Joseph Tainter, Braden Allenby, and basic science.

Jay Moynihan