“WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY ANYWAY?”

“Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do.” (Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce.)

When I tell people I work with Sustainable Tallahassee, the first thing many people ask is: “What is sustainability anyway?”; “Is “sustainable” synonymous with “green” or “environmental”?”; “Is it all about recycling and renewable resources such as solar power and wind power?”

Having worked for the past 10 years at the University of California on issues of sustainability, and even having won the Chancellor’s Distinguished Staff Award for my contributions to making Berkeley a more sustainable campus, you would think defining sustainability should be no problem for me. Think again.

In fact, today, the task of defining the word has become even more difficult because the word seems to be ubiquitous. Sustainable agriculture. Sustainable building. Sustainable community. Sustainable development. Sustainable energy. Sustainable industry. Sustainable health care……

The most widely accepted definition of sustainability comes from the Brundtland Commission, officially known as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WECD), convened by the UN in 1983. The Commission was created to address a growing concern about the accelerating deterioration of the environment and the consequences of that deterioration on economic and social development.

“Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs”.

But since 1983, the word has taken on many more connotations. For example, many cities and agencies have adapted this definition to their individual circumstances. Since the 1990’s, cities like Santa Monica, Seattle, San Francisco and Santa Fe have created full-blown sustainability plans. To the intergenerational ethic noted in the U.N. definition, they have added other values.

For example, for Santa Fe, “Sustainability can be defined as the intersection between three principals; environmental stewardship, economic health; and social justice.” Their plan acknowledges all three of these principles by incorporating values beyond just the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. For them, it’s not just about the environment.

When you explicitly add the values of social justice, and social and economic equity to the concept of sustainability, you begin to make the definition of sustainability even more complex and varied.

As one writer put it, when you begin to hear a word everywhere, in all sorts of marginally related contexts, it means one of two things. Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliché, or it has real conceptual heft.

We tried to decide whether “green” was a more useful term for our work. But “green” has come to be used interchangeably with “safe, earth-friendly, nontoxic, organic, and natural…”, and we have come to discover that many products or practices labeled “green” are not what they claim to be. In fact a new term, “greenwashing” has been coined to describe what many companies do when they try to make themselves more environmentally friendly than they really are.

After many hours of analysis and discussion by the leadership at Sustainable Tallahassee, we have come to the conclusion that, unlike “green”, which has become almost meaningless, the concept of sustainability has real conceptual power and relevance. Although its use can be confusing and ambiguous at times, as is evidenced by the visual thesaurus and the discussion above, there is a core meaning which has great instrumental value. Allow me to explain how we came to this conclusion.

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said with regard to a definition of pornography: “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it.”

I could not agree more. I may not be able to clearly define sustainability, but in my first two months as Executive Director of Sustainable Tallahassee, I know it when I see it.  Allow me to give you three examples of sustainability in action.

SUSTAINABLE BUILDING: RAINBOW REHAB/SUSTAINABLE TALLHASSEE GREEN REMODEL

“So you drive a hybrid, but live and work in a gas-guzzler.”

“Buildings consume over 40% of our energy supply---How can we make them smarter, greener, and more energy efficient?”

It was a beautiful Saturday morning. The kind of day when you would find college students on the green playing Frisbee or touch football, or just catching some rays recovering from a week of school. But on this day, a group more than 15 FSU premed students were toiling away with paint brushes and rollers, and dedicating their time to re-building a “green house” to LEED energy efficient standards for low-income families. They were unselfishly donating their time to a project sponsored by Rainbow Rehab and Sustainable Tallahassee. This community effort was continued, week after week for over a year, until the house was rebuilt. Within the next month, we hope that our efforts will be rewarded with a Gold LEED certification, and some lucky family will be enjoying a super energy efficient home.

SUSTAINABLE ENERGY: SUSTAINABLE TALLAHASSEE SOLAR ADVOCACY PROJECT

“If less than 1% of our energy comes from “benign” renewable power like wind and the sun, or from biofuels, or from the earth and the ocean, can we truly say we that we have a sustainable energy policy in Tallahassee?”

Although it was a stormy Thursday afternoon with no sun in sight, the conference room at the Amtrak station was filled with over 50 people trying to determine how they could encourage the development of more solar power in Tallahassee. Sustainable Tallahassee and the Leon County Sustainability Coordinator had brought together, at one table, all city and county energy professionals, as well as almost every solar vendor and installer. Their goal was to celebrate the successful solar power installations in Leon County, and to identify and remove the local barriers that prevent the progress of future solar power installations.

