Is Sustainability Sustainable (S/S)?

To answer that question we probably should define what we mean by sustainable. Sustainable means that a process retains its function and value...stays the same...year after year way out beyond the foreseeable future.

Sustainability, on the other hand, is a process that ensures that your operations are environmentally and economically sound, and that they are equitable in how the support all involved in the process for todays generation, but also for the generations the follow. Further, sustainability is not just about us (our organization), it impacts all of our stakeholders and those in their spheres of influence.

While I live in the United States and feel that our culture should be a sustainable one, sustainability is not limited to our nation…or the developed nations…it is about all nations, the entire planet. And for sustainability to become sustainable we need to create clear, simple, programs that promote sustainable culture

If we take a simple issue…and a very common organization…we can find a way to look at S/S so that it lasts for the long haul. Let’s consider this issue:

Storm runoff management is an important issue for communities, so we should look at this issue through the eyes of the small town, community, small city point of view.  

Like most, this issue requires that we define the problem for our specific area, as well as the things about it that we see as dangerous for our three areas of interest (Environment, Economy, and Equitability). We also want to project into the future and try to understand how our issues today will impact the generations to follow.

If we look at this for one lake or river we find that our runoff delivers all of the things washed into the gutters, drains, road side ditches that feed the waterways in our community to our precious bodies of water. Failure to restrict this pollution from entering our system means that we are impacted today, as junk in the lake is bad, but it also remains in the water and settled to the bottom of the water course so that it will impact future generations.

Our solutions need to be realistic, effective, and sustaining…drainage systems need to route water where we need it to go. They also need to be accessible so that they can be cleared, where possible they need to have effectively designed settling bays that allow some of the heavy constituents to be captured, and not allowed to flow to the waterway or lake. At the same time we need to limit our costs, both for initial development and for continuing maintenance, and we need to have a reasonable replacement strategy so that we continue to effectively meet these needs.

Best practices include flowing water to common collection sites before moving it on to storage locations, in support of the needs of the community. We also find that some towns and cities have flowed water through downhill targetable regions so that we automatically water these areas, without having to pipe or pump water to take care of these needs.

Through these simple design steps we have looked to meet environmental and economic (cost) aspects of the problem. But how do we ensure equity… in this example we plan and design our solutions so that all of our community is addressed to cover our current needs, while looking toward future community growth to see how we feel the future will be serviced by our solution…years to decades, decades to centuries.

Sustainable Sustainability… multi-faceted and deliverable if we plan for it effectively.