Talk:Sustainability

Wiki Education assignment: Introduction to Policy Analysis

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 March 2022 and 30 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Sammy J 37 (article contribs).

Adding to the article the findings of Gaia

I propose to add to the page in the sections about Economic dimension and Options for overcoming barriers Issues around economic growth about the reasearch of Gaia.

What I want to write:

"Some argue that decline in GDP is inevitable as if people will not stop overconsumption willingly Earth resources will expire in the next decade due to increased consumption and this will cause collapse. But if humanity will willingly reduce overconsumption the collapse will be prevented."

Why I want to write it:

In those articles the only option talked seriously is decoupling even though it is written that it is not enough. We should write about alternatives. This study present one. it is one of the most comprehensive studies it is an analize about practical occurence of the projections of the well known "limit to growth" study. Not all think like her but if at least some seriouse study says GDP rise will peak by 2030 in any case we should include it (mentioning that not all agree with it).

Short explanation in this link:

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-crisis-civilization-collapse-mit-2653980183.html

"Ultimately, avoiding decline means turning society towards “another goal than growth,” Herrington concluded in the study."

Original reasearch in this link:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jiec.13084

"The two scenarios aligning most closely with observed data indicate a halt in welfare, food, and industrial production over the next decade or so, which puts into question the suitability of continuous economic growth as humanity's goal in the twenty-first century. Both scenarios also indicate subsequent declines in these variables, but only one—where declines are caused by pollution—depicts a collapse."

Some detailes already exist in the page Limits to growth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#Legacy

"In 2020, an analysis by Gaya Herrington, then Director of Sustainability Services of KPMG US, was published in Yale University's Journal of Industrial Ecology. The study assessed whether, given key data known in 2020 about factors important for the "Limits to Growth" report, the original report's conclusions are supported. In particular, the 2020 study examined updated quantitative information about ten factors, namely population, fertility rates, mortality rates, industrial output, food production, services, non-renewable resources, persistent pollution, human welfare, and ecological footprint, and concluded that the "Limits to Growth" prediction is essentially correct in that continued economic growth is unsustainable under a "business as usual" model. The study found that current empirical data is broadly consistent with the 1972 projections and that if major changes to the consumption of resources are not undertaken, economic growth will peak and then rapidly decline by around 2040." Alexander Sauda/אלכסנדר סעודה (talk) 11:57, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

No, please don't. This is a high level article which is trying to reach the general public and does not need additional detail on those issues. You could add it at Eco-economic decoupling rather. EMsmile (talk) 12:44, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Sustainable business practices example

Hi User:Mistery13, please stop WP:EDITWAR-ing over those examples for sustainable business practices that you want to add! The source that you are using is not a high quality source but even more importantly, the content doesn't fit in this high level overview article. If we added those very specific "how to" examples for everything it would just blow out. (and Wikipedia is not a how-to guide, see WP:NOTHOWTO guide). You could consider adding that content at sustainable business rather, but with a better reference if possible. EMsmile (talk) 06:20, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

First sentence

We've discussed the first sentence of the lead at length (see earlier on this talk page) but I can see that some more discussion might be needed, based on a recent change/query by User:Doomhope. You said "co-exist with whom" but I think co-exist could just stand on its own. Alternatively one could say "co-exist with nature" or "co-exist with everything else on planet Earth" or "co-exist with other humans, animals, plants, ecosystems etc." but not sure this is needed?

Also, I noticed that you (Doomhope) combined some of the sentences in the lead. We had purposefully split them into shorter sentences in order to have a better readability of the article. I do agree that lots of short sentences in a row don't read very well though: sentence length should be varied. But this is just to explain why I would be tempted to split some of the sentences into two again which you had combined into one. Pinging User:Jonathanlynn who had previously done some work on improving the reading ease score of this article. EMsmile (talk) 10:13, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, all the tools for measuring readability show poor scores for long sentences. So I've tried to break them up to make them easier to read, even though it's not as smooth as it could be for a more sophisticated or specialist reader.Jonathanlynn (talk) 12:51, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Definition of Sustainability

I disagree with the following definition being removed. In fact, maintaining a myopic definition of Sustainability on Wikipedia limits people's understanding of the architecural principles of sustainability, thereby limiting their ability to apply it to their lives. You are only describing one application of sustainability while missing the overarching concept. Its like saying Time only exists as minutes/hours/seconds and missing its position within the lexicon of physics. You are ignoring sustainability as a principle of physics.