Solar Thermal Water Heater	Solar Power (Photovoltaic ) Panels

SUSTAINABLE WASTE STEWARDSHIP: SUSTAINABLE TALLAHASSEE RECYCLING COMMITTEE

 “In Tallahassee, every time you finish a bottle of beer or wine at a restaurant or bar, those bottles go straight into the landfill. There is no commercial recycling of glass.”

	Our own waste enemy Americans toss: 106,000   aluminum cans every 30 seconds 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes 60,000 plastic bags every 5 seconds  15,000,000 sheets of office paper every 5 minutes
Bales of trash awaiting transport to the landfill (Photo by: Chris Jordan, Mother Jones)

“Every day, 40 trucks filled with waste from Tallahassee travel 85 miles to a landfill in Jackson County, and return 85 miles empty.”

At least once a month, citizens, city and county waste professionals, as well as local waste management businesses, meet in the conference room at Sustainable Tallahassee to discuss how we can encourage better waste stewardship in our community through prevention and reduction of waste, reuse of resources, and recycling. We are currently exploring the feasibility of creating a regional recycled glass facility, and the development of local “green” industries, to use this recycled glass as food for their production process, and create local manufacturing jobs. In addition, we are trying to draft a model bottle and can deposit return law for our state. As the diagram below shows, you get the most sustainability bang for your buck if you prevent and reduce waste before it becomes a problem for our landfill.

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY?

In each case, we see the members of Sustainable Tallahassee working hands-on, engaged with their public officials and members of the business community, involved not only in a problem-solving capacity, that is, making what you don’t want go away, but in a creative endeavor to bring about the type of sustainable community we want to bring into existence. Citizens are trying to meet their unmet needsundefinedenvironmental, economic and socialundefinedwithout compromising the ability of future generations to do the same. Here is what my experience has taught me about sustainability. As one headline in the Tallahassee Democrat said describing our work in Sustainable Tallahassee, “sustainability begins with neighbors”.

• All sustainability is local.  Sustainability is a hands-on, community based, house-by-house undertaking. One thing is certain, if we are to bring some clarity to the issue of sustainability, we must focus on the critical role of public education -- communication is essential. You must create a culture of sustainability through education in our local communities. Knowledge is power. It is simply not true that what you don’t now won’t hurt you. We need to teach our children and all our citizens the true impacts of how we live---the impacts of our decisions on the environment, the economy and on our society. We need to nourish and cultivate ecological intelligence by creating as much market transparency as possible. Sunlight is indeed the best of disinfectants. We need to dispel certain mythsundefined“it is too expensive to use renewable resources, or it’s too expensive to recycle or compost.” We need to do true full cost accounting. We must take into account the carbon and social costs of our decisionsundefinedthe savings as well. Three rules: know your impacts, favor improvements, and share what you learn.

• Sustainability is team sport. You can’t do it alone. Consumer choices and grassroots activism are necessary but insufficient. Collaboration and partnership is essential. Collaborationundefinedacross city departments, across local, regional, state, and federal agencies and across the often wide public-private sector divide---is essential to fostering truly sustainable projects and commitments. Whether the goal is conservation of energy, the generation of solar power and other renewable forms of energy, the building of green buildings, the preservation of green space, the stewardship of waste, or the creation of green jobs, you must partner and collaborate.

• Ultimately, there is no tradeoff between the economy and the environment. How often have you heard the argument that “if the environmentalist wins, the economy will suffer”, and its opposing view that “if business wins, the environment will be destroyed.” To quote Kermit the Frog, being green is not easy. Being sustainable is even more difficult. The truth is that the road to sustainability is a long and arduous one.”Getting green done” is hard work. Beware of unforeseen and unintended consequences. You are bound to make mistakes. The key thing is to learn from your mistakes and to work together and share your knowledge.  

We have spent countless hours trying to define “sustainability”, and one can no doubt find sophisticated systems input/output models which try to scientifically capture the many nuances of the term, but I still think that the elegance and simplicity of what Hawken called his “Intergenerational Economic Golden Rule” still says it best--“Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do.” Wendell Berry was even more terse and succinct, for him the most sustainable path “finds the shortest, simplest way between the earth, the hands and the mouth”.