Sustainability Defined
Continuing our series exploring how ENODA defines the keystone concepts of its mission statement, this article presents a functional definition of the essential nature of sustainability.
Sustainability is the preservation of choice. It requires understanding how resources can best be managed to ensure that from the present forward, the greatest number of opportunities are available. It is a moral and ethical duty to the future, and to acknowledge physical environmental constraints. A harmony between people and the world we live in is a prerequisite for true prosperity. For something to be sustainable, means that it makes the world a better place, through preservation and through creation.
As one of the most important considerations of public policy, sustainability was initially treated in economics and political philosophy as a problem to be solved by a social planner, given complete control over a spotlessly clean mathematical apparatus. This hypothetical social planner was tasked solely with balancing sustained growth and a sustained quality of life, across generations. Finite resources and growing populations were simply a constraint to modelling, rather than separate problems to be solved.
From a modern perspective it becomes obvious that, despite leading to the explication of crucial elements of the formula, an approach solely derived from these assumptions would lead to a distinctly stunted result when attempting to extrapolate a broader view of sustainability. The origins of sustainability in economics being so abstract, meant that the inclusion of environmental issues took a longer time to be accounted for, despite those issues becoming the primary contemporary focus.
The true problem in early thinking ran deeper than any of the stated assumptions, the approach itself was seated in a game-theory style view that placed successive generations in a form of quiet competition. When framed as a succession of segmented generations, the available decisions inevitably become whether, and how much, to forgo in the present balanced against the immediate enjoyment of consumption.
At the most basic level, this thinking misunderstands the nature of prosperity and the nature of our society. Conceptually, it is warped, and it leads to a warped set of results.
The future is not alien to us, and future generations are not separate from present ones. Our society is contiguous, and prosperity is not simply a pool of resources to be drawn upon, but rather a maintained state of consistent improvement. In a prosperous society the value seeking actions of individuals are simultaneously drivers of prosperity and the method by which those individuals benefit from prosperity.
Sustainability is not charity, and it is not forbearance, because it is not for the benefit of another, it is for the benefit of an ongoing shared interest. Just as the persistent and everchanging flow of water ensures that you can never step in the same river twice, the choices we are presented with are never precisely the same, and the future is something we live every day.
Future choice cannot be preserved by a static present, it is necessary to always be moving forward. Our tools to increase prosperity beyond the natural rate of increase, are our technology.
Advancements in technology are not spontaneous, even if they are stochastic. Because the arrival of technology that changes productivity often appears to the observer in a fixed moment, (and on a sufficiently small time scale) to come in sudden bursts; and because those developments are inherently novel, it is easy for that observer to believe that these progressions are the product of spontaneous inspiration alone.
In reality, technological progress is the product of present consumption. The eureka moment has become the shorthand for invention, but those moments are only as useful as the ability to implement them, and, intuitively, occur only under the right circumstances. Slowed invention is an opportunity cost of depreciated prosperity.
A society choosing to do nothing in the face of adversity, or in a more realistic scenario curtailing outputs by reducing inputs, is only treading water. In doing so it inherently handicaps its ability to eventually address the problems it faces.
Maximizing the welfare of future generations is still the ultimate aim of sustainability and sustainable policy. What has changed with time, is the summation of welfare. The calculation now factors in more accurately a wide set of variants—the value of resources now includes the value of a habitable planet, and the costs of their extraction include the speed at which its integrity is degraded.
Put in other terms, prosperity is the goal. ENODA defines it as a personal state of well-being and a social condition of welfare. While sustainability is the act of building and maintaining the capacity to choose, when the measure of that prosperity, and the optimal courses of action to achieve it, change over time. Sustainability is the preservation of choice because it de-constrains future decision making. The depletion and mismanagement of resources today, leaves us with fewer ways to seek prosperity tomorrow.
ENODA is dedicated to building solutions that are sustainable, because we believe in the future and in the people who will shape it. Our innovations allow for the non-linear growth of prosperity that does not compromise between today and tomorrow. We craft sustainable technology that increases choice over time through the creation of value. For us, hope is more than a mere sentiment, it is a promise to leave the world a better place than we found it.
