by Jerry Stifelman, The Change

Michael Pollen has a superb piece in this past Sunday’s NY Times magazine about the sustainability of industrial agriculture. He’s concerned that we’re watering down the term “sustainability” to a kind of agreeable lowest common denominator that everyone can agree with and that no one has to do very much about. He instead offers a very precise definition of unustainability:

“A practice or process that can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends.”

Which makes the definition of sustainability, thus: “A practice or process that can continue indefinitely by virtue of preserving the conditions upon which it depends.”

This is inarguable. And since The Change likes (and depends upon) the truth, we will advocated this to all of our clients.

In fact, this definition is so crystal frickin’ clear, I think it should be sent to every legislator, public executive and business executive and they should be asked to evaluate all systems that come before them accordingly.

The Truth is Your Best Tool - ready or not.

Tags: activism, business, culture, nature

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 9:46 am and is filed under Green Misc., Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.