Down to Earth: Sustainability, defined

Down to Earth is a monthly environmental column that explores what it means to live sustainably.

One word unites all manners of things, from business strategies to grocery-store produce to controversies surrounding fast fashion: sustainability — or the lack thereof.

Sometimes viewed as a buzzword — a popular, potentially overused phrase that tends to lose some of its original nuances — the concept of sustainability has been used to describe development, agriculture and everything in between, including products that do not perhaps merit the label. This mix of sincere and insincere usage leaves many wondering what sustainability truly means.

“The word has a lot of different meanings and a lot of different contexts depending on who you are and what your end goal is,” said Mike Shelton, associate director of the Sustainability Institute at Ohio State. “Those can be pretty malleable uses of the term.”

Kerry Ard, Ohio State professor of environment and natural resources, as well as sociology, said the concept constantly evolves and shifts.

“We are making this [meaning] as we go,” Ard said.

The journey to sustainability’s modern-day ambiguity began with 18th-century Germany’s forest industry, when forester Hans Carl von Carlowitz published a manual on the importance of balancing old trees with young ones, according to North-West University professor of history Jacobus du Pisani .

This was the first time the word “sustainable” — more specifically, its German counterpart “nachhaltigkeit” — was ever written.

Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service and father of conservation, developed his “wise-use framework” — an approach that balances human needs with environmental health — in 1910, Ard said.

“He was the first to promote, or among the first to promote, the idea of sustained yield,” Ard said. “The idea that one could both use and protect a resource.”

Ard said Pinchot’s framework called for consumers to use resources wisely, at a rate below the forest’s natural regrowth.

Ard said Pinchot didn’t think humans should completely avoid using forests. However, he knew that the timber industry, if left to its own devices, would “totally destroy it,” Ard said.

Pinchot’s legacy can be seen in the United Nations’ 1987 definition of sustainability : “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This definition can be expanded into frameworks like the Sustainability Institute’s six dimensions of sustainability, which attempt to fully encapsulate the word’s many facets.

“Hemming [sustainability] into a singular definition is very difficult because you don’t want to be exclusionary because, in reality, these are very complex, wicked problems that cannot be solved by any single discipline,” Shelton said.

As such, the institute divides sustainability into human and natural systems; earth and environmental systems; economy and governance; society and culture; engineering, technology and design; and health and well-being.

“Those things have to work in concert,” Shelton said. “And where sustainability comes in is where those things are in balance to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to participate and have a world that is improving from an environmental standpoint, but also our social standpoint.”

Shelton said an example of trying to strike this balance can be seen in a proposal to convert an abandoned tennis court on Ackerman Road into a learning lab on pollinator habitats for landscape architecture students.

“That’s a project that speaks to the planet aspect, the environmental improvement, the social aspect,” Shelton said. “It provides amenities for us as a living lab as well as a recreational space, but it just doesn’t have that financial component. It’ll require some investment to make that conversion, but after that, there’s not going to be a financial payback that you can realize in dollar terms.”

The same project can be considered sustainable or unsustainable depending on the context, Shelton said.

“From an academic standpoint, one would say, ‘Well, that’s not a sustainable project because it’s not going to generate revenue by which you can then manage the piece of property moving forward,’” Shelton said. “But you look at it, you see it — it’s definitely a sustainability project.”

In essence, sustainability requires a holistic approach. But at the individual level, sustainable actions are further complicated, Ard said.

“Sustainability isn’t just about behavior,” Ard said. “It’s so important to remember that we are in a structure that forces the majority of people to act a certain way. And so the biggest changes that we can make — the changes that will have the most impact — are to that structure. So policy, local policy, get out and vote, all of those things.”

However, small-scale actions like replacing paper products with bamboo versions are not useless, Ard said.

“We each have our own little things that we give in on and that we decide are things that we can take on as individuals in our own daily lives, and some things that we can’t,” Ard said.

At the end of the day, the concept of sustainability is not too far from its humble beginnings in a German forestry manual, albeit with a modern twist.

“We have to find a better way to grow and improve the human condition while ensuring that we have a planetary system that will continue to support life on Earth,” Shelton said.