How I View Sustainability

The beaver does a lot of damage. It builds dams, causes localised flooding, stops water from reaching areas it would normally flow to seasonally.

Humans are like beavers. We build these massive colonies of structures, we destroy ecologies to create new plantations of monocultures, we waste land by building housing on top of fertile soils, we pollute our waterways, we push noxious fumes into the air and make it unsafe... the list is a long one.

I've heard the viewpoint that we're different somehow from every other animal, that we have some inherent right to the land that doesn't belong to any other species. That's anthropomorphic bullshit. More and more, we're learning that we're no different from any other mammal.

If I make a mess, it's my responsibility to clean it up. Well, we as a species made a mess. and we have one thing that other animals don't appear to have: we have awareness of the fact that we screwed up. We have awareness of how badly we screwed up. And we have the ability to try to fix it.

Personally, I think it's too late to try fixing. However, it's not too late to make sure we cut down the amount we break in the future.

To that end, this is what sustainability is to me:

Sustainability is putting solar panels on my house, because then I won't have to pay as much for electricity. It also means that a minute amount less coal needs to be dug out of the ground to run the Powerplant at required levels, but that's a side-effect.
The same goes for installing LED lights in my house. For filling my house with power-saving devices. For hanging my clothes on the clothesline instead of using a dryer.

Sustainability is growing my own food, because then I won't have to pay as much for food. It also means that a chunk of land is no longer wasted on lawn. It means that the people I feed are not dependent upon commercial monocultures. It provides a place for bees and other insects to safely gather nectar without being poisoned by pesticides, and for birds to pick at insects.

Sustainability is building our structures around the house with recycled materials, because stuff that was once in a demolished house is so much cheaper than buying wood that's just been chopped down last week. And that avoids putting it in landfill, which is never a nice choice.

Sustainability is composting my food waste. Because compost is great on my garden. It's expensive to buy stuff like that. And like I said, landfill is never a good choice.

Sustainability is reducing waste in the office by double-siding internal documents and using toner-save settings. It saves money and means that only half as much paper and ink get used, plus the company has more money at the end of the year with which to give us all raises.

Sustainability (and this one will raise eyebrows) is GMOs produced to ensure that nations with high populations of food-insecure families have not only more food, but more nourishing food to go around. This means that there is less effort spent in these countries on just surviving, which frees up people's ability to increase their economic stability. More economic stability leads to more education and less need for population expansion. 

Sustainability is planting native plants to desalinate ground. Because ground that doesn't grow anything is worth about as much as you can grow on it.

Sustainability is striving for carbon negative, because global climate change is bad for business. You can't get your product to your consumer if you're blocked from them by unseasonal flooding and people recovering from their house being destroyed by a super-cyclone don't have money to spend on your gee-gaw of the month.

There are a hundreds more examples I can give, and they all come back to one point. Sustainability makes financial sense. And if we can sell it to the corporations who have the muscle to move the mountains in the way, we've got part of the battle out of the way. Money may seem like like a very base reason to do something, but money is king, and we can't dig our way out of our mess without it.

 https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/sustainability-society-and-you