What is Sustainability?

What is Sustainability?

The following two quotes gave me a hard time because I noticed a slight difference in one of the terms used to express essentially the same idea.

"The three dimensions of ecological sustainability, economic stability, and social inclusion are captured in the phrase sustainable development."
"It (sustainable development) was made popular in the 1987 report Our Common Future... which explicitly points at the connection between environment, economics, and equity."

       What I had a problem with was the usage of the terms 'social inclusion' and 'equity' to convey the same idea even though I believe they have little to do with each other. The other two sets of terms actually make sense when compared side by side, so why is it that the authors decided on the two aforementioned terms to describe the social aspect of ecological sustainability? For all of recorded history, nothing in society has ever been equal, and I believe it never will be because there are too many factors that we just can't control. For this reason, social inclusion makes more sense in this context because inclusion on its own doesn't necessarily imply equity. 
       Talking about equity from the standpoint of sustainable development, I honestly don't see any way to achieve it. All people may be included in the efforts to sustain our environment, but it is impossible for all of us to have equal roles in those efforts. For example, it'd be easy to plant more trees in areas such as Canada or other areas with rich soil, but it'd be much more difficult to do that in places like Sub Saharan Africa. As a result, they may end up with different tasks in order to contribute that may be harder or easier than planting trees, guaranteeing that the roles of different groups of people to sustain our environment wouldn't be equal. 

This next quote took me a while to grasp, and after pondering its meaning for a while, I realized that it was actually a good insight that made me appreciate the danger of outpacing the replacement of renewable resources.

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."

If there is one thing wars have been waged over in early history, it would be resources. Before the Industrial Revolution, small communities had to create everything for themselves, so it was convenient for the powerful clans to just raid others so they wouldn't have to go through the process of making what they needed themselves. Today we have huge factories that make everything we need for us, so we don't really think about what goes into creating those items. However, that leads us into a state in which we have no idea how quickly we are using the Earth's resources. Eventually, some country will run out of resources and be forced to wage war on another country for their resources, leading the premature deaths discussed in the quote.

https://earthjustice.org/slideshow/images-of-mountaintop-removal-mining

This final quote seemed a bit nonsensical to me, probably due to the fact that I personally don't believe plants or landscapes have intrinsic value either. 

"In the academic world the ethics of animal rights... was sometimes criticized by other scholars because it was utilitarian, an approach that typically ascribes intrinsic value only to sentient beings but not plants or landscapes, and because it was individualistic, that is, ascribing intrinsic value to individuals only but not to ecological wholes such as ecosystems."


After reading this quote, the first thing I thought of was what a world with only non-sentient life on it would be like. What would be the point of such a world? Sure, it would probably be a beautiful landscape with magnificent plants and oceans, but nothing would be there to enjoy it. This quote almost made it seem like those in the 'academic world' wanted to give rights to these plants and landscapes, which seems somewhat ridiculous on its own. Would we be giving trees the right to not be cut down and used to build houses and make paper? While that is an exaggeration, I still don't understand how non-sentient life can have intrinsic value.

Sources:

1. Robertson, M. (2017). Sustainability principles and practice. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.