Lichens in balance with their East Greenland environment. Image by Ruth H. Leeney, 2009
Introduction: The Concept of Sustainability
Understanding Sustainability means understanding how to have a more successful relationship with the Earth. Studying sustainability doesn’t just change the way we think, it also changes the way we learn.
Natural resources are complex, non-linear systems. Energy moves laterally, through internal links, allowing the system to adapt to changing natural stresses. Systems that successfully adapt are considered Sustainable. Sustainability could be considered a characteristic of a successful system and is often referred to conceptually as an “emergent property”. Emergent properties can not be found outside of a system and cannot be isolated within the system because it is a property of the system itself. So basically, the study of sustainability will only refer to systems and not individual components of systems. This represents a divergence from the historic patterns of scientific study.
Various natural stresses are responded to internally by resource systems.
External linkages also exist.
Summary
Sustainable solutions to natural resource problems require understanding some of the ways energy is introduced and recycled. Some plants may die while others may flourish. Animal populations may fluctuate. Erosion and deposition may redistribute geomass. Systems may take several years to re-establish themselves and actually become sustainable. BUT they should become more sustainable each year. That means requiring less support and less adaptive management. Complex natural resource systems work to achieve sustainability by linking to other systems, including systems of larger scale.
Sustainable systems have the ability to compensate for external or anthropogenic stress. To a degree, albeit an unknown degree. When Sustainable systems reach a tipping point and collapse, the energy spills out of them and restoration efforts may not be possible, even when the stress has been removed. The resource may redefine itself in a non linear, unpredictable manner, becoming a different system. The failure of the Canadian Cod to re establish itself, when fishing was halted for 10 years, would be an example.
The next section for review should be Sustainability: Case Studies