By David Schaller

What exactly does sustainability mean? The issue has been discussed and debated for decades; and yes, there is still so much to consider when trying to explain such an important concept. Over these past 18 years, I have produced a weekly newsletter entitled Sustainable Practices. During this time, the attributes of sustainability have continued to evolve, reflecting a deeper awareness on my part of what the elusive concept should and should not reflect. With nearly 800 newsletter issues now available, it is worth sharing briefly how I’ve come to develop a more robust concept of sustainability that we can use to filter information now shared with so many others. But first, there is a back story to all of this.

In the early 1990s I was in the middle of a long career at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and by 1995 found myself with a position description of ‘Sustainable Development Coordinator.’ This came on the heels of a budding governmental and business awareness of concepts such as ‘pollution prevention’ and ‘waste minimization,’ where common sense was saying that it could be less expensive to reduce waste than to make it and then paying the cost of mitigating its effects. In this way, development could become more ‘sustainable.’

The EPA’s operational toolkit was clearly designed to spur industry compliance with regulatory standards that continued to toughen, in many cases, as more became known about the health and ecological effects of even low-dose exposures to the by-products of our industrial economy. As the costs of meeting standards grew, alternatives to conventional regulation attracted interest. Internationally, the concept of sustainable development began to influence foreign investment, development loans, and efforts to reduce global poverty. The US was not the first, but also not the last, to begin looking at what the tenets of ‘sustainability’ could offer to the tasks of environmental betterment–especially to reduce the array of costs compared to business-as-usual incremental ‘technology fixes’ and burgeoning legal expenses were otherwise requiring.

As with many new ideas that have yet to stand the test of time, ‘sustainable development’ quickly became the ‘flavor of the month’, with everyone wanting to try it without really any agreement of what it meant. The lack of a clear, actionable definition of sustainability led many to simply redefine what they were already doing as it fit within the language of this new concept. It looked good on paper, but without actionable definitions, and examples of what sustainability looked like in practice, skepticism had room to emerge and grew.

By the late 1990s our best approaches to sustainable development were to find ever-clever ways to ‘minimize’ waste. We congratulated ourselves on less-bad behaviors while allowing, even facilitating, a slower motion but still relentless build-up in toxic, hazardous, hormone disrupting, and climate destabilizing chemicals in our air, waters, land, and bodies.  As the millennium drew to a close, and as the US President’s Council on Sustainable Development prepared to dissolve, we seemed no closer to having an effective operational driver, capable of leading us away from the free-fall of ecological and social reckoning and down a more hopeful, possible path.

It was in this context that I decided to assemble a few examples of what I was seeing as emergent, big-picture sustainability advances from around the world. Initially sent to a few EPA colleagues, the newsletter’s intent was to offer an antidote to the prevailing narrative of ecosystem and species loss, and also to the growing social inequality, declining standards of health and welfare, and largely ineffective governance models then in use to address these problems. Attention to these grim occurrences was and remains important, but I believed it was beginning to crowd out developments that offered policies, technologies, and governance models with potential to advance sustainability at a scale that could truly be effective.

What I wanted to do with my newsletter was to suggest a path different than simply finding a more clever way, as the UN was advocating, to increase global productivity five or ten fold and hope that we could mitigate the erosion of natural and social capital that this would entail. After a careful review I determined that for a practice to be considered ‘sustainable’ it needed to be nature-based, systems-focused, and ethics-driven. There was a good measure of time and study involved in selecting these three filters, but that story requires more space than this brief account allows.

Over time, I found the concept of sustainability was clearly not static, particularly as the various ecological and societal problems we face have become more complex and challenging. Fortunately, there are several frameworks now being used to create products and services which have the attributes of sustainability. Frameworks such as biomimicry, the circular economy, regenerative agriculture, upcycling, permaculture, and zero emissions are among the most important of these frameworks. When entrepreneurs first begin to make a completely sustainable process, they begin by asking how nature would do something, how might they use, sequester, and recover/reuse every molecule in a product through sustainable design. In that manner, they are on track for achieving a sustainable outcome. Add in processes that use water and energy from renewable sources at the highest efficiencies possible while creating living wage jobs that are safe and secure, then we start to see what sustainable practices should look like.

Dominating any discussion of sustainability now must be the urgency of climate change. For a time, climate change was considered one of many elements of sustainability. It was clear to me that there was indeed a lot more to non-sustainability than climate change — genetic engineering, increasing social and economic inequality, the globalization of plastics waste, drought, and other deeply troubling trends come to mind. But it was equally clear to me that if we could not as a species find the ability to mitigate climate disruption then it may not matter if we achieve a circular economy that ends the one-way flow of toxins to the land, air, and seas unless those toxins also include greenhouse gases. Thus, as my newsletter approaches its 19th year, the ultimate sustainable practice, one that needs to be woven into every other zero-waste, job-creating, nature enhancing product or service, is a reduction in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. I work to add this filter to the menu of practices vying for consideration as ‘sustainable,’ nationally and internationally.

David Schalleris a retired EPA environmental scientist and Tucson native who writes on regional energy, water and climate issues. He is also founder of Sustainable Practices, a weekly information service that has been highlighting innovations in technology, social, and governance models, and sustainable best practices since 2000. For more information, call David at (520) 665-1767, or drop him an email: daschaller@me.com.