...interestingly enough, there has been a great deal of talk about preserving the environment going into my ears and head this week. But oddly - some of those words have been focused on the natural world and what we should be doing to protect the things that have been living here on the planet long before humans came along and started taking over. While others have been directed at trying to create viable communities where small towns are loosing population to cities, and cities are dying due to job losses, infrastructure problems and financial collapse. And my thoughts - wondering how the two: man who is destructive of natural world, and seems to base existence on the principle of Imminent Domain, and the environment we seem to be bent of destroying for our own gratification of personal desires will look in the future.
So here's the definition of sustainability I wrote down on the back of my handout at the forestry program on Friday, as it relates to being good stewards of the natural environment. And wondering how it fits in with the theories the speaker I heard on Wednesday suggested as his version of regenerating dying urban areas. If we cannot maintain a balance between what humans need and the life that was here before we came along as lord and master of our domain, there won't be anything left of the planet. But if civilization fails, we will be pretty much doomed regardless, back to survival of the meanest, or the one with the most weapons, or the most heartless, least compassionate.
Sustainable: 1.) the ability to be sustained supported, upheld, or confirmed. 2.) The quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long term ecological balance. The thing I heard on Friday was about sustainability being 'proven by meeting a set of standards or established criteria'. But that environment, economics and society are the sources of the 'proving', setting those standards acceptable levels.
And sadly: the reality is that price and occasionally quality take priority over sustainability.
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