Sustainability is a characteristic of a system which enables its processes to be performed perpetually over time, because the processes of a Sustainable system do not deplete resources used within the system. Rgc~enwiki (talk) 05:49, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

I think the current first sentence is more to the point and faster to grasp: Sustainability is a social goal for people to co-exist on Earth over a long time.. Your sentence is unnecessarily wordy. Which publication does it come from by the way? You might be able to add it further down to the definition section if it comes from a reliable source. But I think it basically just repeats what the other definitions are formulating, just in other words. EMsmile (talk) 09:18, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

This definition talks about the fundamental architectural principle of Sustainability. All the other definitions on the page are of sustainability applied to specific contexts. Specific applications miss the essential foundations of the concept which are common to every instance of sustainability (that which can be sustained).

This definition comes from systems theory, which is applied to physics, engineering, computer programming, etc as much as societies and human behaviour. It is a temporo-spatial, architectural condition, not limited to the physical world (eg humans surviving on earth) but also to metaphysical concepts like mathematical equations and auto-generative algorythms (eg pi resulting in a non-depleting iteration of fractional divisions).

This might seem wordy, but it is an incredibly important concept to all practices involved in designing systems (arguably every field of human study, and definitely every area of governance and policy design).

The common but myopic description of sustainability - limited to how people are currently describing the shared social goal - in my experience, has resulted in a lot of people not really understanding what makes something sustainable or not. This can lead to false claims of sustainability, or disagreement over whether something is or isn't sustainable. By developing an understanding of the foundational principle, people learn how to apply the test of sustainability to any context.

This requires being able to perceive the system in which the processes run, and determine whether the processes deplete resources in the system over time. This concept can then be applied to social and economic systems as easily as environmental systems. For example, many economic policies have been designed based on a model of eternal growth. The entire discourse of economics needs to be redesigned to ensure economic policies and processes don't deplete economic resources over time, to correct for this myth of eternal growth which informed 20th century thinking.

This is a large shift in thinking for most people and will take generations to solve. All economic, social and environmental challenges can be solved eventually by making them sustainable, but only if the designers of the solutions understand what sustainability fundamentally means. Rgc~enwiki (talk) 23:17, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Seen from this perspective, phrases currently on the page like "sustainability is a concept that provides a normative structure" can be invalidated; as normative is a biased judgement open to perceived interpretation. Sustainability at its purest is binary. Something can either persist perpetually, or it can't. An example for economic and social sustainability would be a universal wage for all. It is sustainable if it can operate perpetually within an economic system without depleting system resources (eg without depleting labour, entrepreneurship, innovation, if they are also essential components of that system). It is not sustainable if it can't operate perpetually because it erodes resources within the system. EG would a universal wage lead to no one wanting to work, so no health or education services were available. The parent page is currently awash with confusion because it attempts to describe sustainability as something humams choose, like a set of shared values, instead of being a true/false test of a system's condition. Rgc~enwiki (talk) 23:41, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Taking this example further; a universal wage for all might BE sustainable in a country with sufficient revenues to afford it, and a culture where a sufficient percentage of citizens wanted to deliver labour services despite the universal wage. And it might simultaneously BE NOT sustainable in another country which doesn't have sufficient revenue, or where too many people no longer want to work (eg due to different weather conditions or cultural values). It therefore has no 'normative structure'; in a system with certain conditions it is sustainable, in the same system with different conditions it is not. There is no 'normal'; it can either be sustained perpetually over time, or it can't, based on the design of the system and its conditions. Rgc~enwiki (talk) 23:56, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

I think the overall description of Sustainability on this page is so far off the mark that it should be retitled to 'Human Sustainability' because it is not covering the core concept of Sustainability at all. 27.96.192.65 (talk) 01:54, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

Please first review Wikipedia's policies on WP:Verifiability and WP:RS. Then tell us which sentences from which reliable sources you'd like to insert where in the article. Please remember the talk page is not a forum (WP:NOTAFORUM) and we are not writing about original research (WP:OR) on Wikipedia. EMsmile (talk) 23:52, 3 March 2024 (UTC)