I guess any meaningful word can be degraded by unconsidered use into a
buzzword--ecology itself has been a good example of this, historically.
As a planner, its fairly easy for me to find a working definition of
sustainability, or rather, of sustainable development. There are two basic
critiques of conventional development--the status quo, if you will. First,
that such development is driven by decision making processes that are overly
biased toward economic factors, while largely disregarding ecological and
equity (or social, or community) factors. And second, that conventional
decision making about development is unduly biased toward the present while
overly and inappropriately discounting the future. (The latter is or course
the now famous Brundtland call to caring for "future generations.")
If you buy this frame work, then development becomes more sustainable when it
derives from the adoption of decision processes that give some appropriately
balanced attention to economic, ecological and equity factors or issues, while
at the same time giving due consideration to future (and distant future)
states. (A corollary formulation might call for a displacement of exclusively
or even predominantly monetary metrics in doing comparative and evaluative work
within the decision space.)
For me, speaking as a planner, this is not that dissimilar from the place I
come out at when I use scale hierarchic ecosystem ecology to help set up a
decision space for planning. We only get to know reality in some ecological
way by making multiple depictions, across levels of organization, and then only
by using some appropriate mix of spatial and temporal scales. Purpose and
perspective (as in spectator point) condition what we choose to think
significant (and so, real), and then what we can see of that reality is scale
dependent, in very actual ways. So sustainability planning is a decision
making process that uses a strategically balanced mix of purposive
perspectives, using suitably multiple scales and boundaries.
Cheers,
-
Ashwani
Vasishth [EMAIL PROTECTED] (323) 462-2884
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~vasishth
At 06:53 PM -0700 6/5/06, Wayne Tyson wrote:
>Am I the only one who worries that "sustainability" has more than one
>meaning ranging from the useful, even critical, to a deceptive buzzword?
>
>WT
