Sustainability?

Version 2009

Just what is sustainability anyway? I conducted an informal survey consisting of three people: my neighbor who is an engineer, my mother who is a retired English teacher, and a random college student eating a black bean burrito dripping with red chili sauce at a local restaurant. Here are their responses to my question.

Just What Is Sustainability Anyway?

v  Engineer: some sort of activity or process that improves the environment in some way.

v  English Teacher (retired): Sustainability means to maintain and nourish at the same time.

v  Young College Student: It means reducing our environmental footprint and stopping global warming so that everyone can have a decent life, for now and for future generations.

Three intelligent people and three intelligent, but different, responses: So what is sustainability anyway? How would corporations, cities, and the U.S. government respond to the question?

Corporate Sustainability

Corporations that seek to operate sustainably typically use a form of accounting that expands the traditional financial reporting framework to also take into account ecological and social performance. This form of accounting and reporting is called the “triple bottom line,” which is also known as people, planet and profit. For a corporation, sustainability means emphasizing stakeholders over shareholders. The key questions being: is that even possible; and if so, how would the process involve stakeholders?

Sustainable Cities

I live in a rather small but fairly progressive university city in Indiana that has a commission on sustainability. Here is the commission’s mission statement:

The [commission] promotes economic development, environmental health, and social equity in our community for present and future generations. The commission gathers and disseminates information; promotes practical initiatives; and measures, monitors, and reports on our community's progress toward sustainability.

What I find curious about this statement is that the three people that I interviewed above live in the same city as I do and yet none of them explicitly mentioned economic development or social equity in their definition of sustainability. It’s not that their responses are incorrect; each reflects a personal perspective of what sustainable is; each response provides a piece of the whole. In that light, does the commission’s perspective of sustainability reflect the needs and engage the entire community: and how would they know either way?

U.S. Army & Strategic Sustainability

The U.S. Army’s understanding of sustainability underscores the premise that each of us sees sustainability from our own perspective and on our own terms.

The term “sustainability” may have different meanings in different contexts. For the purposes of this Strategy, a sustainable Army simultaneously meets current as well as future mission requirements worldwide, safeguards human health, improves quality of life, and enhances the natural environment.

Our Common Future

To get at the root of the meaning of sustainability I consulted the United Nations’ website and found that the idea of sustainability as we know it today dates back to 1969 to a mandate adopted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN coined the concept of “sustainability” to express that it is possible to achieve economic growth and industrialization without environmental damage.

Over the years, the concept of sustainability evolved and in 1987 the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, prepared for the World Commission on Environmental Development, gave us the definition of sustainability that is often paraphrased now. Sustainability refers to: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

In its report, dated January 2006, “The Future of Sustainability: Re-thinking Environment and Development in the Twenty-first Century,” the IUCN stated the following.

The Brundtland definition was neat but inexact. The concept is holistic, attractive, elastic but imprecise. The idea of sustainable development may bring people together but it does not necessarily help them to agree to goals. In implying everything sustainable development arguably ends up meaning nothing.

What’s Missing?

There are four important questions to consider. Who decides what the needs of the present and future are—you or me or someone else? How can everyone work together? How should progress be measured? And, perhaps more important: Why should some values receive priority over others?

What’s missing is a common understanding of what the concept of sustainability really means. But a common understanding of sustainability can only occur if everyone has a voice in the matter and that would require a common language, equal access to participation, and a mechanism to get at a collective meaning that will most likely change over time. What’s missing foremost is an open system of discussion and participation on the theory and practice of sustainability.

Sustainability: Ambiguous by Design?

There is an interesting parallel to the dilemma of the concept of sustainability: Superfund.

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980, commonly known as Superfund, is a United States federal law designed to clean up hazardous waste sites. The law authorized the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to identify parties responsible for contamination of sites and make the parties clean them up, and if responsible parties couldn’t pay for clean up then the EPA would do it. However, the Superfund had few teeth and limited funding until the passage of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA) of 1986.

With the passage of SARA property owners and operators, including financial institutions that held mortgages, became increasing compelled to prove that their properties were either free of hazardous wastes (required during property transactions and refinancing) or that they were not responsible for the hazardous waste on their properties because someone else was. This is often referred to as a claim for protection from CERCLA liability, or the innocent landowner’s defense.

To qualify for the innocent landowner’s defense, purchasers of a property were required to show that they conducted all appropriate inquiry and due diligence during a pre-purchase investigation to ascertain if the property that they intend to buy was indeed free of CERCLA liability. This burden was often undertook by the sellers or shared somewhat equally with the buyer.

So just what is all appropriate inquiry and due diligence? At the time—no one knew, not even the regulators, and in fact the legislative history of SARA more than suggests that these two ambiguous terms were created ambiguous by design. Why? So that the people could figure the meanings out for themselves. Sounds democratic and rings of the Constitution but the reality on the ground was akin to the Wild West where anything and everything goes.

It’s hard to overstate the confusion, inefficiency, unequal application of the law, and corruption that took place from the late 1980s until the early-to-mid 1990s while the people, and the lawyers who represented them, vied for position and advantage in the arena of environmental compliance.

Fortunately, professional organizations, like the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), lead the way to create a common understanding of SARA by using an open system for dialogue and action that involved all stakeholder groups. The result was a common language and method to meet the intent of the law through guidelines that subsequently became the de facto standards to meeting all appropriate inquiry and due diligence required to protect the user from CERCLA liability. This was the first, but not the last step, in genuinely defining requirements. As perspectives and needs grew more eloquent so did the regulations, guidelines and standards.

A Path Forward: Open Systems of Value Creation

So where does this leave the ambiguous concept of sustainability? Social equity, vital local economies, and a healthy environment: How can all organizations and people work together to make the best choices and pick the best possible route to a sustainable world?

Individuals, governments, community serving organizations, and corporations are interdependent and essentially have the same needs but they all have different perspectives, priorities, and resources and are faced by different obstacles. No one individual or group sees the big picture but each can contribute to society’s successes by working together in an open system to discuss, decide, and act on the values that are most important in the creation of value.

An open system of value creation is a guided process that seeks a diversity of opinions, encourages free competition among ideas, and uses mechanisms to narrow choices to reach a group decision. Equal and accessible participation on issues that matter to everyone—education, social equity, workforce development, governmental regulation, business opportunities, and the environment—will lead to a common understanding of what sustainability means and result in a common language and sets of guidelines to co-create both business and social value.

Involving virtually everyone in the co-creation of value provides a coherent basis for sustainability.