Richard Heinberg: Five Axioms of Sustainability

My aim in this essay is to explore the history of the terms sustainable and sustainability, and their various published definitions, and then to offer a set of five axioms (based on a review of the literature) to help clarify the characteristics of a durable society.

The essence of the term sustainable is simple enough:

It is probably safe to assume that no society can be maintained forever: astronomers assure us that in several billion years the Sun will have heated to the point that the oceans will have boiled away and life on our planet will have come to an end. Thus sustainability is a relative term. It seems reasonable to take as a temporal frame of reference the durations of prior civilizations, which ranged from several hundreds to several thousands of years. A sustainable society, then, would be one capable of maintaining itself for many centuries into the future.

However, the word sustainable has become widely used in recent years to refer, in a general and vague way, merely to practices that are reputed to be more environmentally sound than others. Often the word is used so carelessly as to lead some environmentalists to advise abandoning its use.1 Nevertheless, I believe that the concept of sustainability is essential to the understanding and solution of our species