Sustainability: Virtuous or Vulgar?

Just as businesses have various motivations and interpretations of how to apply sustainability to their corporations, sustainability itself seems to have no clear definition.   Some view it as more economical, some view it as preserving biodiversity and habitat, others view it as more efficiently meeting human needs. This article proposing a five-fold definition:

1. "Development of efficient technologies and markets for meeting human needs, which is generally the purview of engineering, physical science, biotechnology, economics, and business."
2. "Understanding the state and nature of ecosystems, which is generally the purview of ecology and environmental science."
3. "Understanding how exploitation affects ecosystems, which is generally the purview of applied ecology and environmental science."
4. "Understanding how exploitation affects human cultures, which is generally the purview of sociology, political science, policy, law, anthropology, and the arts and humanities."
5. "Understanding the meaning of normative concepts such as human needs, socially just, depriving, and ecosystem health, which is generally the purview of ethics and philosophy."

Keeping this in mind, sustainability is multi-discipline, multi-dimensional and requires the cooperation beyond just an ecologist and an economist; rather, we must incorporate ethics and legitimation into science and economics.  As complex as the environment, so are the methods used to maintain it.

The article then divides sustainability into two forms:

Weak Sustainability- concerned with preserving human welfare and commiserated with economic principles.
Strong Sustainability- concerned with sustaining natural capital, aligned with conservation.

Sustainability now is about balancing its three primary virtues: concern for human need, ecosystem health, and social justice. "What counts as sustainable or good, even for the most specific managing scenario (e.g., harvesting or water use), requires knowing whether proposed management satisfy the guiding virtues of sustainability."

"If we attain sustainability, it will not only require critical changes in technology, but also the most profound shift in ethical thought witnessed in the last four centuries." (What a statement, right?)

And, as a side note, the reason this paper is entitled "Virtuous or Vulgar?" is because it debates whether sustainability is rooted in anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric values and whether or not we should choose one or the other.  I found this debate interesting, but not particularly relatable to our research purposes.

Nelson, M.  Vucetich, J. (2010). Sustainability: Vulgar or Virtuous? Bioscience, 60(7), 539-534.